The theft called “taxes”

I was reading Murray Rothbard the other day and he reminded me about the way income taxes were collected up until World War II.

“… Before World War II, Internal Revenue collected the full amount, in one lump sum, from every taxpayer, on March 15 of each year. (A month’s extension was later granted to the long-suffering taxpayers.) During World War II, in order to permit an easier and far smoother collection of the far higher tax rates for financing the war effort, the federal government instituted a plan conceived by the ubiquitous Beardsley Ruml of R.H. Macy & Co., and technically implemented by a bright young economist at the Treasury Department, Milton Friedman. This plan, as all of us know only too well, coerced every employer into the unpaid labor of withholding the tax each month from the employee’s paycheck and delivering it to the Treasury. As a result, there was no longer a need for the taxpayer to cough up the total amount in a lump sum each year. We were assured by one and all, at the time, that this new withholding tax was strictly limited to the wartime emergency, and would disappear at the arrival of peace. The rest, alas, is history. But the point is that no one can seriously maintain that an income tax deprived of withholding power, could be collected at its present high levels. ~Rothbard

It is hard to believe that the people just paid their income tax out of their saving once a year is it not? It is hard to imagine what would happen today if the people had to cut a check each year for the total amount of their income tax burden.

Over my lifetime I have seen all sorts of arguments over taxes in this country. They have mainly dealt with how the government could extract the most money from the people. The entire idea behind Ronald Reagan’s reduction of marginal tax rates was to increase total revenue to the central government. Yes, that was not a misprint. The great tax reducer really was working on increasing the amount of taxes collected.  During the Reagan administration, federal receipts grew from $618 billion to $991 billion which is an increase of 60% (according to Wikepedia). There has been too much talk about the type of taxation or its “fairness” and not nearly enough on the total amount extracted from the population. I have seen endless tinkering with tax types and tax rates but I have seen little to no talk about the idea of taxation itself.

According to Black’s Law Dictionary, a tax is a “pecuniary burden laid upon individuals or property owners to support the government [...] a payment exacted by legislative authority.” It “is not a voluntary payment or donation, but an enforced contribution, exacted pursuant to legislative authority” and is “any contribution imposed by government [...] whether under the name of toll, tribute, tallage, gabel, impost, duty, custom, excise, subsidy, aid, supply, or other name.” (source Wikipedia)

So just how much should be siphoned away from the producers by threat, intimidation, and the force of a gun? How much should the non-producers be allowed to steal from the productive via the theft called taxes?

Some sycophantic state worshipers will claim that taxation is not theft at all, but merely a “donation” made while having a gun pointed at your head. Sure, and those same people wonder how the US became an Empire that murders innocent women and children all over the world on a daily basis. Taxation is the theft that feeds the Evil Empire and enables its many horrors.

Frank Chodorov once wrote:

It will be seen that indirect taxation is a permission-to-live price. You cannot find in the marketplace a single satis­faction to which a number of these taxes are not attached, hidden in the price, and you are under compulsion either to pay them or go without; since going without amounts to depriving yourself of the meaning of life, or even of life it­self, you pay. The inevitability of this charge on existence is expressed in the popular association of death and taxes. And it is this very characteristic that commends indirect taxation to the state, so that when you examine the prices of things you live by, you are astounded by the disproportion between the cost of production and the charge for permis­sion to buy. …

The main lesson I have learned about taxes is that all taxation is robbery plain and simple. What else could it be? The dictionary tells me that robbery is the use of violence or threat of violence to to take a man’s property against his will. That is taxation in a nutshell.

I have heard some claim that taxation is really “voluntary”. That always makes me wonder if they are that stupid or if they are just blatant liars. On the off chance that they are just completely deluded I offer an experiment I read about long ago. Let us make the paying of all taxes really voluntary just like giving to the Church. Those who want to support the Empire may send all the money they want to and the rest of use can do with it as we please. Let us see how long that arrangement lasts before the state falls.

But taxation really is robbery as we all know, even the liars who will not admit it know it, so it then follows that anyone who is part of government is a thief. Any government worker at any level should be treated exactly like we would treat a mugger in the city. We can only hope that Karma delivers a just “reward” to anyone who works for the largest criminal gang on the planet.

There is no “fair tax” just as there is no “just murder”. Any taxation is theft and the proceeds of the crime goes to pay for even more crime — the murder of innocent men, women, and children worldwide.

The assault on the individual and the 4th amendment

Someone, it does not matter who it was, on a thread of conversation at a large political site said to someone else:

“You are rejecting Enlightenment, liberal values. For they are the mother’s milk of our “American 4th Amendment.”

The trouble is that so many people out there that even if they are anti-war and mostly pro “civil liberties” still don’t seem to have any idea what the Enlightenment was, nor what the liberalism that came with it was.

” … From the struggle of the Dutch against the absolutism of the Spanish Hapsburgs issued a polity that manifested basically liberal traits: the rule of law, including especially a firm adherence to property rights; de facto religious toleration; considerable freedom of expression; and a central government of severely limited powers. The astonishing success of the Dutch experiment exerted a “demonstration effect” on European social thought and, gradually, political practice. This was even truer of the later example of England. Throughout the history of liberalism, theory and social reality interacted, with theory stimulated and refined through the observation of practice, and attempts to reform practice undertaken with reference to more accurate theory. …” (historian Ralph Raico)

Another source puts it this way: “Classical liberalism (also called classic liberalism or simply liberalism) is the original form of, and is today a tendency within, liberalism. It is a political school of thought that first emerged in the 17th and 18th centuries, upholding individualism and free market economics. Classical liberalism focuses on concepts of individual autonomy and private property, and argues that the sole legitimate function of government is to defend these. Classical liberals promote the use of precisely delineated constitutions that are difficult or impossible to modify, intended to prevent governments from assuming an interventionist role.”

I do wish today’s collectivists who act as if they hate the individual with a passion would stop using the word “liberal” since they are the opposite of the liberals who gave us the philosophy in the first place. Collectivists like the “modern-liberal” or the “social-liberal” have worked hard in the US to give us this world wide Evil Empire by destroying all notion of the natural rights of the individual. I hope those people are happy with the dystopia that they have built, but one is led to believe that they never meant for it all to turn out like it has.

The idea of the 4th Amendment to the US constitution was supposed to be like England’s idea that a “man’s home is his castle and all the king’s men are unable to enter uninvited”. But now that security of a man’s home and papers, in both countries, is just a fable told of old times in a mythical place called England. The sovereign’s minions have grown strong and totally without constraint. In the USA it was done in the name of the welfare/warfare state — a thing supported by both so-called conservatives and so-called liberals. Make no mistake, the destruction of individual liberty started long, long before the 2001 attacks in New York City.

Egalitarianism, that Revolt Against Nature, has destroyed the idea of the sovereign individual in the western world. Look around and see the fruits of this evil. Why do I pick “egalitarianism”? It was the idea that no one should prosper above the others that led to the belief that stealing from the productive to give to the non-productive is morally legitimate. It was the justification of the ancient evil of thievery. To enable that theft and wealth re-distribution in society required the support of the state as it was the entity with the force and power to make a great leveling happen. And now here we sit; all of us with no protections of the constitution at all — only an illusion of constitutional protections. And the so-called “liberals” in the US are crying in their beer (or is that their white wine?) at the power and force of the central government that is being used against them.

It is on that day that you agree to use the force of government to coerce others to act in a manner you would have them act that we first trod down the road to collectivism and tyranny. If a man is not committing aggression against anyone else, then there is no reason to interfere with his life. To feel bad for certain groups in society is natural and you should do what you can to help your fellow man; as long as you don’t become a thief stealing from one group to give to the other. For as soon as you join the state and will the taking of anyone’s property you debase all property rights and toss the right to own what is yours out the window.

And now the Obama administration wants to bypass the 4th amendment and use the large phone service and Internet providers to know everything about you there is to know, and all without any warrant or judicial oversight. We already have SWAT teams busting down people’s doors and attacking people in their homes. We already have militarized police that swagger around in full military gear. When the society first allowed people to be robbed “for the good of the poor” we started down this nightmare road.

It looks like only the downfall of the present system will allow us to start back on a road to peace, prosperity, and progress.

Capitalism, Crony-Cap, and Confusion

I read various ‘leftists’ who decry the use of government power by private firms in order to benefit themselves and call that phenomenon an example of  “free market Capitalism” at work. How wrong can these people get? Worse, they often accuse libertarians of supporting this use of government power by large business for their own ends. So where are these libertarians who support the use of government force by large business to enrich themselves? I can’t find any such “libertarians”.

Is it a mark against the free market that business firms do try to use the force of government to benefit themselves? No, it is the natural incentive of the situation that leads to that use of government by large corporations. Libertarians argue that we should eliminate the source of the incentive. We argue that we should eliminate the state: or at the very least reduce the state to such a small and weak condition so that it can not be used to further any corporate ends.

Libertarians, especially market anarchists, claim that the option of using government force to advance the ends of business would not be available in a libertarian society as it is the state that makes possible all manner of plunder that is impossible without the state. The leftists mistake the present crony-capitalism (corporatism) for a laissez-faire free market. I suppose they do that on purpose since it would take an idiot to mistake coercion for liberty.

It is fair to point out that the alliance that exists between government and special interests is morally abhorrent and runs against the economic interests of the masses. It is fair to rail against the present system of corporatism. But since the present system runs completely counter to libertarianism and it could not exist in a libertarian society, it is totally unfair to blame libertarianism for the very thing we have always fought against!

The special interests invest in political campaigns as a cost of doing business. It is natural that they also expect a handsome return on their investments. It is also a fact that they believe there are rewards to those who invest money in politics or they would not do so. Corporations, cartels, unions, and the various industries get back pet legislation, subsidies, tax breaks, limitations on liability, preferential treatment, barriers to entry into their market, and on and on. And of course politicians take money to sell these favors and protections; it is human nature after all.

Rather than a “laissez-faire free market” we have a not-so-free-market that is stymied and is really not a free market at all. Instead, we have the state corporatism of Benito Mussolini who helped pioneer the concept in Italy in the 20s and 30s. We need to free the market to be laissez-faire. If we were to do so then the laissez-faire market would do what it does naturally. It would sort good companies from bad ones and reward the efficient while punishing the inefficient. Innovation would be rewarded and consumers would have authentic choices in the marketplace.

What the “leftists” don’t see, or pretend they don’t see, is that in effect crony capitalism is central planning. The central planning that the great von Mises showed in the 20s was vastly inferior is what some of our leftist critics call “free market capitalism”. What these leftist critics don’t seem to understand is that Capitalism involves nothing more than free contract and exchange, bounded by private-property rights. That is not the same as getting politicians and their goons involved in the economic lives of the citizens!

The planner is a potential dictator who wants to deprive all other people of the power to plan and act according to their own plans. He aims at one thing only: the exclusive absolute preeminence of his own plan. ~von Mises

Leftists seem to expect justice to come from government and its regulatory agencies. Hundreds of years of data showing that justice never comes from the force of government seems to be over the heads of our leftist friends.

The writings of the socialists are full of such utopian fancies. Whether they call themselves Marxian or non-Marxian socialists, technocrats, or simply planners, they are all eager to show how foolishly things are arranged in reality and how happily men could live if they were to invest the reformers with dictatorial powers. ~von Mises

I don’t know what it will take to make our leftist friends understand the difference between crony-cap and laissez-faire capitalism, but we need to find a way to show the honest ones the difference.

Spontaneous social order, mutual arising, and the Tâo of laissez-faire

I saw a discussion among several friends on twitter about the concept of “spontaneous social order” and I immediately thought of Taoism and the Tâo Te Ching. I thought of the Taoist idea of “mutual arising”.

Taoists see the our universe as being in a continuous state of flux. What we experience is a process where everything is always changing and nothing remains constant. There is a constant interplay of opposing forces that shape our reality, much like rock and water meet to shape the river bed over time. Taoism is the philosophy that gave us the concept of yin and yang and it is from this constant, cooperative competition that the unity and harmony of nature arises. Nature is self-sufficient and uncreated. We don’t need to postulate a conscious, controlling “god” to give orders to nature or to man. We also don’t need human ‘rulers’, bureaucracy, or a panel of “experts” to shape our society. We don’t need central planners to tell man what his best course is. This interplay of forces is often called “mutual arising”. I first became aware of this concept reading Alan Watts who may be one of the best sources of explanation on Taoism that you will find.

The mutual arising of opposites implies many things. For one it means that chaos and order are two sides of the same coin. Order will arise from chaos and the opposite also happens. This Taoist concept is strikingly similar to the idea of a spontaneous order. We see from the Wikipedia entry:

Spontaneous order, also known as “self-organization“, is the spontaneous emergence of order out of seeming chaos. It is a process found in physical, biological, and social networks, as well as economics, though the term “self-organization” is more often used for physical and biological processes, while “spontaneous order” is typically used to describe the emergence of various kinds of social orders from a combination of self-interested individuals who are not intentionally trying to create order through planning. The evolution of life on Earth, language, crystal structure, the Internet and a free market economy have all been proposed as examples of systems which evolved through spontaneous order.^[1] Naturalists often point to the inherent “watch-like” precision of uncultivated ecosystems and to the universe itself as ultimate examples of this phenomenon.^{[citation needed]}

Spontaneous orders are to be distinguished from organizations. Spontaneous orders are distinguished by being scale-free networks, while organizations are hierarchical networks. Further, organizations can be and often are a part of spontaneous social orders, but the reverse is not true. Further, while organizations are created and controlled by humans, spontaneous orders are created, controlled, and controllable by no one.^{[citation needed]}. In economy and the social studies, spontaneous order is defined as “the result of human actions, not of human design.”

Spontaneous order is also used as a synonym for any emergent behavior of which self-interested spontaneous order is just an instance.^{[citation needed]}

…

According to Murray Rothbard, Zhuangzi (369 BCE – 286 BCE) was the first to work out the idea of spontaneous order. The philosopher rejected the authorianism of Confucianism, writing that there “has been such a thing as letting making alone; there has never been such a thing a governing mankind [with success].” He articulated an early form of spontaneous order, asserting that “good order results spontaneously when things are let alone”, a concept later “developed particularly by Proudhon in the nineteenth” century.^[2]

The thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment were the first to seriously develop and inquire into the idea of the market as a spontaneous order. The sociologist and historian Adam Ferguson described the phenomenon of spontaneous order in society as the “result of human action, but not the execution of any human design”.^[3][4]

The Austrian School of Economics, led by Carl Menger, Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek, would later refine the concept and use it as a centerpiece in its social and economic thought.

I also agree  that the Taoists were the first (that we know) to advocate against central planing or rulers giving orders on how to live. Consider Lao Tzu writing in The Tâo Te Ching Chapter 57.

The Genuine Influence.
1. A state may be ruled by (measures of) correction; weapons of war may be used with crafty dexterity; (but) the kingdom is made one’s own (only) by freedom from action and purpose.

2. How do I know that it is so? By these facts:– In the kingdom the multiplication of prohibitive enactments increases the poverty of the people; the more implements to add to their profit that the people have, the greater disorder is there in the state and clan; the more acts of crafty dexterity that men possess, the more do strange contrivances appear; the more display there is of legislation, the more thieves and robbers there are.

3. Therefore a sage has said, ‘I will do nothing (of purpose), and the people will be transformed of themselves; I will be fond of keeping still, and the people will of themselves become correct. I will take no trouble about it, and the people will of themselves become rich; I will manifest no ambition, and the people will of themselves attain to the primitive simplicity.’

The sage is talking to a ruler and advising him that taking no action at all will lead to the greatest good for all; himself included. This is telling the ruler not to rule! By allowing the people to jointly arrive at “the way” by cooperation and trial and error we will see the best results.

Thousands of years before the thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment and later the French economists of the 18h century developed the idea that the market is spontaneous order in action and that “laissez-faire” was the wisest path, the Taoists were saying that “The Tao” was the natural force that ordered everything in the universe and to oppose the Tao was folly.

Some define the phenomenon of spontaneous order in society as the “result of human action, but not the execution of any human design“. The Taoist idea of “mutual arising” is that there is no straight line cause and effect in the universe like the simple idea of Newton’s famous “billiard ball universe” in action. The Taoists would tell you that all of us, all of the animals, and everything else is part of one process. Every action is part of every other action — and so the sage can tell us that we experience the whole universe without leaving our dwelling place.

The idea of “mutual arising” is an ancient idea that is basically the same as, or at least very compatible with,  “spontaneous order”. And both of these concepts are compatible with modern physics. Some say that Taoism foreshadowed modern physics.

Lao Tzu sees only evil and woe coming from any action by the ruler. He sees government as man’s folly and he offers us advice that might have come from any modern market anarchist:

The more laws and restrictions there are,
The poorer people become.
The sharper men’s weapons,
The more trouble in the land.
The more ingenious and clever men are,
The more strange things happen.
The more rules and regulations,
The more thieves and robbers.

So we can conclude that the idea of a spontaneous order arising from mutual cooperation is not new at all, and it is at the very heart of Austrian Economics and their advocacy of laissez-faire. The central idea is that millions of people working together will come up with ideas far better than some committee of even the brightest of people. Trial and error will lead the “crowd” to outperform the panel of “experts” every time; and that is even on the rare occasions when the government panel is actually trying to help the masses.

Letting the people voluntarily order society is the path to our greatest fulfillment. Let us toss aside all beliefs that some planning board made up of “experts” will do anything but harm.

Do you like forced monopolies?

I can remember the days when one company had a monopoly in the United States to provide phone service to the nation. “Throughout most of the 20th century, AT&T held a monopoly on phone service in the United States through a network of companies called the Bell System. At this time, the company was nicknamed Ma Bell.” (Wikipedia)

Those of us who lived through those days recall the “party lines” and exorbitant fees to talk to someone “long distance”. The phones themselves remained the same for decades on end and service was everything a libertarian claims about the lack of service, price competition, and innovation inherent in monopolies. Thank the gods AT&T did not have an army back then!

It is a violation of moral principles to give one individual or group the exclusive right to operate the commercial phone network as in doing so there must be force or threat of force employed against all the others who would like to compete in that area. Special privilege is so obviously unfair that even Kindergarten children know that one child should not be getting all the goodies from teacher in class. Every child in middle school knows that one student getting an answer sheet to use on the test from teacher while no one else has this advantage is morally wrong. Heck, even picking one child to “sharpen the pencils” all the time leads to questions of “what is so special about her”?

Look at it this way. What’s wrong with a monopoly on the manufacture and sales of automobiles? Suppose that my gang of ne’er-do-wells are the only ones that are legally allowed to manufacture and sell cars. It is obvious we are going to be rich no matter how bad we are at making cars. From a purely moral point of view, the question is: why us? What’s so special about my gang? We and no one else have the full force of the raw power of the government making everyone bow down to us and let only us make and sell cars. If you can’t see the evil in that arrangement you should probably not be reading this blog!

But aside from the moral aspect of monopolies, there is the pragmatic, consequentialist standpoint as well given that I have a monopoly granted to me by the raw force and brutality of government. The incentives inherent in the situation are completely in opposition to the welfare of everyone but the specially privileged monopoly holder — me and my gang of fat-cats. There is every incentive to make the product or provide the service as cheaply as possible while charging you as much as I chose to charge. There is no competition to force me to be competitive and so I will not take any real risks in innovating my product; after all, no one else can make and sell a better product since only I can sell it by law.  Because I’ve got no competition, you have nowhere else to go for my product — say cars. You also probably shouldn’t expect the cars I make and sell to be of particularly high quality, but you’ll buy them rather than walk. The government monopoly in the old USSR made some of the worse cars in the history of car manufacturing for example. In addition to the likelihood that the my cars are going to be expensive and not very good, there’s also the fact that I have power over others since I can sell or not sell to an individual based on my biases. I might decide to never sell cars to Roman Catholics for example. To hell with them, I am still making tons of money guaranteed by my monopoly. Abuse of power seems to be a great temptation inherent in monopolies.

But even worse than the above, if I am the only one making and selling cars, how will I ever know if I am making the best cars that can be made even if I were to want to do the best job possible for humanity? There is no competition so there is no experimentation in the market. There is no real price competition and choice for the consumer — they can’t vote with their purchases on who is making better cars. Hence, progress suffers just like it did for decades in the telephone business under the AT&T monopoly.

So if you can agree with me that a forced monopoly is bad juju, why would you want a forced monopoly called the state?  Why have a monopoly in the provision of services of adjudicating disputes, and protecting rights, and making laws? We have the moral case against that we learned in Kindergarten: why them? But we have the pragmatic case that the incentives will lead to abuse of power, lack of progress, high costs, low quality, and so forth.

With a forced monopoly like government, we get war after war. Smoke a weed an go to jail for years: come out to a ruined life. We get stupid laws that seek to control every aspect of our lives down to what color we can paint our house. Want to fly to France? Beg permission. The non-productive sector given to us by government is sucking the vitality out of the economy and keeping millions unemployed or underemployed.

I have known “small government  conservatives that claim we need some government  Why? What does the government do other than enslave us?

A look at Mutualism

I was recently asked by a twitter friend what I thought of “mutualists”. My first thought was to say that it all depends on what you mean by “mutualists”. Then I thought about just directing him to one of my past posts on “Syndicalists” but that would not have been fair since a syndicalist is not a mutualist; at least so far as I understand the terms. So, I decided it was time here, once again, to take a look at the left-libertarians: this time “mutualists”.

Mutualism is a theory of societal organization based on the labor theory of value which teaches that when labor or its product is sold or exchanged then one ought to receive back goods or services that were produced with the same amount of labor necessary to produce the article or service that the person offered for trade. Or, in other words, the labor theory of value teaches that the value of final production rests on the labor amount of the inputs. In the 1800s Carl Menger showed that this is the exact opposite of reality. The price of a factor input is based on competitive bidding by producers who use their subjective evaluations based on what they think the factor is worth to them; and so entrepreneurs bid up prices because of their expectation of greater revenues in the future. And so, Mutualists base their theories entirely on an economic fallacy.

As they say themselves:

Our ultimate vision is of a society in which the economy is organized around free market exchange between producers, and production is carried out mainly by self-employed artisans and farmers, small producers’ cooperatives, worker-controlled large enterprises, and consumers’ cooperatives. To the extent that wage labor still exists (which is likely, if we do not coercively suppress it), the removal of statist privileges will result in the worker’s natural wage, as Benjamin Tucker put it, being his full product.

Mutualists claim to believe in private property, but only so long as it is based on personal occupancy and use. They believe that if a property owner rents out or leases any property then the renter may just steal the land as “absentee landlords” have no rights at all. Thus they deny that we should honor contracts! This is a philosophy of theft. And as I have noted elsewhere, how does a “worker controlled factory” operate if one guy gets to sit behind the big desk while another guy has clean the men’s room? Who the hell decides on that? Does the hard working janitor get more “money” since he inputs more labor? (what the hell is “money” to these people anyway?)

It is brutally obvious that the mutualists, if they were in control, would be unable to get the population to act as they would have them act without the sort of force and brutality that the old USSR had to resort to. There is no way that people will value an item based on the labor that was input into its manufacture. People base their evaluations on their subjective notions of its marginal utility to them; and add to that the law of supply and demand. One can labor greatly making an item that no one wants and it will have no value to others. That is just the facts of life folks. And the idea of factories run by a “democracy” made up of its workers has never worked in the real world even though such a system could be tried right now in most countries of the world. It just does not work.

Like all modern terms, there will be disagreements on what, exactly, mutualism means, but It seems that some “mutualists” want only individual tradesmen or very tiny business concerns to exist. This shows a profound ignorance of economics, or else they want to see 7 billion humans die off due to destroying the industrial society that feeds us. The iron law of the division of labor can not be repealed. Anarcho-capitalists, anarcho-libertarians, or market anarchists, on the other hand, are not opposed to the corporation itself, but are opposed to the government granted special privileges that enrich them under our present crony-capitalist model. Of course, some mutualists think a factory can be OK as long as all the workers are paid according to the amount of their labor inputs — regardless of the value of said labor. It is as if a kid in Algebra class gets paid with an A for doing page after page of wrong calculations and the kid that got the right answer in three lines gets an F.

The “market,” in the sense of exchanges of labor between producers, is a profoundly humanizing and liberating concept.

As the quote indicates, these people can only see “the market” in terms of producers trading hours of labor. A short look at the differing pay rates in the NFL here in America will show one that people earn what they are worth, not how much “labor” is put forth.

Many left-anarchists are anti-war and that is great, but unless you are pro-market and pro-private property you are not really an enemy of the state. The state, you see, is the institutionalized agent of aggression against private property rights which forms the basis of liberty of the individual and the market. But we often we find that “mutualists” or “syndicalists” are just pseudo-anarchists who are hostile to free markets and private property rights. Yes, yes, they sometimes claim to love the free market but only if they get to control the market and make everyone do as they say. So much for freedom, eh?

No matter the label, if the “mutualist”, “syndicalist”, “left-anarchist”, or what have you is willing to concede that no force should be used to dictate their Utopian vision on the rest of us and that people should be free to trade without any coercion from any group then I can support their right to go try their wrong-headed ideas out someplace. Let the market decide how people will act after we do away with the beast called the state. Of course, the only way to stop coercion and have peaceful, voluntary cooperation is for the property rights of the individual to be respected at all times. I hope the mutualists understand that, but it is obvious some of them don’t.

Sometimes I talk to mutualists or syndicalists and find that they are simply against the corporation as it exists in our economic system now. Market anarchists like myself are also against the crony-capitalist system we have now. Many of our large corporations are given all sorts of special privilege, favorable regulations, grants, and other give-aways under our current government. But that issue is not the same as saying that the corporate form of organization is inherently bad. We can, however, agree that the present corporate welfare is as bad if not worse than welfare for the individuals.

One very sticky point with many on the left is the idea of “limited liability” of corporations. Typically they don’t understand the issue.

Rothbard:

… None of this means that tort law itself is in no need of reform. The problem is not really quantitative but qualitative: who should be liable for what damages? In particular, we must put an end to the theory of ”vicarious liability,” i.e., that people or groups are liable, not because their actions incurred damages, but simply because they happened to be nearby and are conveniently wealthy, i.e., in the apt if inelegant legal phrase, they happily possess “deep pockets.”

Thus, if we bought a product from a retailer and the product is defective, it is the retailer that should be liable and not the manufacturer, since we did not make a contract with the manufacturer (unless he placed an explicit warranty upon the product). It is the retailer’s business to sue the wholesaler, the latter the manufacturer, etc., provided the latter really did break his contract by providing a defective product.

Similarly, if a corporate manager committed a wrong and damaged the person or property of others, there is no reason but “deep pockets” to make the stockholders pay, provided that the latter were innocent and did not order the manager to engage in these tortious actions.

To the extent, then, that cries about an insurance crisis reflect an increased propensity by juries to sock it to “soul-less corporations,” i.e., to the stockholders, then the remedy is to take that right away from them by changing tort law to make liable only those actually committing wrongful acts.

Let liability, in short, be full and complete; but let it rest only upon those at fault, i.e., those actually damaging the persons and property of others.

I conclude that I can’t be a “mutualist” since I have read too much economics and economic history. The mutualists want to try the idea of collectives joined somehow with mostly individual tradesmen. I wish them all the luck in the world with that but I know that the division of labor leads to the greatest wealth for the greatest number of people. They want to believe that labor forms the basis for value but that is just an often debunked fallacy. A dangerous fallacy at that. And, unfortunately, there are many mutualists who applaud and promote blatant theft of other people’s property. I hope they are a minority in the movement but I fear that theft of property is an inherent part of mutualism.

So, what do I think of “mutualism”? Not much given what I understand of their philosophy. I do agree with many of their ideas as long as we are talking about a system with no coercion that allows mutual, voluntary, free-will cooperation among people — but we already have a term for that and that term is market anarchy or anarcho-capitalism.

UPDATE: Since Dr. Long wanted more citations, here (first and second) are a couple by Stephan Kinsella that I have long thought very good on the certain aspects of this topic.

climate again

There was a post at WUWT concerning a new paper published by a couple of the climatologists who are a large part of the fraudulent data, bogus computer models, wasted billions, and onerous laws of the past 20 years all stemming from bone-headed notion of catastrophic anthropomorphic global warming caused by the trace gas CO2 that life needs to exist.

From the post:

From the Hockey Schtick:  A new paper from Schurer et al (with Mann as co-author) finds that climate “models cannot explain the warm conditions around 1000 [years before the present, during the Medieval Warming Period] seen in some [temperature] reconstructions.”

According to Schurer et al, “We find variations in solar output and explosive volcanism to be the main drivers of climate change from 1400-1900.” They also claim, “but for the first time we are also able to detect a significant contribution from greenhouse gas variations to the cold conditions during 1600-1800.” This claim is highly unlikely given that ice cores show CO2 levels only changed by less than 10 ppm from 1600-1800, and the effect of 10 ppm CO2 on the climate today remains undetectable even with modern instrumentation.

I had thought that I might toss in a small post on this topic and offer up my assessment of this new lunacy. I was especially going to mention the part where these two clowns mention the sun in their paper after denying any solar impact on the earth for decades, and then they toss in a climate impact of a CO2 change of only 10ppm.  Jesus, Joseph, and Mary how stupid can this pair be? And besides that, we are nearing the end of what looks to be the coldest spring in the history of the USA. Will they claim next that warming causes cooling? You know they will.

But it came to pass that a regular WUWT poster named Dave Wendt left a comment over there that so closely modeled my own thinking that I did not believe I could write my thoughts without subconsciously cribbing from his comments. So, I decided to break with tradition and just post his comment in full here. Everything below the line is by Dave Wendt and you can click on the date link to go right to the comment in the comments section of the post at WUWT to see it there and to see it along with other people’s comments. I might quibble with Dave on a point or two, but the following is a wonderful look at the lunacy of those fraudsters who claim a bit of CO2 is going to kill us all.

I pick this time to post this since by today I think the earth will have passed 400 parts per million by the time I get around to posting this one. 400ppm is 0.04% of the atmosphere. 400ppm is 4/10 of one percent of the atmosphere. Has it ever been higher you ask? Well the CO2 concentration has been up to around 7,000 parts ppm in the past. That would be 0.7 percent back then vs. 0.04% now. In fact, we live in a time when the CO2 concentration is at a historic low. So it sure does look like something else drives the climate. Perhaps that big ball of fire in the sky? Just maybe?

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Dave Wendt says:

April 11, 2013 at 4:19 pm

“We find variations in solar output and explosive volcanism to be the main drivers of climate change from 1400-1900, but for the first time we are also able to detect a significant contribution from greenhouse gas variations to the cold conditions during 1600-1800. ”

Aren’t these the same bunch of geniuses who have been giving anyone who has even suggested the Sun might play a role in driving the climate the big horse laugh? And how exactly does “explosive volcanism” drive the climate to something like the MCO? It has been my impression that “explosive volcanism” is considered to be a significant driver of global cooling, not warming.

I am once more, for more times now than I can even approximate, struck by the towering irony that any Hollywood celebutard, MSM human press release fax machine, or brain dead politician in the world feels free to step in front of any available microphone, camera or keyboard and boldly declare that anyone like myself, who is not willing to be an epistemological mattressback for all of this hyperbolic climate catastrophism, must be some kind of a congenital moron.

From the beginning of my attempts to understand this topic I have always been seriously underwhelmed by the quality level of the science that has generated this controversy and frankly that view extends to all sides. I have found myself firmly in the “skeptical” camp for several fairly simple reasons

1) From my study of the philosophy of science, skepticism seems to be the primary and ultimate duty of anyone who seeks to “know” anything about the world and universe we inhabit. Personally I tend toward the view that science, even when done with ultimate rigor and integrity, can only allow us to have slightly stronger suspicions that what has been presented is the best available guess at the moment and that providing actual “knowledge” is beyond its logical capabilities.

2) The people who inhabit the skeptical side of this controversy seem to do their work with much more of the humility that 1) above suggests to me is the second leading requirement to be a true scientist. They exhibit much less of a tendency to declare that the work they have done definitively “demonstrates” or “proves” anything and generally seem to operate in a manor that cleves much closer to what I think of as the scientific method i.e. openness about methodologies and data including inconvenient or countervailing data which might weaken their argument.

3)Though I list this third, if I am truly honest with myself, it is probably my number one concern. It is that no one from the skeptical side suggests that their work demands that the world transform itself in ways that are profoundly detrimental to personal liberty, human prosperity, human wellbeing, and in fact the wellbeing of almost all of life on the planet. The “believers” on the other hand act as if the dogmatic certitude of their ends justifies absolutely any means necessary to enforce them on the rest of us. In a sense they are quite correct in their belief that AGW will necessarily turn into CAGW, but they seem incapable of seeing that the real catastrophes have occurred and will continue to occur because of the hugely damaging and ultimately ineffectual remedies for which they demand docile acquiescence from the rest of us. Biofuels, windfarms, carbon taxes and credits and the whole plethora of supposed AGW cures foisted on the world have already inflicted much more damage on human prospects and the global environment than any but the most hyperbolic of AGW catastrophe scenarios have any possibility of matching.

4) I will add this one even though it will tend to undercut my presentation of myself as an objective observer. In all my time as a denizen of this and other related sites I have never had the pleasure of meeting any of the contributors or commenters whose views on this topic seem anywhere close to my own, but I have always felt that there were a great number I could envision spending a pleasant day or evening with, gathered around a table somewhere, sharing appropriate beverages and perhaps some good cigars and conversing about the climate or any other topic that might arise. Though my personal familiarity with the purveyors of climate dogmatism is no greater than for the folks here, almost none of them have engendered a similar sympathetic response. In fact, I would hesitate to be in the same room with most of them because of a very real fear that I would be faced with a commanding Ben Santer-like compulsion to push a fist through their faces. I haven’t actually struck anyone in anger since I was in the second grade, so I could probably restrain myself, but the prospect of having any fun around these dolts is so slim that it”s not worth the chance that I might not. In the end, even if they should somehow miraculously convince me of the correctness of their position, I would still have a difficult time aligning myself with them, because they almost all strike me as a bunch of j**koffs!