Peace. Love. And Anarchy.

by Jeff Berwick

Boy, I have a lot to say today. Ten or twenty years ago there'd be just one or two stupid things to comment upon every month or two... like the war on drugs or whatnot. Today? I see 10 or 15 things per day that almost make my blood boil. It's a good thing I live in a relatively free place on the beach surrounded by beautiful, smiling, dancing women and good food and good times or I'd get stressed out.

If you don't have a snifter of scotch at the ready or a nice glass of wine... or whatever drink you prefer, I advise you to grab one now. You're going to need it by the time I am done.

PRIVATE VERSUS PUBLIC

Why are people so scared of the thought that something we want/need is privately owned and not collectively organized?

Speaking to your average American, they would nod approvingly as you state that the Soviet Union and anything centrally planned doesn't work. We've got enough evidence now. If I lived a hundred years ago I could have seen myself backing socialism and communism. From each according to his ability, to each according to his need. How beautiful! Those of us who can produce more can give more to those who cannot. Not a person will starve. Not a person will suffer. It is a truly beautiful idea. And, as it turns out, that is why it is so dangerous.

St?phane Courtois has estimated that 100 million people have been killed at the hand of the communist sickle. And Vladimir Lenin stated "The goal of socialism is communism". So on what grounds does someone like Barry Obombya have to stand on when he states that we need to spread the wealth?

How can he even utter that in public?

Especially at a time when, unbelievably, other people, who don't even say anything, but have boyfriends who have certain beliefs, get kicked out of the Olympics? Like Nadja Drygalla who was kicked out of the Olympics just for having a boyfriend with certain political beliefs! She didn't, we emphasize... her lover did! And yet Barack Obombya is worshipped for having beliefs that killed more than a hundred million people!

Why are people so devoted to the idea that the Soviet Union, or Communist China, and their centrally planned and enforced systems are wrong but that we need "certain" things, like the money system, or policing, or courts, or roads, or shcools to be centrallized?

This thought crossed my mind today as we drove down the sidewalk in southern Mexico on my scooter. I was pretty drunk and a public policeman give us the stink eye. I gave him it back double. My expression said "you are worse than a petty thief because at least a petty thief is honest about their intentions!"

Within seconds, we passed by the AcaCondos building, and the private security guards who work there all high fived me and patted me on the back.

Ever heard of private security guard brutality? No, you probably haven't. If a private security guard ever beat or killed someone who didn't deserve it they would be immediately fired and be working at the neighborhood Gap or as a janitor. When the police are centralized and have no profit motive? They will tase, pepper spray, beat and murder you. If you haven't figured that out, wake the f**k up. Seriously.

DON'T DO WHAT IS IN YOUR OWN BEST INTEREST!

I abhor the Olympics. It embodies everything that is wrong in the world today. The Olympics is the embodiment of the concept of one world government... and that is going in the wrong direction. We need more governments not less.

The athletic achievements? That's great! But how is one man or woman who was born 20 miles away from another on the other side of an arbitrary line devised by murderers and thieves on a different team than the other?

But when I saw the headline that eight Olympic badminton players were kicked out of the Olympics for "trying to lose" it piqued my interest. Had some people gone against human nature and intentionally tried to lose?

Upon further review... something which seems beyond the capabilities of most people today had happened... I looked into it a little bit further.

According to the story, "The crowd booed as the badminton players dumped shots into the net, trying to improve their positioning for the next round. The umpire and tournament referee Torsten Berg issued warnings, imploring them to exert maximum effort."

I thought... wow... I've never heard of people ever.... ever... trying to lose at anything. Maybe they are a new mutation of humans who don't have their own self interest in mind.

"We applaud the federation for having taken swift and decisive action," IOC spokesman Mark Adams told The Associated Press. "Such behavior is incompatible with the Olympic values."

Wow, I said again. People going to the Olympics and trying to lose! Good job, Mark Adams, for kicking them out before this catches on and everyone tries to lose!

And then I decided to do what most don't bother doing. I looked beyond the headlines and the quotes.

As it turns out, the system was set up so that those who lost in the earlier rounds would have the advantage in the later rounds. Only a fool would try to win their first games in that situation. The system was set-up, like socialism, where the weak win.... in the early stages. And the response from the horrific, despicable, Satanic Olympics? How dare they try to win by losing under our stupid set-up!

This is exactly how all of statist society is set-up. Force people to adhere to unnatural, non free-market incentives, and then when they do it, kidnap or kill them. That's statism. That's the drug war. Make it illegal to provide people with what they want and then drag them away in the middle of the night.

You know what is the best system for humans who are all completely self-interested to adhere to? Anarchy. The free market, unfettered. Or do you think central planning is the better option? Then, let's start jailing millions of badminton players.

RUN! HIDE! AND, AS THE LAST RESORT, FIGHT!

You absolutely must see the video above. I thought it must have been from SNL when it was sent to me. But, no, it was paid for by your tax dollars if you live in the United State! The message? Occasionally... yes, from time to time... a disgrunteld American, probably who lost his job due to the regulations of the US Government and the destructive Federal Reserve may come by and shoot up your area of work.

So, as a service to you, to protect you from this state caused event, we have stolen money from you and used it to produce propaganda wherein we advise you to, first, call the government if a state-caused shooting spree occurs... which will become commonplace now that things are in high gear. And, then to advise you to run away like scared slaves first and formost. If that doesn't work, hide like little girls.

And, if after all that, you have no other option as you wait for the government to come save you, fashion a fire extinguisher or a chair into a weapon! Never, ever, use a pistol to easily eradicate this government caused agent. Ever.

This is the world Americans live in today.

Hilarious.

UNTL NEXT WEEK

Until the next time we talk... remember to run away... citizens of the home of the brave. And, if that doesn't work, hide! Exactly the same advice we've been giving here for quite some time. Run away (expatriate) and... if need be, hide. And, as the US Government advises... fight! But no one does that anymore... and probably shouldn't anyway. Violence is rarely the answer. Find a way to live outside of this socialist/communist/fascist/statist system and be happy.

I wish you all the best! Live as free as is humanly possible, love your friends and if your family deserves it, them too.. and everyone else.

Peace. Love. And anarchy.
_
Jeff Berwick [send him mail] is an anarcho-capitalist freedom fighter and Chief Editor of the libertarian, Austrian economics grounded newsletter, The Dollar Vigilante. The Dollar Vigilante focuses on strategies, investments and expatriation opportunities to survive & prosper during and after the US dollar collapse.

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Drawing back the Financial Iron Curtain to a Beautiful Anarchy w/ Jeffrey Tucker!

Welcome to Capital Account. The CEO of RBS warned about a huge fine facing the bank due to the Libor scandal; meanwhile HSBC set aside $2 billion to cover regulatory problems, including Libor-rigging and money laundering. We often cover regulation violations by the big banks, but today will talk about a litany of absurd small business regulations that could be crushing entrepreneurs. We ask our guest Jeffrey Tucker, Author of "A Beautiful Anarchy: How to Create your own Civilization in the Digital Age," about the impact of small business regulation.

Also, Mitt Romney was in Poland, after making headlines for his Iran tough talk and UK blunders. Does this campaigning seem like noise? Are you are looking beyond the constructs of the modern US democratic system for alternative ideas? We will hear from author Jeffrey Tucker about anarchy and the role it can play in building a new civilization in the digital age.

And yesterday Sarbannes-Oxley turned 10, but the threat of jail time for executives knowingly signing off on inaccurate financial reports has not been pursued in financial crisis related incidents. What is the lesson? We talk to Jeffrey Tucker, Executive Editor of Laissez Faire Books, about it.

In a special segment of Loose Change, Jeffery Tucker joins Demetri Kofinas and Lauren to talk about wine and art as a possible hedge, and what it means when Olympic Gold Medals contain less than 2% gold.

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The Life of Julia Under Anarchy

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

If you want anarchy, try Somalia. Then tell me about peaceful cooperation with her neighbors. Delusional to give man so much credit. Without government gangs always become the government. "Without government gangs always become the government."

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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"Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened..." - Winston Churchill

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Anarchy in the UK?

By Anthony Gregory

All political labels are limited in their usefulness, and confusion abounds regarding most of them. When a certain political persuasion is being criminalized, it is particularly important to examine the principles involved.

If anarchy means chaos, disorder, lawlessness, reckless disregard for person and property, then the London vandals who set private buildings on fire and the hooligans who jumped on police misconduct as an excuse to loot in the service of their worldly desires were indeed practitioners of anarchy. One could conceivably argue that the word means absence of archy--meaning absence of rule of any kind, including the rule of law, which would render the word a proper label to affix to lawlessness and a philosophy that favors social chaos.

But the word has another definition, which means something distinctly different. It can also mean the absence of rule as in government. And here we have to ask, what is government? Again, we arrive at two possible answers, at least. Government can simply mean lawful order, organization, social hierarchy. Or it can refer to the political institution known as the state--the organization that lays claim to a monopoly on legal violence. Many who have regarded themselves anarchists are opposed not so much to social order or even law and its enforcement, but to the state, arguing that in fact the state as an institution inevitably acts outside the natural law in order to maintain its coercive monopoly.

Most of the London looters probably do not qualify as this kind of anarchist, a serious philosophical tradition that includes Josiah Warren, Henry David Thoreau, Leo Tolstoy, William Lloyd Garrison, Lysander Spooner, Albert J. Nock, Karl Hess, Murray Rothbard and many others. This is the approximate heritage of lawful anarchy that is explored and defended in the Independent Institute book Anarchy in the Law.

In London, the characterization of the looters and violent rioters as ?anarchists? carries very dangerous implications. This can be seen in the fact that the British police, about a week before the riots began, issued a warning for citizens to be on the lookout for and report anarchist behavior. What makes this especially disconcerting is the definition the British officials used for anarchism:

[N]ext to an image of the anarchist emblem, the City of Westminster police's "counter terrorist focus desk" called for anti-anarchist whistleblowers stating: "Anarchism is a political philosophy which considers the state undesirable, unnecessary, and harmful, and instead promotes a stateless society, or anarchy. Any information relating to anarchists should be reported to your local police."

As Brian Martinez pointed out, ?This wouldn't be so worrisome, had the police characterized anarchism in the uninformed and sensationalist fashion still common in mainstream media: that of radically leftist vandals intent on dismantling not just the state but the capitalist infrastructure that in their view props it up.? Violent thugs, in other words; the kind who show up at G-20 summits to smash windows and set fires.?

Instead, the British government was defining anarchism in a purely philosophical manner, declaring that it was the mere belief that the state is ?undesirable, unnecessary, and harmful? and so ?promotes a stateless society.? Yet when the protests erupted, the media jumped on the bandwagon of calling the violent looters ?anarchists,? making no distinction between believers in a peaceful philosophy of anti-statism and those who engage in wanton destruction of private property.

This conflation of anti-statism and violent thuggery is hardly new. House Republican leader John Boehner described some of the Tea Party attendees as ?anarchists who want to kill all of us in public office.? In 2003, the FBI was involved in heavy surveillance of anti-Iraq war protesters--people who were principally opposing the lawless violence being unleashed in the Middle East by Washington, a reminder that the bad kind of ?anarchy? is often a result of government planning--with one FBI official quoted as saying, ?it's obvious that there are individuals capable of violence at these [antiwar] events. We know that there are anarchists? trying to sabotage and commit acts of violence.?

This should send chills down the spine of civil libertarians all across the spectrum, since the United States has a poor record on the rights of so-called anarchists. In the aftermath of World War I, the feds rounded up and deported hundreds of such people to Communist Russia. Many of them indeed had some confused views on society and economics, to be sure, and some were hardly model citizens, but few were any sort of violent threat and none of them should have been damned to live under Bolshevik tyranny for their political views.

Many ?anarchists? who call for the disillusion of the state want to replace it with a social organization that wouldn?t work. Many do not understand the necessity of the market and other traditional social institutions. But even these ?left-anarchists? are not usually violent people. The looting done in London was mostly apolitical--it was a bunch of young folks, raised in a socially degenerate world destroyed by statism, particularly welfare statism, acting in their self-interest to seize whatever they wanted. The police responded in a violent way that hardly helped in the main. Gun control had long made it difficult for Britons to protect themselves. In the end, it was largely the people, including demonized immigrant populations, defending themselves and their communities from the violence, who were the big heroes--much as in the L.A. riots in 1992, when storeowners brandishing personal firearms maintained order in areas the police dared not enter.

As for the London inhabitants who actually identify as anarchists, their political and economic views are not my cup of tea. But despite what I view as their confusion about many issues, they tended not to favor the looting and violence. Even before the riots, they were targeted by the UK police for their opposition to the state, but they should not be lumped in with the welfare-state hooligans destroying private property. In a press release one anarchist group made it clear:

[A]s revolutionaries, we cannot condone attacks on working people, on the innocent. Burning out shops with homes above them, people?s transport to work, muggings and the like are an attack on our own and should be resisted as strongly as any other measure from government ?austerity? politics, to price-gouging landlords, to bosses intent on stealing our labour. Tonight and for as long as it takes, people should band together to defend themselves when such violence threatens homes and communities.

Britain has long been ahead of the United States when it comes to thought crime. Even before the London riots, their police were ominously going after people for their political views. Let?s hope the social chaos resulting from years of flawed government policies--in both social welfare and policing the streets--does not result in depredations on the civil liberties of anyone, particularly those whose only crime is opposing the existence of the very institutions that have failed to keep order and social peace.

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