The Humble Libertarian original

There are lots of good folks out there working hard to advance the ideas and practice of liberty. They deserve our support. Here are a few of those causes. Please send a few bucks in their direction as a quick and easy way to live your principles and advance a more just world for all of us. The Center for a Stateless Society (C4SS) is a libertarian media project. C4SS employs some of the smartest folks in libertarian circles to produce libertarian media, mostly in a written format suitable for op-eds. Read the rest of George Donnelly's article at Arm your Mind for Liberty . James Tuttle , Regular Columnist, T H L Articles | Author's Page | Website

Anarchists want to abolish the state, with all functions now performed by the state being performed by voluntary associations. So naturally, we object to “public employment” — the funding of services through compulsory taxation — in principle. The question is, how do we get there from here? Some things currently done by tax-funded government employees are legitimate functions that would still exist in some form in a stateless society. Mail delivery is one example. Education would no doubt be different in many ways in a free society — no compulsory attendance laws, and no processing of human resources for the corporate state. But teaching children is an important function in any society, and much that public school teachers do now would probably carry over without much change. Even some of what police do, like stopping violent crime and apprehending aggressors, would still be necessary — but without laws against victimless crimes, or any of the thuggish behavior regularly chronicled ...

“Government shutdown.” For sheer beauty, I can’t think of another two-word phrase in the English language that even comes close. And, as American media breathlessly relate, that’s what we’re going to get come March 4th unless Congress and the Obama administration manage a meeting of the minds on spending. Well, no, not really. But kind of. Sort of. In a way. Read the rest of Thomas L. Knapp's article at The Center for a Stateless Society . James Tuttle , Regular Columnist, T H L Articles | Author's Page | Website

In a Feb. 15 op-ed for the New York Times, three representatives of the Authors Guild — Scott Turow, Paul Aiken and James Shapiro — raise the question “Would the Bard Have Survived the Web?” In my opinion they have it just about backward. They’d have been better off asking whether the Bard would have survived copyright. In the course of this piece, the authors manage to recycle just about every pro-copyright cliche and strawman known to humankind. Read the rest of Kevin Carson's article at The Center for a Stateless Society . James Tuttle , Regular Columnist, T H L Articles | Author's Page | Website

One question that’s frequently raised about market anarchism: How would you prevent the economy from being taken over by monopolies, if we didn’t have anti-trust regulations and other restrictions on corporate abuses of power? Without anti-trust laws, the firms in an oligopoly or cartel could simply lower prices when a competitor tried to enter the market, and then raise them again when the competitor went out of business. Oligopoly firms could also, it’s argued, use their market power to restrict competition in other ways, like making exclusivity contracts to prevent a would-be entrant to the same industry from obtaining the suppliers and outlets it needed to function. The problem with this argument is that it assumes a great deal of what it needs to prove. Read the rest of Kevin Carson's article at The Center for a Stateless Society . James Tuttle , Regular Columnist, T H L Articles | Author's Page | Website

Uprisings against notably authoritarian regimes, and resistance to attacks on labor power in Wisconsin show that the general public has power when they choose to use it. How powerful they can become and how beneficial their power will be rests on how much they continue to believe in authority. A conscious populace can discard a system that does not work for them. The current political system solidly maintains the power of politicians and their supporters over the general populace. Office-holders and their corporate partners make deals with each other to keep their faction in charge – and the maintenance of a stable power structure is essential to enabling them to rule. Fortunately the system is composed of people, and those people are bound by the political necessities of good appearances, by rivalries among rulers, and by the consciences of the enforcers. All the weapons money can buy are only as effective as the individuals operating them. Read the rest of Darian Worden's article...

Doug French, in an article for the Mises.org website — a site, named for the conservative Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises, whose politics tend to fall on what’s conventionally regarded as the Right — makes some points about the current trend toward mergers and acquisitions that sound an awful lot like what the Marxists at Monthly Review have been saying for a long time. But they’re both right. In “Merger Monday and the Destruction of Wealth” (Feb. 15), French argues that the uptick in mergers and acquisitions is occurring because corporations are loaded down with cash burning a hole in their balance sheets, with no productive outlet to invest it in. That’s pretty much what the Monthly Review folks have been saying since the 1970s. Read the rest of Kevin Carson's article at The Center for a Stateless Society . James Tuttle , Regular Columnist, T H L Articles | Author's Page | Website

Affirming the old aphorism that actions speak louder than words, the Italian anarchist Errico Malatesta asserted that “the revolution consists more in deeds than words.” Malatesta saw that “each time a spontaneous movement of the people erupts,” there is an opportunity for progress toward society without authority. A similar idea is encapsulated in the Samuel E. Konkin III’s notion of the “counter economy,” all of that economic activity that exists in defiance of the state’s hierarchical control. Where the net results of people working within real market relationships — arrangements free from outside coercion — are adaptability and local-community strength, the product of hierarchy and compulsion is irresponsibility. Read the rest of David D'Amato's article at The Center for a Stateless Society . James Tuttle , Regular Columnist, T H L Articles | Author's Page | Website

In press commentary on the recent events in Egypt, there were frequent expressions of concern that Egypt might be falling into “anarchy.” “Anarchy,” in conventional journalistic usage, means chaos, disorder, and bloodshed — a Hobbesian war of all against all — that occurs when the stabilizing hand of government is removed. “Anarchy” is the agenda of mobs of kids in black circle-A t-shirts, smashing windows and setting stuff on fire. But “anarchy,” as the term is understood by anarchists, is a form of society in which the state is replaced by the management of all human affairs through voluntary associations. Paul Goodman argued that it was impossible, through violence, to impose an anarchistic order on society, or to achieve a free society by replacing an old order with a new one. Rather, a free society results from “the extension of spheres of free action until they make up most of the social life.” Or to quote Gustav Landauer: “The State is a condition, a certain relationship b...

On Tuesday’s Rachel Maddow show, Maddow asked author Thomas Frank about the prospects presented by the defection of some allegedly libertarianish Tea Partiers on the renewal of USA PATRIOT. Isn’t there a split between the libertarian and authoritarian strands of the conservative movement?, she asked. Well, yeah, Frank said. There’s some underlying tension between the socially conservative wing and the pro-business wing (“or as they prefer to be called, ‘pro-market’”). In hinting at the pro-business vs. pro-market distinction, of course, Frank scored at least an oblique hit on an important point: The so-called “libertarian” wing of the conservative movement, for the most part, is more pro-business than pro-market. As he suggested himself, if you examine their agenda closely, despite all the rhetoric it’s not really about whether government is big or small. It doesn’t matter so much what size government is as who it helps out. What they mean by “pro-market” is a big government tha...

The prospect of a state collapsing brings forth worries about a “power vacuum,” an unrestrained state of nature where chaos rules until the strong take over. But chaotic conflict is produced by efforts to seize power and exert power over other people. It is not the rejection of rulership, but the struggle to achieve rulership, that creates deadly conflict. The negation of authority, as advocated by anarchists, does not necessitate the chaotic mess associated with the phrase “power vacuum.” Anarchy would mean that power is dispersed among individuals who would rather safeguard each others’ freedom than rule over each other. And if power is firmly in the hands of organized people then there is no power vacuum. Read the rest of Darian Worden's article at The Center for a Stateless Society . James Tuttle , Regular Columnist, T H L Articles | Author's Page | Website

The Muslim Brotherhood is in the news a lot these days, thanks to the recent upheaval in Egypt. Glenn Beck — living proof that pregnant women shouldn’t do LSD — apparently sees the Twitter Revolution as some sort of choreographed performance behind which the Muslim Brotherhood will dance their way to power. And that’s just the first step toward bringing everything everything from London to Jakarta under a revived Caliphate. The equally goofy Frank Gaffney has elevated the Brotherhood and “Sharia Law” into objects of paranoia comparable to what International Communism was for the Birchers. So guess which country, as it turns out, has been courting the Muslim Brotherhood since at least the 1950s? That’s right. The U.S. government, since the Eisenhower administration, has promoted the Brotherhood as a conservative counterbalance to secular radicals like Nasser. Read the rest of Kevin Carson's article at The Center for a Stateless Society . James Tuttle , Regular Columnist, T H L ...

No, it’s not an abortion rant. My topic is education in general and the weird phenomenon of “school choice” advocacy in particular. But the parallels between the two issues deserve exploration. The school choice movement, broadly defined, proposes to improve public education — the state’s mandate to provide K-12 schooling to all comers — by introducing “market values” in the form of competition between schools (“public,” i.e. government-operated, and private) for the tax dollars allocated to that mandate. The school choice movement breaks down into three camps: Charter schools supporters, voucher advocates and tax credit advocates. Read the rest of Thomas L. Knapp's article at The Center for a Stateless Society . James Tuttle , Regular Columnist, T H L Articles | Author's Page | Website

You know the drill: A formerly useful dictator outlives his usefulness to the U.S. government, becoming a public embarrassment, or maybe even a loose cannon who can no longer be relied on to follow orders. So — they suddenly discover he’s a dictator! The folks in Washington develop a sudden enthusiasm for “People Power,” and start replaying inspiring footage of the Berlin Wall coming down. Then the people marching in the streets, despite all their sincere sacrifice and hopes for building a new kind of society, find — when the smoke has cleared — their revolution stolen out from under them and trademarked as a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Soros Foundation, NED or IRI. And the face of Vlaclav Havel or Nelson Mandela is slapped on the side of the box as a brand-name icon. Read the rest of Kevin Carson's article at The Center for a Stateless Society . James Tuttle , Regular Columnist, T H L Articles | Author's Page | Website

Neoconservatives like Charles Krauthammer warn that the popular uprising against U.S.-financed Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak could easily become a victory for radical Islamists. The neoconservatives scoff at assurances that the Muslim Brotherhood has traded violence for a constructive role in Egyptian society and democratic politics. Indeed, the neocons argue, the Brotherhood, as the best-organized force in Egyptian society (representing up to 30 percent of the population), is in the ideal position to seize the popular movement, betray the people, and install a theocratic state in the post-Mubarak era. With Egypt as a base of operation, goes the narrative, the Islamists would spread their ideology to the rest of the region through terror and subversion, with terrible consequences for the West. Is there any merit to this analysis? Perhaps. No one can predict such things; revolution is a radically uncertain process. Nevertheless, one should not casually assume that Egypt is like Iran o...

With another State of the Union address in our rear view — and all of its “Greatest Show on Earth” excitement reverberating through the political firmament — the mainstream’s pallid analysis can begin. Pundits and politicians, their animated views all firmly grafted onto a broader, elite orthodoxy, have wasted no time in getting down to explaining “what it all means.” By itself, the word socialism requires no statism whatsoever; instead it denotes a set of outcomes as an answer to the “Social Question” raised by disparities of wealth and economic power in society caused by statist intervention. On that account, it’s very possible to be both a socialist and an advocate for a truly free market, and American anarchists like Benjamin Tucker advocated for just this union of concepts “free market” and “socialism.” Read the rest of David D'Amato's article at The Center for a Stateless Society . James Tuttle , Regular Columnist, T H L Articles | Author's Page | Website

Yesterday, while channel-surfing, I saw a pundit on one of the news channels’ talking head shows pontificating on the internal contradictions inherent in U.S. government policy toward the new “Twitter Revolutions” in Tunisia and Egypt. He said that, no matter how unpopular and authoritarian autocratic regimes like Mubarak’s are at home, the United States unfortunately has an interest in preserving their stability because such regimes “support our interests” in the Middle East. Note the unintended irony there. When I hear a reference to “our interests,” or what “we” are doing in Iraq or Afghanistan, my automatic response is “Are you carrying a friend in your pocket?” Read the rest of Kevin Carson's article at The Center for a Stateless Society . James Tuttle , Regular Columnist, T H L Articles | Author's Page | Website

We seem to hear the words “freedom” and “liberty” from some pretty unlikely sources. Think back to the “liberty cabbage” of WWI — recently updated as “freedom fries.” The word “Freiheit” figured pretty prominently in Nazi propaganda; Nazi Minister of Propaganda Josef Goebbels started out as editor of Volkische Freiheit. In other words, all images that would have been just as much at home in Nazi propaganda posters, in which the word “freedom” was so ubiquitous. For the Nazis, “freedom” was about a collective way of life — the right of the German people to their “place in the sun.” And for the American Right, “freedom” — in their idiosyncratic sense of a collective way of life — seems to be threatened mainly by other people being allowed to do what they want: Like people with the same sexual equipment being allowed get married, or people with unfamiliar religions being allowed to build places of worship. Read the rest of Kevin Carson's article at The Center for a Stateless Socie...

As I write this, the Egyptian state seemingly totters on the brink of collapse. One last push from what appears to be a genuine, spontaneous popular uprising may be all it takes to send “president for life” Hosni Mubarak into exile or to a wall with (perhaps) a blindfold and final cigarette. That’s how it looks, anyway. Predicting the future of developments like this is always risky, but with the army apparently operationally neutral and its troops openly fraternizing with the revolutionary masses, I’d strongly advise against buying Egyptian government bonds at the moment. The question, as always at times like this, is “what next?” Read the rest of Thomas L. Knapp's article at The Center for a Stateless Society . James Tuttle , Regular Columnist, T H L Articles | Author's Page | Website

Defenders of freed markets have good reason to identify their position as a species of “anti-capitalism.” To explain why, I distinguish three potential meanings of “capitalism” before suggesting that people committed to freed markets should oppose capitalism in my second and third senses. Then, I offer some reasons for using “capitalism” as a label for some of the social arrangements to which freed-market advocates should object. There are at least three distinguishable senses of “capitalism”: capitalism-1 an economic system that features property rights and voluntary exchanges of goods and services. capitalism-2 an economic system that features a symbiotic relationship between big business and government. capitalism-3 rule — of workplaces, society, and (if there is one) the state — by capitalists (that is, by a relatively small number of people who control investable wealth and the means of production). Read the rest of Gary Chartier's article at The Center for a Stateless S...