Market Anarchist Blogs

You’d think that if someone were going to make a whole movie about piranhas, they’d at least bother to find out how to pronounce the name of the damn fish.

In response to my previous post, someone on a message board replied to the primary question (”What might have been?”) with, “We would be speaking Russian.” And another commenter also indicated he believed the Soviets would or could have developed nuclear weapons first and conquered the world in the absence of the Manhattan Project. In this particular example, the blame appears to fall back on the Manhattan Project itself, since Stalin didn’t have a nuke program until he heard about the one in the U.S.

But I think a more important point for the general case is that a free society, unencumbered by destructive taxation and regulation, would be extremely wealthy and highly versatile. Such a society would have people and firms that would have total mastery over information gathering and would know about a foreign power’s weapons plans in short order. The idea that a wealthy, free, and fiercely independent people would not spontaneously organize to prevent the development or use of such a weapon is absurd. Not to mention that a society that had eliminated the state or reduced it to the point that it was not engaging in military adventures (and the resultant weapons development) would not even represent a threat meriting the creation of a civilization-endangering weapon by a foreign state.

The Moscow Times has a hilarious article about the trials and tribulations that joggers face in Moscow. It starts with an anecdote about a foreign correspondent in Moscow in 1981 who was trailed by the KGB because his jogging routine aroused suspicion, but here's the best part of the article (especially the last paragraph):

Greg Walters, a former Moscow Times reporter and now a guitarist in Brooklyn-based indie rock group Red Wire Black Wire, used to jog in Chistiye Prudy when he lived in Moscow.

“If I ran through after 2 p.m., I’d get heckled by groups of men drinking beer and smoking cigarettes. A couple times, some of them sarcastically jogged along with me, laughing uproariously. They thought I was hilarious,” Walters said in an e-mail.

The woman who answered the phone at the Russian Athletics Federation simply sneered. “We have nothing to do with people who just run around outside for exercise. We have athletes, professionals who run in competitions.”

Now that I think about it, I never saw people jogging when I lived in Bucharest.

...and I've said it before and I'll say it again: The Moscow Times is a great paper.

The government will fall that raises the price of beer. – Czech proverb

When you invite the whole world to your party, inevitably someone pees in the beer. – Xeni Jardin

The Lost Abbey tasting room is literally an oasis in the desert. They are no joke and one of  only two breweries (along with Stone) to have two beers on Wine Enthusiast Magazine’s list of the top 25 beers of 2009. The San Diego area has 33 breweries, part of what makes it Men’s Journal’s top pick for American beer towns (Portland has a mere 29). Yes, it’s good to live in San Diego.

What was I saying before this turned into a tourism ad? Oh, yes. The tasting room. A dollar doesn’t get you much these days, but in their tasting room, “it’ll get ya drunk” on a seriously generous serving (4 oz.) of high-ABV beer of outstanding craftsmanship; full pints are a bank-breaking $4. It’s a ridiculous deal in a wonderful atmosphere, right among the barrels, tanks and attendant smells of a working brewery.

It was a good deal; then the state showed up to put a stop to it. The frustration, anger, and raw emotion expressed in this post makes for a breathtaking read. There isn’t much more to say. But I’ll say it anyway.

Prohibition in the US nominally ended at the end of 1933. I say “nominally” because, as Gary Chartier reminds us, “the end of Prohibition was not accompanied by an end to cartelizing laws and regulations…” In this case, the regulation isn’t directly about alcohol per se but is one of “public safety,” because, as everyone knows,  alcoholic beverages are teeming with all kinds of nasty things that can kill you (and it’s not like, you know, the process of making beer requires cleanliness). But Kevin Carson knows that these kinds of regulations are no less draconian than outright prohibition:

One of the central functions of business and occupational licensing, and “health” and “safety” regulations, is to mandate minimum levels of overhead and make such small-batch production effectively illegal.  “Health” and “safety” codes, for instance, typically require our would-be microbaker to purchase an industrial-sized oven, refrigerator and dishwasher:  an enormous debt which can only be serviced by large batch production on a full-time basis, in a separate building with permanent hired staff.

Under such circumstances, the only people who can afford self-employment and entrepreneurship are those who can raise the artificially high, state-mandated capital outlays;  everyone else must offer himself for hire to an employer who can afford such outlays.  And since the entry barriers artificially reduce the number  of employers and inflate the number of people seeking wage employment, obviously, the dynamic tends to be one of workers competing for jobs, and the terms of employment being artificially set by the employer.

Of course this is lost on the trolls, who arrive right on cue:

Awe [sic]…what a shame that someone running a business has to comply with health regulations. I bet if you think about it there are a lot more throughout your business that you don’t really need either, right.

What they, you and I (“we”) need is “an effectively functioning tort law system that hasn’t been hampered by preemption and similar sorts of limitations.” What “we” need is to understand that “decisions about health and comfort are best made by the individual people who bear the costs and reap the benefits.” What “we” need is to let markets work, the actual, freed market:

Government interference only seems necessary to regulate a market, in the positive sense of the word regulate, if you think that the only way to get social order is by means of social control, and the only way for to get to harmonious social interactions is by having the government coerce people into working together with each other.

And further:

American state corporatism forcibly reshapes the world of work and business on the model of a commercial strip mall: sanitized, centralized, regimented, officious, and dominated by a few powerful proprietors and their short list of favored partners, to whom everyone else relates as either an employee or a consumer. A truly free market, without the pervasive control of state licensure requirements, regulation, inspections, paperwork, taxes, “fees,” and the rest, has much more to do with the traditional image of a bazaar: messy, decentralized, diverse, informal, flexible, pervaded by haggling, and kept together by the spontaneous order of countless small-time independent operators, who quickly and easily shift between the roles of customer, merchant, contract laborer, and more. It is precisely because we have the strip mall rather than the bazaar that people living in poverty find themselves so often confined to ghettoes, caught in precarious situations, and dependent on others—either on the bum or caught in jobs they hate but cannot leave, while barely keeping a barely tolerable roof over their heads.

The poorer you are, the more you need access to informal and flexible alternatives, and the more you need opportunities to apply some creative hustling.

- Charles Johnson, “Scratching By: How Government Creates Poverty as We Know It”

I don’t know if the brewers at The Lost Abbey are anarchists; they write like anarchists might write. If not, I hope, after this, they’ll head over to C4SS and have a look around. Maybe then they will see all facets of the state as not worth a pitcher of warm piss. If warm piss isn’t your thing either, let me call for solidarity with The Lost Abbey folks. Buy their beer!* Become a Patron Saint or Sinner.  I’m sure it will help them cover these unexpected and downright evil costs.

* I’m not affiliated with the brewery.

Filed under: Anarchism, Culture, Law, News Tagged: Charles Johnson, Gary Chartier, Kevin Carson

• The Dialethic Right. Roderick, Austro-Athenian Empire (2010-04-28). Two things conservatives like to say: Our constitutional rights aren’t granted to us by government. Our rights come from God, and the Constitution simply recognises them. Illegal immigrants and terrorist suspects don’t have constitutional rights because they’re not American citizens. (Linked Wednesday 2010-04-28.)

• Remembering Corporate Liberalism. rechelon, Invisible Molotov (2010-04-24). “Remembering Corporate Liberalism” by Roderick T Long “During the first half of the 20th century, there was a widespread perception that big government and big business were fundamentally at odds. Free-market individualists generally regarded themselves as defenders of peaceful business interests against the rapacious state. Those on the left saw... (Linked Thursday 2010-04-29.)

• XKCD "Hell" implemented in flash. Hacker News (2010-04-29). Comments (Linked Thursday 2010-04-29.)

• Anarchism 101. You, Anarchoblogs (2010-04-16). I love how people who would barely pass an 11th-grade civics test like to taunt anarchists with the ever-so-damning, irrefutable line “But how would you prevent a warlord from rising to power, in Anarchy?” and then act as if that is such a complete and well-thought-out argument that it pre-empts... (Linked Thursday 2010-04-29.)

• trying to find embeddable video, but rachel maddow - who, Captain Capitulation, eye of the storm (2010-04-15). trying to find embeddable video, but rachel maddow - who, actually, i like to watch - is incessantly touting her show on timothy mcveigh: it's all about the dangers of "anti-government violence." i guess really they focus-grouped the phrase "anti-gov" and now use it as a synonym for insanity. but... (Linked Thursday 2010-04-29.)

• Insert "Won't Get Fooled Again" Reference Here. Jesse Walker, Jesse Walker: Reason Magazine articles and blog posts. (2010-04-29). Charlie Savage reports: The Obama administration is seeking to compel a writer to testify about his confidential sources for a 2006 book about the Central Intelligence Agency, a rare step that was authorized by Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. The author, James Risen, who is a reporter for The... (Linked Thursday 2010-04-29.)

For those who have been following some discussions elsewhere, this one goes out to dukemeiser. Because Axe Cop is the world’s greatest defender of the Bush-Obama doctrine of surveillance and Homeland Security:

What I like about the comic is that it really does seem to be a pretty accurate representation of how War on Terror-hawks think the world ought to work. Why shouldn’t it? To hell with courts and civil liberties and all those other chickenshit liberal axe-blocks. Since the government has a list of ALL THE BAD GUYS, wouldn’t you want them to chop their heads off?

And I’ve got to say, the kind of police-state and assassin-state policies that they insist on as simple common sense really do sound like something that you get when some bright policy wonk comes up with some legal verbiage and precedents to trick out an idea which, at its core, is something that he got from the ideas and fantasies of his 5 year old little brother.

This story was pretty funny. GM repaid its bailout loan. This made them eligible to borrow even more money at a lower interest rate.

I like the trend to call GM "Government Motors". Even without bailout money, GM executives benefit from regulations that make it hard to start a small car manufacturing business. Each regulation is a tax on small manufacturers, and there are a *LOT* of regulations in the auto industry.

GM received two types of bailout money from the Federal government. The first was a loan of $6.7B. The second was an equity investment of $42.8B. This led to the obvious accounting trick. The equity investment money was used to repay the loan!

The Federal government is holding on to its equity investment in GM. They are waiting for an IPO of post-bankruptcy GM. They are hoping to sell for a profit, so they can claim success. That is unlikely, because GM needs a market capitalization of more than $60B for the investment to be sold at a break-even value. Even if the Federal government does sell its GM "investment" for a profit, it probably won't be a real profit when compared to true inflation. That money/wealth would have been more profitably spent elsewhere.

Also, the Federal government got a really bad deal on its equity "investment" in GM. They overpaid, in price per share. This was a bailout of GM's other creditors. For example, if they overpaid by $5B, it's like a gift of $5B to GM's other bondholders. That's the reason the government was negotiating with GM's other creditors; they were negotiating over how much of a bailout they would get!

It's pretty embarrassing that GM repaid the bailout loan with other bailout money. The mainstream media hyped this as "Hooray for GM and the State!" GM still doesn't have a profitable car manufacturing business.

However, GM does have a profitable business. GM excels at lobbying for bailout money! That's all that really matters.

It is immoral for a business to receive bailout money, and then spend some of that money lobbying Congress for favors. Unfortunately, that's the way the State economy and political system works. GM is doing the same thing as the banksters!

Real interest rates are negative. Interest rates are less than true inflation. Suppose GM has $50B in debt, and real interest rates are negative 20%. It's like GM executives are receiving a bailout of $10B per year. They can repay the loan with devalued money.

As long as GM can borrow more and more money, the scam continues. Inflation is high and interest rates are low. This makes it seem like the total debt stays the same size over time! GM does own some tangible assets, like factories/land and the State car manufacturing monopoly/oligopoly. Inflation means these assets increase in value. Inflation in these assets can keep place with the interest payments due on loans.

GM has easy access to capital. Non-insiders can't borrow money. This gives the State and banksters the power to decide which businesses succeed and which ones fail.

The cost of GM's bailout isn't free. Everyone else pays the cost via inflation. GM gets their bailout. Someone who tried to start/grow a business via reinvested savings/profits gets ripped off by inflation.

A healthy put down by libertarian blogger Last Ditch of one of the most offensive arguments being made about libertarians, in this instance, a crack by environmentalist George Monbiot, a writer I often enjoy when he’s talking about something he knows i.e., not economics. “This may just be the most offensive piece of twaddle the Guardian [...]

Ellen Brown of the wonderful WebofDebt website (check out Ellen’s book, Web of Debt) sends me a note. (Note: I admire Ellen’s writing and research and believe her to be a very sincere person, but I disagree with her prescription, which is to monetize the debt. Monetizing debt is the problem, so it can’t [...]