In a couple of brief posts Charles Johnson and Sheldon Richman say a lot.

It’s convenient to talk about “market forces,” but you need to remember that remember that those “market forces” are not supernatural entities that act on people from the outside. “Market forces” are a conveniently abstracted way of talking about the systematic patterns that emerge from people’s economic choices. So if the question is, who will stop markets from running riot, the answer is: We will; by peacefully choosing what to buy and what not to buy, where to work and where not to work, what to accept and what not to accept, we inevitably shape and order the market that surrounds us. When we argue about whether or not government should intervene in the economy in order to regiment markets, the question is not whether markets should be made orderly and regular, but rather whether the process of ordering is in the hands of the people making the trade, or by unaccountable third parties; and whether the means of ordering are going to be consensual or coercive.

read the rest

Establishment mouthpieces fall over each other to associate competing shows with a Nazi murderer.

People take these guys seriously too. I think it’s time to ramp up libertarian political entertainment. If you want to put liquid heat on the jockstraps of the red team and the blue team, send me an email. darianworden – at – gmaildotcom

“The law will never make men free; it is men who have got to make the law free. They are the lovers of law and order who observe the law when the government breaks it.” -Henry David Thoreau, Slavery in Massachusetts

Sam Dodson, who was arrested for filming in a courthouse and held in jail for refusing to cooperate with his captors, was unexpectedly released today.

While Sam was in prison, the Boston Globe reported him as saying “I see Free Staters as the modern-day abolitionists.” I’ve seen this statement criticized as trivializing the horror of chattel slavery and the bravery of the original abolitionists. It would miss the point to debate whether the practice of attempting to force the legal status of property onto human beings, which can only be done through the most brutal violence and degradation, is worse than the practice of modern statehood, which would include blocking supplies to an entire nation after bombing their infrastructure to pieces and poisoning their environment.

The point is that the principles of abolitionism, which held that regardless of popular justifications no human is worthy to be master and no human can be owned by another, when carried to their logical conclusion require this: that no human is worthy of authority over another, and that no person is owed allegiance simply because of political status. When reason disassembles the popular justifications of statism, as advances in political philosophy since the 1850’s have assisted in doing, the consistent abolitionist cannot oppose the voluntaryist principles of the Keene radicals.

The principle of self-ownership was not alien to the original abolitionists. Lysander Spooner, an abolitionist I never heard mentioned in all of my schooling, would eventually become associated with Benjamin Tucker’s anarchist journal Liberty. Spooner had such an influence that Tucker would describe his death as “Our Nestor taken from us.”

Individualism was the basis of Henry David Thoreau’s opposition to tyranny. In his influential essay Civil Disobedience he writes,

Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience, then? I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward. It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right.

Nothing at all makes the conscience of a legislator worth more than the conscience of the citizen. The primary obligation of any man was to his personal conscience.

Today we are expected to defer our consciences to the legislators as they go on “realistically” lowering the intensity of one imperial conflict only to expand the empire’s reach in another location. We are told to obey the police officer because the badge he carries means he knows better than us – because after all, he has been trained by the state. This is where the deference to authority has led us. Despite the deadly powerlust of the politician, the superiority complex of the judge, and the barely-accountable brutality of the police, we are told to respect them because they have been selected to govern us. Our decisions on who rules us have been made by the so-called “majority.” Numerical superiority imparts no rights, and neither does having one’s interests coincide with the most politically powerful faction in the contest.

In Slavery in Massachusetts, another great political essay, Thoreau displays outrage at the arrogance of a court deciding whether one man is actually be the property of another.

Again it happens that the Boston Court-House is full of armed men, holding prisoner and trying a MAN, to find out if he is not really a SLAVE. Does any one think that justice or God awaits Mr. Loring’s decision? For him to sit there deciding still, when this question is already decided from eternity to eternity, and the unlettered slave himself and the multitude around have long since heard and assented to the decision, is simply to make himself ridiculous…

Massachusetts sat waiting Mr. Loring’s decision, as if it could in any way affect her own criminality. Her crime, the most conspicuous and fatal crime of all, was permitting him to be the umpire in such a case. It was really the trial of Massachusetts.

The title of “judge” does not give one the power to decide if a man is really a slave. The answer is decided by the man whose life is in question, as he knows that he is not another’s property. It is criminal to put this decision into anybody else’s hands, criminal to give the judge authority that could never legitimately be his, criminal to force the “slave” into a court beholden to his opponent’s criminal wishes.

Thoreau also describes how many people relegate the battle for liberty to a mere historical celebration and ignore the living struggle.

Three years ago, also, just a week after the authorities of Boston assembled to carry back a perfectly innocent man, and one whom they knew to be innocent, into slavery, the inhabitants of Concord caused the bells to be rung and the cannons to be fired, to celebrate their liberty — and the courage and love of liberty of their ancestors who fought at the bridge. As if those three millions had fought for the right to be free themselves, but to hold in slavery three million others. Nowadays, men wear a fool’s-cap, and call it a liberty-cap. I do not know but there are some who, if they were tied to a whipping-post, and could but get one hand free, would use it to ring the bells and fire the cannons to celebrate their liberty. So some of my townsmen took the liberty to ring and fire. That was the extent of their freedom; and when the sound of the bells died away, their liberty died away also; when the powder was all expended, their liberty went off with the smoke.

As he walks, Thoreau’s “thoughts are murder to the State, and involuntarily go plotting against her.”

We have come a long way since the 1850s because of people like Thoreau and other daring radicals. We will cover more ground through the efforts of people like Sam Dodson and other committed liberty activists. We can build a future without slaves or masters, a future in which only voluntary agreements carry weight and aggression is commonly recognized as crime regardless of the perpetrator.

Old cartoons depict the issues of the past.

Within three weeks of their release from Jones County custody, the Motorhome Diaries gang released this video of themselves attacking wholesome authoritarian values.

In June of 1989, the statist thugs in control of China sent tanks into Tiananmen Square to solidify their power against the demands of the people.

Benjamin Tucker foresaw the results of state socialism in an 1888 essay State Socialism and Anarchism: How Far They Agree, and Wherin They Differ. He understood what the premises of state socialism required in practice:

The nation must be transformed into a vast bureaucracy, and every individual into a State official. Everything must be done on the cost principle, the people having no motive to make a profit out of themselves. Individuals not being allowed to own capital, no one can employ another, or even himself. Every man will be a wage-receiver, and the State the only wage-payer. He who will not work for the State must starve, or, more likely, go to prison. All freedom of trade must disappear. Competition must be utterly wiped out. All industrial and commercial activity must be centered in one vast, enormous, all-inclusive monopoly. The remedy for monopolies is monopoly.

Such is the economic programme of State Socialism as adopted from Karl Marx. The history of its growth and progress cannot be told here. In this country the parties that uphold it are known as the Socialistic Labor Party, which pretends to follow Karl Marx; the Nationalists, who follow Karl Marx filtered through Edward Bellamy; and the Christian Socialists, who follow Karl Marx filtered through Jesus Christ.

What other applications this principle of Authority, once adopted in the economic sphere, will develop is very evident. It means the absolute control by the majority of all individual conduct. The right of such control is already admitted by the State Socialists, though they maintain that, as a matter of fact, the individual would be allowed a much larger liberty than he now enjoys. But he would only be allowed it; he could not claim it as his own. There would be no foundation of society upon a guaranteed equality of the largest possible liberty.

The state exists to extract resources from one class of people for the benefit of another. When claims to these resources are disputed, it is commonly called “war”. When the people are subjugated enough through propaganda or the outright violence of the gun, gas, and chains of the state, it is commonly called “peace”. There can be no true peace under statism, as the state exists through theft and coercion, and its enforcers are permitted to throw peaceable people into cages and kill them if they resist. This is true no matter what values the state claims to protect.

The fact that some states are significantly less brutal than others provides no evidence in favor of statism. It provides evidence in favor of the radicalism and resistance that makes the difference.

A new issue of ALLiance, a journal of theory and strategy, is out and ready for download. It includes an article I wrote on Libertarian Left propaganda.