Mr Civil Libertarian

At Liberal Conspiracy on left-libertarianism.

Yay, I did an “elsewhere” post! I’m a proper blogger now!

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As Libertarians across the US flock to cinemas to watch the film version of Atlas Shrugged (the film has a limited release and harsh criticism from everyone outside those who are already fully bought into Ayn Rand’s philosophy of corporate apologism and advocacy of selfishness as a way of life), the UK’s own Libertarian Party is caught in a minor controversy over its leader.

So it’s not a brilliant week to be a reader of Nozick, Rand, Friedman or Mises. But then, it’s never a good time to declare yourself associated with any philosophy that holds lassez faire capitalism to be a virtue.

But to an increasing number of self-described libertarians, myself included, the “right wing” libertarians of the LPUK/LPUS are quietly abandoning the doctrinaire “virtue of selfishness” model of freedom advocated by the Capitalist Libertarians who insist on the productive wonders of hierarchial, wealth concentrating and politically powerful private corporations.

The left-libertarian, on the other hand, prefers to recognise these economic powerhouses as what they are: the beneficiaries of near invisible State subsidies in a variety of forms.

These subsidies include
- artificial property rights,
- a regulatory system that benefits large, established players at the expense of smaller suppliers,
- subsidising of long-distance transportation at the expense of local enterprise more able to adapt supply to demand,
- and overhead capital costs made so high that most regular people are unable to ever go into business themselves.

In short, Capitalism as we know it couldn’t survive without the state; “free market” capitalism is an oxymoron. In reality, capitalism – even anarcho-capitalism – is in effect, privatised feudalism.

So why do so called Libertarians come out in full force to support an economic system that is anything but libertarian?

The problem is that many forms of libetarianism lack any form of social context.

Such libertarians, derisively named “vulgar” libertarians, are best characterized by the very stereotypes they try so hard to shake off: misanthropy, selfishness, and a total disregard for non-State sources of oppression (sexism, racism, other forms of prejudice), as well as the vast inequality of wealth and lack of opportunity pesented by the modern, top-down State Capitalist economic system.

Rather than attempt to understand the sources of these harmful feelings, they often ignore, or worse, justify their presence in their vision of a “free” society.

As an example of such, I refer you to much of the work of Austrian Economist Walter Block, who recently relased a book titled The Case for Discrimination.

The Left-Libertarian argument, on the other hand, runs differently. We accept the harm caused to minorities by socially destructive and divisive prejudices- and the need to fight them.

We also accept the damage caused by concentration of wealth and the class system- and the need to fight them.

Our only disagreement with the conventional left is our mistrust of the State as a tool for reforms.

After all, the State is an instution that exists to allow the corporate classes thrive- and the liberal left’s policies, while claiming to work towards a more fair and free society, are merely tinkering within the permitted parameters of the status quo.

It is this distrust of both State and private privilege that sets us apart from the Libertarian Right.

The left-libertarian position is well summarised by the mutualist writer Kevin Carson, of the Centre For a Stateless Society: “Big business has been a creature of the state from the beginning. And genuinely free markets would operate as dynamite at the foundations of corporate power.”

This little rant was half inspired by a thread over at the ALL Forums, half by a thread at the UK Libertarian forums, and half by a web comic about a doctor that’s also a Ninja. I know that’s three halves, but it’s a long post.

Despite the claims by anarcho-capitalists that they don’t represent the form of corporate capitalism that conservatives endorse (and to be fair, some manage not to- Lefty years Rothbard, Karl Hess, etc), there’s a few areas in which they manage to do so perfectly, and in doing so get themselves bogged down in the “right- conflationism” which has led conservatives to endorse the statist corporatocracy in the name of the free market, and for socialists to dismess the free market due to the statist corporatocracy. The mistake is made by non-anarchist libertarians too, and it’s one of the main reasons libertarians are decried as Thatcherites on steroids, or otherwise nothing but extreme conservatives “who smoke pot”.

It works like this:
Anarcho capitalists have no real objection to wage labour as such. This is fine; many anarchists who aren’t have no objection to the practice as such, but the problem is that Right libertarians either downplay, or refuse to accept, that the modern hierchial corporate structure, and the wage labour system that goes with it, are at their core statist, and authoritarian; and just because Tesco, or Wal Mart are not per se a part of the State, does not mean they are not “statist”; their vast wealth, and the highly unequal way it is distributed, as well as their massive market power and disdain for worker’s rights are consequences of inevitable effects of Statist policies. Regulations that act not to protect the consumer, but rather place artificially high overheads on businesses, subsidies on transportation that make local goods uncompetitive, lobbying of government for more of the same to protect vested interests and current players from competition (usually paid for and supported by the same), and of course our old friends legal person-hood, intellectual property. Add into this the State’s monopoly credit system, meaning people have no choice but to sell their labour, due to the massively increased difficulties in owning and operating their own business and owning their own land without a lifetime of debt, and you have a recipe for State supported corporatocracy- “private tyrannies” that can often be just as authoritarian as State tyrannies proper. You can’t beat a man with a stick just because it’s called the “people’s stick”, but it’s not ok to do so just because it’s a Tesco Value stick either. No more so just because your “boss” is wielding the stick in one hand and your totally one sided employment contract in the other.

Ok, so that’s the main problem, and here’s how it manifests itself most commonly: Opposition by Right-libertarians to minimum wage laws, health and safety regulation, and a belief in the “Least worst option” theory of sweatshop labour. To put it briefly: Minimum wage laws, in the context of the modern world, in which corporatocracy and the State do exist, are necessary to at least try to redress the massive inequity of wealth created by Statism. Health and safety regulation is needed for a similar reason: The massive economic power of corporate bodies, along with their lowered demand for labour means that they can afford to not give a damn about an employee’s health; there’s a whole queue of replacements at the Job Centre. As for sweatshops, they maybe the least worst option, but only because they’re the least worst option that they are permitted to choose. Yes, I admit: In a free society, none of these regulations would exist, and nor would sweatshops. They would not need to; the economic system that makes their existence so necessary would be not exist either, and until that system is gone, whatever society we find ourselves in will be anything but a free one. The problem is, we are light-years in distance and decades in time from seeing such a society emerge, and on a global scale, I doubt it will ever happen. There is, therefore, to the “thick” libertarian, as opposed to the “thin” libertarian (to whom libertarianism has no standards beyond the Non Aggression Principle), not a massive problem to support minimum wage, worker’s rights legislation, etc, whilst we find ourselves in the status quo.

Right-Libertarians, however, often don’t grasp this. Many, when pressed, will however agree with the evils of crony capitalism. They may even stretch to admitting that under their own principles, the modern corporate State should be opposed, and that big business is not the friend to humanity that Mises Daily writers make it out to be. Moreover, they will admit that unions are not the economically illiterate social evil that Mises Daily writers make them out to be. For evidence of this, do a search at Mises.org for “union” and find me a result that puts worker’s unions in a positive light.  Many talk the talk when it comes to the Corporate State, and yet when it comes time to advocate policy, “the free market” to them once again becomes nothing more than “Tesco minus the State”. Wage labour is advocated fully, the most one-sided of employment contracts treated as binding, and the notion of “rights” of the worker are treated as if you are asking for rights for amoeba. No doubt to the more Objectivist minded libertarian, to whom your net value is representative of your worth, the working class are amoeba; after all, wouldn’t they be rich if they weren’t? And, yes, once again, sweatshops are the savour of the third world.

Despite all this enthusiasm for the authority of bosses and glorification of corporate power, I would argue that if the Right-Libertarians I refer to here were to actually advocate the the principles they claim they do, rather than continue to act in a knee-jerk, reactionary way to any policy or idea labelled “socialist” or “collectivist”, then they would quickly realize that freedom requires not just the removal of the State, but the active fight against those institutions that act like States too. To be a Libertarian, you must be against authority too; but there are those amongst us that fail to see those sources of authority that don’t stem directly from what we conventionally know as “The State”.

Wage slavery, contract feudalism, and corporatocracy are real, guys. Get over it.

Congrats; you’ve reached the end of my rant. If you followed this, you may understand what has caused me to separate myself from the Right-Libertarian movement, such as the LPUK, Adam Smith Institute, Cato, and so on. To put it another way, the line of thought that took me from “thin” to “thick” libertarianism. Now you may have the dinosaurs I promised.

Typical, really.

I take it either Hari is a moron, or is currently filled with cognitive dissonance. He asserts humans are cooperative, will work altruistically to help each other, and are not necessarily selfish.

In a disaster, very few people are on-yer-bike individualists grabbing for themselves, and they are regarded as incomprehensible by everybody else. After the 2005 tsunami, the Ayn Rand Institute – set up by the philosopher-queen of the American right – issued an appeal entitled: “US Should Not Give Help to Tsunami Victims.” Even the people who every day take this callous view of victims within our own societies – the poor, the homeless, the ill – felt the need to distance themselves from this sociopathy. It’s often implied that kindness and generosity are naïve, idealistic fictions that will always be trumped by self-interest and greed. This is at the core of a particular kind of right-wing ideology that has been ascendant for 30 years now. But when the stakes are highest, the opposite is the case. When everything else is stripped away, when the buildings fall and the seas rise, we remember all that really matters is caring for each other.

Yet he constantly and advocates Statism- a necessarily non-cooperative, non-altruistic entity of privilege, selfishness, and power.

I have yet to hear any good justification from the statist left- which includes Hari- as to how they balance their committal to equality with the most fundamentally un-egalitarian institution in society.

There is a fear the Japanese government is withholding information about the dangers of the nuclear meltdown because they don’t trust the people to react sensibly and calmly. There is no way of knowing, yet, whether this is true. But understanding this crucial history should guide the government to tell the truth. As Solnit puts it: “If you imagine that the public is a danger, you endanger the public.” They are the allies of public safety, not its enemy.

Oh dear, Johann. Oh dear. As one commenter says:

So, voluntary taxation then?

Of course not. Hari doesn’t have the brain power to see beyond the status quo. He likes to talk in radical terms, yet has no solutions.

He is truly an “establishment” journalist.

Hat tip to Tim Worstall, where I first saw the article.

Or: “Trying hard not to make a Seinfeld reference”

If the Tories won the election (to the extent that they did) on their “Big Society” ticket, they have a very odd way of showing it.

For a program of “voluntary” social enterprises replacing State mandated aid (and what would they know about voluntary social enterprises? Go ask an anarchist, any anarchist, if you really want to understand what that means) to work, it helps for there to be two things:

1) an economic environment where people are able to give up more of their time to volunteering without diminishing their own quality of life. You know, where the forces of wage labour don’t mean we need to spend most of our waking hours just to keep up with the mortgage. Stuff like that.

2) For said voluntary enterprises to, um, not be illegal.

Proposals for a ban on soup runs and rough sleeping in a part of the centre of the capital have sparked a political row.

Westminster City Council is seeking to pass a bylaw that would prohibit soup runs from operating in a designated area around Westminster Cathedral.

Labour councillors have attacked the proposal as ‘cold-hearted and callous’ but the council says soup kitchens perpetuate homelessness and insists it has the support of interested charities.

For all the guff about Big Society, the Tories are very much a typical bunch of Statists; they only seek to increase their own influence, and that means suppressing non-State, libertarian alternatives. It’s not the first time this very thing has happened in a country that claims to promote volunteering and freedom:

Bobby and Amanda Herring spent more than a year providing food to homeless people in downtown Houston every day. They fed them, left behind no trash and doled out warm meals peacefully without a single crime being committed, Bobby Herring said. That ended two weeks ago when the city shut down their “Feed a Friend” effort for lack of a permit [because giving out hot soup and bread is such a dirty job, you just *NEED* a team of health and safety experts to ensure you don't give the homeless population diarrhea- Mr Civ Lib]. And city officials say the couple most likely will not be able to obtain one.

Back in January when the C4SS reported this news story, Brad Spangler cited this quote from Harry Browne that I have used in the past:

I’m reminded of Harry Browne’s old story about the guy who broke another man’s legs and then handed him a pair of crutches and said “See, if it wasn’t for me then you wouldn’t be able to walk!”

As one commenter on Facebook noted, “The kind of ‘compassion’ the centre-left has for people is the same kind of ‘compassion’ the farmer has by providing his cattle with hay and a barn.”

The point is that if our glorious overlords were to just let us go around helping each other willy-nilly, we might figure out that we don’t need them.

Of course, for London’s version of events, you can replace “centre- left” with “centre-right”. Or just plain old “right” depending on how you view the Tories. One more difference is that in Houston, the “justification” given here was food health and safety. The Tories, at least, are being more open in their callousness. They just hate the homeless, quite explicitly.

The Daily Fail article brings out a load of suits, none of whom have probably spent so much as a night outside of their homes unless it’s in a 3 star minimum hotel, arguing that soup kitchens ”Do little to help people make the step away from rough sleeping. Instead they frequently prevent people from facing up to the reality of the harmful life-style they have adopted.”

Thank you for pointing out that homelessness is a choice, Jeremy Swain, of Thames Reach Homelessness Association. ‘cus, you know, every homeless person secretly has a 3 bedroom, 2 bathroom semi-detached they could up and go to if only they could be arsed (but this cardboard box is just so comfy).

No, a handout of soup isn’t going to get a person fixed up with a job and a roof over their head. What it may well do is make sure they don’t starve that night. Lifeless, cold bodies aren’t very employable, except as councilors, apparently. Some suit named Charles Fraser from St Mungo’s tries a similar point: Soup kitchens do nothing for the long term betterment, but if the homeless aren’t fed in the short term, they won’t be around for the long term for us to help!

It’s preferable we have a homeless population that we actively aid, both in the short and long term, than an entirely dead homeless population we did nothing to prevent. Why on earth are two homelessness organisations sucking up to the government on a policy that quite obviously, shitty “long term only” logic notwithstanding, harm the very people they claim to represent?

Thames Reach relies on donations from individuals and the corporate sector, and many of our programmes could not run without this support. We also receive funding from and work in partnership with:

• charitable trusts
• central government
• London Councils [you know, the ones behind this policy]
• Supporting People
• the European Social Fund

Ah, that’s why. St Mungo’s, what’s your excuse? And would it be tactless given the circumstances to call Thames Reach a bunch of rent-seeking fuckwits?

The cynic in my feels this is just some twisted social cleansing scheme to make the city seem nicer in the run up to the 2012 Olympics. Screw that. If people are coming to London for an orgy of steroid abuse at the taxpayer’s massive expense holesome, competitive sport and the coming together of nations, best we show them the real London. Maybe, just maybe, that’ll get something genuinely helpful done. And if it is done, it’ll be done by real voluntary social enterprises, and not Big Society fantasies- because God knows the State isn’t doing jack shit.