Monday Lazy Linking   Rad Geek at Rad Geek People's Daily (Monday, May 09)

• Mutual aid opportunity. Shawn P. Wilbur, Two-Gun Mutualism & the Golden Rule (2011-05-06). You'll find a new ChipIn widget in the sidebar of the blog (or on ChipIn), to support Laughing Horse Books, one of Portland, Oregon's few remaining independent bookstores, and a radical, collective-run bookstore/music venue/meeting space for 25 years now. All the little things that tend to snowball when a business... (Linked Saturday 2011-05-07.)

• In Defense of Flogging - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education. chronicle.com (2011-05-07). "Certainly my defense of flogging is more thought experiment than policy proposal. I do not expect to see flogging reinstated any time soon. And deep down, I wouldn't want to see it. And yet, in the course of writing what is, at its core, a quaintly retro abolish-prison book, I've come to see the benefits of wrapping a liberal argument in a conservative facade. If the notion of tying people to a rack and caning them on their behinds à la Singapore disturbs you, if it takes contemplating whipping to wake you up and to see prison for what it is, so be it! The passive moral high ground has gotten us nowhere." - Peter Moskos (Linked Saturday 2011-05-07.)

• Marie Curie. xkcd.com (2011-05-08). (Linked Monday 2011-05-09.)

• Bin Laden reaction roundup. John, Blagnet.net (2011-05-08). I have been much more interested in the various and sundry reactions, mainly from Americans, to Osama bin Laden’s killing than to the news itself. The whole situation ought to inspire quite a bit of mixed feelings from any libertarian, and even from any sensible, sympathetic human being. Notwithstanding the... (Linked Monday 2011-05-09.)

• Urban Airport of the Future (1926) Matt Novak, Paleofuture Blog (2011-05-07). The fine people at Popular Mechanics recently published a book that deserves a prominent place on every retrofuturist's bookshelf. The Wonderful Future That Never Was by Gregory Benford looks at technological predictions that appeared in the pages of Popular Mechanics from 1903 until 1969. The prediction below was an attempt to... (Linked Monday 2011-05-09.)

• No Laissez Faire There. Sheldon Richman, The Freeman | Ideas On Liberty (2011-05-06). (This article is based on remarks delivered at the meeting of the Association of Private Enterprise Education in April.) Friends of the free market tend to see the Gilded Age, roughly 1870-1890, as the closest thing in history to a laissez-faire economy. In some respects that is true — but... (Linked Monday 2011-05-09.)

The only other known phenomenon of similar density is Four Dollar 40 Night at Babs’ in Ann Arbor, Michigan.   Rad Geek at Rad Geek People's Daily (Monday, May 09)

Oh, God, it’s like every hipster joke in the Universe was pulled together and compressed until they reached the Schwarzchild radius and formed a humor event horizon — where no attempt at satire, no matter how ridiculous, can escape the gravitational pull of reality. And so these words appeared in print — not in the Onion but in the Los Angeles Times.

A wrong turn for L.A.’s food truck scene?

(If you are curious, the rest of the story is more or less the following: self-consciously quirky gourmet food trucks have been all the rage for a couple years.^[1] Now the market is getting competitive, and the first-movers are discovering, holy crap, that mature markets without high barriers to entry are often no longer dominated by experimental entrepreneurs. Because low overhead means lots of competition, and economic rents eventually dissipate as all those entrepreneurial discoveries and the results of all that market experimentation get diffused throughout society. New players jump in and incumbents have to either move on to the next big discovery, or accept the lower margins for normal business. But like a lot of folks in niche markets, their first response to competition has been to toss some indie-crafty-funk bombs about how incumbents shouldn’t have to deal with economic entropy or take some losses or work harder to please customers who are enjoying ever more options, because, dammit, they were into this scene before it got cool. Really, I like what they are doing, and so I hope they have a second response. Meanwhile, the other big squeeze on their margins, and on the viability of funky alternative street food — that is, all the regulations that are starting to crack down, and the sharp ratchet effect that this has on the fixed costs of operating — is treated as if it were simply an economic fact of nature. Rather than blaming peaceful competitors for cannibalizing your business, perhaps the energy and the outrage would be better directed at the belligerent, controlling politicos who whose periodic panic attacks are dignified as an attempt to issues presented by … nascent food truck cultures. (Actually, the folks who run food trucks and the folks who eat at them have been doing just fine; issues here are the city councils’ — but we’d all be better off if they were no longer able to make their control issues our problem.) Anyway, when margins are being squeezed there are two sides — the competitive pressure downwards on revenues, and the political pressure upwards on fixed costs. The downward pressure is from an essentially peaceful activity and means that the rest of us can get more food from more places at less cost. The upward pressure is from an essentially coercive, dominating activity that provides no-one a cheap sandwich, and mainly benefits local regulators and established restauranteurs. The thing that’s supposed to be awesome about food trucks is how they can bring people together in all kinds of different ways by getting light-weight, creative, and driving the huge fixed costs out of the economic and social equation; why not embrace that, welcome new competition, and refocus on the domming political cartels that try to shove the huge fixed costs back in, make thinner margins so difficult to deal with, and constantly force energy to be rechanneled away from experimentation and into compliance?)

1. ^[1] Of course, loncheras have been around for decades. What’s changed is that professional-class white people spent years mocking loncheras with borderline-racist put-downs, when not actually going to cops and city councils in an effort to violently shut them down. But thanks to a couple of smart entrepreneurial moves a couple years ago, they got sold on food trucks all of a sudden — as long as they charge high prices, offer weird or gimmicky food options, and sport an expensive new paint job — and so now all of the sudden it’s all the rage among newspaper food writers. Which is all fine, and it’s great really, and I’m glad that folks are doing well and having a bite to eat, but if you’re going to spend all your time talking up L.A.’s neighborhoods and street food culture and funky, independent, low-overhead, mobile alternatives to the restauranteuring status quo, you might give some props to the taco trucks that were doing it decades ago, instead of starting practically every story on the New Food Truck Armada with fuck-you lines like In the past few years, a new wave of food trucks has emerged, making food trucks the latest and hippest niche in the foodie world. These trucks are not the roach coaches of days of yore. These are sophisticated gourmet eateries where the food happens to be made in a kitchen that operates inside a truck, etc. etc. ↩

Profiting From Our Loss   David D'Amato at Center for a Stateless Society (Monday, May 09)

A recent letter to the editor of the Boston Globe from an officer at the Massachusetts Public Interest Research Group asked, “We’ve already paid to bail out banks and other big corporations — is it fair to ask us to pay their taxes as well?” Her question came in response to a Globe article from May 1 that reported on a number of big companies that “paid no federal income taxes last year, despite making millions of dollars in profits.”

Since market anarchists regard taxation as no different from any other form of theft, one might assume that we toast the tax avoidance of Big Business. After all, in a free market everyone is entitled to what they make, right? And the answer to that question is yes — again, assuming we were in anything remotely close to a free market.

Contrary to a free market, the economic system today is a product of what Murray Rothbard called “oligarchic rule: rule by a coercive elite which has managed to gain control of the State machinery.” What those elites make, then, is in no way something they’re entitled to, something obtained through simple, mutually satisfactory trade in a market where all are allowed to compete.

In the accepted political lexicon, free market phraseology has long been applied in the service of a state capitalist system defined by constraints and controls on economic activity, poisoning the well against the ideas of genuine freedom. Likewise, the language of egalitarianism and social justice has been dominated by advocates of a statist status quo who are hardly motivated by justice for the productive class.

What we’re left with is a distorted ideological framework wherein economic exploitation is associated with free markets, equitable conditions for the worker with state intervention in the economy. But the American Enterprise Institute doesn’t stand for true free markets, and the Center for American Progress doesn’t stand for true social justice.

The truth, though perhaps most will find it counterintuitive, is that unbridled economic freedom leads to economic justice. The two are not at all in conflict, as we’ve been assured by the fallacies of “both sides,” but are naturally and inseparably bound. It is monopolization, possibly only through the state’s coercive restraints on consensual economic behavior, that allows a few to amass enormous hoards of wealth, that allows them to extract rents from the toils of industrious society.

Westward Hey   Roderick at Austro-Athenian Empire » Left-Libertarian (Sunday, May 08)

I’m off to Riverside CA tomorrow; here’s what I’ll be doing Tuesday, at Gary’s university. Back on Wednesday; after that, no more trips for a month or so.

Confronting the Father   stuartbramhall at The Most Revolutionary Act (Sunday, May 08)

From The Battle for Tomorrow (Excerpt Chap 3)

Ange had sent a fourth text, adding for the first time that she was pregnant, when the 43 let her off at Garfield. The response was immediate. Reuben’s text said to meet him at the Segway Coffee House on University Ave at six p.m. She was scheduled to work, as Thursday was a late shoppers’ night. Clearly, confronting Reuben took precedence, so she texted her manager to tell him she was sick.

Reuben was waiting for her at a table near the back when she arrived. Her boyfriend had perfectly straight, brownish blond hair that reached his shoulder blades. He was incredibly vain about his hair and liked to jerk his head to flounce it like a horse’s mane. Reuben, who was actually quite effeminate in a lot of ways, also had a girlish way of sweeping it out of his eyes. He was quite vain about his hands, using his long, hairless, perfectly tapered fingers a lot when he talked. In the eleven months they were best friends and then lovers, Ange did her best to put these imperfections out of mind. However, once she decided to break up, she could allow herself a full inventory of his flaws. This included his straight, perfectly white teeth, which Ange was convinced he secretly bleached, and his affected blue-collar look complete with a faddish two-day stubble, plaid Pendleton work shirt, and unscuffed, crease-free Wolverine work boots.

Reuben gave her a half-hearted smile as she dumped her backpack and parka on the chair across from him. “I have to admit your text was quite unexpected,” he said as she returned from the counter, where she had ordered a chai latte. His tone was superficially pleasant, with a strong undertone of accusation that characterized most of their recent conversations. “It seems to me we’ve been extremely careful.”

Ange bit her lip, determined to keep a lid on her anger. They both knew the relationship was over. It was up to one of them to say it. “It’s your kid, Reuben. I haven’t been with anyone else.”

Shameless Self-promotion Sunday   Rad Geek at Rad Geek People's Daily (Sunday, May 08)

It’s Sunday. Everybody get Shameless.

You know the deal. What have you been up to this week? Write anything? Leave a link and a short description for your post in the comments. Or fire away about anything else you might want to talk about.

M@ Mailed Monthly (May 2011): Ideas and Letters, Natural Liberty and Artificial Scarcity   Rad Geek at Rad Geek People's Daily (Saturday, May 07)

tl;dr. Two beautiful new booklets are available for ordering to-day from the ALL Distro — this month’s Market Anarchy, with an article on intellectual property and this month’s Anarchist Classic with two letters from Lysander Spooner to Congressman Thomas F. Bayard. You can get one free sample copy of either series (or both) to check out, if you’re considering a monthly subscription for individual copies or monthly packs to distribute in the radical space of your choice. Sound good? Contact me for details.

Scatter tracts, like raindrops, over the land….

—William Lloyd Garrison, The Liberator, March 1831.

To-day, I am happy to announce that earlier this week I mailed out the first orders of this month’s newest additions to the Alliance of the Libertarian Left Artwork & Agitprop Distro. Issue #19 (May 2011) of the monthly Market Anarchy Zine Series is a tract from Kevin Carson on the authoritarian nature and structural effects of so-called intellectual property rights. Issue #7 of the Anarchist Classics Zine Series is a fine little edition of a pair of letters to a Congressman — Congressman Thomas F. Bayard, the chosen recipient of two memorable letters from Lysander Spooner, Challenging His Right — and That of All the Other So-Called Senators and Representatives in Congress — to Exercise Any Legislative Power Whatever Over the People of the United States in light of natural justice, natural liberty, and the inalienable equality of every individual person.

As I’ve mentioned in past months, both the Market Anarchy Zine Series and the new Anarchist Classics Zine Series have become regular monthly publications. One issue in each series is published every month. New issues are announced during the first week of each month, and mailed out during the third week of the month. You can pre-order individual copies or contact me to sign up for a regular subscription, either for personal reading or bulk orders for distributing, tabling, or stocking local infoshops and other radical spaces. If you’re considering subscribing, you can contact me to request a free sample copy for you to check out, compliments of the Distro; then, if you like it, continue the subscription for the rest of the year at the following rates:

In Intellectual Property is Theft! Kevin Carson exposes so-called intellectual property as a law-made monopoly, upholding corporate privilege and consolidating economic control at the expense individual ownership of real, tangible property. Copyrights and patents lock in inefficient, privilege-ridden business models based on command and control, and enable corporations to capture outsize profits from the economic rent on innovations. Copying is not theft. But monopoly is. Real, tangible property rights result from natural scarcity and follow as a matter of course from the attempt to maintain occupancy of physical property that cannot be possessed by more than one person at a time. Intellectual property, on the other hand, creates artificial scarcity that does not naturally exist and can only be enforced by invading real, tangible property and preventing the owner from using it in ways that violate the supposed intellectual property rights of others …. Intellectual property also serves as a bulwark for planned obsolecence and high-overhead production. Corporations rely on increasingly authoritarian legislation to capture value from propriety information…. Privileged, state-connected economic interests are becoming increasingly dependent on such controls. But unfortunately for them, such controls are becoming increasingly unenforceable thanks to Bittorrent, strong encryption, and proxy servers…. This has profoundly weakened corporate hierarchies in the information and entertainment industries. In this environment, the only thing standing between the old information and media dinosaurs and their total collapse is their so-called intellectual property rights. … Without intellectual property, in any industry where the basic production equipment is widely affordable, and bottom-up networking renders management obsolete, it is likely that self-managed, cooperative production will replace the old managerial hierarchies. $1.25 for 1; 75¢/ea in bulk.

Lysander Spooner’s first and second Letters to Congressman Thomas F. Bayard (D-DE) challenge all government with the standard of natural law and natural liberty. Spooner’s work was widely circulated and admired among the individualist anarchists in the late 19th and early 20th century. Later, the first letter to Bayard was widely reprinted and became incredibly influential in the intellectual revival of individualist anarchism during the 1960s. Whereas the first Letter to Bayard is one of Spooner’s best known works, the Second Letter to Bayard is a lost treasure recovered from the archives, until now very difficult to find in print. Together, they are one of Spooner’s sharpest attacks on the usurpation of legislators and the fraud of the legal Constitutions that are supposed to authorize, and yet somehow also limit, the arbitrary dominion of the State and the men who control it. No man can delegate, or give to another, any right of arbitrary dominion over himself; for that would be giving himself away as a slave. And this no one can do. Any contract to do so is necessarily an absurd one, and has no validity. To call such a contract a Constitution, or by any other high-sounding name, does not alter its character as an absurd and void contract. No man can delegate, or give to another, any right of arbitrary dominion over a third person; for that would imply a right in the first person, not only to make the third person his slave, but also a right to dispose of him as a slave to still other persons. Any contract to do this is necessarily a criminal one and therefore invalid. To call such a contract a Constitution does not at all lessen its criminality, or add to its validity… All this pretended delegation of legislative powr — that is, of a power, on the part of the legislators, so-called, to make any laws of their own device, distinct from the law of nature — is therefore an entire falsehood; a falsehood whose only purpose is to cover and hide a pure usurpation, by one body of men, of arbitrary dominion over other men…. $2.00 for 1; $1.50/ea in bulk.

Market Anarchy Zine Series
	Individuals	Bulk Distribution Packets
	$1.50/issue

Hope for Humanity?   Francois Tremblay at Check Your Premises (Saturday, May 07)

Two cartoons from Savage Chicken about whether we should have hope for humanity. Click for the original post.

Those Libyan “Freedom Fighters”: The Fix is On   Kevin Carson at Center for a Stateless Society (Saturday, May 07)

In a column three months ago (“Egypt: Let the Looting Begin,” Feb. 4),  I suggested that was really going on in Egypt was somewhat different from the official narrative. In quite a few of the “people power” revolutions in recent years — no matter how sincere the people on the streets — it turned out that there were attempts to orchestrate things by people behind the scenes, for whom “people power” was the very last thing on the agenda. In that column I reported that Frank Wisner — a veteran spook, described by Vijay Prashad at Counterpunch as a “bagman of empire,” was Obama’s man on the ground.

Wisner, a former Director at AIG and Enron with longstanding family ties to the OSS and CIA, had previously been involved in drafting the Bush administration’s postwar blueprint for Iraq. That agenda involved so-called “privatizations” of state industry that amounted to insider deals with global corporate interests for pennies on the dollar, “strong intellectual property protections” largely written by Monsanto and the RIAA, and draconian crackdowns on genuine freedom fighters in the labor movement and the Iraqi Freedom Congress. Paul Bremer, with the help of his Heritage Foundation boys in the Green Zone, basically oversaw the looting of everything that wasn’t nailed down.

In that light, some recent news from Libya is especially interesting. First, Alexander Cockburn (“What’s Really Going On in Libya?” Counterpunch, April 15)  reports that a high priority for the NATO operation in Libya was to see to the central banking arrangements of the revolutionary government in Benghazi. On March 19 they authorized the Central Bank of Benghazi to handle monetary policy for the country. Qaddafi, it seems, had announced his intention to repudiate the dollar and the euro and encourage the use of the gold dinar as a common currency by all of Africa. He’d gained tentative buy-in, over the previous year, from a number of Arab and African regimes. The government-owned Libyan national bank in Tripoli, which is independent of the global banking industry, has been a thorn in the flesh of global financial elites for some time.

C4SS Media Coordinator Update, 05/07/11   Thomas L. Knapp at Center for a Stateless Society (Saturday, May 07)

Dear C4SS Supporters,

Sorry for the late update this week — I’m running a bit behind.

This week, I submitted 8,454 Center op-eds to 2,819 publications and tracked six “pickups” …

• On April 30, the Portales, New Mexico News Tribune published a lengthy excerpt from my piece, “On the Road to Nowhere with Johnson and Paul,” as “Their view: Government is vehicle that won’t take you anywhere.”
• On May 3, “The crimes of national pride,” by David D’Amato, appeared in the Dhaka, Bangladesh New Age and the Deming, New Mexico Headlight ran Darian Worden’s “Good riddance Bin Laden: Now get rid of blinders.”
• The Dhaka, Bangladesh New Nation published Kevin Carson’s “Knowing the Real Enemy” on May 4.
• Kevin Carson’s “The Defeat of the United States by Al Qaeda” appeared in the St. Joseph, Missouri Telegraph [PDF] on May 5 and on Antiwar.com on May 7.

Three random acts of link reciprocity for the week: FU Corporate Media, Patrick Henry Press News, and We Never Jump Ship.

Have a great weekend!

Yours in liberty,

Why Creative Commons Hasn't Caught On In Serbia: They're Happier Without Copyright At All   Mike Masnick at Techdirt (Thursday, May 05)

He gave the story of what had happened when then-Yugoslavia was under an international embargo in 1990-1995.

W3C Steps Up: Wants To Create A Decentralized, Distributed Web System   Mike Masnick at Techdirt (Friday, May 06)

Ron Paul vs. Tort Reform   Peter Suderman at Hit & Run (Friday, May 06)

Crazy Trains   Jennifer Abel at Ravings of a Feral Genius (Friday, May 06)

From self-directed to networked-directed learning   Michel Bauwens at P2P Foundation (Tuesday, May 03)

Excerpted from George Siemens:

“Self-directed learning has a long research and philosophical tradition. Malcolm Knowles figures prominently in discussions, but roots go back to Dewey, and even further, to humanist philosophers.

While connectivism begins with the individual, it stresses the growth of connections and connectedness in learning and knowledge. Self-directed learning explains the attributes of learners who learn at their own pace and interest. Is that sufficient to describe our knowledge needs today? I don’t think so.

When faced with learning in complex environments, what we need is something more like network-directed learning – learning that is shaped, influenced, and directed by how we are connected to others. Instead of sensemaking in isolation, we rely on social, technological, and informational networks to direct our activities.

With MOOCs, we emphasize that early course experiences tend to be overwhelming and chaotic. After all, learners face hundreds of introductions, blogs posts, and reading resources, in addition to dozens of new tools and technologies. As the course progresses, small sub-networks form based on shared interests and goals. Learners also gather in various social spaces that we as facilitators don’t create (Facebook was common in CCK11 as was SecondLife) and in language specific forums – a key requirement with global courses.

To address the information and social complexity of open courses, learners need to be network-directed, not self-directed learners. Social networks serve to filter and amplify important concepts and increase the diversity of views on controversial topics. This transition is far broader than only what we’ve experienced in open courses – the need for netwok-centric learning and knowledge building is foundational in many careers today. For example, the discovery of the corona virus (SARS) was achieved through a global distributed research network. New technologies are increasingly assemblies of innovations that often span millennia – a process that was wonderfully covered by William Rosen in The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention . To be competent, to be creative, to be adaptable, requires that we are connected.

Pleased To Make Your Transmittance   admin at Not Always Right | Funny & Stupid Customer Quotes (Friday, May 06)

(Plant Nursery | Austria)

Customer #1: “Oh, look! They’ve got cape gooseberries! I’ve got to get one!”

Customer #2: “Cape gooseberries? What are those?”

Me: “They’re the round orange fruits in a husk. They’re also called Physalis–”

Customer #2: “Oh! Syphilis! Yes, I know those!”

Either Way, He’s Talking About Nuts   admin at Not Always Right | Funny & Stupid Customer Quotes (Friday, May 06)

(Retail | Toronto, ON, Canada)

Customer: *with a thick accent* “Excuse me, sir?”

Me: “Yes?”

Customer: “Which aisle is the penis butter in?”

Me: “Excuse me?”

Customer: “The penis butter.”

Me: *blank stare*

Customer: “Penis butter! You know, penis butter! Penis butter, penis butter!”

Me: “Oh, peanut butter!”

Customer: “Yes, pea-nut butter.”

Me: “Sorry about that. It’s in aisle 5.”

Customer: “Okay. Thank you, sir!”

Stereotypes Are All The Same Anyway   admin at Not Always Right | Funny & Stupid Customer Quotes (Friday, May 06)

(Furniture Store | El Paso, TX, USA)

(I’m a customer and am looking at dining tables. I’m an obvious Muslim as I wear a hijab. Another customer sees me with my son in a stroller and walks over.)

Another customer: “I thought you people couldn’t use electronics?”

Me: “That’s the Amish. And a stroller isn’t electronic.”

Another customer: “Oh…” *walks off*

Hours Worked Not Rising   Matthew Yglesias at Yglesias (Friday, May 06)

David Leonhardt delivers some bad news from the jobs report:

Businesses may be getting more confident, but they are far from wildly optimistic. The average work week in the private sector remained 34.3 hours in April, unchanged over the past three months. If businesses were on the verge of a hiring boom, an increase in the work week would be a leading indicator (given that companies often give their existing employees more work before adding new ones).

Employers know more about their existing workers than about hypothetical future workers, it’s easier to scale back hours than to fire someone, and you can extend someone’s hours without incurring various overhead costs (health care, training, whatever) so this is generally a more attractive response to a small upswing in business activity. If you’ve got increased demand, your first response to offer your current employees more shifts. If the increase is sustained, or if your workers don’t want more shifts, then you hire new people. But we have plenty of “part time for economic reasons” folks in the workforce at the moment, so there shouldn’t be a problem extending hours as a prelude to new hiring.

Two veteran Anonymous members say group is responsible for Sony attacks   Xeni Jardin at Boing Boing (Saturday, May 07)

Libertarianism and the Just Price?   Matt Zwolinski at Bleeding Heart Libertarians (Friday, May 06)

I’ve been listening to Murray Rothbard’s Economic Thought Before Adam Smith: An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought, vol. 1, available as a free PDF here or as a free audiobook narrated by the sonorous Jeff Riggenbach here.  Early on, there’s an extended discussion of the idea of the “just price” as developed by Roman jurists, early Canon Law, and Medieval theologians.  And it led me to wonder: what should libertarians think about this idea?

Rothbard holds what I take to be the standard position among libertarians – that a just price is whatever price people are willing to pay in the market without force or fraud.  And he claims to find at least the core of this view in St. Thomas Aquinas.  Aquinas, in his Summa Theologica, II.II, 77, 3, discusses the following example (as presented by Rothbard):

A merchant is carrying grain to a famine-stricken area. He knows that soon other merchants are following him with many more supplies of grain. Is the merchant obliged to tell the starving citizenry of the supplies coming soon and thereby suffer alower price, or is it all right for him to keep silent and reap the rewards of a high price? (53)

Aquinas’ answer, perhaps surprisingly, is that the merchant is not so obligated.  It would be “exceedingly virtuous” of the merchant to provide this information to his customers, but he is not required by justice to do so.  From this, Rothbard concludes that Aquinas views the ”just price as the current price, determined by demand and supply” (53), and not as some market-independent fact determined by, say, the “real” value of the object or by the cost of its production.

So is Aquinas defending price gouging?  If the just price is the market price, and the market price shoots up suddenly because of a natural disaster that limits the supply or increases demand for a good like ice, or electrical generators, can merchants justly sell these items for whatever their customers are willing to pay?

Smashing Capitalism in Nassau, Part 2   Roderick at Austro-Athenian Empire (Friday, May 06)

And here’s Sheldon Richman’s contribution to our FMAC panel at APEE.

Mutual aid opportunity   Shawn P. Wilbur at Anarchoblogs (Friday, May 06)

Headline of the day   Libby Jacobson at The Agitator (Friday, May 06)

The Lede: “Floridians are going to have to start pulling up their pants and stop having sex with animals soon.”

(H/T Ross)

[Libby]

Hey, kid! Don’t you walk away from me!   Dave Krueger at The Agitator (Friday, May 06)

Phoenix Cop tackles 15 year old girl on camera.  According to the article, the girl was drunk and had already assaulted her mother and a teacher, so it’s not like she was just walking along minding her own business.

What I found interesting was this:

The video, uploaded in March, was found online by a police employee on Tuesday who showed it to a supervisor. The department said it was ‘greatly concerned’ by the incident.

And why are they “greatly concerned”?

‘Obviously we don’t like the video out there, and don’t want this to be the image of us within the community.’

You’ll be glad to know the officer had never previously been caught on video no previous record of excessive violence, but he is now on paid vacation administrative leave pending the outcome of the investigation into whether it’s appropriate for a cop to slam a 15 year old girl onto a concrete sidewalk for walking away.  I think we can all guess what the outcome will be.

Luckily, the girl had no permanent injuries.

[Posted by Dave Krueger]

Libretto Stiletto   Roderick at Austro-Athenian Empire » Left-Libertarian (Friday, May 06)

I just saw a Muslim cleric on Fox News who was clearly saying “Barack Obama, you will pay” (it was even part of a chant that rhymed with “way”) and the subtitles changed it to “Barack Obama, you will die.” There’s some journalistic integrity for ya.

Friday Lazy Linking   Rad Geek at Rad Geek People's Daily (Friday, May 06)

• The Paradox of Property. Roderick, Austro-Athenian Empire (2011-05-05). Nonlibertarians are often puzzled as to why libertarians accept such strong property rights claims (sometimes called “absolute” property rights, though I’ve never figured out what “absolute” is supposed to mean in this context). The answer I’m going to give here is one I’ve already offered elsewhere (see here and here),... (Linked Thursday 2011-05-05.)

• History News Network | Because the Past is the Present, and the Future too. hnn.us (2011-05-05). Mutual Aid in Tuscaloosa. (Linked Thursday 2011-05-05.)

• TomTom Sold User Data to Police, Motorists Then Targeted With Speed Traps. John Gruber, Daring Fireball (2011-05-02). Consumer Reports: Following reports that TomTom had sold traffic data collected from GPS device users to police who then used it to determine locations for speed traps, the company has issued a statement and video in an effort to appease angry customers. Shameful.  ★  (Linked Thursday 2011-05-05.)

• Jon Stewart on the Photos of Osama bin Laden. John Gruber, Daring Fireball (2011-05-05). Jon Stewart: Maybe we should always show pictures. Bin Laden, pictures of our wounded service people, pictures of maimed innocent civilians. We can only make decisions about war if we see what war actually is — and not as a video game where bodies quickly disappear leaving behind a shiny... (Linked Thursday 2011-05-05.)

• On the Road to Nowhere With Johnson and Paul. Thomas L. Knapp, Center for a Stateless Society (2011-04-28). Is it just me, or is the silly season of electoral politics — the presidential election cycle — arriving earlier and earlier in each successive four-year stretch? Last time around, it was nearly Memorial Day of the year preceding the election before pundits started speculating about when the obvious odd... (Linked Thursday 2011-05-05.)

Female Troubles (Excerpt Chap 1)   stuartbramhall at The Most Revolutionary Act (Friday, May 06)

The Battle for Tomorrow

TGIF: No Laissez Faire There   noreply@blogger.com (Sheldon Richman) at Free Association (Friday, May 06)

What’s often unappreciated is that writers sympathetic to the free market have disparaged the Gilded Age as broadly illiberal and contrary to the spirit of free enterprise.

38 years of unintended consequences   Ken at The Early Days of a Better Nation (Tuesday, May 03)

Even more AV   Alex at The Yorkshire Ranter (Monday, April 25)

Libya: It’s More to It Than Following the Money, It’s About Grabbing It   Editors at SolidarityEconomy.net (Wednesday, April 27)

Financial Heist of the Century:

Confiscating Libya's Sovereign Wealth Funds

Solidarity Economy.net via Il Manifesto

Teaching Physics   at xkcd.com (Thursday, May 05)

Cultivating hatred through “personal responsibility.”   Francois Tremblay at Anarchoblogs (Thursday, April 21)

The best way to generate hatred towards an identity (any of the myriad arbitrary ways we have to classify people) is to claim that “those people” have made the conscious decision to bring it upon themselves, that they are explicitly immoral. It is very difficult to generate hatred for people who didn’t choose their fate, and therefore it is always found necessary to place upon them some imaginary responsibility.

Personal responsibility and the ability to choose are of paramount importance in order to understand how we got into the current state of affairs. Therefore, it is vitally important that we differentiate between things we are actually responsible for and things we are not actually responsible for. It is merely part of the clever insanity of the prevalent ideology that it demands of us to feel guilty for things we are not responsible for, and to completely ignore the crimes we are responsible for.

The goal of making people feel guilty about things for which they are not, and cannot, be responsible is for us to identify them as misguided and evil, and often to absolve ourselves from the responsibility we share in the social context that created their misfortune as well. As I discussed in this entry, they are also thought-stoppers. If we can blame individuals for social conditions, we don’t have to think about the origins and perpetuation of that condition.

Here are some examples of imaginary responsibilities imposed on individuals.

* “You are responsible for the way you feel.” “Think positive and your reality will be positive.”

I already addressed this one in the entry linked above. Propositions like this are designed so that you stop thinking about whatever part of your environment triggered undesirable feelings, and to collapse into yourself. They are deadly thought-stoppers used in New Age cults and other mind-control organizations.

* “The poor are poor because they are lazy.”

I also addressed this in the entry linked above. This is an attempt to explain away poverty by stating that it is an individual flaw instead of a structural feature. The individual who is conditioned to think of poor people as lazy has no incentive to examine how his own work and the institutions he supports create more poverty. If poverty is the poor people’s fault, then they are the ones who need to fix the problem, making further thought unnecessary.

Re: On the Road to Nowhere With Johnson and Paul   Rad Geek at Rad Geek People's Daily (Thursday, May 05)

On the Road to Nowhere With Johnson and Paul. Center for a Stateless Society (2011-05-05):

Is it just me, or is the silly season of electoral politics — the presidential election cycle — arriving earlier and earlier in each successive four-year stretch? Last time around, it was nearly Memorial Day of the year preceding the election before pundits started speculating about when the obvious odd...

I have only two real objections. First, it just isn't true that Republicans are the party that says government doesn't work. They've spent decades being the most militant faction in favor of bigger, badder, more violent government. What they actually say is that government doesn't work at helping people, so government ought to be killing and torturing and imprisoning people instead. Lots and lots of people.

My second objection is that ABBA is a marvelous band and if what Gary Johnson and Ron Paul were actually planning to do was just to sit in a car all night listening to ABBA cassettes, I'd think they were pretty cool guys with a remarkably good social agenda.

Osama Bin Laden and the 9-11 Exception   at James Leroy Wilson (Thursday, May 05)

The Info Law Enforcement Gets When They Subpoena Facebook   Mike Masnick at Techdirt (Thursday, May 05)

Once Facebook has the form submitted, they will then prepare an archive for the police to review. That archive will include the following.

• User ID number
• Email address
• Date and Time of your account’s creation
• The most recent logins, usually the last 2-3 days
• Your phone number, if you registered it
• Profile contact info
• Mini-feed
• Status update history
• Shares
• Notes
• Wall posts
• Friends list
• Groups list
• Future and past events
• Videos
• Photos
• Private messages
• IP logs (computers and locations you logged in from)

You’ll notice that this list includes just about everything that you’ve posted to Facebook. In addition, it also includes a list of your Friends, which you didn’t technically add to Facebook yourself.

Homeland Security Demands Mozilla Remove Firefox Extension That Redirects Seized Domains   Mike Masnick at Techdirt (Thursday, May 05)

To help us evaluate the Department of Homeland Security's request to take-down/remove the MAFIAAfire.com add-on from Mozilla's websites, can you please provide the following additional information: