by Kevin Carson
As a toddler Julia will begin a twenty-odd-year sentence in institutions designed to process her into a ?human resource?: Someone encultured to view the existing institutional framework and power structure as natural and inevitable, who trusts and obeys the state and takes its self-justifications at face value. Someone who takes orders from authority figures behind desks, and has been trained ? at taxpayer expense ? in the skills employers want in their human resources. Both Obama and Romney enthusiastically support the need for this school-to-HR treadmill to ?maintain global competitiveness.? Once Julia comes off the human resources assembly line, she?ll look for work in an economy where most employment opportunities are controlled by hierarchical, authoritarian institutions. She?ll spend her work life selling her labor in a system designed to minimize the competition employers face from self-employment ? in which the state?s avowed macroeconomic policy is to keep the bargaining power of labor (aka ?inflationary pressure?) within manageable bounds.
If she tries to escape the reservation, she?ll confront a host of state-enforced artificial scarcities whose main effect is to make the means of production artificially expensive for labor, and impose artificial entry costs and overhead on self-employment. Until Julia turns 65, she?ll exist in a system where wage labor is the only alternative for all but the rich. The President, Democrat or Republican, will accept the basic presupposition of the ?jobs culture? as a fact of nature.
Under market anarchy, Julia would live in a society where education was self-organized by her neighbors, her studies were shaped by her needs rather than those of future employers, and economic power was distributed and decentralized. She?d spend her working life in a market without entry barriers to using her skills in self-employment or in a cooperative shop, and where if she did consider wage employment she?d encounter potential employers as an equal rather than as a commodity pre-shaped to their needs.
As a consumer, Julia will pay prices consisting largely of rents on artificial scarcity enforced by the state. She?ll spend $200 for proprietary software CDs that cost $5 to print out, and pay a 2000% markup on medications under patent. She?ll buy sneakers with a $195 brand-name premium over the $5 the sweatshop charged to make them, and a camera whose price comes mainly from embedded patent rents rather than actual parts and labor. She?ll pay a markup of about 20% as the result of price-fixing on goods manufactured in oligopoly industries.
Local goods and services will be far more expensive because of zoning laws that protect brick-and-mortar shops by requiring the rental of commercial space as a condition of doing business, high licensing fees, and regulatory codes that criminalize small-batch production by mandating industrial-scale machinery. Both Obama and Romney strongly support all these policies.
Under market anarchy, there?d be no state-enforced cartels, entry barriers, or artificial scarcity. Competition would drive the prices Julia pays down to the actual cost of production. Julia would far more easily purchase home-grown, -baked, and -sewn goods, as well as unlicensed daycare and cab service ? all of which would involve near-zero overhead because they were provided out of her neighbors? homes with ordinary household capital goods they already owned.
Whether Julia buys or rents her home, the price of the land it sits on reflects enormous tracts of vacant and unimproved land being held out of use by state policy, so that landlords are protected from competition. Neither Obama nor Romney can even imagine an alternative to this state of affairs.
Under market anarchy, there would be no enforceable title to vacant and unimproved land. Competition from freely available vacant land would reduce landlord rent, driving down Julia?s housing costs.
Throughout her life, Julia?s travels in the United States will be restricted by an internal passport system in which boarding a plane, and soon maybe a train or bus, will require submission to being either scanned or groped. Her phone and Internet history and her purchases will be constantly monitored by a government for which the Fourth Amendment is a quaint relic of history. Every business where she shops will be spying on her for the government. She?ll be liable to indefinite detention without charge, or perhaps even murder by drone, based on an arbitrary and unilateral finding that she?s a ?terrorist.? If there were ever any lingering hopes that the party controlling the presidency would make a difference in this regard, Obama dashed them long ago.
Under market anarchy ? Well, you get the idea.
Under either party, Julia will be a means to the ends of people utterly unaccountable to her, a tool for enriching a ruling class. Under anarchy, Julia will be an end in her own right, free to build any life she chooses in peaceful cooperation with her neighbors.
__
Kevin Carson is a senior fellow of the Center for a Stateless Society (c4ss.org) and holds the Center's Karl Hess Chair in Social Theory. He is a mutualist and individualist anarchist whose written work includes Studies in Mutualist Political Economy, Organization Theory: A Libertarian Perspective, and The Homebrew Industrial Revolution: A Low-Overhead Manifesto, all of which are freely available online. Carson has also written for such print publications as The Freeman: Ideas on Liberty and a variety of internet-based journals and blogs, including Just Things, The Art of the Possible, the P2P Foundation, and his own Mutualist Blog.
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i was asked very recently, if i would like to go back to a simpler time, when life wasn't so complicated. the idea was to use love to fix the future.
my answer was immediately, "NO!"
like this article, the question was a con. if we keep going back, we never move forward, never end the dictatorship, and never free ourselves.
regrets are markers to learn from, and i say "take me anywhere but back."
I'm sorry, but this passage is absolute rubbish:>>"As a consumer, Julia will pay prices consisting largely of rents on artificial scarcity enforced by the state. She?ll spend $200 for proprietary software CDs that cost $5 to print out, and pay a 2000% markup on medications under patent. She?ll buy sneakers with a $195 brand-name premium over the $5 the sweatshop charged to make them, and a camera whose price comes mainly from embedded patent rents rather than actual parts and labor. She?ll pay a markup of about 20% as the result of price-fixing on goods manufactured in oligopoly industries."
Sure, software costs pennies to copy. But what does that first copy cost to create? What about the dozens (hundreds? Thousands?) of man-years of labor from highly-skilled programmers and artists which are used to create that product?
Dittos for the hypothetical medication. Pharma is not a charity. It is a business and deserves every right to charge anything it wishes for a product IT INVENTED in order to cover the years of research and development, pay for those failures which never made it to market, and fund ongoing research AND still, somehow, pay a dividend to the company owners (aka shareholders).
Finally, no one is compelled to purchase $200 sneakers. Somehow my $15 "skippies" from Target (or was it walmart?) seem to have lasted for nearly two years and miraculously my friends haven't abandoned me for my lack of fashion sense.
Yet if you see these as somehow impassible, unpractical barriers, then I present to you three wonderfully simple business scenarios:
Go write computer software and sell it for peanuts.
Discover that new blockbuster drug that cures cancer. Prove it to be safe and effective, then give it away.
Create shoes and sell them for a trifling.
Your strawman is foolish.
If you wish to talk about state-imposed scarcity, talk about the foolishness of licensing boards for interior decorators and flower arrangement. The fact that in many states one may not simply go test for-and-obtain a HVAC license to install heating and cooling systems until one has served as an "apprentice" (read: low-cost-labor) for some arbitrary number of years. Mere knowledge and skill isn't enough in these cases. The existing system is reinforced by the laws and bureaus.
I could give numerous other examples but I doubt it's worth the effort.
I hope you find clarity of thought. Regards,
--Jack
You just created a circular argument. That's like saying the problem with sharing is people who don't share. That's not the problem with sharing, that is the problem with selfishness. Stateless society assumes no government, gang or otherwise. You cannot discredit a premise by removing that premise and then positing problems.
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