no third solution

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Category Archives: Left Libertarian

Free Immigration is About Compassion

March 30th, 2009

Each year, there are millions of people who for one reason or another decide to leave their banana-republic homelands in search of greener pastures. Maybe they can’t find employment, they aren’t safe from bandits or warlords, perhaps their homeland is torn by civil war. In one manner or another, their governments have utterly failed them.

And so they leave.

They quickly learn that they’re not allowed to go anywhere else — at least not for the purposes (i.e., work) they had in mind.  If they “succeed” at crossing unfriendly borders, they’ll likely work for what most Americans would consider less-than-subsistence wages, in conditions that are far from tolerable.

For suffering these injustices they will be villainized, accused of “stealing our jobs.”  (Ironically, if you’re a businessman operating in one of these countries, you’re villainized for “sending jobs overseas,” accused of exploiting the poor and/or depriving good white people your countrymen of employment.)

If caught, they’ll be told, “There’s no room for you, here. Go back to your own country, and if you want to come back here, do it the right way.” Whatever that means.

The “right way” is designed to keep “them” out.

Since only exploiters benefit from restrictive immigration laws (as only exploiters can benefit from slavery), only the exploiters are harmed by free immigration: only those who have been extracting economic rents as a result of the violent oppression of the non-native poor.

Do you want to continue exploiting, continue hurting people?  Or do you want to give them a chance at human dignity?  If you care about the poor, hell, if you care about your own well-being, then you’ve got to have some compassion for those people in the world who have far less than you, they love your freedom, too.

Can you blame them for wanting a tiny piece of it?

Buying Locally: It’s NOT About Autarky

March 18th, 2009

I was reminded recently of an old post at the Mises blog, in which Art Carden criticizes the idea of buying locally.

Buy local is, at its logical limit, a prescription for poverty and starvation… [It] may be good for some local farmers and it may soothe the conscience of the social progressive, but the longer-run, hidden consequences will be undesirable and injurious.

Carden objects to the “buy local” philosophy as economically wasteful, and given incomplete and short-sighted analysis, this certainly appears to be the case. Following Hazlitt’s suggestion that, when evaluating an economic prescription, it’s imperative to trace “the effect of any policy to all groups rather than its effect on specialized interests,” Carden’s argument makes a strong appeal to our sense of economics, but ultimately does not go far enough in heeding this sage advice.

Properly understood (which is not to say that a great deal of “buy local” proponents don’t understand things properly!), the argument is not a call to Autarky. To be fair, I believe that there are tremendous benefits to both trade and the division of labor. What I contest, however, is the assumption which Carden (knowingly or not) smuggled into the argument: the current division of labor is a close enough approximation of universally preferable methods, policies, and behaviors — as such its own structure warrants no further consideration.

Fréderic Bastiat would ask that we examine ce qui l’on ne voit pas, that which is not seen.

To the extent that government subsidizes huge agribusinesses (cf. Archer Daniels Midland, the most prominent recipient of corporate welfare prior to teh $7.4 Trillion bailout of 2008-09), shields companies with limited liability laws (OK, this is a subject of debate among libertarians), manipulates the market for capital and credit through inflationary monetary policy, etc., we’re certainly not talking about anything even approaching a free market. In light of these (and myriad other examples of distortion and misallocation), at the very least, Carden’s argument which assumes that any deviation from the current division of labor would be economically wasteful, does not pass the smell test.

In the West, a lot of people favor the allegedly “free market”, primarily because it “works” for us. That’s what we see. What we don’t see is exactly how widespread some of these manipulations reach. But it’s responsible for keeping a substantial majority of the world’s nations impoverished, her people indebted. Even at home, the problems are only hidden from view, if we refuse to look.

  • Generations of government interference, regulation, “deregulation”, reregulation, etc., have incentivized urban sprawl to the detriment of sustainable communities (after all, who needs to care genuinely about his community, if he’s able to move to a slightly further suburb or ex-burb as soon as his neighborhood starts to take a turn for the worse?).
  • Decades of landmark financial regulations, each one of which was designed to prevent another calamity, and each one of which was ultimately an epic fail in its own right!
  • Subsidies for auto companies that spent the better part of a century fleecing the public with planned obsolescence and strongarm tactics to keep better, cheaper, and more fuel-efficient foreign cars off the market.
  • Your tax dollars (or your children’s tax dollars) siphoned back in to the very same banking industry that might well have begun the end of the world as we know it.

Ce qui l’on ne voit pas.

Sure, a lot of the people who advocate “buying local” are economically misguided, but many of them aren’t, and ignoring the root of the problem, tilting at straw men isn’t going to make things any better. Arguments like Carden’s, in my opinion, are more likely to marginalize any honest analysis that seeks to address the root causes.

Communism vs. Agorism

March 10th, 2009

The reason communism is bound to fail is because all of its serious proponents believe in some variant of the Internationale, which is to say, they accept the argument that communism can not succeed in competition because of the “inconsistencies” in the extra-communist systems. This is a crybaby loser argument, which is embarrassing, but not harmful.

Unfortunately, it’s often the back-door through which some proponents smuggle a justification for violence.

Many people say that “communism isn’t violent”, but that doesn’t stop them from rationalizing violent revolution in order to achieve it. They may argue that history has proven it impossible to establish communism without a revolution, but once the chains of oppression have been cast away (a justifiable retaliation, IMO), once the exploiters have been vanquished, there should be no more violence. One problem is determining exactly who is an exploiter, and who has been exploited. Communists just use a lot of colorful language to describe those who disagree with them as “exploiters” or “bourgeois”.

This is problematic in its own La Terreur-like manner. In the history of the world, many otherwise justifiable revolutions have devolved into gross miscarriages of justice in the end.

More important though, especially at the Internationale level, is the question of how such a rule is maintained. This is likely going to be a violent process. Consider the person doesn’t believe in teh communism, how will he be treated? What if it is a group of men that don’t believe in teh communism? Maybe they form an alternative “commune” somewhere — a competing commune, if you will. What about them?

  • Are they allowed to “own” and work their land?
  • Will they be allowed to trade with the communists, if any are willing?
  • Will they be systematically shunned and persecuted?
  • Will they be attacked as a “threat” to the communist way of life?

If these men, unwilling to acquiesce, are in-fact the cause of those “external inconsistencies” which have hitherto caused communism to fail, I see no reason why a consistent communist wouldn’t propose their extermination. Real-world examples of socialism often (always) won’t even let their captives leave.  This is violence, and it is ultimately this violence which is the most damning element of communism, as it is for Statism alike: both of them view my mere existence as a threat to their own, and they are willing to kill me in order to keep me from realizing freedom.

Communism says, in effect, “Our goal is impossible unless everyone agrees, and we’re willing to kill you to if you disagree with us.” (Interestingly enough, many communists favor some form of rule by the popular tyranny of democracy to deal with disagreements.) Agorism says, “We’re going to do this, no matter WTF you do, and for the most part we’re not worried about you, because you don’t even know who we are.”

Communism coerces a “community” by casting out dissidents. Agorism creates a community between individuals on the basis of mutual aid, mutual trust, and cooperation. The term “comrade” is applied to everyone as co-equals, in order to instill confidence. An agorist’s word and reputation are his bond.

Communists believe that a world of abundance can be created, if only nobody owns anything, and all things are “free”. Agorists understand that the only people who believe in the metaphysical impossibility of “everything is free!” are those who are unwilling to work in order to provide for themselves. Communism abhors the black market, where people engage in mutually beneficial trades that hurt nobody. The black market, or the shadow economy is an integral part of practical agorism.

Of all “revolutionary” ideologies, Agorism has the greatest chance of success because its proponents accept piecemeal victories, but primarily because agorists don’t succumb to the same loser-mentality as other econo-political ideologies.

Also, communists can’t calculate.communism p4wnt

no third solution

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