Today I observed a Tea Party rally for about 40 minutes in Hackensack, NJ.

The rally was very much about getting conservatives elected – speakers emphasized this, and signs had this electoral bent to them. Liberals, progressives, and “Marxists” were clearly the enemy. The Founders were idolized.

Signs that I observed were mostly about taxes, “socialism,” and government spending (mostly related to social programs). I saw one “No More Bailouts” sign. A number of signs referenced 2010 elections and “We the People” taking control of the government. I saw US flags, Gadsden flags, and one Three Percenter flag.

The only references to war and the military (a big portion of government spending) that I noticed were people wearing military veteran shirts and hats.

Campaign for Liberty folks had a table and literature, some of which I saw being distributed by a woman carrying a sign about how much money illegal immigrants cost NJ taxpayers. Instead of highlighting the costs of war and other security state programs ( “a non-interventionist foreign policy” was mentioned on one flyer but no details were there), they had literature that was generally Constitution-oriented, anti-Federal Reserve, and one flyer advocating Ron Paul’s bill to overturn Roe v. Wade. CL, at least this chapter, is looking for a niche as a conservative, not a libertarian organization, which is not surprising because that was Ron Paul’s position all along.

The event was not completely anti-immigrant – at least one of the speakers was a Russian immigrant with a noticeable accent. She gave a rosy picture of 1917 Russia – there was “an expanding middle class” – before the Communists took over.

A number of people were wearing National Rifle Association attire.

An overall Christian affiliation was presented. The opening speaker proudly declared he was a Creationist, and there were a number of handouts with a religious right perspective.

The crowd was not exclusively white, but was noticeably whiter than the general populace I observed in the streets surrounding the rally. I would guess that average age would be solidly middle age.

A 16 year old conservative speaker proudly stated that he refused to watch An Inconvenient Truth when his public school class showed it. He then proceeded to comment on the film that he refused to watch before blasting liberals for not listening to anything that counters their views. Unless I heard wrong, he said “God bless” governor Christie, which resulted in lots of applause.

I’ve got to get better at crowd counting – I’m guessing 50-100 people were there (see pics below).

One CBS news van was present.

Click to enlarge the scans and photos:

Related:
The Nineties Called. They Want Their Poser-lution Back

Tea Party Report

It’s the second week of April, so a commentary on taxation was definitely in order. Death and Taxes, my latest commentary, was posted today at Center for a Stateless Society.

The way taxation works shows the non-consensual nature of the state. One is not allowed to opt out of paying for things the government does, regardless of whether one wants them done at all. Taxation rests on coercion.

Money taken through taxes helps support state monopolies and fund enforcement. In addition, a higher tax burden means that one needs a higher income to maintain a standard of living. By doing so, taxes raise the barriers to independent living and undertaking non-traditional work. Stronger state monopolies, stricter enforcement, and incentivizing longer working hours means less time for liberty and fewer opportunities to build alternatives to authoritarian controls. Taxation supports the state’s efforts to reach further into all areas of life. [Read the rest]

I’ve seen the following chart floating around on Facebook (click to enlarge):

This chart is certainly inaccurate, and probably misleading.

For one thing, anarchists are often labeled far-left, and anarchists support none of the government programs listed. But let’s assume that the chart author prefers to put anarchists under the libertarian center of the chart, and by left s/he means liberals, Democrats, Greens, and maybe democratic socialists, while by right s/he means conservatives, Republicans, and other right-wing movements. And let’s ignore totalitarians like Maoists and fascists. There are still problems.

Since when are statists on the right stalwart supporters of economic freedom and respect for others’ property rights? They wouldn’t be statists if they were, and saying that they are certainly contradicts the items on the right column in the red box.

Right wingers often aren’t even that good on the individual right to keep and bear arms – “stricter enforcement” and keeping guns out of the hands of “criminals” are big buzz phrases. I’ve seen gun shop employees avoid helping people who had a Muslim or ghetto look to them, and I’ve seen signs at gun shows saying that the vendor will not sell to anybody heard speaking a language other than English. I guess it depends on who counts as an individual.

It’s also pretty laughable to think that “giving generously to those in need” and “advancement based on individual ability” are characteristically right wing.

Similarly, since when have Democrats been stalwart defenders of personal freedom, non-interventionist foreign policy, tolerance of others’ personal choices, civil liberties and privacy, or ending corporate welfare? And Democrats will certainly play the Jesus card to get elected. These things generally contradict the items in the left side of the blue column.

And then we move to libertarians. The word “libertarian” means seeking to maximize individual liberty. Once the libertarian realizes that the institution of the state is necessarily in conflict with individual liberty, the libertarian becomes an anarchist. Once she realizes that social and economic authoritarianism restrict individual liberty and intertwine with political authoritarianism, she becomes a better anarchist. So saying that libertarians support this or that state policy is misleading: a radical libertarian supports preventing the state from functioning in any manner.

I think it is more useful to make a left-right spectrum based on the observations of Karl Hess:

My own notion of politics is that it follows a straight line rather than a circle. The straight line stretches from the far right where (historically) we find monarchy, absolute dictatorships, and other forms of absolutely authoritarian rule. On the far right, law and order means the law of the ruler and the order that serves the interest of that ruler, usually the orderliness of drone workers, submissive students, elders either totally cowed into loyalty or totally indoctrinated and trained into that loyalty…

The overall characteristic of a right-wing regime, no matter the details of difference between this one and that one, is that it reflects the concentration of power in the fewest practical hands.

Power, concentrated in few hands, is the dominant historic characteristic of what most people, in most times, have considered the political and economic right wing.

The far left, as far as you can get away from the right, would logically represent the opposite tendency and, in fact, has done just that throughout history. The left has been the side of politics and economics that opposes the concentration of power and wealth and, instead, advocates and works toward the distribution of power into the maximum number of hands…

The farthest left you can go, historically at any rate, is anarchism — the total opposition to any institutionalized power, a state of completely voluntary social organization in which people would establish their ways of life in small, consenting groups, and cooperate with others as they see fit.

The attitude on that farthest left toward law and order was summed up by an early French anarchist, Proudhon, who said that ‘order is the daughter of and not the mother of liberty.’ Let people be absolutely free, says this farthest of the far, far left (the left that Communism regularly denounces as too left; Lenin called it ‘infantile left’). If they are free they will be decent, but they never can be decent until they are free.

I hope you read the rest of Hess’ passage at Wally Conger’s blog.

I have said that consistent libertarians, those who want to maximize the freedom of the individual in all aspects of life, are properly understood as left-wing. This roots us historically, and identifies us as people looking for a radical change, not looking to stabilize the system or look backwards to a mythical golden age. It also identifies ways we can attack would-be oppressors – for example by using the tools of direct action and bottom up consensual organization to build independence of, and opposition to authoritarian structures. See my Libertarians Are Left discussion from Alternatives Expo for elaboration.

Certainly the meanings of words change over time, and labels should be used for facilitating communication, not locking communication in the chains of dogma. To communicate better it is helpful to look deeper at what is being said – especially noting contradictions and inconsistencies. This will help us present ideas as accurately as possible, and have an understanding what others are trying to say. So while we shouldn’t use labels to make ourselves more insular (I advocate reaching out to right and left), they can be useful in understanding the optimal ways to communicate, network, and build.

See also Charles “Rad Geek” Johnson, Kevin Carson, Roderick T. Long, Sheldon Richman, and The Alliance of the Libertarian Left.

[Update June-10-2010: Today I received an email from a Washington State Libertarian Party member saying that the chart was part of a brochure to be used in Libertarian Party outreach. They are sold at TheLibertySource.com.]

WikiLeaks recently posted a video showing a US military helicopter fire on over a dozen individuals. The helicopter crew appears to believe that some of the individuals were carrying weapons. When a van stops and its driver attempts to carry some of the wounded away, the helicopter crew shoots into the van until there is no more movement. Two young children are seriously wounded. The US government tried to keep the video from being viewed by the public since the 2007 killings.

View the video at WikiLeaks.

I didn’t post a link to my Center for a Stateless Society commentary last week. In Health Care Anger, Anarchist Solutions, I described how potentially violent power struggles can be defused by ceasing to struggle for power over people:

Consistent libertarian thought offers a clear path out of the conflicts that occur when people struggle to rule over each other.

Governments, or factions within governments, fight over who, what, and where they are to exert their authority. When these turf battles get serious, words like “war” are used.

My March feature article examines What the State is Made Of:

The state is an organization through which some people exercise political authority – coercive power with a claim of legitimacy – against other people.

A state is said to have the right to do things that ordinary individuals do not have the right to do. The state is conferred the right to rule over individuals. It works to control life in order to safeguard or expand the power of the people in charge and the powerful interests they answer to. Individuals may not opt out of state demands without being subject to legal sanctions (unless state agents find the cost of enforcing an individual infraction too high for the perceived benefit).

My latest commentary describes how A Free Society Would Have Safer Subways:

The recent Moscow subway bombings brought out the only response the state could make – more cops, harder crackdowns, and tougher talk. But what if there was another way?