You're not helping.

While I have a lot of sympathy for the outrage that is being expressed by the Occupy Wall Street movement, outrage alone is not enough. Outrage alone can be dangerous if not correctly focused. Just standing up for what you believe in is not necessarily a virtue. The most important thing is what you believe in, or even better, what you can know to be true and what you can prove about the real world. The sense that young people in the so-called “United States” have that they are being screwed is totally understandable and justified. But who is screwing you, how are they doing it, and what is the proper response?

Young people are getting it from every direction. College costs are sky high. Job prospects for meaningful employment are low. The economy sucks. The hurdles to starting your own business are huge and practically insurmountable, particularly for the young who lack the startup capital. To add insult to injury, you are then taxed on what income you can earn in order to pay for the retirement benefits and doctor bills of the richest generation to ever exist on planet earth. The very generation that grew rich from the post-war boom has not only used the government to prevent you from competing with them, they now want you to be taxed to pay into the unsustainable “Social Security” and medicare scams that they benefit from, but you never will. The powerful and well-connected are destroying the economy and gaming the system to get bailouts while everywhere you turn is yet another scheme to trap you in debt slavery. No wonder you are pissed.

Student loans in particular are an insidious trap for the young. From the time you enter the government school system as a kid, the unionized government indoctrinators that call themselves “teachers” fill your head with propaganda telling you that you must go to college in order to achieve any success in life. This propaganda has artificially raised the demand for so-called “higher education” to the point where almost every high school graduate in the so-called “United States” expects to go to college.

The idea that all people deserve a college degree, and that a college degree is the key to financial success goes back to the post-WWII GI Bill that provided one year of “free” college to every returning WWII vet. It also has roots in various collectivist and egalitarian ideologies that are always popular among the elite intellectual class. The very same class that — coincidentally — stands to benefit from government subsidies and increased demand for their product. Is it really surprising that a group of people that sell a certain product are also the people screaming the loudest that this product is a “human right” that must be guaranteed to all by government? Imagine the reaction if McDonald’s were to declare the same about hamburgers.

College prices have always been artificially high due to the fact that most colleges and universities are public institutions and thus shielded from market competition. Even nominally private schools receive grants and subsidies from the government. Since most people cannot afford to pay the already inflated $25,000 – $40,000 (or more) per year to attend a college or university there needs to be a way to finance this supposed ticket to financial freedom that everyone has a “right” to. So naturally the all-wise and friendly government must intervene to offer financial aid, loan guarantees and grants to people that have been convinced that they must seek a college degree.

These loans then have the effect of further raising the demand for “education” by shielding students from the immediate cost, and guaranteeing that tuition will be paid. This in turn has the inevitable effect of further inflating the already inflated price of “education” and thus requiring more people to go into debt to pay for it. It is a vicious cycle and a classic bubble. After all, if you were a businessperson providing a product or service to the market and all your potential customers had been relentlessly indoctrinated for 12 years to believe that they absolutely had to buy what you are selling, and were then given guaranteed loans to pay for it, you would naturally raise your prices. You would be a fool not to. When consumers are shielded from costs, their demand rises. When something is subsidized, the price rises. This is just basic economics. Only an economics professor with multiple college degrees would tell you different.

On the other side of the coin, the quality and service offered by the educational establishment has necessarily gone down. After all, if everyone goes to college naturally standards will have to drop. Not all students have the same capabilities. In order to accommodate the influx of students coming into the system on financial aid and loans, the quality and standards must go down. More faculty must be brought on to deal with the extra load, so naturally their quality will go down. And when a student’s financial aid is linked to performance, this creates a perverse incentive for the institution to lower standards to keep the aid dollars flowing. This process was also at work in the now infamous Atlanta cheating scandal.

These subsidies and guarantees shield the “education” providers from any meaningful feedback from their customers. This naturally reduces their incentive to actually produce anything worthwhile. Instead of meeting the market demand of customers, many college professors take their tenured paycheck and study some obscure academic topic that is of personal interest to them. They leave the actual teaching and interacting with students to graduate teaching assistants. Why work, when you have guaranteed income? Why please customers when you have tenure and can’t be fired? The students themselves don’t particularly care since they are shielded from the costs  — for a short time at least — and many of  them are only there because of the financial aid in the first place. The predictable result of all this is that the price of a Bachelor’s degree has exploded while the value has plummeted.

As a result many young people find themselves in a situation today where they are deep in debt and all they have to show for it is a worthless piece of paper. Many of you have probably spent 4 years studying at a college and are only qualified to be a server at Starbucks. That sucks. You were tricked. You were hoodwinked. You were bamboozled. You were sucked into a system before you were old enough to really understand what was going on. That bogus loan was effectively shoved down your throat at a young age before you understood all the implications. So who really did this to you? Who is really screwing you? Is it Starbucks and Walmart? Is it the free market? Is it capitalism? No, it is the corrupt, self-interested and entrenched government/educational industrial complex that has benefited enormously by putting you into debt slavery and forcing you to buy their products.

Occupy your mind first. Education does not have to be synonymous with college. It can be as free or expensive as you make it. You have the tools and resources to educate yourself and learn useful skills right at your fingertips. You can teach yourself all kinds of useful and marketable skills. I taught myself computer programming and all I had to do was buy a few books. You can even teach yourself economics and philosophy without paying anyone a dime if you have the personal motivation to do so. And if you don’t have that motivation, why would you go into debt slavery to pretend to have it at a college?

So rather than making loud and obnoxious demands to further expand government and get more free handouts at the expense of other people and future generations, focus your rage where it properly belongs. Be angry at the government. Be angry at the educational establishment. Be angry at the people that forced you into a state indoctrination center as a child and mentally tortured you for 12 years. Be angry at the people that violently stole your childhood. Be angry at the “teachers” and parents that told you  you would be nothing without a piece of paper saying you spent a certain number of hours in a stifling lecture hall listening to a bunch of overpaid Marxist blowhards peddle their BS social theories.

Raising taxes, increasing government, destroying what is left of the free market and creating more regulations and violent controls is not going to solve your problems or make you free. Being angry at some nebulous notion of “greed” leads nowhere and makes you an easy pawn for someone else’s power agenda. If you want to get back at the people that screwed you, just stop paying back your bogus loans. You didn’t get what you paid for anyway. Stop participating with the government and asking them for handouts and bailouts. Stop getting involved in useless political campaigns that drain your energy, your wallet and empower old and corrupt politicians. The government put you in this spot. They will not be your savior.

One common objection to the concept of self-ownership is to say that you don’t own yourself, you are yourself. This is a fairly empty statement. First of all, saying that you are yourself is just a simple tautology. Nothing follows from it. Second, it does not even contradict the statement that you own yourself. To compare the two statements is to compare a purely factual statement to a normative statement. It is apples and oranges. Both statements can be true at the same time.

Self-ownership is a normative concept. It is a statement about how things should be. To say that you own yourself is equivalent to saying that it is right that you own yourself. It is right and proper that you should be the one to decide your actions for yourself and to control your own destiny. You should have the right of exclusive control over your body and mind. It is a statement about ethics. But these ethics are not subjective or arbitrary. They are necessarily implied by the facts of human action, specifically the action of argument.

Since you cannot help but exercise control over yourself — even if just to make an argument against self-ownership — self-ownership is a fact of human action. It is a requirement for the action of argument. If just by the fact of exercising exclusive control over yourself you are not doing something that is wrong, immoral or unethical, then you must be doing something that is perfectly right, moral and ethical. How would you argue that self-ownership is morally wrong, without doing something that is morally wrong by your own definition? Self-ownership is thus both a moral right and a factual property of human beings.

You can be yourself, and still be a slave. If you just are yourself but you do not own yourself, on what grounds would you object to being a slave? How could you ever say that slavery is wrong? Most people that make this objection are in fact trying to justify some kind of slavery. While they would probably cringe at the implication that they are advocating for slavery, they are usually attempting to argue for the subordination of the individual to a “collective” or “society.” In reality these are just code words for the will of another person or group of people. The relationship of the individual to “society” in this scenario is fundamentally the same as that of a slave to a master. In making this argument the speaker presumes to grant for himself exactly that which he seeks to deny others. He is necessarily being tyrannical.

The notion of self-ownership is already presumed by the individual making the argument against it with regards to himself. He has engaged his rational faculties and made the decision to put forward the argument against self-ownership. In doing so he has attempted to deny the very property that he has necessarily used to make the  argument. He has taken ownership of himself. He cannot very well then deny the concept of self-ownership without falling into a contradiction. It would be equivalent to saying “I cannot speak” or something similar. The concept of self-ownership is necessarily presupposed for the speaker himself by his action of making an argument.

Self-ownership is also necessarily presupposed by the speaker to be a property of the individuals hearing or reading the argument. After all, why would someone make an argument if not in attempt to convince others of his point? He is necessarily assuming that the people that hear the argument also have ownership of themselves and the right to make decisions for themselves. He is trying to convince others to make the decision to change their minds. This assumes that the people he is addressing are the owners of themselves and rightfully control their own ideas, even if those ideas are incorrect.

It is further implied by the act of making an argument that self-ownership is a universal right and property of all humans. Who is the argument being made to, and who is it being made about? Would this person make the argument to anyone, or only to specific people? If someone claims to own themselves, and another person seeks to deny this  claim, is the latter person’s argument specific to one individual or universal for all people? It would have to be universal. The act of correcting someone else necessarily implies that the correction is universally valid. It assumes that there is such a thing as right, that people can have ideas that are right, and that this is universal for everyone. How could it be argued otherwise?

The concept of rights is the necessary logical result of the properties of acting human beings. Property rights, starting with property in the self are derived from the facts of human action and the necessary conditions for interpersonal proposition making. To engage in the act of making propositions to others about how things should be or what people should think and do is to assume that there exists a state of rightness in thought and action that can be achieved by human beings. Many philosophers talk about the so-called “is/ought dichotomy.” The claim is that since there is theoretically no fact that is from which a statement about what ought to be can be derived, that it is incorrect to make such statements. But any argument that makes use of this point labors under its own premise. It assumes that there is a correct way to think and act and that one ought to do so. The “is/ought dichotomy” is contradicted in reality by the facts of human action. One can indeed derive statements about what ought to be from what is. There is no possible way to deny this without yet again affirming it.

A statist commenter recently left this note on an earlier post on this blog:

I don’t really understand this self ownership concept… no-one owns themselves. If someone wanted to take you and make you their slave they could. Your self ownership doesn’t mean anything, its a human concept that has no teeth and no rights or protections. The only way you can be protected is by entering into an agreement with the members of your society to form moral definitions and institutions in order to give the members of that society the greatest level of “freedom” without overlapping into the “freedoms” of others, and these precedents are ever-changing anyway. You don’t own anything. you have no rights to anything. If a person wanted to they could take my so called “property” and my life. Without an institution and a moral consensus based on mutual benefit you don’t “own” anything. You get these things by entering into the social contract.

Like all arguments against self-ownership and property rights, this argument contradicts itself and falls into an infinitely recursive backward loop. It is a “turtles all the way down” argument.

The statist here makes the same error of confusing a factual for a normative statement. The fact that someone could in reality forcefully take you as a slave and make you obey their will says nothing about the rightness of such an action, nor does it negate the property of rights that each individual holds. The person taking another as a slave must make use of the property of self-ownership for themselves while denying it to the slave. The action of enslaving another denies the universal property of self-ownership in the same way that the argument against self-ownership does. On what grounds does someone that claims self-ownership for themselves deny it to others? How could they ever claim that it is right for them to do so without contradicting themselves?

The state is empty

The statist wants to show that the individual is subject to a abstract entity called “society” or sometimes “the community.” In reality this is just a group of people that claim to be something called “the state.” This group reserves for themselves the right of self-ownership while denying it to others through the use of force and threats. The statist not only wants to subject you to this group, but he wants to convince you that it is right that it should be this way. In typical contradictory fashion the statist is attempting to convince us that rights are not a property of human beings that are implied by action, but something granted to people by subjecting themselves to the will of “society.” But this very action presupposes the rights he is denying.

The use of the “social contract” argument as the source of rights fails for the exact same reason. It already accepts contracts as something that are valid a-priori. The validity of contracts does not stem from contracts themselves, but from the universal human property of self-ownership. Contracts cannot arise contractually. How can a person enter into a contract to gain rights if he has no rights to enter in to the contract in the first place?

The great libertarian feminist Wendy McElroy has explained it like this:

[A] contract is nothing more than a voluntary exchange of what is mine for what is yours. Embedded in the very idea of contract, therefore, is the concept of voluntary versus forced exchange, and the concept of property. Contracts make sense only in the context of rights. To claim that rights spring from contract is to invert the logical order.

And as Professor Hans-Hermann Hoppe has pointed out in his essay Argumentation and Self-Ownership:

To argue and possibly agree with someone (if only on the fact that there is disagreement) means to recognize the prior right of exclusive control over one’s own body. Otherwise, it would be impossible for anybody to say anything at a definite point in time and for someone else to be able to reply, for neither the first nor the second speaker would be a physically independent decision-making unit anymore at any time.

…Hence, one is forced to conclude that the libertarian ethic not only can be justified and justified by means of a priori reasoning, but that no alternative ethic can be defended argumentatively.

Collectivist and statist arguments that attempt to deny the universal right of all individuals to own themselves and make their own choices — whether these arguments make use of the imaginary construct of the “social contract” or not — must necessarily fail because they seek to deny the very rights and properties that the action of argument must assume as valid a-priori. Self-ownership and property rights can thus be derived from the facts of reality and the nature of human action.

The Primatene Mist inhaler is supposedly being eliminated from the market in order to protect the ozone layer from depletion. The inhaler uses aerosol propellants that emit chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) into the atmosphere when it is actuated. It is theorized that CFCs deplete the ozone layer thus exposing organisms on earth to harmful UV radiation from the sun. There is of course  debate and dissent on this theory. A recent article in Nature highlights some scientists who have cast doubt on earlier pronouncements that there is a definite link between human production of CFCs and ozone depletion.

The so-called “United States” signed on to an international agreement known as the “Montreal Protocol” in 1987. The terms of the agreement went into force in 1989. The purpose of this protocol was supposedly to put into place some “safeguards” and “controls” on human production of CFCs, mainly through aerosol spray cans and the air-conditioning coolant freon. The recent “FDA” rules are intended to bring the “United States” fully into line with this protocol and eliminate the last vestiges of aerosol propellants left on the market. The “Montreal Protocol” is widely recognized as a major victory for environmentalists in pushing government policy. The success of the protocol has served as the inspiration for the recent attempts to create an international agreement on limiting carbon dioxide to combat so-called “climate change” or “global warming.”

Environmentalist inspired bans on industrial products have a grim history. The earlier ban on the insect repellent DDT resulted in millions of deaths from malaria. The deaths continue to this day. This ban will likely also result in many premature deaths and they will tend to be concentrated among the poor and vulnerable. Whether these bans are an honest attempt to preserve the environment or are actually intended to cause mass deaths among humans is irrelevant. These are the documented and predictable results of such bans, yet environmentalists defend the previous bans and push for more. Either way they exhibit an extraordinary callousness toward human life and dignity.

Many famous and powerful environmentalists have openly called for population control, including sterilization of the food and water supply. As “scientist” Paul Ehrlich famously wrote in his 1968 book The Population Bomb:

[T]he first task is population control at home. How do we go about it? Many of my colleagues feel that some sort of compulsory birth regulation would be necessary to achieve such control. One plan often mentioned involves the addition of temporary sterilants to water supplies or staple food. Doses of the antidote would be carefully rationed by the government to produce the desired population size.

Ehrlich is no incidental figure either. He is firmly entrenched in the establishment. Despite Ehrlich’s predictions proving to be consistently and disastrously wrong, his protege and co-author John P. Holdren was nominated science adviser to Barack Obama the so-called “President” of the “United States” in 2009. Holdren and Ehrlich co-authored a 1977 book entitled Ecoscience in which they advocate for population control and suggest a “Planetary Regime” to control and administer all natural resources. In their own horrifying words:

[I]t has been concluded that compulsory population-control laws, even including laws requiring compulsory abortion, could be sustained under the existing constitution if the population crisis became sufficiently severe to endanger the society.

Such a comprehensive Planetary Regime could control the development, administration, conservation, and distribution of all natural resources, renewable or nonrenewable…not only in the atmosphere and oceans, but in such freshwater bodies as rivers and lakes…The Regime might also be a logical central agency for regulating all international trade…The Planetary Regime might be given responsibility for determining the optimum population for the world and for each region and for arbitrating various countries’ shares within their regional limits…the Regime would have some power to enforce the agreed limits.

So should we really be surprised when policies suggested and inspired by such people result in mass death? The banning of over the counter asthma inhalers will further serve this misanthropic agenda.

As an asthma sufferer myself that has used the Primatene Mist product, this ban hits particularly close to home for me. The Primatene Mist inhaler is the last available over the counter asthma remedy. It costs about 20 dollars and delivers 260 metered puffs of epinephrine to dilate the brochiols in the lungs that constrict during an asthma attack. It is a cheap and effective remedy that is readily available to anyone that suffers from asthma. Immediate relief from a sudden asthma attack can mean someone’s life. There are 4000 deaths from asthma attacks each year in the US. We can expect this number to increase with the ban.

Because it is inexpensive and readily available most of the users of this product are poor. Asthma is concentrated among the urban poor since they tend to live in substandard housing and are exposed to more asthma inducing allergens like mold, dust and cockroaches. Many of these people also lack health insurance and cannot afford to see a doctor without it. They have no way of obtaining the more expensive and “environmentally safe” prescription products. These products cost about 40 dollars without insurance. So a person without insurance that needs an asthma inhaler will now need to pay around $150 for a doctor visit to get a prescription, and then $40 for the product itself. This is probably outside the means of many poor asthma sufferers. Their options will now be limited to going to the emergency room in case of attack. This is not only the most expensive way to treat asthma, the delay in getting there could cost a person’s life.

The requirement of a prescription to purchase an asthma inhaler, along with the “FDA” regulations and patents that restrict the production of such inhalers are ridiculous. They are nothing more than yet another state subsidy to the medical/industrial complex. The purpose — as always with such things– is to limit the supply of medical goods and services and drive up their price. They are blatant handouts to AMA certified doctors, the big pharmaceutical corporations and the overqualified check-out clerks and pill-counters known as “pharmacists.”

Why should a prescription be required for this drug? A person with asthma can easily purchase the inhaler they need on their own. Doing so would not stop them from seeing a doctor should they wish to learn about the newest treatments, although such information could just as easily be passed along by a pharmacist. Asthma can easily and effectively be treated by the individual themselves after an initial visit to a doctor. The rules and regulations that prevent a person from doing so are directly harmful to their well being. I know how to treat my own asthma. There is no reason to force me to incur the expense of seeing doctor every three months for a check-up and to obtain a new script. Such visits last an average of 30 seconds and cost around $150. Often times a patient is not even seen by the doctor. A nurse delivers the prescription while the doctor does more important things. This entire process is costly, unnecessary and out of reach for many people with low incomes.

I have long since opted out of this process and instead order my medications from an overseas pharmacy. This will likely become illegal in the near future. As you would expect it is the AMA that is behind the lobbying efforts to make such purchases illegal. Why then should I believe that the AMA is interested in my health and well being?

The regulation and banning of these products is a team-up between powerful interest groups to screw the consumer and serve their own ideological and financial interests. And of course those that suffer the most will be the poor.

The same goes for the supposed killing of the individual named “Osama bin Laden” last week. Assuming this individual ever existed there is no reason to believe anything in the story told to us by “The United States” about his death. He has been reported dead before. There is an obvious incentive for “The United States” to lie, and they have a pretty consistent track record of doing so. These are the people that claimed that there were chemical, biological and nuclear weapons in Iraq after all. Given their track record it is amazing that any individual believes anything that members of this group say.

Ever since the announcement that “Osama bin Laden” had been killed the story of exactly what happened has been changed. First it was a daring commando raid on a heavily fortified compound. The brave Navy Seals fought their way to the inner sanctum where the defiant terrorist mastermind was wielding a gun and shielding himself with the body of one of his wives. Then this story was revised. It turns out that there were no weapons on the “compound” — which was really just a broken down house — and the brave Seal team faced no resistance. Nor was there a dramatic scene at the end with a human shield. We were also told that film and pictures of the event would be released, but these statements were soon retracted. Now they deny that they have any video of the event at all. As far as we know the Navy Seals just broke into an old man’s house and killed him. That is assuming that even this much happened and the entire story isn’t totally fabricated out of whole cloth.

Ultimately though, none of it matters. Even if “Osama bin Laden” is real, even if “Al Queda” is real, and even if these people really did do 9/11 it doesn’t matter. The people that call themselves “The United States” are ultimately responsible. Even if we believe the official narrative of what happened on 9/11, it is clear that it was a reaction to previous provocative actions by “The United States.” Not only that, it was one of the best things to ever happen to that group of people and they have a clear incentive to continue to provoke such actions. It is not as if this group of individuals grew less rich and powerful as a result. Just the opposite. Given the incentives involved the idea that “The United States” has an interest in protecting you from terrorism is naive in the extreme. They actually view you as a potential enemy even if you think they are there to protect you.

Three Cups of Deceiit

Since 9/11 “The United States” has been experiencing a huge expansion. First two, and now three wars in parts of the world rich in oil and natural gas. A nice bloated military industrial complex to suckle at the teat of the taxpayer. A beefed up police state on the domestic front together with all the corrupt and evil surveillance companies chomping at the bit to supply them with tax-funded gear. Plenty of jingoism, xenophobia and patriotic fervor to prop up the state and make sure that dissenters keep quiet. This is not just a scene for conservative statists either. With the poor treatment of women in Islam and the general poverty of the people of the region the liberal “social justice” crusader can get involved too. There really is something for everyone. The scam artist Greg Mortenson and his fraudulent book “Three Cups of Tea” is a great example of the kind of opportunities that the “war on terror” offers to the unscrupulous and power-seeking social justice advocate. War really brings the state and the parasitic class into their own.

The important thing to understand is that the military strategy of “The United States” has nothing to do with fighting terrorism or protecting so-called “citizens.” To the extent that the group of people running the military industrial complex care about terrorism at all, it is a boon to them. It keeps the public interested, engaged and supportive so they can continue their greater plan. The greater plan was laid out by the military theorist and neoconservative intellectual Thomas Barnett in his books The Pentagon’s New Map and Blueprint for Action. It has also been articulated in various research papers by the neoconservative think-tank Project for a New American Century.

The basic theory is that the world is divided into two regions. There are the “core integrated states” that include “The United States” and its allies as well as countries that trade with it and follow the same general political and economic pattern. Then there are the “non-integrating gap states” that do not toe that line. These are generally poor countries in Africa, South America, the Middle East and Central Asia. The grand plan is not very complicated. “The United States” will conquer them militarily and install governments that will integrate these countries into the state-corporate/democratic system. Sometimes this is referred to as “the international community.” It really is that simple, and that simple-minded.

If this attempt to unify the world under one political and economic system sounds very Trotskyist, that’s because it is. The founders of the neoconservative movement came out of a group of communist intellectuals around a man named Irving Kristol in the 60s. These communist radicals saw which way the wind was blowing however and switched their allegiance to “The United States” during the Vietnam War era. Following the classic Trotskyist strategy of entryism they proceeded to infiltrate conservative political institutions in an effort to gain power and influence. They were extremely successful. Today the ideological core of the Republican party is made up of people carrying on the intellectual legacy of Trotskyism. I know that this actually sounds crazier than some of the 9/11 “truther” theories, but it’s the truth. It can easily be proven by reading Barnett’s book and some of the research papers on the PNAC website as well as examining the intellectual history and influences of the top ideologues. They are quite blatant in their calls for “The United States” to conquer the world. They are not even embarrassed about it.

Certainly oil and gas play a part in this agenda. So does the continuing excuse for astronomical military budgets and bloated Pentagon contracts into the indefinite future. Ultimately this maniacal strategy is an excuse to keep the Pentagon machine that was born during the cold war going for another 50 – 100 years. The TSA and DOHS have recently been added to the mix to create yet more bureaucrats whose jobs are dependent on endless war.  If some crazy Arabs blow up a few subway trains in the meantime, so much the better. It will keep the people frightened and create public demand for revenge and protection. Several neoconservative strategists have even publicly expressed hope that another terror attack will occur because it will make carrying out their agenda easier.

I would like to make the final point that if the “truthers” and “conspiracy theorists” want to prove that “The United States” is a group of mass murderers they need not posit theories about 9/11 that they will never be able to prove and that are not likely to be believed anyway. They need only point to the front page of The New York Times to show that horrifying crimes are going on in plain sight. So don’t be fooled. Osama bin Laden doesn’t matter. It is the people that call themselves “The United States” that are your real enemy.

When the people that claim to be the state demand income tax from you as a so-called “citizen” they are really making a prior claim to your body. They are saying that they own your body. If you generate income with your body and do not pay the state a certain percentage of that income — a percentage which will be unilaterally determined by them with no input from you — they will exercise their claim to your body, take possession of it and put it in a cage where you can expect to get ass-raped. In effect taxes are rent you pay to the state on the use of your own body. If you do not use it in ways that the state approves of they reserve the right to lock it up and even kill it.

Taxes are not voluntary, no matter what anybody tells you. Even those that may support taxation and tell you that they are happy to pay taxes cannot possibly prove that they pay voluntarily. Taxes are extracted from people with threats of kidnapping and violence. The liberal that claims they pay taxes voluntarily is subject to the same violence should they not pay as anyone else. In order for them to actually show that they pay voluntarily, they would have to first show that they are somehow exempt from the penalty of violence.

Recently the famous author Steven King was at a pro-government rally with a bunch of liberals. He pointed out that his income was in the millions, yet he was only paying 28% in taxes. His challenge to the government was “Why aren’t I paying 50%?” The answer is because he does not want to. The so-called “US Treasury Department” maintains a website where they offer instructions on how to make a voluntary gift to the “United States.” So if King really wants to pay 50% no one is stopping him. I would say the same to anyone that thinks taxes are too low or that the government needs more money. Lead by example. Even if you don’t make a voluntary gift, certainly do not deduct anything on your tax return. Tell the government to keep more of your income.

We can assume that King has not made a voluntary contribution for the same reason that Warren Buffet, George Soros and Michael Moore probably have not. They do not actually want to do so. They want to keep their money. The “US Treasury” maintains another website where they track the voluntary gifts they have received. As of this writing in 2011 they received $645,917.73. We can safely assume this is less than 50% of King’s income, not to mention the other three.

Of course whenever you complain about taxes the response you will likely get from statists is that you are party to the non-existent “social contract” or that taxes go to help the poor. Few people will argue that you should pay taxes to kill poor people half way around the world with robot planes, maintain a bloated military industrial complex or pay for bailouts and subsidies to big corporations. Never mind that these are the bulk of the government’s activities. No, you should pay taxes for the poor. This argument fails on many levels.

In a society without taxes there would be nothing stopping the bleeding hearts that are so generous with your hard earned money from helping the poor. A good question to ask is whether or not the person saying this believes in democracy. If they do, then presumably taxes go to help the poor only if more than 50% of the voting population want them to. That would be more than enough people to get together and work out some programs to help the poor if there were no taxes. If that many people really want to help the poor, there is no need for the state. If the liberal statist doesn’t actually think that more than 50% of the people want to help the poor, then they would have to actually be advocating for dictatorship. Either way one of their principles has to go. Either they have to admit that that there is in fact no need for taxes to help the poor, or they have to admit that they do not really believe in democracy. The liberal is unlikely to be comfortable with either of these positions.

The same argument applies to any other service that the government claims to provide. If in fact this is a service that more than 50% of the voters want, then clearly there is enough demand that there is no need for a central apparatus of coercion to be in charge of administering it. Nor is there any evidence that taxes are payments for services in the first place. The state grants itself the right to levy taxes. Nowhere does it say that it owes anyone any services in return. The state is under absolutely no legal obligation to provide anything to anyone. If they do provide anything it is only because they feel like it and only in the quantity and quality that they choose. Taxes are by far the worst possible way to fund public services.

Just a few thoughts to consider while you do your taxes and think about how much easier your life would be if you were allowed to keep the full product of your labor.

Gene Rodenberry imagined The United Federation of Planets as a society that had moved beyond money. Supposedly the invention of replicator technology, in which energy can be transformed into any kind of matter, had created a post-scarcity society for which money was now superfluous. We are expected to believe that the citizens of the Federation have moved beyond greed to a higher level of human consciousness. With replicators people are now free to follow a higher purpose than the base acquisition of personal wealth. A couple of quotes form Captain Picard illustrate the general attitude towards money and wealth taken by the writers of the show:

A lot has changed in three hundred years. People are no longer obsessed with the accumulation of ‘things’. We have eliminated hunger, want, the need for possessions.

The economics of the future is somewhat different. You see, money doesn’t exist in the 24th century… The acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force in our lives. We work to better ourselves and the rest of Humanity.

This attitude towards money is utopian, wrongheaded and naive. Money is not evil or a symbol of greed. It is simply a universal medium of exchange. Money is necessary for any society functioning above subsistence level. Not using money is in fact a step backward towards primitiveness, not a step forward into the future.

Money prices are a rational way of assigning value to resources. Prices are necessary to decide how resources are to be divided up amongst people. A society without money would be impossible, even with replicator technology. No money means no prices, and thus no way to rationally decide on the distribution of resources. It would fall into the socialist calculation problem on a massive scale. Without any money at all the problem would apply not just to the state, but to every single individual in society. No one would be able to decide anything. Individuals would have no way to know how they should use their time. There would be no way to decide who gets what or what anybody should do.

Even if we assume that replicators produce all end-use goods for individual consumption this does not completely eliminate the problem of scarcity. The replicators still need energy to function. How is this energy produced and who produces it? If everyone’s needs are supposedly taken care of by replicators, who will make the replicators and why would they do this? How is it decided which people will do it?

End-use goods are not the only resources that can be scarce. Individuals, land and time are also scare resources. They require some kind of medium of exchange to assign value them to and make it possible to rationally allocate them. Why in a post-scarcity society would individuals subordinate themselves to Captain Picard? Why couldn’t everyone be captain? Why would Scotty be the engineer on The Enterprise instead of some other ship? Even if Scotty absolutely loved to engineer, how would he know what to engineer?

Land and time are also obviously scarce in the universe of the Federation. Starfleet is always out looking for new planets to colonize. How is it decided who has property on Earth, and who will be a colonist? Colonization and exploration take time, as do all other activities in the world of the Federation. People are not instantly transported from one planet to the next, nor do scientific experiments yield instant results. How do people decide how best to use their time if there is no way to rationally allocate? How much time should each person spend working for the Federation and how much time should they spend for leisure? It would have to either be centrally controlled and backed by force, or left up to the whim of the individual.

The Federation also engages in warfare with other civilizations. Why would they do this if there was no scarcity? Not only do they engage in warfare, but sometimes they lose in battle. How could they ever possibly lose if resources were not scarce? Why would they go into battle with 100 ships instead of 100,000 ships? After all, if resources are not scarce they can immediately conjure up 100,000 new ships instantly at no cost whatsoever. Obviously the idea of post-scarcity is bunk, even in the fantasy world of Star Trek. Why even write stories about such a society? There would be no conflict, and thus nothing interesting to write about.

There is certainly no private property in the Federation. In all the episodes of the show throughout the years there have been no references to private companies in the Federation. No company logos and no advertisements are anywhere to be seen. No consumer products are shown other than standard issue Federation or Starfleet gear. There is no evidence that Federation citizens are engaged in commerce or trade of any sort. No one has a private starship, or even a private shuttlecraft. It seems that people must either join Starfleet or work for the Federation. There are no other employers. Most characters are Starfleet officers, but sometimes there appear characters that are politicians, diplomats or scientists. We can safely assume that all scientists must work for the government.

Based on its premises, the Federation would necessarily have to operate like a totalitarian communist state. Unfortunately it is portrayed as a utopian dream society rather than the nightmare dystopia that all communist states in history have been. There are references throughout the show to the fact that The Federation is a perfect society without war, disease, poverty or hunger. Clearly a society like this without money, where all goods are produced by a machine and all people only work for the betterment of others can be classified as a utopian socialist fantasy. I put Gene Rodenberry in the same category as the utopian socialists Robert Owen, Charles Fourier and Jacque Fresco. These men have all envisioned perfect utopian socialist societies of one variety or another.

Fourier and Owen were 19th century utopian socialist philosophers that imagined future societies without money. Fourier called his imaginary society The Phalanx after the ancient Greek military formation. The Phalanx was imagined as a society of exactly 1,620 people living communally in a building that would be specially designed to have both urban and rural features. This idea actually gained a following in its time and 29 different communities were founded in the US based on Fourier’s ideas. The most famous were La Reunion in Texas, The North American Phalanx in New Jersey and Community Place in New York. None of these communities lasted more than a few years. They all eventually failed as the enthusiasm of the settlers waned and people moved away. The histories written about these communities don’t usually say so, but when you read between the lines it becomes obvious that lack of private property was the main reason for people leaving.

New Harmony as imagined by Owen

Robert Owen himself attempted to found a utopian community without any money or private property at New Harmony Indiana in 1825. By 1829 it had already collapsed. The individualist anarchist Josiah Warren was an original participant in the New Harmony experiment and offers some insights as to why it failed:

We had a world in miniature — we had enacted the French revolution over again with despairing hearts instead of corpses as a result. It appeared that it was nature’s own inherent law of diversity that had conquered us. Our “united interests” were directly at war with the individualities of persons and circumstances and the instinct of self-preservation.

Cybernated Government

The Venus Project, which was founded by Jacque Fresco in the 1970s is probably the utopian vision that is most similar to Rodenberry’s Federation. I would not be surprised if Fresco actually got his ideas by watching Star Trek. Despite Fresco’s claims to be some sort of innovative social genius there is not much different about The Venus Project from other utopian fantasies. Fresco claims to have invented a “New Social Design” based on what he calls the “Resource Based Economy.” In their own words:

The term and meaning of a Resource-Based Economy was originated by Jacque Fresco. It is a system in which all goods and services are available without the use of money, credits, barter or any other system of debt or servitude. All resources become the common heritage of all of the inhabitants, not just a select few. The premise upon which this system is based is that the Earth is abundant with plentiful resource; our practice of rationing resources through monetary methods is irrelevant and counter productive to our survival.

Modern society has access to highly advanced technology and can make available food, clothing, housing and medical care; update our educational system; and develop a limitless supply of renewable, non-contaminating energy. By supplying an efficiently designed economy, everyone can enjoy a very high standard of living with all of the amenities of a high technological society.

University of Global Resource Management

Yawn. We’ve heard it all before. No money. No private property. The cool paintings are probably the only thing that is actually original about The Venus Project. The idea that scarcity is artificial and resources can be distributed according to a central plan is as old as Marxism. Many have taken to calling the Venus Project “Marxism with Robots.” Fresco envisions society being planned by a central computer that decides how all resources are to be used and distributed. Ironically there have been several episodes of Star trek that seem to warn against just this possibility. Presumably central planning is fine as long as humans are doing it, and The Federation maintains that human touch. Or the writers of Star Trek just never thought that deeply about it.

While economically the Federation is a utopian socialist fantasy, culturally the values and ideas expressed in Star Trek reflect those of modern day liberalism. This is probably because the writers are California liberals and they write their own biases and prejudices into the show. Elitist liberal cultural preferences prevail everywhere in the show. To give just one example, apparently everyone in the future only listens to classical music and opera. No lowbrow styles like rock, heavy metal, country or hip-hop are ever heard. Everyone that is not in the military has some sort of academic career like a botanist, historian or archeologist. Time is spent by these people jet-setting between conferences in  their various fields on different planets. It’s like a universe filled with NPR listeners.

The Original Series episodes were mostly space adventures with a military-socialist bent. Everyone had a rank, a color-coded shirt and they all answered to the wise all-knowing cowboy captain. By the time The Next Generation came out The Enterprise had become sort of a floating UN in space, spreading human rights and social justice to the galaxy. Many of the episodes deal allegorically with the hot-button social issues of the time like gay identity, the rights of the disabled and assisted suicide from a liberal perspective. Other episodes often deal with bureaucratic structures of government and interplanetary diplomacy. One thing you never see is an episode where the crew of The Enterprise meets an alien race that has no government. This is probably beyond the imaginary capabilities of the writers.

All the societies with which the crew interact are also centrally structured. Whenever the crew beams down to make contact with a new society or a new race it is always basically the same. They go right away to meeting with the planet’s ruler or ruling body. The aliens all seem to wear the same clothes as well. Aliens for the most part are treated as members of groups, not individuals. They are given characteristics based on their group membership and they are assumed to share interests based on their race. It is a kind of intergalactic version of racial identity politics.

Liberal bigotry

Probably the worst example of present day liberal prejudices coming through is the treatment of the Ferengi, the only civilization in the galaxy whose society is based on free trade and private property. While Starfleet officers are all depicted as handsome, noble, heroic, and self-sacrificing, a sort of “New Socialist Man” if you will, the Ferengi are depicted as monkey-like, money grubbing, sniveling little wretches. Many of their physical features as well as their behavior are reminiscent of the worst Nazi stereotypes of Jews. This reveals far more about the bigoted nature of liberalism than it does about how societies with free enterprise look and operate.

The writers get everything backwards when it comes to the Ferengi. The culture is depicted as backward and misogynistic. The government is depicted as bureaucratic and oppressive, while the communist government of The Federation somehow preserves individual freedom. This may be the biggest lie of all peddled by the writers. There is never any reference to rules or laws in the Federation, while the Ferengi supposedly have a huge code of 285 laws known as “The Rules of Acquisition.” They even have an enforcement agency called the FCA to make sure no Feregi step out of line and accidentally treat their  employees well or give a customer a fair deal. Yet contracts are also supposedly sacred to Ferengi.

When the home planet of the Ferengi is visited the bureaucrats are shown to be nasty, venal and greedy — just as we would expect bureaucrats to be. But why aren’t Federation bureaucrats like this? Why is it the society based on free trade that has backward cultural values and an oppressive government when in reality we see the exact opposite? In the real world countries that have a greater degree of economic freedom also tend to have more personal freedoms, progressive social values and gender equality. But this is not how liberals would like to see the world. They dislike reactionary social values, and they dislike capitalism and economic freedom. So naturally they put the two together to please themselves.

So how can we explain this? Why is it that The Star Trek writers have these biases? Why would they create this kind of fantasy world? It is because they grew up in a system where the ideas of individual freedom, capitalism, private property and trade are all treated with hostility. Most people in this country that went to public school have been raised to have these values. The military and the government are treated as ideal social structures in public schools. Central authority is praised. The government is where all prosperity is assumed to come from. Economics and logic are not only not taught, they are actively shunned. Racial identity politics and multiculturalism are taught. Children are taught that their value comes from their membership in an ethnic group, not from their own individuality. Politicians and Generals are celebrated as heroes, while capitalists and businessmen are treated as villains. Given that all these prejudices are taught to us in school, it is not surprising that they are reflected in fantasies about the future.

So what should the libertarian position on labor unions be? What exactly is a union in the first place? How do unions operate? Do they operate differently in the so-called “public” (violent) sector than they do in the nominally “private” sector? Could unions play a part in a theoretical free market society of the future? Many libertarian thinkers have said that while public sector unions are clearly immoral, it is possible for private sector unions to legitimately exist on a free market and operate according to free market principles. I disagree. A union operating on free market principles will not accomplish its goals, and to the extent a market is characterized by union activity it cannot be called free.

In order to understand how unions operate we have to first identify what they are and what their purpose is. Unions are organizations that claim to represent a certain group of workers in a collective bargaining process with employers. Other kinds of organizations can call themselves unions, but for the purpose of this essay I am using this definition because this is the most common type and this is what unions are usually understood to be. The purpose of a union, whether in the private or public sector, is to raise the wages and benefits of the members. How do they go about doing this? As Franz Oppenheimer pointed out in his essay “The Genesis of The State:”

There are two fundamentally opposed means whereby man, requiring sustenance, is impelled to obtain the necessary means for satisfying his desires. These are work and robbery, one’s own labor and the forcible appropriation of the labor of others…

I propose in the following discussion to call one’s own labor and the equivalent exchange of one’s own labor for the labor of others, the “economic means” for the satisfaction of needs, while the unrequited appropriation of the labor of others will be called the “political means.”

While the political economy of unions in the public and private sectors is different, unions are necessarily parasitic organizations that must resort to the political means to achieve their ends. The common myth, relentlessly promoted by unionized government indoctrinators, that past union activism has led to the improvements in pay and working conditions that we all enjoy today is false.

On a free market, or even a hampered market such as exists in the “United States” today, wages will tend towards the marginal product of labor (MPL). The marginal product of labor is the amount by which a firm’s output will rise if it adds one worker. This is not necessarily the same for all workers. More productive workers get paid more because they add more output and thus more revenue. Given a competitive market, where more than one firm bids for labor, wages will tend toward this level. The market need not be totally free for this to occur. In the US today there is no  kind of free market, but there are multiple bidders for labor numbering in the hundreds, possibly thousands. For unskilled labor the number of bidders is even greater. It is not just firms competing for the same market like McDonalds and Burger King that are bidding for unskilled labor in that market. All companies across all markets that want to hire unskilled labor must compete for people from the same pool of unskilled workers. While ultimately the price of labor is determined by the market and employers will want to pay as little as they can, given the level of competition in the US wages for both skilled and unskilled labor will hover very close to MPL.

A worker’s MPL rises if he or she adds new skills, but also if more capital is added to the production process. For example, I am much more productive with a computer than without. If you give me a newer and faster computer my productivity will increase even more. Pay and working conditions have improved since the time of the industrial revolution not because of unions but because of capitalism. The more capital there is relative to labor in the process of production the higher will be a worker’s MPL and thus the higher his wages. It has nothing to do with unions at all. The reason wages were low and conditions poor at the time of the industrial revolution is the same reason these conditions exist in poor and industrializing countries today. There is a low level of capital relative to labor. (Keep this in mind the next time you see spoiled college students protesting so-called “sweat shops.” They are protesting to maintain precisely the conditions that will keep workers in poor countries in poverty.) It is likely that because of the lost wealth and hampering of capital formation due to union activity wages are lower and working conditions worse than what they would otherwise be. Even worse, by driving workers out of certain fields unions create gluts in others, thus lowering the wage level for workers in those fields and creating unemployment.

In the private sector unions are essentially price fixing cartels. They operate by the same logic as a corporate cartel. They restrict output and raise prices. The goal of unions is to raise the wages and benefits of their members. Since on a competitive market wages will already tend to hover near the MPL, logically unions must seek to raise them above this level. How can they do this? In order to raise their wages above this rate unions must create artificial scarcity. They must limit the supply of labor. They must necessarily resort to the political means — violence. They can either engage in this violence against employers and “scabs” themselves or they can get the state to do it for them. In the old days of union activism they would do it themselves, today it is outsourced to the state.

Many people will argue that it is theoretically possible for a union to restrict itself to doing as a group only those activities that each individual can morally do on his own. That is, threaten to withdraw their labor if wages are not increased. Perhaps the cost of replacing so many workers all at once will give the capitalist an incentive to accede to their demands. But when we look at history we see that in fact unions never actually do this. There is good reason. It is unlikely it could ever work. If they are going to act peacefully and morally unions must overcome two almost impossible hurdles. They must get employers to voluntarily bargain with them in the first place, and they must get non-union workers to voluntarily agree to not seek work in the same trade or for the same employer, and to not replace them if they go on strike. Unions have never done this peacefully.

Before they got the state to force employers to recognize them as bargaining agents unions would engage in threats and intimidation of replacement workers, vandalism of private property and obstruction of peaceful trade during their strike actions. The government would usually take a hands off approach to this sort of violence. With the passage of The Wagner Act in the US, forbidding the firing of strikers and the permanent hiring of replacements, unions effectively outsourced their violence to the state. They became little mini-states unto themselves.

There are a number of ways we can know that private sector unions are in fact raising the wages of their members above MPL and forcefully keeping others out of the trade. Union members pay dues to the union bureaucracy that are automatically deducted from their paycheck. These dues are just like income taxes for everyone else. If the union members are really worth the increased wage they are getting then they have every incentive to bargain behind the back of the union, get that wage on their own and  and cut the union out. They do not do this. They are prevented legally from doing this today, but workers paid dues to unions even before they were legally barred from doing this. Why didn’t union members do this back then?

We can know that unions are cutting other workers out of their trades because there is a high degree of unemployment and abstention in the fields that are unionized. Recently in New York City the Electricians Union opened up 100 apprentice jobs and about 2000 people lined up to get them. Clearly there is an artificial shortage in this field and plenty of people that would like to enter it. The union is a huge barrier to entry. Like all cartels, unions must create barriers to entry to the industry. It is significant that these people had to make their application to the union rather than directly to an employer. That is because the electrician trade in New York City is 100% dominated by the union with the backing of the full force of the state. At this point it is ridiculous to even speak of this as a private sector union.

Industries that are heavily unionized such as auto manufacturing, airlines and steel are also heavily regulated and cartelized by the state. Only a few privileged companies are allowed by the state to participate in these industries. It is not a surprise that they tend to be heavily unionized. One way to tell that a company is heavily subsidized by the state is if it is unionized. These are exactly the kind of companies that are likely to manifest Kevin Carson’s corporate calculation problem. Carson does not claim that unionization is one of the factors that leads to his calculation problem, but it stands to reason that having a significant number of employees receiving wages above the MPL, engaging in strikes and slow downs and bringing all kinds of workplace regulations to the daily operations of the company would contribute to calculation problems. When these companies find themselves buried in red ink and are bailed out by the state this is also a bailout of the union. The union was one of the main factors that brought the company down in the first place. The idea that unions act as a countervailing force to the state/corporate complex is false. They are firmly embedded in this complex and could not survive without it.

The situation is even worse with “public” sector unions. Here the “employees” work directly for the government. In the public sector there are no market signals whatsoever. It is impossible to put a rational price on government “services.” It is impossible to know what a public sector worker’s marginal productivity is. It is impossible to know whether or not the “services” that the state claims to provide are demanded by consumers in the first place. No one is given a choice, so how can you know? What public sector unions engage in cannot even be properly called bargaining. It is just helping themselves to the product of other people’s labor. Public employee unions are the ultimate expression of the political means. It is little better than organized looting. In the private sector there is at least some downward pressure on the demands of the union based on the bottom line of the company. The government has no bottom line. All government money is taken by force in the form of taxes or created with debt that is collateralized by future taxes. Public sector unions profiteer off the sweat of their neighbors and the futures of their children. Politicians have no personal stake in the money stolen by the state, so they have no incentive to bargain downwards with the unions. Union members are also voters, and politicians want that vote. Unions hire big-time lobbyists and make big campaign contributions as well. So there is every incentive for the politicians to give the union what they want and little incentive to deny them.

If the state ever does come into confrontation with the public employee unions it has to be because the promises to the union have grown so extravagant that the state faces a fiscal crisis. This is what is happening now in Wisconsin and across the country. States are not going to be able to make good on the promises to these unions. If they raise taxes to do it they will further destroy investment, jobs and productivity in the private sector. If they issue debt to do it they will only make their fiscal situation worse, and at some point no one is going to be willing to buy their worthless bonds. As the privileges these unions expected to get are cut and promises made by the state are reneged on we can expect more temper tantrums like the one in Wisconsin. No doubt these tantrums will come packaged with self-interested and hypocritical appeals to justice and solidarity. Don’t buy it. The working class are the victims of unions, not helped by them.

So to answer the original question, what is the proper libertarian position on unions in general, and in particular what is the proper position on the Wisconsin controversy? For unions in the private sector libertarians should oppose price fixing and support freedom of contract. People that want to work should get the chance to bargain with potential employers, no matter what their group affiliation or lack of affiliation may be. The state’s actions in the Wisconsin controversy may actually lead to some beneficial effects for the majority in the short term, but that is no reason to support the state. Libertarians should call a pox down on both houses and hope the battle lasts a long time and weakens both institutions.

Here is an excellent lecture by Tom Woods that details some labor history in the US and highlights some major incidents. He provides a large amount of facts to back up my statements about the violence of early union organizing and he details all the pro-union legislation that has been passed in the US over the last hundred years or so. Part II of the lecture should be available in the related links section.

First of all, a brief historical overview. Who were the Spartans and where did they come from? Like most of the ancient Greek city-states the prehistory and origins of Sparta are shrouded by the mists of time. There is evidence of human settlement there from about the Middle Neolithic period. There is an oral tradition that attributes the founding of classical Sparta and its militaristic social system to a mythical lawgiver named Lycurgus around the 7th century BC.

Bas-relief of Lycurgus in the U.S. House of Representatives.

This Lycurgus person, like many legendary ancient Greek lawgivers and city-fathers, probably never existed. A lot of contemporary ancient Greek philosophers and scholars, such as Herodotus and Plato, thought he did and wrote favorably about his social system. Whether man or myth, he was beyond fascist. Naturally there is a plaque of him in the US house of representatives along with a myriad of other fascist symbols.

The established history of classical Sparta is long and bloody. It includes a lot of famous battles that even average people today know about. The most famous is the stand of the 300 at Thermopylae which has been retold in various films and comic books and has become a part of our culture. Of course the version we get in movies is very different from the truth, but what else would you expect? Other than this there is the famous Battle of Plataea where the Spartans led another Greek victory against the Persians.

The Spartans also emerged victorious, if you can really call it that, from the decades long Peloponnesian War. This was a war between two opposing coalitions led by Athens and Sparta. It embroiled all of Greece in bloody conflict from 430 to 404 BC. There were really two wars, and they were of course  characterized by a lot of lies, backstabbing, murder and ridiculously stupid ventures like the Athenian Sicilian Expedition which ended up costing them an entire army, a naval fleet and ultimately the war. In the end, no one really won. This war marked the end of the golden age of classical Greece. Five years later the Athenians killed Socrates for asking too many questions.

The Peloponnesian War is one of the most fascinating eras in ancient Greek history and I recommend reading about it more if you are interested. It is one of the few periods from which we have a complete primary record that is also an enjoyable read. I recommend Thucydides “History of the Peloponnesian War” to anyone that wants to read further. But this is not the main topic I want to focus on here.

So what was this Spartan social system and why do I characterize it as socialist? The Spartan system was dedicated entirely to producing the finest warriors in Greece for whom there was no greater honor than to die for the state in glorious battle. Trade and commerce were outlawed for the most part. Gold and silver were outlawed for all but the elite. Private property and inheritance were abolished for all but the most elite (of course). All land was granted by the state to the Spartan elite to run as caretakers. The nuclear family as an institution was essentially abolished and children were raised communally. The society was entirely static. A person’s role in society was determined for them by birth and they stayed there until death. It was a totalitarian centrally planned society, with all aspects of life, not just economy, sublimated to the interests of the state. That is why I characterize it as a socialist system.

There were four tiers to Spartan society. At the top were the two kings. Traditionally there were two rival families, both claiming to be descended from Heracles, that occupied the position of King at the same time. They were the top generals and priests of the state. Leonidas, the famous King from the stand of the 300, was a real historical figure and one of these Kings. Just below the Kings, and the least numerous other than the Kings, were the citizens, or Spartiates. These were the elite class of Spartan warriors. Members of this class were selected from birth to go through the uniquely hellish Spartan brand of military training. Given the nature of this training, by the time the Spartiates reached adulthood they would probably be considered complete sociopaths or even psychopaths  by our standards. The Spartiates were granted land to manage by the state and allowed to own gold and silver, but they were absolutely forbidden to engage in any kind of commerce or trade. This was probably not a prohibition that needed to be enforced given Spartan notions of honor and their ideas about commerce.

Below the Spartiates was a slightly larger class of so-called “free men” or Perioikoi. I don’t think I would actually consider anyone in this brutal society to be “free” but whatever. The Perioikoi served as lower level military reserves as well as craftsmen and sometimes messengers or agents of trade, when the Spartans deigned to actually engage in trade.

The lowest rung of society was occupied by the huge majority of people in the area of ancient Laconia (The area around the city of Sparta), known as Helots. At some time in the murky pre-7th century BC past of the Spartans, they conquered the neighboring city of Messinia and enslaved its population. These people became the Helots. They were a slave class owned by the state, not by individual Spartiates. They worked the land that was owned by the state and granted to individual Spartiates, thus freeing the warrior class from any kind of productive activity. The major event in a young Spartan’s coming of age was the ritual slaying of a Helot. Helots could be killed at any time by a full Spartan for any reason with no consequences. A lot of the Spartan military prowess was exercised in controlling this native slave population and putting down the numerous revolts. Some historians think that the entire society ended up structured this way specifically to control this population. This is a credible thesis.

At age seven a boy born into the warrior class was removed from his family and placed into training in the Spartan military academy known as the Agoge. Boys were raised communally in this military training center. They slept and ate in communal barracks and mess halls. They were deliberately underfed in order to teach them toughness and the skill of fending for themselves. At age twelve they were assigned an adult Spartan male as a mentor and substitute father. It is pretty certain that this relationship also included sexual relations. So we can add rape to the list of traumas suffered by Spartan boys. At the age eighteen boys were sent out in groups to live in the wild, live off the land and hunt and kill renegade members of the Helot population as part of the larger effort of controlling the slave population. This final coming of age ceremony was called the Krypteia. Boys that survived this system graduated from the Agoge at age 20 and became full citizens and members of the warrior caste. They were probably completely broken and insane by this point.

Civil and judicial administration was carried out by a council of 28 elder Spartiates known as the Gerousia. State policy was discussed by this council along with the two Kings and proposed to a council of full citizens known as the Damos. State policy in Sparta probably consisted of little more than controlling the Helots and declaring war.

Sparta was a very closed society and hostile to foreigners so little is really known about what went on there. The above is what has been reconstructed as best as possible by both ancient and modern historians. There are of course examples in history of when this system was seemingly not adhered to. Some Spartan Kings showed a fondness for material wealth and inheritance was sometimes allowed for the elite class. But this is probably what the social system of classical Sparta generally looked like.

Sparta today. Nice legacy.

As you would expect from a society entirely dedicated to militarism, controlling a slave population and exhibiting an ethos of contempt for trade and commerce Sparta was poor in comparison to other Greek city-states. No great works of philosophy, theater, art or poetry came out of Sparta. If you go to the site of ancient Sparta today all you will see are some holes in the ground and broken down stone walls. There are no grand statues, temples and monuments such as those decorating the magnificent Acropolis at Athens. There are barely even any buildings. It is a wasteland.

But of course intellectuals throughout the ages have praised Sparta and admired its austere militarism and lack of corruption by commerce and trade as a society to be emulated. The idle rich classes in Athens had a particular admiration for Spartan life. The fascistic prison state imagined by Plato in “The Republic” is loosely based on the four tiered Spartan system, with an additional tier of “Philosopher Kings” at the top. Of course Sparta had no philosophers, and the Spartans would have spit on a wealthy and idle intellectual like Plato. Laconophilia, or admiration for Sparta, has continued down through the ages and even exists today. The recent spate of war movies involving the Spartans and the lionization of the 300 is part of this phenomenon. A valid comparison can be made to a wealthy New York Times editor enjoying the fruits of a society with a certain degree of freedom, property ownership and trade waxing rhapsodic about the virtues of the Soviet Union. Or perhaps a neoconservative intellectual like Victor Davis Hanson excoriating the population of the US for being selfish and not willing to sacrifice for the “War on Terror.” Presumably this “sacrifice” includes paying higher taxes, accepting state spying, undergoing body scans and pat downs and “supporting” the troops no matter how pointless and corrupt the mission.

We need to move beyond this. We need to get away from stupid prejudices against commerce, property and free trade. We need to get away from romantic notions about brutal, regimented, warlike states like Sparta and see them for the evil and barbaric societies they were. We need to recognize that there is nothing heroic about a society based on slavery and systematic child abuse. Most of all we need to recognize the ugly truths about our own society that would lead intellectuals to romanticize a place like ancient Sparta.

Relevant questions about the background of Jared Loughner would be: Was he abused? What were his parents like? How was he treated at home? How was he treated at school? Was he abused by the staff or other students at school? Were alarm bells raised about him previous to this incident by either his parents or the schools? Was he on any psychiatric medications, particularly antidepressants like zoloft, paxil or prozac, or stimulants like ritalin or adderall? But of course these questions will not be asked. They will not be asked because to ask them would be to make too many powerful groups in society uncomfortable. Parents and school officials are authority figures and political constituents. Pharmaceutical corporations have a significant amount of power and influence in government. None of these groups are served by rocking the boat and asking the relevant questions, so blame will be shifted to skepticism of government and religion.

If Jared Loughner was in fact responding to calls for violence by right wing politicians, why did he choose this particular course of action? Sarah Palin, Glen Beck and Rush Limbaugh never actually called for the shooting of these particular people. They do call for violence on a regular basis though. These right wing pundits and politicians have openly called for a war, and possibly a nuclear attack on Iran. They have openly called for the assassination of Julian Assange. If Jared Loughner was really so affected by calls to violence from the right wing, why didn’t he try to kill Julian Assange?

Much like the call made by government comedian Jon Stewart in his “Rally to Restore Sanity” political liberals are making the usual calls for everyone to just be nice to each other and talk in their inside voices. Liberal pundit Keith Olbermann recently said on his show that “There is no place for violence in our political discourse.” Now this is a real howler. Political discourse is violent rhetoric. Political advocacy is a call for violent action. There is no way around this.

The government is a group of people that systematically use force and threats of force  to accomplish their goals. With no justification other than their ability to use overwhelming violence against those that resist, they act as a monopoly on violence and ultimate decision making over a certain geographical area. They claim the people that live in this area as property, call them “citizens” and take a certain percentage of their income as tribute. They set up rules against certain kinds of non-violent behavior and certain kinds of voluntary transactions between consenting adults. They then initiate force against people that engage in these behaviors and transactions and extract further tribute from them. They are no better and no different than a mafia gang subjecting a local business to a protection racket. Government is just a protection racket writ large.

When you advocate for government action, you are necessarily engaging in violent rhetoric. Even if you voluntarily submit to government and would voluntarily submit to whatever new program or control you are advocating for, there is no reason to assume that this is true for anyone else. Politics is so heated precisely because is it a winner-takes-all game of abuse and victimization. Each side of the left-right political spectrum is eager to be the abuser and avoid being the victim. Those of us that do not participate just seek to avoid being the victim as much as possible.

Not only are calls for government action necessarily violent, they are also hypocritical. The person that advocates for this or that government program, regulation or law has presumably used their own rational faculties to come up with the idea. They have used their own rational mind to think of the rule and to make the decision to follow it. Yet this is precisely what they would deny others. They give themselves the right to use their rational minds and to make decisions about their own behavior, yet they would use the violence of government to deny this to others. They would force you and I to conform to their opinions of how people should act and how society should be.

Given the violence they call for on a daily basis, complaints by statist comedians and pundits about overheated rhetoric ring especially hollow and are hypocritical in the extreme.

The first question to answer is what exactly is Marxism? Marx wrote on a lot of different things, mostly capitalism. He wrote three huge volumes collectively called Capital. The funny thing about these is that the third volume, released posthumously, seems to contradict things he wrote in the first two. Marx never actually laid out any theory or vision for his socialist utopia. He did make some suggestions for preliminary steps to get there in the Communist Manifesto. These steps are a horror show and involve the state pretty much taking over absolutely everything.

So then what really is Marxism? Marxism is a variety of political economy. It is mixture of economic theories and political values that when put together form a coherent political philosophy. Marx’s political economy logically leads right to violent communist revolution as the only solution to the problems he creates, as we shall see.

The goal of Marx’s particular political economy is to develop a theory of exploitation of labor, thus justifying violent action by the working class to “re-appropriate” the means of production from the evil capitalists. Marx starts out with a new interpretation of the classical Labor Theory of Value (LTV). This theory states that the value of a product is determined by the labor time necessary to produce it. Marx adds in the caveat that labor must be “socially necessary” in order to produce value. While obviously false, and long since surpassed by the more sophisticated, and more Austrian theory of Marginal Utility, this theory presents an irresistible attraction for those wanting to come up with an exploitation theory. Marx’s exploitation theory states that since the value of a product is bound up with the labor time necessary to produce it, any profit that the capitalist takes is necessarily taken out of the worker’s hide and is a form of exploitation. Essentially the profit of the capitalist represents unpaid labor time by the worker. This is called the theory of Surplus Value.

This theory ignores the time value of money, among other errors. Marx ignores the fact that the capitalist takes a risk and must wait to realize his profit. He may not even make a profit, yet the worker gets paid for his labor anyway, and he gets paid right away. The capitalist performs the service to the worker of waiting and risk-taking. The worker can do this too, yet he demonstrates by his actions that he would rather not. His time preference is higher, and he would rather collect a check now and play it safe.

The purpose of Marx’s political economy and all his theorizing is to come up with a reason for a so-called “worker’s” revolution. If the evil capitalists are stealing the value created by the workers, then the workers are justified in stealing it back. Thus we get Marx’s recommendations for state communism and violent action on the part of the working class.

So we can define Marxism as a variety of political economy that bases itself on a Labor Theory of Value, derives a theory of exploitation of labor and then recommends militant working class action and socialism or communism as the cure. The exploitation of labor comes from the fact that the capitalist, in order to realize profits must necessarily be taking for himself value created by a worker’s labor time.

This theory seems to have some kind of permanent grasp on the imagination of intellectuals. The most recent revival of Marxist political economy is actually being smuggled in under the guise of libertarianism. So-called “left-libertarian” theorist Kevin Carson has recently come up with a new economic theory based on a rather old and obscure left-anarchist system called “mutualism.” His theory is a synthesis of the ideas of 19th century anarchist thinkers like Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Benjamin Tucker. He also adds in a bit of Marx and even Murray Rothbard among other Austrians. While he takes from all these disparate, and even contradictory sources, his theory comes out to be yet another rehashing of the basics of Marxist political economy.

My suspicion is that Carson’s motivation for developing this system is a desire to come up with a theory to fit a preconceived conclusion. The conclusion being virtually identical to the Marxist conclusion that labor is exploited by capital, capitalists do not really own their property and militant working class action leading to socialism/communism is the answer. Interestingly Carson’s own critique of marginalist economists is that they are opportunists just seeking to find an apology for big business. I agree with Stephan Kinsella that left-libertarian ideology probably comes from an unwillingness to abandon certain sentimental left-wing prejudices like localism, wage-slavery, alienation of labor and romantic rhapsodizing over the plight of “the workers.”

Carson uses his own version of a LTV in designing his system, but he also endorses Marx’s defense of the objective LTV from it’s subjectivist and marginalist critics. Ultimately any LTV will have to propose some sort of objective value to labor time in order to get to exploitation. Carson says Marx is correct that “socially necessary” labor time is a valid response to the marginalist criticism of his LTV, but Carson’s own subjective LTV takes a very different approach than Marx. However, there is not really anything new in Carson’s formulation. It’s just a reversal of standard subjective, marginal value theory applied to a laborer’s view of his own labor. Carson tries to get from there to an objective value to labor, as we shall see. Carson says:

“A producer will continue to bring his goods to market only if he receives a price necessary, in his subjective evaluation, to compensate him for the disutility involved in producing them. And he will be unable to charge a price greater than this necessary amount, for a very long time, if market entry is free and supply is elastic, because competitors will enter the field until price equals the disutility of producing the final increment of the commodity.”

There is not much here that has not already been said by marginal utility theory. Applied to hours of labor time the first part of this theory could be stated like this: At a given price per hour a laborer will continue to bring his goods to market (work) until such time as the disutility of continuing becomes too much for him (he gets tired or fed up) or he physically collapses (or until the office runs out of coffee). The lower the hourly wage in this circumstance the quicker the disutility will cause the laborer to stop. This is all perfectly sound Austrian economics. One problem I see with stating the subjective LTV this way is that it does not seem to take into account the differences between individual laborers and instead views labor as an undifferentiated blob.

Another problem comes with the second half of this theory, and the attempt to derive exploitation from it. Carson says that market forces will continue to adjust the price of labor until an equilibrium price is reached. This price would then represent the exchange-value of labor in some kind of objective way. So the combination of all the subjective valuations by laborers of their own labor leads to market processes that then discover the objective value of labor. A laborer can be said to profit if he receives a price for his labor that is above the “disutility” price. In other words, if he is paid more for his work than one penny above what would get him out of bed in the morning. Commodity prices also tend toward this kind of equilibrium, a price where supply exactly meets demand and there is zero profit. Theoretically a capitalist profits when he receives a price that is higher than this equilibrium price.

Stated another way the subjective LTV claims that the exchange value of commodities is determined by the opportunity cost of labor. Ultimately, all factors of production can be reduced to labor and thus can be valued according to this opportunity cost. Any profit the capitalist takes represents a difference between what is paid to labor and labor’s true value as determined by opportunity cost. So again, just like in classical Marxism we have a surplus value theory cropping up.

From here Carson can now go where he wants to go and start in on his exploitation theory. Since prices tend toward equilibrium and zero profit on a free market, the only remaining source of disequilibrium is the disutility of labor. Thus labor is the source of profit, yet the profit is taken by the capitalist not the worker. And therefore we have exploitation. Profits are necessarily taken out of the hide of workers. Now Carson can conclude all that he wants to about the exploitative nature of capitalism, but he can also say that he advocates a free market. A free market where no one profits and everyone is organized into voluntary socialist communes and collectives, but still a free market.

There are a few problems with this. Some Austrian economists take issue with the concept of equilibrium and the analytical tool of the evenly rotating economy as not being useful for analysis of the real world. I would tend to agree. A free market is good because price signals organize resources as best as possible in regards to the subjective valuations of individuals, not because it avoids profit and exploitation. The evenly rotating economy is not a goal. The market is dynamic and discovers how meet people’s desires on a daily basis, not something that is designed to meet equilibrium. Another problem is that when viewed from the perspective of opportunity cost of labor this theory appears to argue that labor is exploited because it begins work at rates that are below what would be necessary to get labor to begin work. But those rates cannot be determined until labor starts working in the first place. This is a very confusing logical contradiction.

Carson argues that the state is the primary tool used by capitalists to create the disequilibrium that allows them to extract profits. Capitalists do this by using the state to limit competition from other capitalists and thus driving up prices. But this is really just a caveat that is added on later. There is no reason why the state is a necessary element in this exploitation theory at all. Why would the state be the only source of disequilibrium? Why would the state be the only reason that capitalists take the profits that are rightly due to the workers? This theory would seem to claim that the state is a huge conspiracy by capitalists to create disequilibrium, and thus create conditions for profit taking. This ignores the numerous other interest groups that the state serves, including big labor unions and including the state itself.

This theory would also seem to negate itself. The theory that disutility labor is the only remaining source of disequilibrium, and thus the source of profits is no longer valid once there is another source of disequilibrium: the state. The state’s limiting of competition from other capitalists would actually mean that profits can be realized in another way than by exploiting labor. Capitalists actually exploit other capitalists, create disequilibrium and thus profit (I would actually argue that this happens in reality, but from a different theoretical perspective). No need for labor to come into the equation. In fact, the state would seem to be the worker’s friend here because it sets the capitalists against each other and prevents them from being the ones that must be exploited for capitalists to profit. From here we can see the theory falling further and further into contradiction with it’s goal of proving capitalist exploitation.

Another standard left-libertarian exploitation theory is that workers do not really agree to be wage laborers and enter into voluntary contracts, as the “vulgar” Austrians would have it, because capitalists are privileged by the state. The workers have no chance to become capitalists themselves, and thus it is not an even playing field where all options are open to workers. It is certainly true that measures taken by the state to regulate, control and cartelize business do raise barriers to entry that make it harder for workers to start businesses and compete with established capitalists. This valid observation does not validate the LTV though, or necessarily mean that workers are exploited by anyone other than the state. It does not follow from this that workers do not voluntarily enter into contracts or that they take jobs for any reason other than that they prefer doing so to other options. This version of exploitation theory ignores the extent to which business owners themselves are exploited by the state and the fact that workers in state protected unions are themselves exploiters of capitalists along with virtually everyone else in society.

The state makes it hard to start a business, and we all suffer for it. No aspect of Marxist political economy is made true by this fact. Nothing follows from this other than the understanding that we ought to get rid of the state. Left-libertarians do not provide an adequate theory as to why this fact means that those capitalists that make it through the statist web are necessarily immoral or exploitative. It’s not that exploitation is not possible, just that there is no reason — and no argument provided — as to why it is necessarily a rule under state-regulated capitalism. If anyone and everyone that prospers under the state is guilty, then all of us have unclean hands and it really doesn’t mean anything to criticize anyone for immorality or exploitation. We are all just exploiting each other all the time by profiting while the sate exists. No one can be good, so whats the point?

While Carson disagrees with Marx on certain points, and I certainly cannot accuse him of being a statist, his method and motives follow the Marxist map. Carson does claim labor as the ultimate source of value. He does claim workers are exploited under capitalism. He does claim that profits are the result of capitalists seizing the value from unpaid labor time. He does claim that capitalists in a statist system are not legitimate property owners. And finally he does defend militant working class action and call for socialism as the solution. This is why I say that Carson is a Marxist at heart, if not necessarily an orthodox Marxist in his economics. Ultimately I think Carson’s ideas are potentially dangerous and run the risk of endorsing or excusing violence, as long as it is violence aimed at the proper class of victim: capitalists.