In a recent exploration of what it means to “strike the root” I pointed out that my battle lines are between individuals and institutions rather than the more “libertarian” framing of its struggle as the battle between the private and public sectors. My beef is not with narrowly-defined “aggression,” but with something more broadly-defined, and I’m not sure just what to call it. “Assertiveness” might be a little too broad (but only a little). My best single-word answer so far is “ascendancy.” I think much of the hobgoblinry over internal consistency, and also over narrow definitions, while useful as a tool for ferreting out illogic, can also be a tool for constructing rhetorical traps, or constructing a framework which substantially defends the status quo. I freely admit that I believe the difference between persuasion and force is more one of degree than one of kind. Maybe my sliding-scale understanding of freedom is a slippery slope, but it seems plainly obvious to me that under assumption of formal rather than substantive equality, some people are not only more equal than others, but more free than others. My own hedge against bullshit relies less on rigid definitions and more on the assumption that de facto matters matter, while de jure ones (mere formalities) do not. Equality to me is not some formalism such as equality of opportunity or equality under the law. It’s, among other things, ethological equality. It is treating others as your equal, which means behaving like a parrot and not like a primate, even when you are a primate. It means putting the most into holding your head high precisely when it is most discouraged. And perhaps hanging your head low when holding it high is least discouraged. At its best, of course, it means refusing such contests altogether, but one must confront the world as it is. Being a primate, behaving like a parrot takes real effort. This is also why I regard anarchism not as narrowly-defined anti-statism (a highly anti-egalitarian and reactionary view, in my view) or even diffuse anti-authoritarianism (although that impulse at least is authentic), but at its core, the rejection of human-nature essentialism. Between the classic conservative position that human nature is essentially vicious and the classic liberal position that we’re essentially selfish, of course liberalism is the lesser of two evils, but Evil itself is problematic. The quest for value-free science, while it was laudable in an earlier time when the main enemy to freedom was the Church, has become a source of pat excuses for social darwinism. Time to throw it out with the bathwater. That’s all for now.

“In the far future, when science rules the world and religion is dead, time travelers will come back to scan the brains of the atheists of the past at their moments of death and recreate them in new immortal bodies in the future. Those annoyingly preachy religious folks will be left behind and stay dead. Stop believing now if you want to live forever.”—Chuck1863

“The Puritan presumption that ‘the devil makes work for idle hands’ is not just repressive, but also completely misdescribes human nature and culture at the start of this century.”—Pat Kane, quoted by Jack Saturday

“People deserve the benefit of the doubt. Institutions do not. And the more powerful the institution, the more important it is to challenge it and hold it to scrutiny.”—Marja Erwin

“But are people’s wants really infinite? ‘Infinite’ is the word they actually use in the textbooks. If literally interpreted, it would mean that everybody desires to obtain the whole universe. Which is absurd.”—Adam Buick

Justin Oliver at Who Plans Whom? (a question based on what I consider a false dichotomy) comments on Making Liberty Popular, by which he seems to mean making property rights popular with the unpropertied classes. He raises concerns such as “I think those politically moderate Republicans have a valid concern that their party could run the risk of prompting a backlash from voters,” and “That is why advocates of liberty need to think strategically to appreciate how alleged pro-liberty reforms could injure the most vulnerable in society, making genuine reforms to advance liberty seem callous and lacking in empathy.” There is an emphasis on perception here, as if the purpose is to give the “pro-liberty right” public relations advice. Oliver reaches a conclusion that addresses not image but substance: “I think popular actions would be to target those prior acts of intervention that make the secondary regulations appear necessary. Rather than hacking at the branches, which have unintended consequences of their own, of government intervention, we can spend our resources striking at the root in principled and still politically popular ways.”

The trouble with the root striking metaphor is that the root is always the state. I draw the battle lines between individuals and institutions, not private and public, so for me the root is “hierarchy in the abstract,” which could be something as subtle or subliminal as someone speaking or carrying themself in a way that conveys dominance. Striking it, to me, means constantly fighting every habit, imprint and possible genetic tendency of domestication to communicate in every way I can that I regard everyone I meet as an absolute equal.

Now I’m aware that right-wing libertarians see harm in those parts of the regulatory bureucracy that affect the little people; mostly licensing and zoning. What they do with that awareness, for the most part, is hit us bleeding hearts over the head with the “fact” that their philosophy is better than our philosophy for achieving our objectives. The implication being “why don’t you just give up already and concede that markets are what works?” Would it kill these small-government conservatives who increasingly call themselves libertarians to spend the next few decades focusing on the petty local tyrannies that are the perimeter lines of defense for business insiderdom, perhaps even at the expense of the struggle against the maze of federal agency regulations? The long-standing alliance/overlap between small-government conservatives and the cause of “states’ rights” would suggest not. But there is hope. One organization that has attracted my attention (and some begrudging admiration, in spite of the Tea Party tone) is F.A.C.E.OFF. (Fight Against Code Enforcement OFFice). Stylistically they are very right-of-center, with their central issue framed as “property rights” and their bogeymen including what they call “green goons,” which definitely alienates me, as my conflict with local authority is more “food not lawns” than “buildings not wetlands,” plus I’m queer, trans and agnostic and a social anticonservative all around, and I don’t have a track record of getting along well with the people who rally around symbols such as muscular eagle depictions, the “clean-cut salesman” look that so many evangelicals seem to have, and the  Gadsden flag which has recently become fashionable among Tea Party groups. But I give the F.A.C.E.OFF. group kudos for seeing that sometimes the most abusive forms of authority are at the local level. There is nothing anti-authoritarian about decentralization of authority, and of course there is nothing anti-statist about “states rights.”

“The American Centrists have detached ‘legitimacy’ from its supposed grounding in consent and now use ‘legitimacy’ to support secrecy which makes consent impossible.”—Marja Erwin

“I’m so tired of having to explain how the education I provide leads to employment. It leads to many other things, too. Work is important but it isn’t like we only exist to work.”—Clarissa

“ALEC is to politics as genetic engineering is to selective breeding.”—Poor Richard

“The notion that politics and economics are separate realms is a fiction.”—cholte

“Unfortunately, this libertarian willingness to generalize about the organization of governments as thinly disguised protection rackets does not extend to the necessary and inevitable concentration of power, wealth and bad faith in those successor organizations which would follow the collapse of the state-as-Leviathan.”—Jack Crow

“Politics does not have power. Politics serves power.”—Simon Critchley

“Still, after the man had left, the mothers who had sold their children felt empty and sad. They felt as if this act, done freely by themselves (no one had forced them, no one had threatened them) had not been performed willingly. They felt cheated as well, as if the price had been too low. Why hadn’t they demanded more? And yet, the mothers told themselves, they’d had no choice.”—Margaret Atwood, in Oryx and Crake

“We” perceive them as friendly yet entrepreneurial, and admire their dexterity on the tight rope.  We hope they appreciate our facility with suspension of disbelief.  🙂

See http://aaeblog.com/2009/07/13/parallax-view/

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As long as competition is a prerequisite for work, then what you are defending is not a work ethic but a competition ethic.  For the unfortunate fact that competition is a prerequisite for work, I blame the market, not the state, though the latter is to blame for plenty of considerably more serious atrocities.  If you want to castigate people for not being winners, you’re entitled to your sick and twisted opinion, but please don’t advertise it as castigating people for not being workers.

“To those of us outside the movement, the fact that libertarians are a proxy army has always been painfully obvious. The key piece of evidence was always the set of issues that libertarians chose to emphasize.”—Noah Smith

“I know it’s difficult for Mitch [McConnell] to believe, but some people work for companies they don’t believe in, that they don’t even like, because they need the paycheck.”—Brittany-Ann Wick

“It never shocks me to see that the pro-business, pro-free market [sic] crowd always makes out like businesses and markets are so inflexible that the slightest bit of change will cause the entire thing collapse and burn.”—Eric B.

“Decentralization’s great weakness is that there’s no guarantee that valuable information which is uncovered in one part of the system will find its way through the rest of the system. Sometimes valuable information never gets disseminated.”—Derek Sivers

“The idea that we either have a fully centrally planned economy or one that is entirely left up to market forces is a naive, even child-like one, but it’s currently the most fashionable political philosophy.”—Eric B.

“Since you must work, and everybody else must too, you are constantly forced to compete against others. You compete for paid work you could do; more general, you compete trying to sell commodities (your labor power is one of them) while others try the same. It may be less apparent that this situation will always produce winners (who find paid work) and losers (who don’t), since it might seem that there could miraculously be enough paid work for everybody, but such a scenario would indeed be ‘miraculous’ and has always been very far from reality.”—Christian Siefkes