#antistatism

@thomasjwebb.

The week before last, at the International Students For Liberty Conference (ISFLC), Ron Paul once again misgendered and deadnamed whistleblower and hero, to libertarians everywhere, Chelsea Manning in a speech. Though his words otherwise sounded supportive, they indicate someone who at best hasn’t paid attention to any news pertaining to her. More likely, he and the people he surrounds himself with disrespect not only Manning, but trans identities everywhere. As soon as he said this, some people in the audience, including some people from the Center for a Stateless Society (C4SS) shouted back to correct him. In return, rabid Ron Paul supporters have responded with insults and threats. This needs to stop.

But this isn’t about Ron Paul or about any particular celebrity. It’s about our tendency as a movement to treat some people as irreplaceable because of what they have done at some point in the past. It’s about libertarian movement celebrity worship orcelebritarianism. It’s not only counter-productive, but goes against libertarian principles. Once you get over the intellectual-property based thinking our society adheres to where an idea belongs to someone, you can understand that continuing where someone left off isn’t that person’s prerogative. Ron Paul got famous making tirades against endless wars and The Fed on widely televised Republican primary debates. Libertarianism, even if it was his odd brand thereof, made its way into our living rooms and his name to dinner table conversations. But other people hold similar views as him on these issues without his numerous problems, including the infamous racist newsletters which he won’t fully repudiate and his association with Gary North, a Christian reconstructionist who supports the stoning of adulterers. A common retort to any criticisms of him is that he’s already famous among the general public and whoever you offer as an alternative isn’t. This may technically be true, but it’s also a self-fulfilling prophecy. We must forget the capitalist mythology of the superman who rises to great heights entirely on his own strength. He got where he is by the help of people around him. That includes many hard-core conservatives, which is why he finds himself unable to say things that would upset that camp. But he also got a lot of help from the liberty movement and continues to be given a platform. Again, this needs to stop.

Innocent Mistakes Aren’t

It’s important to remember that Ron Paul’s use of name and pronoun for Chelsea Manning didn’t appear in an off-the-cuff remark during a discussion or Q&A, which would make ignorance a little more plausible. It was in a speech, which no doubt has been gone over by himself and his aides. And it doesn’t matter what his intentions are, only their effects. This is a point that libertarians have no problem making when addressing the apparently well-meaning actions of state actors — a disconnect Bobby, an ISFLC attendee, has noted:

The defense of Ron Paul by appeal to lack of malicious intent — “he’s old and doesn’t know better” — is perhaps the most pathetic instance of special pleading I’ve ever come across. I’ve been hurt my entire life by people who apparently mean no harm. Libertarians of all people should immediately recognize how morally bankrupt this argument is, given their constant insistence that the good intentions of central planners do not mitigate the harm they cause, nor does it weaken our condemnation of their callous actions.

It is also implausible to suggest that it’s an accident. Ron Paul is unwilling to upset his hard-core supporters, which includes people with frighteningly backwards beliefs on various social issues. It speaks volumes about not only his priorities but that of any venue, any promoter and, dare I say, any movement that gives him a platform. Ron Paul can’t truly comment on the racist newsletters because the conditions that created them, the people he surrounds himself, remain largely unchanged. No wonder his speech writer saw it fit to write about Manning from the perspective of someone who’s been living in a cave for the past several years. Bobby then continues:

If he cannot gender Manning correctly — an admitted hero and public figure — how could we expect him to have good ideas for resolving the pandemic of violence facing trans women of color? His refusal to disavow the racist newsletters published in his name speaks volumes. Whether you agree with him on the Fed, war, borders, whatever — this man is an enemy of trans liberation and an enemy of black liberation and struggles for racial justice. He has no business in a movement for liberty, much less speaking as a figurehead. This is not extremism. This is a wake-up call.

If our movement can’t keep people with terrible views out of it, we have no business asking out loud why women, why gays, why trans people, why people of color, why genderqueer people don’t want to be a part of it. And if our movement manages to be successful anyway, then it will become every bit as evil as the status quo it seeks to change.

Dealing With True Monsters

Most of the people who have achieved fame in our movement aren’t terrible people, but it’s helpful to consider how we respond when they are a true monster. One of the co-founders of C4SS, Brad Spangler, has admitted to child rape. Some people responded disturbingly supportive of him. Most people did not, but that there were people who defended him speaks volumes of the power of celebrity. This incident brought with it some other questions — what to do with his works and what are we doing wrong as a movement to have let the monster who walked among us remain among us, despite some clear warning signs. After internal wrestling on finer points, C4SS decided to archive his writings, keeping them available for public consumption but also dissociating them from the main website. This I think was the right call, and it illustrates that someone can, at least in extreme situations, be dissociated with even if they did valuable things in the past, like found the organization in question or write prolifically. It also shows that ideas have an integrity of their own and can survive and evolve even if they were worked on at one point by poisonous individuals. The other truly important question it raised was how to prevent giving cover to such individuals in the future. William Gillis explored this question in his article:

We’re always going on about how non-state approaches to fucked up dynamics can be so much more effective — and ultimately they can be — yet this is precisely the kind of situation where we should easily be able to demonstrate that, and instead we’ve come up empty.

This isn’t movement inside baseball. If our movement is successful, the shape post-state societies takes will be greatly influenced by it. If we can’t deal with poisonous individuals now, then we can’t truly assert that stateless societies will be able to do it. Restricting the flow of information by protecting beloved celebrities can distort the market much the same way bad legislation can, as Gillis continues:

Markets work through the brilliantly self-organizing decentralized conveyance and evaluation of information. Insofar as we suppress that among ourselves — insofar as we declare that we know better than our compatriots what information is pertinent to their decisions and what they can be trusted to evaluate rationally — we suppress signals and leech dynamism from the market. We in effect reproduce some of the irrationality of state capitalism.

How we respond to bad people in a movement tells much about our ability to build a better future. And it shouldn’t have to come to arguably the most heinous of crimes. Like Gillis stated, child rape is particularly evil, but part of “a spectrum of predatory and dehumanizing perspectives and behaviors deeply connected to misogyny” and thus must be struck at the root if it is to be dealt with. We should feel free to criticize early and criticize often. If we feel afraid to attack someone for less overtly violent awfulness, we need to loudly ask “why?”

Anarchism as Praxis

Central to celebritarianism is the idea that ideas are precious and that some people have really good ideas. But if you already understand how Microsoft’s profits, for example, are largely rents off of spurious intellectual property rights, then you should have a good nose for why celebritarians’ ideas are not precious or at least don’t belong to them. Each person who contributes to our political philosophy does so on the shoulders of giants — no! — on the shoulders of a mound of others of equal stature. Markets work this way, societies work this way. If I’m wrong on this, then we need to throw in the towel and accept technocratic welfare statism as the best society our species is capable of. It doesn’t take deep understanding of economics, sociology or philosophy to understand the basics of how the state operates. It certainly helps, but the problem hasn’t been lack of knowledge all this time — it has been bias and ideology. Practicing anarchism must not be seen as a highly technical skill that only a smaller number of economists are qualified to do. For it to work, it must be something we can all practice to some degree. We do need experts to discover things and teach, but experts must not monopolize the podium and must not be worshiped. After all, any critic of power structures is familiar with how experts have their own biases as a class. In a freed market, there would be space for specialization and, of course, some people will be more interested in social sciences than others. That is fine. But being an advocate for liberty shouldn’t be an elite club, a gentleman’s club (it’s no accident that celebritarians are disproportionately straight, white and male, maybe dropping one of those things from time to time). The resources to enter that field should be accessible and translated into multiple languages. We must shift from looking at ideas as the job of pampered heroes to seeing it as an endeavor too important not to crowdsource.

Thomas J. Webb | More articles by Thomas J. Webb

Originally published at C4SS on 27 February 2015 CC0 1.1

@gmincy.

In the November of 1859, Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species was published, thus changing the way natural scientists viewed the world forever. In this text, Darwin describes the idea of descent with modification and brilliantly illustrates the concept of natural selection: The gradual process by which heritable traits express themselves, if at all, in a population based on reproductive success and environmental pressures. Amid the scientific jargon, there exists grand prose that capture the incredible workings of nature. One such passage comes at the end of Origin:

It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us……There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

What Darwin captures with his rhetoric is the incredible way everything works together to form the living Earth. Behind the simplest of actors lies an infinite and beautiful complexity — billions of years of life, ancient worlds and time our civilizations will never know. Darwin is correct, there is grandeur in this view of life. It is interesting to consider the interactions of life out in the wild. Microbes liberating breathable oxygen, annelids and nematodes churning the soil, fungus bonding to the roots of plants and feeding them nutrients, trees providing canopy habitat for numerous fauna and so on. There is mutualism everywhere in the wild. When we think of evolution the old motto “survival of the fittest” comes to mind. This is a bit unfortunate. Darwin did talk of competition in his book, but, as the above passage signals, he also provides lengthy descriptions of mutualism and symbiosis. He regards many of the relationships among species, such as the moth and orchid, as cooperative, complex and wonderful. It is considerations such as these that also caught the deserved attention of another famed evolutionary biologist: Peter Kropotkin.

Kropotkin was an interesting human with a rather lengthy curriculum vitae. In addition to his biology credentials, the man was also a Russian prince. Growing up he was fascinated with the French revolution and studied anarchist theory. Above all, he was a lover of nature. Considering the lengthy bio, it is pleasant to think of this man reveling in natures beauty while reading about the splendor of liberty. One can almost picture the bearded fellow, studying Darwin’s book and anarchist literature in the great out-of-doors. After all, there is no better place than the natural world to discover liberty and one’s own wildness. Kropotkin’s anarchism grew with his fondness of the wild. The prince saw mutualistic relationships everywhere in nature. While conducting field research in Siberia he wrote:

I failed to find, although I was eagerly looking for it, that bitter struggle for the means of existence, among animals belonging to the same species, which was considered by most Darwinists (though not always by Darwin himself) as the dominant characteristic of the struggle for life, and the main factor of evolution… 

In all these scenes of animal life which passed before my eyes I saw Mutual Aid and Mutual Support carried on to an extent which made me suspect in it a feature of the greatest importance for the maintenance of life, the preservation of each species and its further evolution.

At the time, Kropotkin’s ideas were rather radical. The narrative of the day described evolution as the product of strict competition among species. Kropotkin did not waver from his views, however, and argued mutualism was just as prominent, if not more so, than competition. He was, of course, correct. Today there are hundreds of papers published annually that describe the cooperative relationships among all kinds of living organisms — all three domains and all kingdoms are represented. Kropotkin found hope in the natural world. He wanted to contribute to the understanding of mutual aid to shed light on human cooperation. This was his labor to save humanity from systems of power and domination — to render such institutions useless.

Like a countless number of people, I too find beauty everywhere in nature. I am an advocate of wilderness preservation for what open spaces can teach us. I do not mean the information found in stratigraphy, though rocks do tell the greatest tale ever told — they have crafted their story for some 4.6 billion years, after all. I instead refer to nature for nature’s sake. When we take time to contemplate the natural order, we see the simple turn to the complex in a great bottom up diversification of life.

There is a humbling and awe-inspiring liberty in the wild — freedom from the industrialized, mechanized, technicalized order of human civilization. Wilderness is an open system. The interlocking, ancient mechanisms of biology, ecology, geology, chemistry and physics operate in unison. There is no administration in the wild. Wilderness is a place to discover truth, a place of challenge and a space for tranquility. Wilderness is a means of escape, it allows us to re-imagine the human condition. I speak of the danger, the splendor, the solitude, the adventure, the comradeship and the truly liberating experiences awaiting us in the great out there. Wilderness allows us to discover our individual wildness.

I do not mean to paint a picture of myself as a rugged, wilderness individualist. Nothing is further from the truth. I am an urbanite, as are most of us these days — for better or worse. I truly enjoy our cities and the benefits they award us in a post industrial, technologically advanced society. I especially enjoy baking soda tooth paste, beer can chicken, beer, the internet, libraries, college campuses, the farmers market, food trucks, taverns (the best of human institutions), Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soap, a good protest, the theatre and other such conveniences. My family and I live in Knoxville, Tennessee and are just a mile from the urban center — a quick stroll on the bridge across the Tennessee River and we are in the square. I enjoy walking downtown as the activity awards the perfect excuse, no matter the time of day, to stroll inside a watering hole, order a pint or a shot of Tennessee whisky (Hell, why not both?) and relax the day away.

The troubling thing about cities, however, is they are enclosed. There is limited neutral space in the city proper, though the city center should be rich in common place. Most venues are spaces of capital exclusions and barriers to entry exist everywhere — “Do you have any money, sir?” Even the geography of the city is affected by enclosure, creating spaces of privilege and spaces of disparity, blocked apart by neighborhoods, zoning laws and manipulated by the gentry. If only we would organize a strong movement for the commons. Should all members of the community not have, as first proposed by sociologist Henri Lefebvre, a “right to the city” — a space shared in common, free of capital restrictions? Urban sociologist David Harvey elaborates:

The right to the city is far more than the individual liberty to access urban resources: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city. It is, moreover, a common rather than an individual right since this transformation inevitably depends upon the exercise of a collective power to reshape the processes of urbanization. The freedom to make and remake our cities and ourselves is, I want to argue, one of the most precious yet most neglected of our human rights.

In order to claim this right to the city our cultures will need to evolve. How do we imagine this evolution — how do we proceed and function as an adaptive unit? How do we craft mutualistic relationships among individuals and neighborhoods? How do we advance pro-social behavior? Yet another evolutionary biologist, Dr. David Sloan Wilson, has pondered these questions for a few years. The focus of his work includes genetics and, sometimes controversially, cultural evolution. He is fascinated by the idea of an altruistic city and suggests we pay attention to Nobel Prize laureate Elinor Ostrom. For Wilson, Ostrom’s ideas of commons governance offer a way to get there. In an interview, for NPR’s On Being, Wilson explains:

Her contribution was to show how groups of people attempting to manage their common resources, such as farmers or fishermen or forestry people managing forests, how they’re capable of managing their affairs pretty well, but only if certain conditions are met. Those conditions are very conciliant with what we know from an evolutionary perspective about pro-sociality and cooperation.

Human beings are social animals. As such, we are fond of organizing in groups. According to Wilson, the social environments we produce directly affect our biological fitness (fitness is the product of interactions between different groups and of individuals within a group). This idea, that groups are fundamentally important to the human condition, paves the way for the emergence of a fairly controversial subject in evolutionary biology – group selection. If evolution works on individuals, organisms and groups, argues Wilson, then groups and symbiotic communities can become higher evolved organisms in their own right. This is particularly important for human beings because the cultural transmission of traits can quickly escalate behaviors throughout an entire group. Evolutionary biologists who study cultural evolution acknowledge just how important cultural selection is to human evolution. Cultural selection can potentially produce very large implications for our societies — socially, economically and biologically. An example of such progress is found in the Dudley Street neighborhood of Boston. Economic woes in the 1980’s left much of the neighborhood vacant. The city government of Boston sought the classic neo-liberal fix to the urban corridor: Gentrification. The neighborhood was to be converted to a space for hotels and offices that would serve downtown Boston. Community members organized the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative, however, and developed a land trust to take democratic control of the land and guide re-development. This stopped such gentrification in its tracks, as explained by Yes! magazine:

A community land trust (CLT) is a nonprofit organization governed by community members that stewards land for long-term public benefit. CLTs protect land from the pressures of the real estate market, as the land is never resold. It remains part of the commons… 

Through its governance structure, the land trust balances the varying interests of homeowners and the broader community in the land.

What’s developed in the Dudley neighborhood is not only a reclaiming of the commons, but also a reconnection with nature. Among the affordable housing, town common and community center there too exists a community greenhouse, public gardens and several urban farms. The agrarian life in the city, complete with habitat and niche space for numerous critters — absent of capitalists, commissioners and central planners. There are many other examples, all over the country, around the world, of social power advancing past the authorities. Each unique. That is really the beauty of it all. Who knows what may happen with reclaimed space? Commons governance is as spontaneous as the freed market. These ideas depend on you and me — it is up to us to decide how to live our lives. We just have to take that first hard step toward a higher evolved society: Democracy. Anarchism will be our method. So, what does all of this talk of urban space and common property have to do with the wild? Governance in urban corridors has sweeping consequences. Urban governance impacts not just us residents, but also, if not more so, the natural world. Cities are population centers and population centers drive policy. Cities are also mechanized, industrialized and centralized — they are highly inefficient and removed from the wild. Their demand for resources is great. Power lies in the city – we, the urban population, need resources. Our demand for energy and commodities impacts the natural world — global biomes are exploited for the means of our consumption. Cities place demand on their sites and their hinterlands. Urban sprawl and demands for energy call for the excavation and reshaping of natural lands. In the search of coal, oil, gas and timber the policy of growth levels mountains, fills valleys and wetlands, buries streams and plunders forest. The neo-liberal city paves roads for the sake of roads, builds malls, subdivisions, manicured lawns, factories and churches for the sake of growth. From the city center, and out into natural lands, wildlife populations are killed. Earth’s current great extinction, the literal end of entire species of flora and fauna, is a result of central planning — the backbone of urban development and growth economics. Reclaiming the commons in our urban corridors can change this. In a libertarian social order market actors will conduct cost/benefit analyses before harvesting resources. By paying true environmental costs market mechanisms for conservation will develop and naturally cap resource extraction at its maximum sustainable yield. It is in our best interest to have resilient, healthy ecological communities because the ecosystem services they award are far too important for the cash nexus. Because of this, wilderness will be preserved once more. Gone will be the maximum utility of resources we see today. Respect for natural boundaries will also limit the amount of sprawl into the landscape. In the commons, land is not a commodity, but a connection — a place of labor and heritage One thing is certain to me: If our cooperative, libertarian spirit is to defeat the authoritarian nature of the powerful we must champion a grand, renewed preservationist ethic. The idea that human utility of resources is superior to an entire species or ecosystem, that we would favor extinction to preservation, is nothing but extreme totalitarianism. Such an ethic flies in the face of liberty. Such power holds no place in the permissive, free society. Civilization needs wilderness. We need to know and experience natural lands. We need to shed the “social” we, every now and then, for the “wild” we. Just having wilderness exist, a place totally free of the Leviathans of civilization, keeps the very idea of liberty alive. A whole other world is out there — we can run to it so long as we protect it. Wild lands are the cradle of all life, the bastions of existence and the cathedrals of creation. To plunder such grandeur defiles the very concept of civil society. I am ever grateful to those who labored for the preservation of wild lands. They were able to keep the spirit of liberty alive. I personally owe them a great debt. I have experienced much in the wild — built memories and lasting friendships. I have grown in solitude in the forest and have learned more among the rock and tributaries than any classroom instruction. I have explored wild lands with such a close friend I can only refer to him as a brother. I proposed to my wife along the banks of the Big South Fork on an overnight trip into the country. We now have a beautiful child with whom we hike the woods with weekly, just to babble the afternoon away. My heart bursts with love in the wild. Out there, I continue to discover who I am. I love my community, but my heart aches for the places I have been. There is no way to describe the experience of standing in the summer rain of a mesic cove forest in the Cumberland Gap. Watching the sun set over the ancient ocean rock of the Badlands, feeling the wind on ones skin out on the prairie with the Grand Tetons on the horizon, watching ocean waves crash into arched rock on the Northwest coasts, standing among the towering Redwoods, sitting among sage brush and rolling desert hills and the many other experiences that await are moments of nothing but radical freedom. For what it is worth, I encourage you to get out there. I encourage you to breathe deep of the sweet, lucid air. Run the ridges, bag the peaks, make your way to the most amazing view. Sit a while. Smile. Enjoy the untouched wild. Get lost in thought. Peer into the forest canopy. Experience your wildness. Be an individual. Stand naked, with all worldly burdens stripped away. Get dirty. Be bone weary. I sure will.

Grant A. Mincy | More articles by Grant A. Mincy

Originally published at C4SS on 17 February 2015 CC0 1.1

. @dsdamato. #liberty. #antistatism. #poverty. #inequality. #injustice.

Recently, in a comment on my short piece, “The Libertarian Road to Egalitarianism,” philosopher and prominent libertarian Tibor R. Machan cited George Orwell’s Animal Farm as an example of what happens when we attempt to do something about inequality. To Machan, inequality is a “fabricated problem,” and Orwell’s fairy story is a cautionary tale on the dangers of trying to remedy it. Upon reading his comment, I was somewhat nonplussed, for it had never occurred to me to read Animal Farm in such a way. Indeed, since reading the novel for the first time, I have understood it to offer a warning almost antithetical to that of Machan’s reading.

It seemed to me then, as now, that Orwell’s Animal Farm in fact counsels on the problems with inequality, the results of granting special rights and privileges to some politically connected ruling class. Orwell skillfully illustrates the fundamental problem with political authority, its inherent conflict, that confronted with the incentives which favor abuses of power, lofty philosophical ideals are readily discarded. Orwell’s whole point is that the pigs never actually take their rhetoric about equality and reestablishing the farm on fairer terms seriously — that they almost immediately begin to take advantage of their distinctly unequal position on the farm to exploit the rest of the animals and hoard the luxuries for their own private use and enjoyment. Animal Farm thus succinctly demonstrates the connection between political power and economic power. When inequality in the former is instituted as a matter of legal fact, inequality in the latter follows unavoidably. Free market libertarians are often uncomfortable with the left’s condemnations of economic inequality, arguing that in principle libertarianism can take no issue with inequality itself.

After all, if we favor individual rights, open competition, and private property, we ought to accept whatever results they yield. Strictly speaking, that’s all true enough. It seems to me, however, that a thoroughgoing libertarian critique of society as it is today must include a critique of economic inequality as a symptom of the lack of economic freedom and the persistent interferences of political power to favor and enrich a rich elite. In his biographical study of Thomas Hodgskin, historian David Stack describes Hodgskin’s belief that “the worker could be liberated by the full application of bourgeois morality.” For Hodgskin, Stack writes, “Inequality and misery, social order and the anti-peace” were all functions of the law, artificially imposed and not the result of “any inherent inequalities in the system of production.” If existing economic injustices flowed from the operation of positive law, then “socialist strictures against laissez faire were mistaken.” Hodgskin lived and wrote in a time when it was easier to articulate a view that was both liberal and socialist. The underappreciated legacy of thinkers like Hodgskin makes the case (frequently made at the Center for a Stateless Society today) that libertarians ought to be wary of embracing the term “capitalism,” and trumpeting it as a thing that we favor.

Like Hodgskin, today’s market anarchists do not object to the mere fact that capital is compensated for its part in the process of production. The worry — which can only finally be allayed by observing a now hypothetical free market and finding out — is that capital is overcompensated due to a position of privilege which the State confers on it. “One is almost tempted to believe,” wrote Hodgskin, “that capital is a sort of cabalistic word, like Church or State, or any other of those general terms which are invented by those who fleece the rest of mankind to conceal the hand that shears them. It is a sort of idol before which men are called upon to prostrate themselves . . . .” Among Hodgskin’s central insights, habitually overlooked by most free marketers, is the idea that the fact of exchange in and of itself does not prove the absence of exploitation. Unequal exchange is exploitative insofar as one party to the exchange has an unfair advantage, one gained from the coercive prevention or restriction of competition. Considered on the micro level, unequal exchange might manifest in, for example, the employment relationship or an agreement for consumer goods or services. On a larger scale, unequal exchange analyses may aid our understanding of the way that the poor, developing world interacts economically with the rich and developed West.

In the world of Animal Farm, the pigs employed violence as a way to preserve their position of power; the other animals worked increasingly long hours for less and less, with the pigs ruling as lords of Animal Farm — the name of which was eventually changed back to its original name, Manor Farm. The original mantra, “All animals are equal,” is gradually, almost imperceptibly supplanted by the idea that “some animals are more equal than others.” Machan’s interpretation of Animal Farm forgets that Orwell was a socialist, and as Orwell scholar Craig L. Carr observes, the famous novel is straightforwardly warning about the “betrayal of the egalitarian ideal.” Following the pigs’ revolution, the ouster of Mr. Jones, “[a]n economic system that legitimates material inequality remained in place.” Orwell is interested in the use of language. In all his work, including Animal Farm, political fustian is the mechanism through which the noble goals of the revolution are “rendered consistent with the privilege and superior position of the upper class.” The language of libertarianism and free markets is analogously important to the beneficiaries of economic privilege. Without it, people would recognize corporate power for what it is, a creation of political violence and coercion, a class system as real, observable and quantifiable as any before it. Criticizing inequality ought to be important to libertarianism to the extent that we take our own free market ideas seriously and see the political economy of today as far removed from our model. Libertarians should accordingly welcome socialism and class analysis as found in the work of leftists like Hodgskin and Orwell. It’s time we start emphasizing liberty and equality, not liberty or equality.

By David S. D'Amato - More articles by David S. D'Amato

Originally published at the Center for a Stateless Society on 4 December 2014.

Republished under a Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication.

. @knappsterdotbiz. @CIA. #TortureReport.

The US Senate’s minimal, partial, heavily redacted summary of its report on the CIA’s post-9/11 torture program is out. That report’s reception by establishment media turns out to be at least as demonstrative of the problem it addresses as the report itself.

As any recovering addict will helpfully inform you, the first step is admitting the problem. The US government and American media (and presumably following them, the America public) still resolutely refuse to do that.

In story after story, we see references to “enhanced interrogation” and “brutal interrogation tactics.” Those are weasel words. They’re not admissions of the problem, they’re attempts to talk around the problem.

We’re not talking about “enhanced interrogation techniques.” Nor are we discussing “brutal interrogation tactics.” The subject in question is torture.

Torture is clearly defined in US law (18 US Code §2340): “[A]n act committed by a person acting under the color of law specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering (other than pain or suffering incidental to lawful sanctions) upon another person within his custody or physical control.”

Torture is clearly defined in international law (the UN Convention Against Torture): “[A]ny act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity.”

These summations in the laws of states are informative, but we don’t really need them to conclude that the actions described in the report — waterboarding, sleep deprivation and the forced infusion of substances into victims’ rectums, to name three — are torture, all torture and nothing but torture. There exists no reasonable definition of torture that the described actions don’t conform to.

From that primary conclusion we must inevitably draw a secondary conclusion: The persons involved in the torture, from the operators actually implementing it all the way up the chain of command to the president of the United States, are violent, dangerous criminals and would be recognized as such in any sane society, regardless of whether or not codified law existed to describe their offenses.

The question, of course, is what to do about it. “Mainstream” suggestions range from “nothing” to “hold some Senate hearings and hope it goes away” to “appoint a special prosecutor and let him throw some of the less well-connected criminals under the bus so we can get on with life.”

Even at the radical end of the spectrum, suggestions tend to run to things like putting the US under the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court and conducting a wholesale rendition of the gang, from top to bottom, to the Hague for trial.

The second step in 12-step addiction recovery programs involves recognizing a “higher power.” The second step in any torture recovery program is recognition that the existing temporal “higher power” — the state — is in fact the real problem.

The state bestows extreme power upon its agents, especially over prisoners and detainees. That power corrupts, enabling those agents to abuse and torture, as social psychologists observed in the Stanford Prison Experiment.

The state’s structure also protects its agents from accountability, shrouding discussions of state violence in euphemism, turn the debate from torture as a crime to torture as policy. Furthermore, the state’s monopoly on law leaves prosecution and adjudication up to the state itself. Torturers know they’re unlikely to face justice.

If we tolerate the state, we tolerate torture. It’s time and past time we stopped tolerating either.

By Thomas L. Knapp - More articles by Thomas L. Knapp

Originally published at the Center for a Stateless Society on 10 December 2014.

Republished under a Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication.

Image via anarchistart.com.

. @JoelSchlosberg. #wearethe45. #Scotland. #imperialism. #independence.

The “No” outcome of the referendum asking Scotland’s voters the question “should Scotland be an independent country?” is a Pyrrhic victory for the United Kingdom.

“Yes” netting 44.7% of the tally undermines a 300-year consensus and the devolution of substantial political power to Scotland is already conceded. Such a near-tie is far more problematic for an existing political system struggling to maintain its legitimacy than for a new one trying to find its feet. And the concerns raised in advance of the referendum persist.

With the burden of proof shifted onto them, the social-contract arguments for existing states were drawn out from the shadows of handwaving and dimly-remembered civics classes. This culminated in the astonishing rationale against Catalan independence expounded by Spain’s Foreign Minister Jose Manuel Garcia-Margallo: “Each and every Spaniard is the owner of each and every square centimeter of the country.” The formation of the Scottish-English union via agreement of the Scottish parliament was frequently invoked as a source of its legitimacy three centuries later, underscoring how rarely modern political territories are not solely the result of conquest.

With much of the impetus of the “yes” side stemming from a desire to get nuclear weapons out of Scotland, even with the practicalities of operating a domestic conventional military unresolved, the textbook objection of “but what about defense?” was largely obviated. Naysayers even seriously presented the prospect of Scotland becoming the new Switzerland as if that were a bad thing.

Far more of the commentary was devoted to economic uncertainty in the case of independence. Critics such as Paul Krugman raised the valid point that since Scotland’s economy currently relies on the global financial system, with all its instability, political independence would have reduced its leeway to absorb the damage from wider economic crises to which it would have still been vulnerable.

The question split the economic elite, with British Petroleum predictably backing “no” and the more global sectors favoring “yes.” Meanwhile, ownership of the bulk of Scotland’s land itself remains with the elite, fully half in the hands of a mere 432 families. Ownership of individual estates has already been shifting away from old-money aristocratic families to a global pool of speculators.

The Scottish economy, with its diminishing oil and gas revenue, has been hit particularly hard by deindustrialization. But as post-industrial technology rapidly becomes the norm, an economic base is increasingly viable. Key services can be unbundled from geography; the referendum received much of its impetus from the effects of the most limited competition of Scotland being able to pick and choose between the UK and the EU. And full competition of currencies, for one, will go far beyond the choice between the pound and the euro. Decentralization to a point matching the level of the traditional Scottish clan system will no longer be a romanticized memory, but everyday reality.

The sun is setting on the imperial state.

Translations for this article

Italian, La Scozia Conquista il Regno Unito.

Citations to this article

Joel Schlosberg, The Conquest of the United Kingdom by Scotland, Dhaka, Bangladesh New Nation, 09/22/14

Joel Schlosberg, The Conquest of the United Kingdom by Scotland, Cayman Reporter, 09/20/14

Joel Schlosberg, The Conquest of the United Kingdom by Scotland, Baltic Review, 09/20/14

Joel Schlosberg, The Conquest of the United Kingdom by Scotland, Before It’s News, 09/20/14

By Joel Schlosberg – More articles by Joel Schlosberg

Originally published at the Center for a Stateless Society on 20 September 2014

Republished under a Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication.

Image via Twitter user @irenewarnermack.

. @Wave_movement. #MontOrder.

The techno-progressive WAVE institute has formed a collaborative connection with the Mont Order. M. Amon Twyman, the WAVE movement's top executive, confirms that WAVE considers itself to have a "collaborative connection" to a social and political club known as the Mont Order. This follows the official claim by a friend of the Mont Order that the WAVE Zero State group's accession to the Order's "club" has been successfully negotiated. The Mont Order: ancient club revealed The move to include activists in the counsel of the Order marks the return of the Mont Order to a more active form since its original breakup in 1999. This is according to Mont negotiator L'Ordre, in a Mont statement released through the popular activist outlet Dissident Voice. The WAVE movement influences a vast network of activists centered around the ideas of eminent British social futurist M. Amon Twyman, in the United Kingdom. The ability to advise this network on the sidelines somewhat re-establishes Mont as an active religious and political club, as is now recognized by both L'Ordre and Amon. Amon confirmed the move to form a connection with the loosely defined Mont Order club, in its current form, in an informal WAVE statement on Thursday. This may be followed by further comments. The Zero State Facebook group The Mont Order is still shrouded in mystery, with a conspiracy theory in existence over its origins, although L'Ordre assures that the current iteration is just another affinity group intended to be part of the future fabric of global social change. The club's main developing form is as a public affiliation of churches, groups and writers. At present, Mont only sees itself as existing in a formative state, but already has aspirations to bring many disparate churches and individuals together in the interests of global social change in the future. It now displays a public page blessing its representative groups and writers through the world's top multifaith website, Beliefnet.

.@ChessaAnarch. @C4SSdotOrg. #antistatism. #anarchia.

A charge that has been leveled by the pro-government left is that anarchists are simply neoliberals without money or some variation upon this. The tweeter in question provides no definition of neo-liberalism, so, we turn to Dictionary.com to provide us with a definition of neoliberalism to be used in analyzing this charge. It’s as follows:

a modern politico-economic theory favouring free trade, privatization, minimal government intervention in business, reduced public expenditure on social services, etc

There’s a wide range of anarchist views and types of anarchism. Some of which largely or entirely reject economies based on notions of free exchange or free trade. Anarcho-communism and anarcho-primitivism come to mind. They tend to favor gift economies and oppose market economics. There are forms of anarchism like mutualism and left-wing market anarchism that do support free trade and markets. Their conception of free trade and markets is not neo-liberal however. These types of anarchism involve worker control and opposition to usury in some cases.

The related notion of privatization is another supposed feature of neo-liberalism that anarchists allegedly also agree with. There is a huge problem with this accusation. Anarchists favor the abolition of capitalist private property. A faulty assumption at work is that the government sphere and public sphere are the same thing. It’s possible to advocate “privatization” in the sense of non-government or non-state control/ownership without ditching the idea of public space. The kind of corporate capitalist privatization favored by neo-liberals is also not what anarchists support. A related point to be made is that neo-liberal “privatization” tends to involve just outsourcing a government monopoly to a private corporation. This corporation is the new monopolist protected by law and gains tax dollars via government compulsion.

What about minimal government intervention in business? Not all anarchists advocate business arrangements. Those that do are proponents of non-capitalist markets. It’s also important to note that our present neo-liberal system includes plenty of subsidies to corporations. This corporate welfare is something anarchists oppose.

Anarchists also don’t have the same ideas about what should replace government social services. We oppose capitalist arrangements as a viable alternative. Neo-liberals don’t. This is an important difference to note.

A final and very important difference to note is that neo-liberalism is not really so anti-government. Peter Frase noted this in a good Jacobin piece. He said:

Neoliberalism is a state project through and through, and is better understood as a transformation of the state and a shift in its functions, rather than a quantitative reduction in its size. In his Brief History of Neoliberalism, David Harvey underlines the importance of the state in forcibly creating a “good business climate” by breaking down barriers to capital accumulation and repressing dissent.

By Natasha Petrova - More articles by Natasha Petrova Originally published at the Center for a Stateless Society on 29 August 2014

Republished under a Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication

.@WAVE_Movement. @TZMGlobal. #AntiStatism. #AntiState.

This article was published with permission and is an excerpt from a chapter of Anticipating 2025, the book

The third section in this chapter will lay out a ‘toolkit’ of policies and strategic options for a transition phase toward a Social Futurist outcome. Such a medium-term focus on transition and interim steps may give an impression that our viewpoint is reformist rather than deeply revolutionary, when in fact it should be considered revolutionary on two levels.

2.2 Upgrading the Societal Operating System

The first sense in which Social Futurism is revolutionary can be seen in its intrinsic reliance on radically transformative technologies. Wherever there is no potential for an accelerating cascade of disruptive technological innovations to sweep away old institutions, there is no potential for Social Futurism. The second way in which Social Futurism is revolutionary is related, but more specific. Our societal system is composed of any number of institutions, many of which will soon be rendered obsolete, but at the heart of the matter are the mechanisms of money creation and investment. Our society is currently organised around a need for continuous economic growth, the creation of interest-bearing debt by central banks, and the investment of that money for profit (creating what Marxists call surplus value). These mechanisms have been described in many ways, but the simple fact that they lie at the heart of how our society operates is invariably the only thing Capitalists and Marxists will agree on.

Social Futurism should be considered revolutionary because in the long term it would abolish all of these mechanisms where possible, replacing them with decentralised resource-management systems made possible by technological innovation. Although people should be free to use Capitalist systems where they personally see fit, those systems should not be imposed upon all of society when alternatives are available. This abandonment of a single societal organizational principle is revolutionary in scope, not to mention the fact that it would satisfy traditional revolutionary criticisms of Capitalist society. By altering the organizational principle at the heart of society, we would be doing nothing less than upgrading our entire societal Operating System, which is to say the framework subsidiary systems (such as corporations and governments) use to engage with society as a whole. As explained in section one this is not a matter of mere preference, or even of social justice, but of survival.

3.0 Riding the Wave of Change

You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete. 

R. Buckminster Fuller

 What does it mean to speak of revolution? Of course we can easily conjure images of violent political revolutions, and there is no denying that public rebellion is back in vogue. I personally believe that violent revolution is not something to be desired or fetishised, both because it seldom ends well or as predicted, and also because the deepest revolutions are inclusive and take time to play out. Here I am referring not to minor political revolutions so much as major paradigm shifts like the Industrial Revolution. Now, we are facing a techno-cultural shift on that scale (if not much larger), but at the same time it is likely to spark smaller social, economic, and political conflicts of the sort associated with violent revolution. We are now facing a vast wave of tremendous change which will sweep away many familiar institutions, one way or another. We must ask ourselves how best to proceed, to maximise the chances of not only surviving that wave, but riding it to a higher state of civilization.

At least two answers to that question might be suggested by the Zero State (ZS) [1] community, which is part of the wider Wave movement [2] for positive social change through technology. The ZS idea is to create a kind of alternative State which adheres to a set of ethical principles, and the first answer as to how to proceed is that Social Futurist engagement in violent situations should be governed by such principles (e.g, an imperative to do so only in self-defence).

The second answer is to focus on building new communities, new infrastructure, and new paradigms rather than attempting to fix broken systems. In short, we need to build principled networks and use them to apply the latest innovations to our highest ideals, to the benefit of as many people as possible.

In addition to holding their principles in common, such networks should attempt to be mutually supportive and implement at least some of the tools outlined below. It is critical to understand that each of these policies or strategies would only apply within any given network’s sphere of influence, and that the paramount Social Futurist principle should always be that membership or citizenship of any such sphere of influence must be entirely voluntary.

3.1 Emergent Networks for Mutual Support & Coordinated Action

Time is short. We have been aware of the problems discussed in section one for decades, and in that time two things have become apparent. The first is that traditional political systems are incapable of solving the really serious problems. Even if we were to be charitable and say that the current system would address these civilization-threatening issues if it could, then we would be forced to conclude that it simply cannot do so. My view is that there are some things beyond the power of the system to change, others it won’t change without sufficient incentive (by which time it will be too late), and finally there are some problems which are actually produced by the system as it was effectively designed to operate.

The second thing that has become clear in recent decades is that for all the posturing of law makers and ethicists, new technologies do not wait for societal consensus to enter the world. Academic commentators sometimes call for a Grand Conversation to assess new technologies and determine strategies for the future, despite the fact that humanity has never once managed to muster such a grand conversation. Now that change is happening faster than ever before (and faster all the time, as noted in observations by Ray Kurweil and other Futurists), it is highly unlikely that there will be a spontaneous public congregation to comprehensively address these issues and assert its interests over those of powerful, entrenched stakeholders. It would be possible to hold such a conversation these days thanks to the internet, but it would be extremely hard to have it presented in a way broadly seen as neutral and helpful, and nigh impossible to have its conclusions universally accepted by society.

Together these things could spell disaster, or could offer a way to solve every major problem currently before us. In order to use our remaining time most effectively, we need to abandon the idea of societal consensus, identify people with great influence who believe in positive social change through technology, and work to facilitate coordination of their efforts. Rather than trying to convince those who can never be convinced in time, or to reform institutions which cannot be reformed in time, we need to build new, alternative institutions from coordinated networks of influential stakeholders. That way, at least a subsection of society could forge ahead and make necessary changes for itself, applying the latest tools to the problems at hand and offering others the chance to participate as and when they see fit. If the new networks can indeed solve deep problems and create a zone of safety and prosperity in an otherwise dangerous and uncertain world, then people will inevitably want to participate as a matter of personal advantage.

This new system of emergent networks might be expected to include a mix of older organizational networks which already exist, and new ones which would grow with the specific intent of pursuing Social Futurist goals. The networks which exist already may be associated with companies, notable individuals, geographic or online communities, or any number of other organizational types. Our task as Social Futurists is to find the key decision makers in such communities and encourage them to help build a wider community of mutually supportive networks, which could in turn act in a coordinated manner to address societal problems.

In the case of the newer, “purpose built” networks, the idea is to build principled communities which will work to develop influence, and use that influence to implement Social Futurist policy. One such policy is to employ the principle of subsidiarity, which holds that organizational responsibility should be devolved to the lowest or most local level capable of dealing with any given situation. In other words, power should be decentralised, insofar as that does not diminish our ability to face challenges as a society.

For example, local governance issues should be handled by local rather than national-level government where possible. Similarly, there is an opportunity here for companies (particularly large technology companies) to lead by example in actively cooperating to develop alternative institutions, and educating people about these new avenues for social and political engagement.

Social Futurism takes subsidiarity to its logical conclusion, by insisting that people should have the right to govern their own affairs as they see fit, as long as by doing so they are not harming the wider community. On the other side of the coin, broader (e.g. national and transnational) levels of governance would be responsible for issues that local organizations and individuals are not capable of facing alone.

Where global governance is needed, the model should be one of cooperating global agencies focused on a specific area of expertise (e.g. the World Health Organization), rather than a single government acting in a centralised manner to handle all types of issue. In this way, decentralization of power applies even when an issue cannot be resolved on the local level.

In order to encourage the development of such a system, we advocate the establishment of communities with powers of self-governance known as VDP States, where VDP stands for ‘Virtual, Distributed, Parallel’. ‘Virtual’ refers to an online community, orthogonal to traditional geographic territories. ‘Distributed’ refers to geographic States, but ones where different parts of the community exist in different locations, as a network of enclaves. ‘Parallel’ refers to communities that exist on the established territory of a traditional State, acting as a kind of organizational counterpoint to that State’s governing bodies. Two or three of these characteristics may be found in a single VDP State (VDPS), but it is expected that most such communities would emphasise one characteristic over the others. Alternatively, a VDPS may emphasise different characteristics at different stages in its development.

Given Social Futurism’s emphasis on voluntarism, VDPS citizenship must be entirely voluntary. Indeed, the entire point of the VDPS is to broaden the range of governance models which people may voluntarily choose to engage with, whereas they are currently told that they simply have to accept a single model of governance.

As this is clearly a new and experimental approach to governance, it is to be expected that many ideas associated with it are still to be properly developed and tested. Some of these ideas may not meet our own standards of empirical review. However, to briefly anticipate some common objections it is worth noting several points. Firstly, decentralization does not imply an absence of social organization. It simply means that people can exercise more choice in how they engage with society. Secondly, yes it is true that all three of the VDP characteristics have limitations as well as strengths (e.g. difficulty of defending isolated enclaves), but that is why any given VDPS would find the mix of features that suits its purpose and context best. Thirdly, as mentioned earlier in this article, different approaches may be mixed and balanced as necessary, such as a single-location VDPS being used as a template for the later creation of a distributed network of communities. Finally, the VDPS idea is not intended to stand alone but to complement any initiatives which have the potential to maximise its value (e.g. Open Source Ecology), and these States might even be expected or encouraged to grow out of existing initiatives, initially. At this point we might reasonably ask for further details and object broadly that a call for innovative cooperation doesn’t escape the foibles of human nature, but such questions are beyond the introductory scope of this chapter.

3.2 Universal Basic Income & Land Value Tax

A minimal, “safety net” style Universal Basic Income should be established. This is as opposed to putting undue strain on the economy by introducing a basic income larger than is required to satisfy essential living requirements. Where possible, the UBI should be paid for by a combination of dismantling welfare bureaucracies, and Land Value Tax (LVT) [3]. LVT would take the place of increasing numbers of arbitrary taxes on goods, services, and assets currently being used to shore up Western economies.

LVAT (Land Value & Automation Tax) is a possible extension of traditional Land Value Tax to include a small tax on every unit of workplace automation equivalent to a single human being replaced. This extension of LVT is intended to harness the economic momentum of workplace automation, which is expected to be the principal cause of technological unemployment in coming decades, but serious problems in the effective implementation of any automation tax are foreseeable (and beyond the scope of this chapter). Any automation tax should be considerably less than the cost of hiring a human, thus causing no disincentive to automation (some would argue that any tax would disincentivize automation, but our principal goal is not to encourage automation, and as long as automation is cheaper than human labour it will win out).

Social Futurism is compatible with private property ownership and does not advocate property confiscation. Wealth redistribution is only advocated to the degree that it can be achieved through LV(A)T and UBI as described above. Where a functional equivalent of UBI exists which is proven more effective (e.g. citizen shares in Distributed Autonomous Cooperatives), then Social Futurists should favour the more effective solution as a matter of evidence-based policy.

Abolition of Fractional Reserve Banking

Fractional Reserve Banking is the process by which banks are required to hold only a fraction of their customers’ deposits in reserve, allowing the money supply to grow to a multiple of the base amount held in reserve. Through this practice, central banks may charge interest on the money they create (thereby creating a debt which can never be repaid, across society as a whole) and expose the entire economy to risk when they cannot meet high demand for withdrawals. Fractional Reserve Banking fosters potentially critical risk to the entirety of society for the benefit of only a tiny proportion of citizens, and therefore should be abolished. The alternative to Fractional Reserve Banking is Full Reserve or 100% Reserve Banking, in which all banks must hold the full amount of deposits in reserve at all times.

Full Reserve Banking is much more conservative than Fractional Reserve Banking, and would signal an end to easy credit. In turn, it would afford enough stability to see our society through a sustainable transition phase, until technological post-scarcity makes reliance on traditional banking systems and the Capitalist principle of surplus value itself unnecessary. It is true that a restriction on lending would have consequences for economic activity and that action undermining technological development across the board would not be compatible with the Social Futurist idea. We do not have the space to explore such implications here, so will have to suffice by noting that careful management of the economy would restrict innovation less than would a full economic collapse.

Responsible Trade, Post-Scarcity, & Emergent Commodities

Social Futurist policy must favour the encouragement of responsible trade and strong regulation of reckless behaviour, with an eye to making Capitalism a constructive component or engine of society rather than its blind master. To this end, it should be Social Futurist policy that all companies that wish to operate within any given community must be registered with the appropriate regulatory bodies (including ethics committees) employed by that community. Non-regulation and self-regulation by industries which are not accountable to the communities they affect is unacceptable. [4]

Social Futurists should advocate the eventual transition to non-monetary peer-to-peer resource management under post-scarcity conditions, where possible. In other words, we should seek to avoid the creation or maintenance of artificial scarcity in essential resources. A continuing place for trade even under post-scarcity conditions is acknowledged and encouraged where it reduces artificial scarcity, promotes technical innovation, and serves the needs and directives of the community. Emergent commodities (e.g. natural artificial scarcities such as unique artworks) will need a framework for responsible trade even under optimal post-scarcity conditions, so it benefits us to develop such frameworks now, in the context of contemporary Capitalism.

Human Autonomy, Privacy, & Enhancement

Social Futurism incorporates the transhumanist idea that the human condition can and should be improved through the intelligent and compassionate application of technology. We also strongly emphasise voluntarism, and in combination these things necessitate the championing of people’s rights over their own bodies and information.

It should therefore be Social Futurist policy to oppose any development by which people would lose individual sovereignty or involuntarily cede ownership of their personal information. Social Futurists must also defend the individual’s right to modify themselves by technological means, provided that the individual is a mentally competent consenting adult and the modification would not pose significant risk of harm to others.

4.0 Conclusions, & Beginnings

Humanity stands at a crossroads. We are on the verge of an era in which unprecedented promise and total catastrophe are both distinct possibilities. We face a set of interlocking risks driven by technology which have the potential to trigger global societal collapse or war. The Social Futurist vision is of a direct democratic, decentralised society in which these risks are seriously addressed by new institutions evolved from emergent mutual support networks. Technology is a powerful force in our world, but a morally neutral one, and our actions will prove pivotal in deciding whether technology can be used to solve global problems, or merely exacerbate them.

There are many attempts to move toward an improved state of affairs in the world today, some involving established public institutions. To the extent that their efforts are made in an open, cooperative, and innovative spirit then we should welcome and support them. So far, however, traditional institutions have been unable to solve the problems facing humanity, and it is time for new institutions to engage directly with the issues at hand.

[1] http://zerostate.net

[2] http://wavism.net

[3] LVT is a progressive tax on the value of land only, ignoring any developments on that land.

[4] For the purposes of this brief statement I have conflated Capitalism and markets, despite the fact that trade existed millennia before the organization of society around profit based on Capital investment.

By M. Amon Twyman - More articles by M. Amon Twyman Reprinted from Anticipating 2025 with permission of the author