I was reading Sarah Lacy’s “If You’ve Got Social Media Fatigue, UR DOIN IT WRONG” on TechCrunch and was reminded of a passage from Henry David Thoreau’s seminal essay “Civil Disobedience” that I discuss in chapter 6 of my dissertation.

First the passage from Lacy’s article:

Sometimes metrics can be a bad thing and beware of any so-called “social media consultant” who tells you otherwise. What’s the value of a Retweet or a Like? It’s roughly the equivalent to sitting next to someone during a keynote who nods his head at a salient point. Someone hitting a button in front of them is hardly a heady endorsement—nowhere near the impact of someone calling you to tell you about a story he read. That actually takes more than one-second of attention and work.

This reminded me of the moral hazards of voting in electoral politics and Thoreau’s likening it to a sort of gambling with morality:

All voting is a sort of gaming, like chequers or backgammon, with a slight moral tinge to it, a playing with right and wrong, with moral questions; and betting naturally accompanies it. The character of the voters is not staked. I cast my vote, perchance, as I think right; but I am not vitally concerned that that right should prevail. I am willing to leave it to the majority. Its obligation, therefore, never exceeds that of expediency. Even voting for the right is doing nothing for it. It is only expressing to men feebly your desire that it should prevail. A wise man will not leave the right to the mercy of chance, nor wish it to prevail through the power of the majority. There is but little virtue in the action of masses of men. When the majority shall at length vote for the abolition of slavery, it will be because they are indifferent to slavery, or because there is but little slavery left to be abolished by their vote. They will then be the only slaves. Only his vote can hasten the abolition of slavery who asserts his own freedom by his vote.

With this last sentence Thoreau is no longer really speaking of voting, as becomes clear later on when he writes “Cast your whole vote, not a strip of paper merely, but your whole influence.” He is advocating civil disobedience and participatory democracy.¹

A moral hazard arises from this gambling aspect of voting and the gulf that the formal, especially representative, democratic process creates between the act of voting and the consequences of said act. Responsibility and costs are diffused among a plurality or majority of voters who do not actually have to carry out or enforce policies themselves. Given the nature of voting, the employment of the coercive power of state agents, and the fact that the benefits of state policies tend to be concentrated while the costs tend to be spread over a large population (including those who did not vote for them), voters have a strong incentive to support policies that they otherwise would not if they had to bear the full cost and risk in money, time, and enforcement themselves.

This moral hazard is compounded by the representative system. A democratic representative cannot identify precisely who his real constituents are (those who voted for him). He is not strictly responsible to them; generally the worst he has to fear is a small chance he will be ousted in the next election. Nor is he held strictly responsible for his actions while in office. Despite frequently employed social-contract language, this is not a real principal-agent contractual relationship. And the representatives themselves are not the ones who actually have to pay for, carry out, or enforce the policies they enact either. The result of these facts is that both voters and their representatives have strong incentives to support and enact irresponsible legislation, regulations, and policies.

Participatory democracy is not to be confused with statist forms of democracy, like direct democracy and representative democracy. Participatory democracy is extra-governmental and involves discourse and deliberation culminating in direct action; it is decentralized and spontaneous, dynamic and flexible. Both direct democracy and representative democracy transform democratic processes into a rigid, formalized, procedural instrument of the state. The result is a centralization and monopolization of democratic decision-making processes.

Representative democracy distances the bulk of the population from direct moral and political action on important public matters. It encourages the formation of a professional political class. It is conducive to a top-down bureaucratic management of society by a technocratic and plutocratic elite. The masses have every incentive in this system to be increasingly ignorant of their representatives and of important public issues.

In “Do Elections Guarantee Freedom?” libertarian writer James Bovard compared the act of voting in elections to the feudal act of swearing fealty:

French historian Marc Bloch noted that, during the Middle Ages, “the notion arose that freedom was lost when free choice could not be exercised at least once in a lifetime.” The only freedom many people sought was to pick whose “man” they would become. Medieval times included elaborate ceremonies in which the fealty was consecrated. With current elections, people are permitted to choose whose pawns they will be. Voting is becoming more like a medieval act of fealty – with voters bowing down their heads and promising obedience to whoever is proclaimed the winner.

Benjamin Constant anticipated this observation in his classic essay, “On the Liberty of the Ancients Compared with that of the Moderns“:

[T]he individual, independent in his private life, is, even in the freest of states, sovereign only in appearance. His sovereignty is restricted and almost always suspended. If, at fixed and rare intervals, in which he is again surrounded by precautions and obstacles, he exercises this sovereignty, it is always only to renounce it.

Are relatively frequent elections a sufficient safeguard for freedom? And what good are elections when any representative democratic system eventually, and inevitably, becomes rigged to favor incumbents and a class of elites? The present system is dominated by a class of career politicians, increasingly hereditary, who must possess some combination of wealth, influence, insider connections, and official credentials, and who use their offices to acquire more. Generally, the higher the office the more this is the case. It is little wonder that a system such as this would create a mass of passive, easily manipulated citizens and a professional political class increasingly adept at manipulating them.

Even in direct democracy the focus on voting is still vulnerable to the Thoreauvian objection of gambling with morality, i.e., that you must gamble on getting enough votes to get done what you believe to be right. The very existence of this centralized voting system for deciding public matters of moral importance encourages citizens to focus their energies on this formal democratic process, which is to say that it encourages the wasting of time and money on vote getting (or buying), at the expense of getting anything actually productive done in a timely fashion. The result is the incentive increasingly to use the system to centrally plan society from the top-down. And a gulf is opened up between discourse and action. As Benjamin Constant remarks: “Lost in the multitude, the individual can almost never perceive the influence he exercises. Never does his will impress itself upon the whole; nothing confirms in his eyes his own cooperation.” This is not participatory democracy. Participatory democracy is about engaging in (often spontaneous) discourse and deliberation culminating in direct action, in voluntary cooperation with likeminded fellows who are equals (in authority), to do what one can to substitute a more satisfactory state of affairs for a lesser one.

‘Likes’ and ‘Retweets’ are essentially entry-level activism, which is fine. For many, this is the first step down the path to greater activism in pursuit of a cause. Division and specialization of labor applies here as well; we can’t maintain a high level of activism in every cause in which we are interested. ‘Likes’, ‘Retweets’, ‘Diggs’, and similar uses of social networking features provide a valuable service, signaling to friends, family, and others what we like and don’t like, of what we approve and disapprove. They also help spread the word, sometimes resulting in the cause or news item or what-have-you going viral.

But the differences between these sorts of “head nods” and voting are that they are spontaneous, continuous, bottom-up grassroots-like activities that do not inherently involve  having a monopolist organization violate the rights of others. They are compatible with and expressive of participatory democracy while voting in state elections is antithetical to it. They may not be “casting your whole influence” as Thoreau put it, but that’s okay — so long as they are not all you are doing.

Political and economic freedom is not simply the absence of government controls over the economy and of dictatorial authority. It involves the emergence of alternative and more fragmented notions of “authority” in which participants in effect have to earn the always partial authority they have. It depends on the active participation in the polity and in the economy by diverse people who exercise their own initiative.

–         Lavoie and Chamlee-Wright, Culture and Enterprise, p. 1.²

Radicalizing [democracy] is too often imagined as moving toward “direct democracy,” voting directly for social outcomes. But there is much more to democratic processes than voting, and much more to politics than government. Wherever human beings engage in direct discourse with one another about their mutual rights and responsibilities, there is a politics. I mean politics in the sense of the public sphere in which discourse over rights and responsibilities is carried on.

–         Lavoie, “Democracy, Markets and the Legal Order,” pp. 111-112³

Cross-posted at The Libertarian Standard.

Endnotes

1. For more on participatory democracy, see chapters 6 & 7 of my dissertation
2. Lavoie, Don and Emily Chamlee-Wright. 2000. Culture and Enterprise:  The Development, Representation, and Morality of Business. New York: Routledge, A Cato Institute Book.
3. Lavoie, Don. 1993. “Democracy, Markets, and the Legal Order: Notes on the Nature of Politics in a Radically Liberal Society.” Social Philosophy and Policy Vol. 10, No. 2 (Summer).

Over at Forbes.com, Reihan Salam had something rather unexpected but very welcome to say about the CEO of a major corporation:

That the success of the Kindle is good news for Amazon should go without saying. But it represents a remarkable environmental advance as well. The publishing industry in the U.S. felled roughly 125 million trees and generated vast amounts of wastewater. And, of course, physical books have to be transported by trucks, which generate carbon emissions, exacerbate congestion, increase traffic fatalities and cause wear-and-tear on already overburdened roads. One assumes that Bezos didn’t have the environment foremost in mind when he pushed the Kindle concept forward, yet he’s arguably done more to fight climate change by threatening hardcovers and paperbacks with extinction than any number of environmental activists.

Salam goes on to argue that Amazon will ‘win the internet’ through the Kindle and its rapidly growing ebook sales. I don’t know about that. What does it mean to ‘win the internet’? He only considers Facebook as a rival. What about Google? Android and ChromeOS are poised to dominate the mobile phone and tablet pc markets, putting Google into direct competition with the Kindle. Then there’s Google Search, Books, Voice, Gmail, Docs, Maps, Chrome browser, TV, and so on and so forth.

But bravo to Salam for daring to recognize in public the (probably unintended) positive environmental externalities of business decisions and technological innovation driven by profit-seeking amidst market competition — indeed, for daring to rank them on par with or above that of ‘altruistic’ environmental activists.

Cross-posted at The Libertarian Standard.

In How to Mirror a Censored WordPress Blog, I discussed how the Mises Institute open-sourcing all of Mises.org and putting its entire literature and media library online as a set of torrents will help ensure the continued existence of this treasure trove of liberty in the event of a natural disaster or a future crackdown by the US government.

Here’s a practical example taking place before us. Some technologically and strategically-incompetent pundits are clamoring for the United States federal government to use its cyber capabilities to take out WikiLeaks before the organization puts online the remaining 15,000 documents of the leaked Afghan war logs.

Kevin Poulsen of Wired.com explains how a previous attempt to take down wikileaks.org has already failed in the past and how future attempts to take out WikiLeaks will fail as well.

In 2008, federal judge Jeffrey White in San Francisco ordered the WikiLeaks.org domain name seized as part of a lawsuit filed by Julius Baer Bank and Trust, a Swiss bank that suffered a leak of some of its internal documents. Two weeks later the judge admitted he’d acted hastily, and he had the site restored. “There are serious questions of prior restraint, possible violations of the First Amendment,” he said.

Even while the order was in effect, WikiLeaks lived on: supporters and free speech advocates distributed the internet IP address of the site, so it could be reached directly. Mirrors of the site were unaffected by the court order, and a copy of the entire WikiLeaks archive of leaked documents circulated freely on the Pirate Bay.

The U.S. government has other, less legal, options, of course — the “cyber” capabilities Thiessen alludes to. The Pentagon probably has the ability to launch distributed denial-of-service attacks against WikiLeaks’ public-facing servers. If it doesn’t, the Army could rent a formidable botnet from Russian hackers for less than the cost of a Humvee.

But that wouldn’t do much good either. WikiLeaks wrote its own insurance policy two weeks ago, when it posted a 1.4 GB file called insurance.aes256.

The file’s contents are encrypted, so there’s no way to know what’s in it. But, as we’ve previously reported, it’s more than 19 times the size of the Afghan war log — large enough to contain the entire Afghan database, as well as the other, larger classified databases said to be in WikiLeaks’ possession. Accused Army leaker Bradley Manning claimed to have provided WikiLeaks with a log of events in the Iraq war containing 500,000 entries from 2004 through 2009, as well as a database of 260,000 State Department cables to and from diplomatic posts around the globe.

Whatever the insurance file contains, Assange — appearing via Skype on a panel at the Frontline Club — reminded everyone Thursday that he could make it public at any time. “All we have to do is release the password to that material and it’s instantly available,” he said.

WikiLeaks is encouraging supporters to download the insurance file through the BitTorrent site The Pirate Bay. “Keep it safe,” reads a message greeting visitors to the WikiLeaks chat room. After two weeks, the insurance file is doubtless in the hands of thousands, if not tens of thousands, of netizens already.

We dipped into the torrent Friday to get a sense of WikiLeaks’ support in that effort. In a few minutes of downloading, we pulled bits and piece of insurance.aes256 from 61 seeders around the world. We ran the IP addresses through a geolocation service and turned it into a KML file to produce the Google Map at the top of this page [go to the Wired.com article or view it on Google Maps -- GAP]. The seeders are everywhere, from the U.S., to Iceland, Australia, Canada and Europe. They had all already grabbed the entire file, and are now just donating bandwidth to help WikiLeaks survive.

Cross-posted at The Libertarian Standard.

Yesterday, in All Your Tubes Are Belong to Googlizon, I blogged about the Google-Verizon proposal for regulating the internet and why libertarians should oppose both it and any net neutrality laws and regulations. Today, I came across a post on CrunchGear, a tech and gadgets site, by Nicholas Deleon, that criticizes the Tea Party for opposing net neutrality on the basis that it will violate the right of ISPs to free speech. I left a comment on his post, but I’ll reproduce it here.

I’m a libertarian, not a Tea Partier, but I’ll take a stab at explaining this.

Both free markets and the right to free speech are based on the right to private property. Net neutrality, insofar as it involves regulation, violates private property rights. That said, not every violation of the right to property is a violation of the right to free speech.

“But really, to expect the ISPs to do “right” by you is laughable. If it could, Comcast and the nation’s ISPs would offer 1 mbps (down, mind you) and call that SUPER FAST INTERNET, then charge you $100 per month for the privilege of using it.”

If they could? Maybe. Maybe not. But in a free market, they could not. Restrict competition through regulations, monopoly franchises, and whatnot, and then maybe they could.

“But to oppose Net Neutrality in order to defend the free speech of ISPs is pretty laughable.”

Umm… I don’t see in the letter where they defend the free speech of ISPs. I don’t see it in the quoted soundbite either.¹ More likely the speaker was concerned about the free speech of users who could be prevented by net neutrality regulations from purchasing services that otherwise might have been available, services they could have used to express themselves more effectively.

In any case, the fundamental reason to oppose net neutrality laws or regulations is that they constitute a violation of property rights.

Then I realized I had made a small mistake, so I left a second comment:

Okay, I see that in the linked article on Radtke’s quote, the reporter writes:

“The free-speech objection to net neutrality has also gained some ground recently. The National Cable & Telecommunications Association (NCTA) and AT&T began citing First Amendment objections to net neutrality in public discussions and in filings with the FCC this year.

“The free-speech argument holds that, by interfering with how phone and cable companies deliver Internet traffic, the government would be thwarting the free-speech rights of providers such as AT&T, Verizon and Comcast.”

This is the reporter’s interpretation, but let’s say it’s accurate. Is it not possible to imagine how net neutrality regulations could interfere with even the free speech of ISPs? And as “browse” at 1:58 pm UTC pointed out:

“The EFF has some great pieces on Net Neutrality. One of the issues is the Trojan Horse issue: whereby a more activist commissioner could abuse powers won in the aims of Net Neutrality to stifle free expression online. Even if they current FCC has no inclinations to regulate the Internet beyond Net Neutrality, regimes do change pretty frequently, and agendas change with them. If you look at it from that perspective, the argument you quoted above sounds a bit less crazy.”

In any case, as I mentioned in my previous comment, the fundamental reason to oppose net neutrality laws and regulations isn’t free speech but private property.

To wrap things up: That Nicholas finds the Tea Party’s free speech argument so laughable on its face betrays a leftist anti-corporate bias. Corporations are often not the good guys, such as when they seek government protection from competition. But at least corporations are not intrinsically evil. To turn to government as our savior, when it is government that is the primary enemy and source of man-made problems in the world, now that’s more than slightly misguided. In any event, Nicholas hardly gives the Tea Party a fair shake, focusing on their free speech argument as he does and not even bothering to give that a charitable interpretation or serious counterargument.

Cross-posted at The Libertarian Standard.

Endnotes

1. Jaime Radtke, chairwoman of the Virginia Tea Party Patriot Federation, said, “I think the clearest thing is it’s an affront to free speech and free markets.”

What you say!!!¹

There has been a lot wailing and gnashing of teeth recently over a joint announcement by Google and Verizon of a legislative-framework proposal they’ve been working on.

Now, I’ve seen this variously referred to as a backroom deal or pact, a secret treaty, or a set of regulations Google and Verizon are imposing on the internet. The FCC is shamefully abdicating its responsibility to regulate the internet! Nevermind that the D.C. Circuit court determined recently in the Comcast case that the FCC has no such regulatory authority over broadband internet; hence, the calls to disastrously reclassify broadband internet access in order to place it under the same regulatory rules as regular telephone service. Some are even intimating that Google and Verizon are trying to ‘own’ the internet. Net neutrality activists are up in arms about this proposal, viciously attacking Google for selling out and reversing its longstanding defense of net neutrality, and calling for people to stage a silly boycott of Google products and services. If you don’t join the herd, you get labeled a Google-Verizon apologist or it is insinuated that you are on their payroll (see comments on the CNET articles linked below, for example).

So what should libertarians make of all this?

As libertarians, we must of course oppose the Google-Verizon proposal and favor the abolition of the FCC and all internet regulation.

First, it is necessary to get a few facts straight. Larry Downes provides the best analysis I’ve yet seen in “Deconstructing the Google-Verizon Framework” at TechLiberation.com and “What the Google-Verizon proposal really says” at CNET. (There’s some overlap, but it’s worth reading both.) Also good and level-headed are Peter Suderman’s “No More Net Neutrality?” at Reason.com’s Hit & Run and Berin Szoka and Adam Thierer’s “Just say no to Ma Bell-era Net neutrality regulation” at CNET (though libertarians cannot agree with their claim that governments should step in “when . . . self-regulation fails”).

As Downes points out,

the Google-Verizon framework has absolutely no legal significance.  It’s not a treaty, accord, agreement, deal, pact, contract or business arrangement—all terms still being used to describe it.  It doesn’t bind anyone to do anything, including Google and Verizon.

Moreover, if Downes’s analysis is correct, there are very few significant differences between the Google-Verizon proposal and the FCC’s own Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) made way back in October of last year. So much for the “FCC is abdicating regulatory responsibility” nonsense (the authority for which it lacks, remember). Keep in mind this is just a proposal. We don’t know if the FCC or Congress will adopt any of its points. Google and Verizon cannot write or impose regulations without Congress and the FCC.

According to Downes, it is primarily for the very points on which the Google-Verizon and FCC proposals are identical or very very similar that Google and Verizon are being attacked. And, bizarrely, it is these points that net neutrality advocates usually support — and, notably, do support…when they come from the FCC. Odd how vague terms and turns of phrase get interpreted much more charitably when coming from a government bureaucracy than from a corporation.

Where the Google-Verizon proposal does differ significantly from the FCC proposal is where things get interesting. It does suggest the FCC not be granted any authority to regulate broadband internet access and only be granted the authority to enforce rules passed into law by Congress. Libertarians can get behind the first part of this at least. And one would think people of a democratic bent would approve of keeping regulatory control in the hands of a democratically-elected body rather than a technocratic, politically-appointed bureaucracy.  Unsurprisingly, the FCC is none too fond of this part of the proposal, insisting the only way net neutrality will be achieved is if Congress gives them more power and authority. Imagine that.

The proposal significantly departs from net neutrality by suggesting wireless broadband, i.e., mobile network, infrastructure is not mature enough yet to function reasonably well under its rules. This appears to be a compromise Google made with Verizon, long a staunch opponent of net neutrality, in order to come to an agreement on a middle-ground policy proposal before Congress or the FCC got it into their heads to do something drastic, like reclassifying broadband internet or otherwise granting the FCC broad regulatory authority to screw up the internet.

Another noted exception to net neutrality is the exclusion of ‘unlawful’ content from the non-discrimination rule. Libertarians can object to this that there is much that is unlawful, under positive law, in the US that should not be. But is this exception really that unusual? Don’t landlords often include such provisions in leases? Do we really imagine that governments won’t mind ISPs allowing ‘unlawful’ activity and content or that ISPs won’t mind bearing the risk of liability for what customers do on their networks? Instead of attacking Google and Verizon on this, net neutrality advocates ought to attack governments for unjust laws and get them repealed. Still, it would be heroic of Google and Verizon to defy governments on this.

The Google-Verizon and FCC proposals don’t seem all that radical, status-quo altering, or different to me. It seems much is being made ado about nothing and the claims of the death of Google’s commitment to net neutrality as well as the FCC’s exercising of its regulatory responsibility have been greatly exaggerated.  Surprise Surprise. The boring truth wouldn’t generate as many page views and as much anti-corporate political outrage.

But all this is really neither here nor there. Whether Google has sold out on net neutrality or not, whether Downes’s analysis is correct or not, whatever the correct interpretation of certain phrases in the Google-Verizon proposal that net neutrality advocates are criticizing – it shouldn’t have a significant impact on how libertarians ought to view what Google and Verizon are trying to do.  Google and Verizon are attempting regulatory capture. They are trying to get Congress and/or the FCC to regulate the internet in certain ways. This is understandable. It can be seen as defensive in a sense – to prevent regulation that will be harmful to their business. The proposal seeks to preserve the lack of net neutrality in wireless broadband, at least for now, effectively maintaining the status quo for Verizon. And it seeks to preserve, codify, and extend net neutrality in wired broadband, which benefits Google on personal computers.

Meanwhile, in a separate move, Google is apparently starting to co-locate portable data centers with Verizon’s network hubs to speed up its services for mobile users as well as save space for other traffic and probably save the two companies money. There’s nothing wrong with this at all, legally or morally, as it is a shrewd business decision that involves no aggression; and it will only benefit users.

While the Google-Verizon legislative-framework proposal may be defensive in a sense, self-defense against impending aggression (i.e., the threat or use of initiatory force) cannot justify aggression against innocent third parties. The proposal as a whole will involve just such ‘collateral damage’. Government regulation involves initiating force against people to prevent them from engaging in voluntary, mutually-agreeable transactions with their own property.  As libertarians, we must of course oppose this and favor the abolition of the FCC and all internet regulation. Depending on your point of view, the Google-Verizon proposal may be the best politically-realistic option on the table or there may be better alternatives (though it’s not the abominable betrayal many are making it out to be), but because it is a proposal for regulating the internet it is not something libertarians can actively support.

Against this position I have personally seen a number of different objections (in blockquotes below):

This is naive and reflexive. What you propose is dangerous, because voters and internet users do not have a voice in corporate decision-making (unless they own stock and exercise voting privileges). This is not hands-off government, this is hands in the pockets government.

This makes it sound as if voters have much of a voice in government decision-making. This, along with turning to government to solve perceived problems, particularly when it has to do with corporations, could be labeled naive and reflexive. As if government agents are disinterested and altruistic. Public Choice Economics 101. I don’t see the difference between hands-off government and hands-in-the-pockets government. In any case, either type is an oxymoron. Government is always putting its hands in other people’s pockets, often on behalf of big corporations. Why are people still surprised at regulatory capture? I’d be surprised not to see it.

Libertarian idealism is great in theory, but in practice it is co-opted by the interests of those who have risen to the top in business and now want to solidify those gains by making it difficult for others to take the same level playing field they enjoyed when they were smaller.

This is not libertarian ideals in practice. The only way the guys at the top in business can do this successfully is through the government. This is the very opposite of the libertarian ideal; it is not libertarianism in action. It is precisely why much corporate regulation is actually proposed by the big players in an industry once they’ve risen to the top, not by forward-thinking, altruistic politicians. What the objection actually describes is Republicanism, which pays lip service to liberty and free markets but in reality is corporatist. But the Democrats are corporatist too, in a different way. The existence of internet regulation and the FCC just serves to support the state-corporate plutocratic partnership.

Libertarians do not suggest regulatory capture as a solution. We suggest abolishing the FCC so that there is nothing for Google or any other corporation to capture and no political reason for them to feel they need to do so.

Google is great and I would love to see government stay out of a fair fight. This isn’t one, and you’re rooting against your own best interests, unless of course you own stock in Google or Verizon.

What is fair about a fight in which those with the best political connections — usually the wealthy and big corporations, mind you! — can employ the massive force of the government to impose their will on those who disagree? This generally is not good for the little guy. In fact, if this issue weren’t thrust into the political arena, it wouldn’t even be fair to call it a fight. Politicizing the issue and vying for control over the minds, bodies, and property of others against their will is what turns this into a fight. It is not in my best interest (properly conceived) to force others to let me use their property the way I want.  Government regulation of telecoms has also gone hand-in-hand with invasion of privacy, such as government snooping after ‘terrorists’ and whatnot. And do we really want to open the door to Hollywood, the RIAA,  indecency police, and Homeland Security influence on internet regulation?

Allowing Google and Verizon to write regulations for themselves is like letting the financial industry regulate itself. (How well has that worked for us?)

As I’ve pointed out, Google and Verizon cannot write regulations without Congress and the FCC. Moreover, the financial industry most certainly was not left to ‘regulate’ itself. It is shot through and through with government regulation, regulation that failed, that will continue to fail, that is in fact counter productive. Regulation is what screwed up the rating agencies, making them worse than useless. Government interference in the housing market and the money/credit supply is what created the housing bubble upon which the infamous credit default swaps were built. Regulatory capture happened and will continue to happen in the financial industry. It has and will continue to happen with the internet so long as the government seeks to regulate it.

Moreover, the politicians and bureaucrats are ignorant of the very things they are regulating. Regulators didn’t catch Enron. They didn’t catch Madoff’s scam and they ignored the guy who did. They didn’t understand credit default swaps. Does anyone really expect them to understand how the internet works, what business models work best, and what consumers really want? The late, and unlamented, former Senator Ted Stevens, famously referred to an email message as “an internet” and described the internet as a “series of tubes” (referenced in the post title). This man chaired the Senate commerce committee for years, overseeing a large overhaul of the telecommunications bill and ‘authoring’ S. 2686, the Communications, Consumer’s Choice, and Broadband Deployment Act of 2006.

Do telecoms understand the technology better than politicians and political appointees? Yes, they do. That’s precisely why they should not be allowed to police themselves.

What you say!!!

The illogic of this is mindboggling. I do not understand how “telecoms understand the technology better than politicians and political appointees” leads to “That’s precisely why they should not be allowed to police themselves.” Is this based on fear? I’m more afraid of politicians and political appointees. They have much more power and much less accountability. That makes their ignorance all the more worrisome. At least companies have to compete with one another for (voluntary) customers and revenue.

I think most people do not understand the extent to which the telecom and internet industries are regulated by governments already, leading to myriad problems, including distorted and decreased competition. Separate economy and state, and corporations would have far less power.

What I am advocating is defending the status quo. If the status quo must be defended by regulation, then I am for government regulation.

Why defend the status quo? What’s so special about it? Change can be good. Ask Obama. Seriously though, by what right can anyone use regulation to maintain the status quo?

Left alone, I’m afraid internet would go the way of television — mostly garbage for free and very dumbed down, the more you pay, the better. My other biggest concern is lack of access to information by people who are low income, or schools on limited budgets, etc.

The internet is for porn! Seriously though, I’m fond of Sturgeon’s Law: 90% of everything is crap. Still, there is a lot of great, free content on the internet. That would be the case even without net neutrality. And I see no reason why non-commercial sites like Wikipedia would slow to a crawl and become hard to use, as some have irresponsibly claimed.

Peter Suderman said it well:

And, of course, that’s the big picture here: allowing and encouraging a diversity of feature sets and service options for content providers and consumers. Neutrality advocates stress the concept of equality for a reason — the goal is to ensure a level of sameness amongst consumers. But when it comes to information-service markets, especially the growing world of mobile data access, not all plans, phones, and networks are created equal. But that’s as it should be, because not all consumer needs are the same. Those who want more should be able to pay for it. Those who don’t shouldn’t have to.

Broadband may be becoming so voluminous and cheap that we’ll effectively see net neutrality for most users by default. But if this turns out not to be the case, and traffic needs keep up with expanding supply, then we might not see net neutrality fully realized in all respects. If net neutrality is not what would arise in an unhampered market, then so be it. It won’t be the end of the world and the poor will not be more unable to access the internet (at reasonable speeds) than they already are. I expect they will be better off.

Free wifi with reasonable speeds is offered by a growing number of businesses, including coffee shops and restaurants. Even Sam’s Club will soon be offering free wifi to shoppers. Businesses have an incentive to do this as a loss leader, to get customers inside to sample and purchase their products and other services. Companies like Google want everyone to be online and having a good experience; it’s better for their bottom line.  Even Verizon benefits from providing customers a satisfying internet experience.

Tell Googlizon to do no evil, but do it for the right reasons.²

Cross-posted at The Libertarian Standard.

Endnotes

1. Confused by this sentence and the title? The title is a mash-up of a few geeky internet memes. Know your meme, and also check out this Wikipedia article and this YouTube video.
2. Googlizon, for those who haven’t figured it out, is my Japanese Godzilla-style mashup of Google and Verizon.

From the Edmonton Journal comes news that some Greenpeace members rappelled off the top of Calgary Tower to hang a banner that read “Separate Oil and State.”

Scott Blasken got this shot from his office window Tuesday morning after Greenpeace unfurled a banner from the Calgary Tower.

Hey, I’m all in favor of separating oil and state. But that means no strategic oil reserves; no taxes, including carbon taxes; no cap-and-trade; no regulations; no moratoriums or bans on offshore or other drilling; no special protections of any kind, including caps on liability for actual damages to private property caused by oil companies;¹ no eminent domain (ab)use; and no mercantilistic and imperialistic wars to make the world safe for domestic consumption of foreign oil. But somehow I don’t expect all of this is what the Greenpeace activists confusedly mean by “separate oil and state.” Alas and alack.

Cross-posted at The Libertarian Standard.

Endnotes

1. I’m not talking about limited liability for shareholders here. I’m referring to caps like the $75 million liability cap that has received so much attention in the wake of the BP oil spill, enacted in 1990 as part of the Oil Pollution Act following the Exxon Valdez spill.

About a month and a half ago, in Atlas Shrugged movie finally filming?!, Jacob Huebert updated us on the Atlas Shrugged movie. Now, thanks to Reason Magazine and Reason.tv, we are privileged to see behind-the-scenes footage and interviews.

I’ll admit I was leery of the current iteration of the project, but I am somewhat reassured to hear that Atlas Shrugged will be made into three movies, not one, which is more doable. I’m also reassured that the director and the actor playing Henry Rearden seem to have a decent handle on Ayn Rand’s vision and characters, though I was a bit disquieted by the director mispronouncing Rand’s first name.

From Reason.com’s Hit & Run blog (video below):

Many actors and producers have talked about adapting Ayn Rand’s classic Atlas Shrugged for the big screen, but 53 years after its publication no one has dared tackle the ambitious project—until now.

Reason.tv heads to the set of Atlas Shrugged Part One to offer viewers a rare behind-the-scenes glimpse of this most anticipated film.

Director Paul Johansson (One Tree Hill) and Grant Bowler (Lost, True Blood, Ugly Betty), who plays Henry Rearden, discuss the perils, pressures, and pleasure involved in telling the epic tale of a society where the “men of the mind” go on strike and refuse to contribute to a collectivist world.

Produced by Ted Balaker and Hawk Jensen. Camera by Austin Bragg and Hawk Jensen. Production support by Sam Corcos.

Music: “Eu Nao Sabia” by Anamar available from Magnatune Records.

Approximately 5.3 minutes.

Go to Reason.tv downloadable HD, iPod, and audio versions of this and all our videos and subscribe to Reason.tv’s YouTube channel to receive automatic notification when new material goes live.

Cross-posted at The Libertarian Standard.

Clearly, in times of emergency, the internet, in order to be protected, must be destroyed.

Cross-posted at The Libertarian Standard.

From Wired.com comes news of the US Army’s latest spy mobile — a high altitude, long-duration flight, combat airship, ominously nicknamed “The Unblinking Eye.” This sweet ride and its two sister blimps will cost taxpayers upwards of half a billion dollars. The 5-year contract calls for mere $517 million, and we all know military contractors never experience cost overruns.

I love Noah Shachtman’s analysis of the propagandistic publicity poster by Northrop Grumman, the maker of the Army’s latest war toy:

God smiles when the Army spends a half-billion dollars on spy blimps the size of a football field. I believe that’s the message Northrop Grumman is trying to convey in this illustration. . .

The first airship is supposed to be inflated around 10 months from now. Eight months later, the Army hopes to have the first LEMV flying over Afghanistan. On that day, the clouds will part, the sun will shine, and the cherubs will sing as the unblinking eye begins looking for Taliban.

God bless America indeed.

The Unblinking Eyes of Sauron are intended for use over foreign soil. But with the increasing militarization of US borders and police, I wonder how long until they or their successors are deployed over our own heads? looking for brown-skinned interlopers, pot growers, and terrorists under every rock.

I’m reminded of a couple of pieces by heavy metal bands, though these work just as well for spy satellites. The first is a creepy intro, “An Eye Is Upon You,” by Powerman 5000 for their album Tonight the Stars Revolt! And the second is “Electric Eye” by one of my favorite bands, Judas Priest (their compilation album Metal Works is a good place to start).

Cross-posted at The Libertarian Standard.

It is a common mistake, made even by some libertarians and former libertarians, that libertarians reject the idea of unchosen obligations. Gene Callahan, apparently a former libertarian turned communitarian, is the latest to make this mistake. He says:

Obligation . . . is the crucial idea denied by libertarian political theory.¹

Well, this is just patently absurd. Libertarians, of course, do not deny that individuals can have obligations to others, including non-humans.

Fortunately, Callahan goes on to clarify what he means:

We can have obligations that we did not agree to take upon ourselves.

But this is something that not all libertarians deny, as a wide and deep enough perusal of libertarian literature will demonstrate.

At the very least, libertarians recognize the unchosen obligation not to threaten or use initiatory physical force against other rational beings (i.e., to refrain from what we call aggression).

Libertarians generally make two important sets of distinctions regarding obligation: that between negative and positive obligations and that between enforceable and unenforceable obligations. One can go further and recognize that obligations can have different weightings relative to one another such that one obligation can override or delimit the legitimate means of fulfilling another.

Rights, at least as I define the term, are legally enforceable² moral claims against another’s prior obligation not to threaten or use initiatory physical force. The Non-Aggression Principle (NAP)³ and corresponding rights⁴ are unchosen, enforceable negative obligations.

Can we have unchosen positive obligations? Libertarians need not deny this, and not all do. It should be easily recognized that unchosen, unenforceable positive obligations are strictly compatible with the NAP/rights.

What about unchosen, enforceable positive obligations? Provided they are compatible with the NAP/rights, if there are any that meet this description, then libertarians need not deny unchosen, enforceable positive obligations outright. I’ll leave it up to the reader’s imagination to come up with possible examples of unchosen, enforceable positive obligations that are compatible with the NAP/rights. If you take the challenge, bear in mind what I wrote about how one obligation can override or delimit the legitimate means of fulfilling another.

Suffice to say that it is a myth that libertarians (need to) deny unchosen, even positive, obligations. Callahan is attacking a straw man.

To criticize libertarians in general for denying unchosen, enforceable positive obligations, or just certain of them, would be more accurate. But to do so would be to take the position that the threat or use of initiatory physical force (i.e., aggression) is at least sometimes justified — that, for example, what is usually thought of commonsensically as theft or trespass or murder in everyday life, is not theft or trespass or murder in the ‘political’ sphere, i.e., when the state or the ‘community’ does it.⁵

I will conclude with four quotations of my own:⁶

Freedom is, in truth, a sacred thing. There is only one thing else that better serves the name: that is virtue. But then what is virtue if not the free choice of what is good?
– Alexis de Tocqueville

The practical reason for freedom, then, is that freedom seems to be the only condition under which any kind of substantial moral fibre can be developed.
–Albert Jay Nock

Simplicity and truth of character are not produced by the constraint of laws, nor by the authority of the state, and absolutely no one can be forced or legislated into a state of blessedness; the means required are faithful and brotherly admonition, sound education, and, above all, free use of the individual judgment.
– Benedict de Spinoza, Tractatus Theologico-Politicus

Now human law is framed for a number of human beings, the majority of whom are not perfect in virtue. Wherefore human laws do not forbid all vices, from which the virtuous abstain, but only the more grievous vices, from which it is possible for the majority to abstain; and chiefly those that are to the hurt of others, without the prohibition of which human society could not be maintained: thus human law prohibits murder, theft and such like.
– Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I-II, Question 96, Second Article

Cross-posted at The Libertarian Standard.

Endnotes

1. It doesn’t help interpretation that Callahan started this sentence in the title of his post.
2. The presence of the term “legally” here but not elsewhere in the post should not be taken to imply I am making a different claim here. I add it here in a definition for greater clarity.
3. It’s not an axiom.
4. Most fundamentally, the life, liberty, and property triad. Of the three, I think liberty is the most fundamental (at least at the individual level of analysis, from the perspective of moral theory; at the structural level of analysis, that of political and legal theory, the right to property may be the most fundamental; rights cannot be fully understood exclusively from either perspective, but rather must be conceived from a dialectical perspective that encompasses both as well as the cultural level (see Chris Sciabarra’s Total Freedom: Toward a Dialectical Libertarianism for more on these three levels of dialectical analysis, which I adapted to conceptualizing rights chapter 3 of my dissertation) ) but it cannot be exercised or properly understood without the right to private property.
5. In chapters 6 and 7 of my dissertation, I deny that this is truly the political sphere. I conceive of genuine, immanent politics as discourse and deliberation between equals in joint pursuit of eudaimonia (flourishing, well-being). By “equals” I mean “equality in authority” as in Locke’s state of nature, though I do not conceive of “nature” in Lockean, social-contract theory terms but rather in Aristotelian terms, i.e., of teleological completeness or perfection. In short, politics presupposes liberty. Hence, the term “vulgar politics” (or vicarious politics) used as a category on this site as a synonym for statist ‘politics’.
6. Yes, I know these thinkers were not libertarian. But seen in the proper light philosophically, free of the contradictory ideas held by those who wrote them, these statements present truth. Accurate textual exegesis has its place but is another matter, one we are not concerned with here.

A couple of days ago David mentioned on The Libertarian Standard that the Mises Institute providing its entire online media and literature library as a set of free torrents can be seen as part of a distributed or grassroots intellectual guerrilla resistance against the state.

This is just one aspect of the Mises Institute’s effort to be completely open source. All of the intellectual eggs of the Austro-Libertarian movement are no longer being kept in one basket. The more people who seed those torrents, the easier the burden on the Mises Institute.

But more importantly, should statist or natural disaster strike, the world won’t lose the vast wealth of information hosted by the Mises Institute. Indeed, not only will the information not be lost, but there will be no downtime in its worldwide online distribution. Should states decide to actively move against us, they’ll be in for one hell of a game of ‘whack-a-mole’. They’ll face the same problems the RIAA, Hollywood, and others are facing in their War on Piracy Copying.

Austro-Libertarianism has gone viral, folks.

All this is to set the context for another example of open source anti-state resistance that I recently discovered. WordPress is an open source website and blogging platform. It’s an easy to use, yet powerful, tool for getting our ideas online where people around the world can access them. It’s free, as in speech and beer. This site is powered by it. The Libertarian Standard is powered by it. The Mises Institute’s site is powered by it.

But some countries like China and Australia censor the internet, blocking access to unapproved sites like YouTube and Twitter, filtering or blocking or shutting down or otherwise regulating websites and blogs.

There are ways to get around this censorship, however. Here’s one: The good folks at Global Voices Advocacy, an organization defending free speech online, have heroically created a guide to mirroring a censored WordPress blog. It’s covered by a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license, just like this site and The Libertarian Standard. Get it. Share it. Even if you don’t need it yet, someday you might. Others already do.

In the spirit of the Mises Institute’s torrented online library, I’m hosting the guide here as well.

Cross-posted at The Libertarian Standard.

Apropos Jacob Huebert’s excellent post a few days ago on the time Before We Worshipped Presidents, our lesser rulers are getting increasingly used to their special, above-the-law status as well. Watch how Democratic Congressman Bob Etheridge responds to being peacefully asked a simple question by a well-dressed student on a public street:

Congressman Etheridge thinks he can interrogate and assault someone simply for having the temerity to ask him a question in public, apparently without fear of retaliation or legal consequences, despite being recorded. He has a right to know who the student is? I don’t think so. He’s not police. I don’t think even a police officer would have cause under positive law to demand identification and assault the student simply for video recording and asking a question in public. In any case, their authority is illegitimate and what we have here clearly is assault even under current positive law.

What’s more disturbing is that this incident is indicative of just how much our petty tyrants view themselves as being above us and the law — though I suppose assaulting one person on the street is an improvement over assaulting millions through his legislative acts; if only he and his fellow control-freaks would cease the latter, the world would be a much better place and their private crime manageable.

Update: Congressman Etheridge and the establishment news media go into damage control mode.

Update II: Glenn Greenwald of Salon.com agrees that this is “a clear case of assault and battery” and that Etheridge is “obviously inebriated with an extreme sense of entitlement.” He’s not impressed with Etheridge’s public apology after being outed online. Greenwald says in an update that he expected Democrats would try to defend Etheridge’s actions, but even he was “surprised by the extent of the eagerness to defend a clearly illegal and indefensible assault based on the political ideologies of those involved.” Follow the link to read more.

Unedited video from the first camera:

Update III: Digby reminds us of other similar incidents (with video) and points out that the state’smen and/or their security detail are never prosecuted, whereas a private citizen doing the same thing generally would be.

Cross-posted at The Libertarian Standard.

A common retort that libertarians, even minarchists, hear when criticizing ‘their’ government is “If you don’t like it, then just leave.”¹ Indeed, residency is perceived to be one piece of evidence (among others, like voting, paying taxes, etc.) for one’s implicit consent to the state and its rules. Just leave. As if there are better alternatives. Or, as if ‘their’ country being the least bad option somehow justifies its government. Just leave. They make it sound so simple, don’t they? If only it were. Unfortunately, states are not so keen on letting their slaves get away so easily, free and clear.

So, my wife is from India and she recently got her U.S. citizenship. She had a permanent greencard (which cost us a couple thousand dollars and much hassle over several years to acquire, by the way, even for the wife of a U.S. citizen), so why would she want U.S. citizenship? Well, for one thing, even with a permanent greencard she wouldn’t be able to leave the country for a protracted period of time, say to return to India for an extended visit, without more hassle and the risk of being barred re-entry and losing her permanent resident status. Because India has not yet passed a dual citizenship law (and doesn’t seem likely to do so anytime soon), she has to renounce her Indian citizenship. Okay, fine. She can get an oddly named OCI (Overseas Citizenship of India) lifetime visa to visit India whenever she wants, however long she wants.² That doesn’t sound so bad. But India’s 1967 Passports Act doesn’t make renouncing Indian citizenship so easy.

Indians acquiring foreign citizenship are required to renounce their Indian citizenship, surrender their Indian passports, and acquire a “Surrender Certificate.” So my wife has to mail her Indian passport to the Indian Consulate in Chicago and pay $175 (plus $20 for mailing fees) for the certificate. She has 3 months from the time she acquired U.S. citizenship to do so. And she needs copied pages from her U.S. passport, which she can’t apply for until acquiring U.S. citizenship, as part of the paperwork. If she misses this 3 month deadline, additional penalties begin to accrue. Yes, I say “additional penalties” because she is already being unjustly penalized by having to pay $195 and face greater hassles entering and exiting India. I’m not sure what the additional penalties are, but suffice to say they would further increase the costs of leaving India and renouncing citizenship. There are also penalties for foreign citizens traveling to India under their Indian passport. The minimum penalty appears to be $250 for each such visit, but penalties of up to 5 years in prison and a fine of up to $1,250 are mentioned as well.

But, no, that’s not all. There are more fees and paperwork to apply for her OCI lifetime visa. $275 and another $275 for our American born daughter’s OCI visa, plus mailing fees of $21. She also needs five passport photos each of herself and our daughter. Passport photos run you $10 on average and, of course, you can only buy them in pairs, so we’re looking at another $60 there. Of course, I need my own visa, but mine is good for only 10 years and I can only stay for up to 6 months at a time. I forget how much it cost as I got it several years ago. The Indian Consulate in Chicago reports that for a family of four, including two children under 18, recently naturalized, this whole process (renunciation of Indian citizenship, “surrender certificate,” and OCI visa) would cost:

1. OCI fees: $1,100 ($275 x 4)
2. Surrender certificate fees: $700 ($175 X 4)
3. Mailing fees: $23

Plus the cost of all the passport photos, of course — another $120 — for a grand total of $1,943.³ Just leave, eh?

No doubt the statist will respond that when he said you should just leave, he didn’t mean you should be able to return for a visit, much less acquire effective permission for permanent residency. Even granting his point for the sake of argument, that only subtracts the temporary visa or OCI visa fees, plus photo expenses, from the penalties of renouncing Indian citizenship while increasing or adding others.

The United States doesn’t make it easy to leave either. I’m not sure about India, but it appears the U.S. State Department doesn’t like the idea of letting people go stateless (imagine that!) and will not be “reluctant” to allow (!) expatriation (renouncing citizenship or permanent residency) until you have attained citizenship or legal asylum in another country, which of course is usually an expensive and complicated process. The U.S. is notorious for being unusual among nation-states in taxing its own citizens’ (and permanent residents’) earnings abroad, so it comes as no surprise that it imposes an expatriation tax if you’re worth enough. Even more outrageous, the U.S. government taxes the earnings of expatriates and it is against the law to renounce citizenship in order to avoid paying U.S. taxes. So much for one of the main reasons for “just leaving.” It is apparently possible to be granted credits and/or exclusions, but even so there are conditions that must be met and the fact that you have to file tax returns is outrageous. As the last link indicates, there are of course hefty penalties for filing expatriation and tax forms late or not at all. $10,000 for not filing expatriation Form 8854. The recent Tax Increase Prevention and Reconciliation Act signed by Bush in May 2006 is apparently a mixed bag and even applies retroactively to January 1, 2006 (isn’t that unconstitutional? naturally, the SCOTUS would side with the state itself on this one). The Heroes Earnings Assistance and Relief Tax Act of 2008, also under Bush, also appears to expand and increase taxes on expatriates in order to offset increased benefits to military ‘service’ members. To make matters worse, the U.S. under Obama has recently instituted capital controls hidden (naturally) in the Hiring Incentives to Restore Employment Act (HIRE; H.R. 2487).

I’m not a lawyer and am no expert on these issues — state laws, especially tax laws, can be quite complicated — so feel free to correct me or elaborate on any particulars.

What is clear is that it’s not so easy to just leave after all. Moreover, even when it’s possible, returning even for a limited time, much less an extended stay, is not so easy or cheap. There are other problems with leaving the country as well. It is not so easy to leave friends and family behind, find a job in another country, learn a new language and culture, move all your stuff, and so on. There are also U.S. tax penalties for cashing out of retirement plans early. There are probably more that I’m forgetting at the moment or have never heard of. All told, there is a hefty price to pay for leaving. Why should we have to pay such a price just because we don’t recognize the legitimacy of the state or certain of its rules?

But all this about the difficulty of “just leaving” is really neither here nor there. The difficulties undermine the statist’s position but they do not strike at the root. “If you don’t like it, then just leave” is not really an argument. “Just leave” just does not follow from “If you don’t like it.” Why should we have to leave? Why can’t we stay and complain? Seek to change things? Why should we be subject to laws, regulations, and actions to which we have not consented and that we consider to be unjust while we remain here?

“Well,” the amateur or professional social contract theorist will reply, “this land is our land. If you remain here, you are demonstrating implicit consent to the state and its laws.” Of course, this too does not follow at all. There can be many reasons why I might remain in a country other than consent to its state and its rules. Lysander Spooner long ago exploded social contract theory and the implicit consent justification of the state. There is also the fact that the alleged implicit consent is directly contradicted and trumped by explicit denial of consent.

But what I want to point out here is an even greater logical problem for this line of ‘argument’. As the theory goes, a state is justified if and to the extent that it has the consent of its people. Now, no state anywhere in history has ever had the unanimous, explicit consent of its people. So social contract theorists have had to settle for implicit consent and do not usually insist that it be unanimous. Nevermind that a majority consenting to or approving something does not in and of itself make that thing right, much less justified to impose on those who do not consent to or approve it. Social contract theorists will often make ‘reasonable man’-type arguments, putting forth conditions and propositions to which they think a ‘reasonable man’ would consent. Quite naturally there is much reasonable disagreement among even social contract theorists as to what constitutes a ‘reasonable man’.

As I mentioned at the start of this post, however, they will also often point to particular practices as evidence of implicit consent: e.g, voting, paying taxes, and our focus for this post, residency. The notion that residence demonstrates implicit consent unintentionally reveals that what we are dealing with here is actually a viciously circular argument.⁴ Behind the command “If you don’t like it, then just leave” is the hidden implication that society or the state has a prior claim to your land and property, indeed to all the land, property, and individuals in a given geographic area. The statist might respond to the obvious objection “Why should I have to leave?” with the claim that by coming or staying here you have consented to the state and its laws, but notice that this too relies upon the hidden and unargued for premise that society or the state has a prior claim to all the land, property, and individuals in a given geographic area. Why should we believe this? While common or public (i.e., jointly-held private) property is not necessarily precluded by libertarianism, it is quite a collectivist stretch to claim that ‘society as a whole’ owns (or owned prior to parceling it out) all the land in a given geographic area; here we must part company even with Locke. To say that the state owns (or owned prior to parceling it out) all the land in a given geographic area is to assume prematurely that the state is legitimate, that it could justly own anything, so it will hardly do to attempt to show that the state is justified by pointing to ‘evidence’ that presupposes that the state is justified.

Just leave? Sorry, try again.

Update: My brother-in-law, who just got his US citizenship, has informed me that the Indian Government recently decided not to charge the extra $175 for renouncing Indian citizenship, but only for people who got their US citizenship before June 1, 2010. Those lucky individuals who beat the cutoff will only be charged $20, unless they are even luckier and somehow already happen to have a “Cancelled” stamp on their Indian passport. See the text in red at the bottom of this page on the Chicago Indian Consulate’s website.

[Cross-posted at The Libertarian Standard.]

Endnotes

1. Thanks to Stephan Kinsella for reminding me of the especially vulgar “AMERICA: LOVE IT OR LEAVE IT!!!” He tells me he typically responds with “No, if you don’t like it that I get to stay here and bitch about it, then you leave.” This works in the United States, but not in every country.
2. This is one of those convoluted things governments do. The Constitution of India does not allow simultaneously holding Indian citizenship and foreign citizenship. But the Indian government decided to grant ‘overseas citizenship’ or ‘dual citizenship’ to former Indian citizens through the OCI visa anyway. Despite including the term ‘citizen’, an OCI visa does not grant full citizenship (no voting rights, etc.).
3. And what if you have more children or your children are not minors? They have to file as individual applicants and the mailing fees increase.
4. There is a distinction to be made between circularity and vicious circularity in argumentation. It is the latter that is logically problematic. For more on this, see, e.g., Douglas Rasmussen, “A Groundwork for Rights: Man’s Natural End,” Journal of Libertarian Studies Vol. IV, No. 1 (Winter 1980): 65-76.

There’s a new anti-war rock/hip-hop song hitting the air waves lately. It is called White Flag Warrior, from the album Survival Story, by Flobots and featuring Tim McIlrath of the punk rock band Rise Against. It’s a catchy tune with good lyrics, melding both rock and hip hop elements. The song has a definite non-violent resistance ring to it. The oft repeated line that “we’d rather make our children martyrs than murderers” reminds me of the Socratic position that it is better to suffer injustice than to commit it — truly libertarian sentiments.

Music video and lyrics below:

Lyrics

We request to negotiate
We come to you unarmed
We desire to communicate
You cannot do us harm

They want sacrifice
They hatch schemes and ask me to follow their path to the afterlife

I’ve got an appetite
For nice things and pipe dreams that my enemies could be blasted by

New metaphors
View that are better for you can’t survive if I’m your competitor

Rise together or fight separate wars
I pray I’m never forced to be a predator

Spectres spectate
We wont last
They glad to hate
When gladiators
Breathe their last
Scream en masse
When the dreams do clash
Like the swords in the wars
Let me bleed on that
But they feed on that
Say we need strong backs
Call us weak
If we don’t redeem contracts
But the feast wont last
When this beast attacks
The sons and the fathers
Will be free at last

This is love this is not treason

They see sharks in the estuary
They claim the arc’s Bartholomew’s
They say war is necessary
But we say war is child abuse

We’d rather make our children martyrs than murderers
We’d rather make our children White Flag Warriors

Core-to-core
Were the ones
We’ve been waiting for
We hold steady
Steadier than stevedores
Not tevias or matadors
On matters of what came before
Forgive the debts
To settle scores
Test the mettle
Either ore
Whats your plan got to do with me
If the bell tolls let freedom ring
And find new ways if we must be King
Instead of leading the young to our suffering

We pass testaments down scream back at heaven
For testing us like Wednesdays at eleven
Wanna recruit and train us to act evilly?
Save it for the shooting range and smack DVDs
Won’t study war no more this millennium
It’s never again to me or anyone
So think harder when you refer to us
Rather make our children martyrs than murderers

They shell dwellings to quell the shelling
They lift taboos to seduce the cowards
They say we’re too yellow-bellied
But we say we’re the new superpower

We seek waivers to not be liable
We claim to speak for a higher truth
We stand opposed to the homicidal
We tell you you’re fireproof

***

Cross-posted at The Libertarian Standard.

This is not a real Mediterranean recipe. I just made it up. I like it because it’s simple, easy to make, consists of just good meat, cheese and bread, and tastes good.

Ingredients

• 1 mini-sub roll (a small, slender 6″ sub-shaped roll; I like Asiago cheese rolls)
• deli-style, thinly-sliced smoked ham (Hillshire Farm is good)
• pizza-style pepperoni, for some spicy kick (I like Armour)
• goat cheese

Recipe

1. Slice the roll in half lengthwise. Optional: Heat the roll in the oven at 350°F for a few minutes first until the crust gets a little crispy.
2. Slather the goat cheese generously on the insides of both halves of the roll. It helps to let the goat cheese warm up a bit ahead of time as goat cheese can be really crumbly and hard to spread when cold.


(Click to enlarge.)

3. Put down an overlapping layer of pepperoni slices on the bottom half of the roll. The rolls I like are just wide enough for one row of pepperoni.
4. Pile on 2-3 layers of thin deli-style smoked ham, say 6-9 slices. Don’t lay ‘em out flat, cafeteria-style. I like to twist or fold them for greater volume and texture.
5. Put the top half of the roll on, and maybe slice the roll in half widthwise. Enjoy!

A while back I published a blogpost here about the individualist American strain of SF and the more cosmological perspective of the British strain. I just published and expanded and revised version at The Libertarian Standard, working in more explicit libertarian observations.

First of all, I found the title of the movie to be redundant from the get-go. The action scenes are mostly way over the top. The gore insanely so. Swords and other blades slice through body parts, even cutting men in half at the waist, as if they were hot knives slicing through butter. Ninja stars fly from hands like they are being fired from a machine gun. They even have chemtrails. Blood fountains and splatters by the bucket load. Our ninja hero takes dozens of lethal wounds, losing gallons of blood, and not only lives to tell about it but keeps on fighting. There is a bit of super-speed blurred movement and mind-over-body self-healing, so the movie is something of a fantasy action thriller. We’re treated to the cliché of the hero being down for the count, about to be killed, when someone he cares about is attacked and suddenly he discovers renewed vitality and determination and, inexplicably, an unbelievable (that’s saying a lot for this movie) leap in skill level.

For all that, I found the movie entertaining. The action scenes are well-done and stylish. And I particularly liked the parkour-inspired sequences. The plot is interesting and tightly executed. The story even has a couple of elements of interest to libertarians. There are a number of ninja clans that kidnap orphan children and train them to be assassins, indoctrinating them with the belief that the lives of individuals are valueless compared to that of the clan, which is one big family to which they owe unquestioning and unwavering loyalty and obedience. The ninja clans apparently act as secret private contractors for governments around the world, assassinating targets for 100 lbs. of gold. Our ninja hero is one particularly promising pupil of the Ozunu clan. He buys into the propaganda at first, but falls for a pretty young girl, a fellow trainee, who does not. She attempts to escape, and is recaptured and executed in front of all the ninjas-in-training as an example. When he is later faced with killing another girl, whom he is told has similarly betrayed the clan, as the final requirement of becoming a full member of the clan, he refuses and is nearly killed. The bulk of the movie is about his quest for revenge against the Ozunu clan with the help of a female government agent.

Though it is a classic revenge tale, the negative portrayal of coercive and aggressive collectivism is a nice touch. The notion that the individual should be subservient to and acquires his value and ultimate end from The Collective, whatever it be named (the Family, the Clan, the Tribe, the Race, the Nation or State), is an insidious sickness. It that permeates the communitarian classical republicanism of Rome (as I explain in my working paper “Roman Virtue, Liberty, and Imperialism: The Murder-Suicide of Classical Civilization” (pdf)), which, along with classical liberalism, with which it is in tension due to the conflict with the latter’s inherent individualism, was one of the major influences on the so-called Founding Fathers of the United States of America. It is also inherent in nationalism and, of course, the modern collectivist political movements of our age. At the risk of being redundant, a truly libertarian and civilized society exists for each and every individual’s own well-being – not the other way round.

Cross-posted at The Libertarian Standard.