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Category Archives: Agora!

“Things Could Be Worse”

October 12th, 2009

Stephan responds briefly to a common objection to anarchism:

I get people who tell me “Yes, the government is bad, but look at it this way, things could be worse”. It’s true that I could be living in some other country under conditions that are even worse, but that’s not the point.

Practically none of us desire to see a world that’s a worse place to live in, in fact many of us routinely dig deep, even during tough times, to help out those less fortunate, so why presume that we’d let it become something worse?

This is an objection raised on propaganda: People imagine “things could be worse” because they imagine a world without any of the “good” things which governments provide*. The government builds roads, maintains the police, provides for law and order, ensures the quality of our foods, etc., so without government there would be neither roads, nor police, nor law nor order and we’d all eat naught but poison until we die.

It’s clearly stupid to believe this, but many people do because they’ve been conditioned to believe it, and they’ve never been taught to think for themselves (a reflection on the sorry state of public education, I might add).

They are afraid that things would be worse, without a government to control and influence nearly every aspect of their personal lives**. But this is a very untenable assumption unless one unconditionally supports everything the government has ever done and will ever do. And for the record, “everything” includes “Don’t ask, don’t tell”, housing projects, rent control, restrictions on your rights to peacefully assemble, to bear arms, to speak freely, to love who you want to love, to drive an SUV, whether and what to smoke, to eat organic foods, etc. “Everything” also includes internment camps, apartheid, chattel slavery, civilian massacres, corporate welfare, Agent Orange, trashing the environment, destroying our cities, etc.

People are so preoccupied with the how-bad-things-might-become in the worst-case scenario, that they’ve entirely neglected how bad things actually are.

If you say, “Things could be worse,” I challenge you to instead imagine how things could be better.

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* In the real world, all of the “good things” come at a the expense of something worse: Either these “good things” rely on violence (in order to pay Peter, the government must first rob from Paul) or, due to the law of unintended consequences, inadvertently cause something else undesirable.

** Every intereference in the market, whether tax, subsidy, regulation, or prohibition, ultimately has an effect on the other tradeoffs and decisions we make.

When Is a Recovery Not a Recovery?

October 3rd, 2009

When it’s a jobless recovery, i.e., that fiction by which the Politicians and Fat-Cats pretend that everything is A-OK, in order to trick the rest of us into following their marching orders off the next goddamn cliff, next year or next decade.

But it’s worse than “jobless”, which suggests job neutrality.  In reality, jobs are disappearing.

Last November it was big news when the FT reported[1] that the world’s economies lost 80,000 jobs. Now, we learn that the American economy shed 263,000 jobs in the month of September[2] alone, sending the national unemployment rate close to 10%. Adding insult to injury, people are remaining unemployed longer than ever: more than 50% of them have recently exhausted their public benefits. What happens to these people?

Even though young college graduates with a few years of work experience have suffered the least (so far), they’ve still been relatively hammered over the past year. Ihe unemployment rate among college graduates 25 years old has nearly doubled since 2008, approaching 5% for 2009[3].

Unemployment rates are increasing

If the aggregate unemployment rate for people 25-34 is 10.1%, and college grads are pacing 4.5%, what’s happening to those without a degree?  Do the math: they’re faring far worse.  These people are supposed to be just starting out, but how will they ever get out of their own way when they start with such a severe handicap? They’ll be 26, 27, 28 years old with no relevant work experience. If and when the economy recovers, there will be a new class of college graduates, competing with the classes of 2006 through 2009, who have been diligently pumping gas and waiting tables at TGIFriday’s for the last five years, patiently waiting for an opportunity to toil for the same people now responsible for their collective misfortune.

Fifteen million people want to work (more precisely, they want to earn), but can’t find employment. I’ve previously written that whenever resources are idle and needs are unsatisfied, there is something fundamentally wrong. But it goes beyond fundamentals when this amount of dis-coordination persists for any measurable amount of time. It is evidence that errors have not been corrected, malinvestments have not been liquidated, resources and labor have not been reallocated towards valuable output, etc.  This amount of disequilibrium can only be effected force, suppression, and exploitation.  People aren’t working because they’re not allowed to work.

Economic crises are part of State capitalism.  Crises, their concomitant mass-unemployments, discoordination and idleness of capital resources, are the means by which the power structure is sustained by the few, subjugating the many to lingering fears of total collapse and destitution.  Without widespread economic crises, the hierarchy flattens and power disperses.  Individuals retain their wealth, they retain control of their lives and livelihood.

Now, individuals need to take the power back.  We’ve been waiting for orders our entire lives, and where has it gotten us?

Don’t ask for permission, don’t wait for orders. Take life into your own hands.  As long as there are needs yet unment (and there are), there are jobs that need to be done.  People need to do these jobs.   We can wait for the jobs to come back, or we can create them ourselves.  Withdraw, as much as possible, from the slave economy.  Pay fewer taxes (or none at all).  Ignore stupid regulations. Take care of your neighbor and your neighbors take care of you.  Grow community.

The only sustainable recovery occurs when people no longer fear “the economy”, when people realize that they, in their individual capacities are “the economy”.

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  1. More than 80,000 jobs cut in just five days. (Permalink from FT.com, may no longer be active)

  2. Jobless Report Is Worse Than Expected; Rate Rises to 9.8%

  3. BLS data: Series LNS14027662 – Seasonal unemployment, 25yrs+, BS or higher education, Series LNS14000000 – Seasonal unemployment (Total) [link] and BLS Table A-13 Employment status of the civilian non-institutional population by age, sex, and race.

Hang the Zombieconomy by its Own Rope

September 1st, 2009

Lenin once said that capitalism would ultimately undo itself, because the entrepreneurs would gladly sell the rope with which they would later be hanged; they’d be too busy counting the profits to see the noose tightening around their necks.  Well, somebody is choking right now, but it’s not the “capitalists”.

Instead, like a torture victim, the little guy is being pressed to see just how much he can tolerate, how close they can bring him to the brink of asphyxia… Aside from the obvious swindle, the banks are using trillions of blackmailed dollars, stolen from the people, to strengthen the stranglehold.

Several companies (e.g., Goldman Sachs and American Express) became “bank holding companies” only after the sh*t hit the proverbial fan, for the sole purpose of capitalizing on TARP funds, which they’re now using successfully to buy up the “not too big to fail” banks (the ones that actually failed, or were on the verge of failure) in order to become “too big to fail,” ensuring a limitless source of future bailout funds. And they are now using those stolen funds to earn risk-free profit.

Quoth Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Economy.com, “The oligopoly has tightened.” The Washington Post emphasizes:

Regulators pushed failing mortgage lenders and Wall Street firms into the arms of even bigger banks and handed out billions of dollars to ensure that the deals would go through

In several metropolitan regions, [J.P. Morgan Chase, Bank of America and Wells Fargo] were permitted to take market share beyond what the Department of Justice’s antitrust guidelines typically allow,

Right now the biggest banks in the world are sitting on the biggest stockpiles of “excess” money ever, and the government is paying interest on these reserves.  And why would bankers lend the money to people who might need it, or might be able to put it to good use, (especially in such turbulent times!) when they can instead earn risk-free profit?  Banks do not need to compete for business when the government guarantees their profits and subsidizes their losses.

That risk-free profit is someone else’s loss.  And that “someone else” is you.

This is not an accident, not misfortune, not due to “animal spirits” or any other academic gobbledygook. Economic depressions are built into the system, by design:

[T]he booms and busts of State-capitalism are coordinated. …[T]hey are coordinated in the sense that, failure to coordinate them results in the complete dissolution of State capitalism’s power structure. Business Cycles then, are not so much engineered by policy makers, as they are tolerated as a necessary evil.

— Engineering a Depression: Monetary Policy 101

Because the zombieconomy feeds on the flesh of the living, at some point the torturer has to relax his grip, has to let go.

So they give us—the victims—a brief reprieve, allowing us to catch our collective breaths just long enough to beg for mercy. At which point they will offer to advance us our own labor and our own credit and our own belongings that were stripped from us in our previous attempts to satisfy their new demands (plus interest). Failing to learn from our mistakes and the mistakes of our forefathers, many will likely accept the terms of whatever new bondage they can devise.  History is doomed to repeat.

How much more suffering at their hands will it take to learn the lesson? We do not need them. But like any parasite, they need us.

I used to doubt whether the “capitalists” were stupid enough to sell the rope, but I confess now that I grow less doubtful each day.  Whether the rest of us are wise enough to tie the hangman’s knot, is another story.

We can control our fates if only we stand and take back what’s ours.

no third solution

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