Freedom vs. Safety

David brin says: “Nobody makes me choose between freedom for my children and their safety!” That’s fighting spirit, and I love it! The idea that there’s a tradeoff between freedom and safety is the basis to all the post-9/11 hysteria and the resulting surveillance state. It’s also a proven strategy for pitting public opinion against ACLU types, let alone anarchists. I’m probably not quite as sold on the idea that there is absolutely no tradeoff between freedom and safety, but I’m so thrilled to see someone refuse to have their ideals pitted against one another, that I too wish to make a “no compromises” statement. Several, in fact.

Liberty vs. Equality

This is the big one. Strict NAPster libertarians of course insist that equality is a prerequisite for liberty, and that libertarian thought endorses egalitarianism—specifically analytical egalitarianism, according to Steven Horwitz, writing for the think tank Foundation for Economic Education:

Too often it is used to mean “equalizing outcomes” by the hand of the State as opposed to treating people equally and accepting that unequal, but just and socially desirable, outcomes will result. Libertarians who rightly defend such inequalities of outcomes need to recognize that those are only possible in a world where the assumption of analytical egalitarianism operates and where the State treats all humans as having equal moral standing and equal capacity for free choice. Equality should not be a dirty word for libertarians since equality of liberty and equality before the law are in our intellectual DNA.

Put another way, equality should not be a dirty word, because equality (like everything else) should be so narrowly defined as to be a formality. Basically the old right-wing canard “equality of opportunity, not of results.” Horwitz is advocating an even narrower understanding of equality, basically “equality at birth.” From that point forward, life is a rat race, and to the victors go the spoils. Like most Americans of my generation, I was raised with the mantra “you can be anything you want when you grow up.” Perhaps a variant on Brin’s statement above is in order: Nobody makes me choose between freedom for my children and their equality with their peers when it comes to life chances! Just to be clear, I think analytical egalitarianism is part of life chances, but access to resources is another part, and social capital is another.

Opportunity vs. Security

Whenever there is Euro-bashing (i.e. social democracy bashing) there is the rhetorical question: Would you rather live in an opportunity society or a security society? Hello? Economic security is a foundation on which economic opportunity is built. The freedom to take entreprenoorial risks often rests on some fall-back position, such as bankruptcy law. I’d rather live in an opportunity and security society.

when compromises must be made

Like I said earlier, I’m not 1,000% convinced that there are no trade-offs. I understand the idea of competing goals, or multiple objectives for optimization. As a matter of principle, we should go to great lengths to verify that whatever compromises we make between our most cherished values are as efficient as possible, that is, and we should always push the envelope and try to expand the envelope when it comes to feasible combinations of these factors.

My fixation on the sacred/profane dichotomy is apparently shared with one Charles Eisenstein.

In the spirit of using plain English definitions, what is the definition of commercial? A TV or radio advertisement, of course. By this yardstick it would be empirically (i.e. behaviorally) demonstrable that a sizeable population harbors an anticommercial attitude. More generically, commercial means “pertaining to commerce.” Lacking a precise understanding of what “commerce” means, I think of commerce as a suite of practices that together comprise the “conduct of business.” The key commercial skill sets, as I see it, are salesmanship, negotiation and other persuasive communication skills. Kind of reminds me of the old ancap slogan “businesses persuade, governments force.” OF COURSE business is the lesser evil here. Far be it from me to deny the obvious. What puts me off about the non-aggression principle is the assumption that one can unambiguously categorize social situations as either coerced or voluntary. I’m simply not capable of believing that the world is that simple.

A good (and I think agorism-friendly) starting point, I think, is the understanding that independence is a prerequisite for freedom. It behooves us to ask what characterizes a portfolio of personal skills sufficient to the task of economic independence, and what does not. I have no quarrel with the idea of division of labor; indeed of its utter necessity. I don’t even fret about the size of the “rainmaker’s cut” unless my cut ends up being a less-than-living wage. The problem is, that’s been the case for most of my adult life. It seems to me that it’s a question of relative prices, which is to say, the price one commodity would go for if the “currency” used to purchase it were another commodity. For the purposes of the rainmaker problem, we’ll call these commodities “production skills” and “promotion skills.” This introvert’s theoretical questions are:

• What is the relative price of promotion skills, measured in production skills? How can it be determined objectively? Does the Iron Law Of One Price apply?
• Since negotiation falls under promotion skills (for the pupose of this probably-flawed analysis, anyway) what strategies other than negotiation exist for getting relatively cheaper promotion?
• How much of the triumph of promotion over production is due to statism?

Surely by now the entreprenoor types are asking, why not simply develop promotional skills? That’s a good question. Every now and then I try to develop these skills; I’d like to think with some success. I must confess that, rightly or wrongly, I associate commercial skills with personality traits that I don’t entirely admire; maybe a certain pushiness, one-upcrittership, willingness as well as ability to “pester” people, etc.

Just as there’s empirical reason to believe that the typical person (let’s assume for the sake of argument that there is such a thing) prefers commercial-free TV (all other things being equal, anyway) the TV commercials themselves suggest that “haggle free” shopping can be a selling point for some. Whether or not this particular market segment is the majority, I don’t know. It’s obviously not everybody, but it’s equally obvious that it’s a great many people. I’m willing to confess that I dream of a haggle-free economy!

Big thank you to Jeremy Weiland for including this blog in the aggregation called leftlibertarian.org. I will try to keep the content worthy. Must confess last night threw in another quotebag due to writer’s block. My sympathies are more with social anarchism than left libertarianism, whose tone strikes me as a mixture of 1% left and 99% libertarianism. I have no quarrels with the libertarian left; as I understand their definition of ‘market’ almost perfectly matches the laissez-faire enthusiasts’ definition of ‘capitalism.’ My definition of capitalism is distinct from both; being simply another word for ‘business.’ My head is 100% on their side, while my heart has qualms with the bulletproof case of both camps to the effect that voluntarism implies agorism—with all that that implies—in particular price signals. The purpose of this blog is the search for end-runs around the Iron Laws of Economics. Lately I’ve been looking mainly at gift economy (gift paradigm as an alternative to exchange paradigm) and extreme transparency (visible hand as an alternative to invisible hand). I’m not sure my content is appropriate in a left libertarian venue, but I can promise to be nice, even when doing the devil’s advocate thing. And I appreciate the analytical acumen of the left libertarians. Those who are closer to my most passionate views, unfortunately tend to be either interested in talking about no subject other than demonstrations, or are hopelessly mystical and therefore speak gibberish. This project is, as much as anything else, an exploration of my own head…

At the Crossroads of Civilization, wiredsisters inform us that “[w]e know, from centuries of observation, that the market economy is basic to human nature.” Unfortunately for my purposes, that article is presented in religious terms. In other words, no attempt is made to challenge the positivists on positive grounds on the inevitability of markets. According to observable human nature, perhaps nothing is more unnatural than equality. In nature social groups are always hierarchical, and in mammals there is most always an alpha male to whom other individuals defer. Parrots may be a partial exception to the rule, in that at least their hierarchies appear to be “tangled,” or nonlinear, but even with them there is still the overall pattern of male dominance. Individualism, like egalitarianism, is unnatural. “Survival of the fittest” contributes to the increase in sophistication of species, not of individuals, which are the sacrificial element in that mode of development.

I find that treating everyone I meet as an equal takes a certain amount of willpower. Maybe that’s just a symptom that I’m more of a nebbish than the average human (and badly in need of some self-directed re-imprinting, perhaps), but dominance and submission does seem to be a more typical dynamic in group behavior. Needless to say, nowhere is my practice of forced equality more risky than in the workplace, which is why I insist that the workplace is a political place, quite independently of the formal construct called the state.

One person credited with bringing psychology into the natural sciences is B. F. Skinner. Is it any coincidence that the popularizer of the naturalistic approach to psychology is the author of a book titled Beyond Freedom and Dignity? I think not. Freedom and dignity (and importantly, equality) entail a relentless struggle against nature; a deliberate effort to do what does not come naturally. Therefore, I announce another component mental widget to add to my worldview-in-progress: unnaturalism. So far, the list of mental widgets reads as follows:

• thick libertarianism
• thick individualism
• thick voluntarism (a.k.a. feasibilism)
• unnaturalism

One of the many unkind side effects of living under a market economy is the fact that everyone is out to sell you something. My pet theory on this is that there is some Iron Law of Economics to the effect that Information Does Not Want To Be Free; so noise will inevitably trump signal. Market economics guarantees that many people will find a market niche only in promotion—salescrittership, marketing and advertising—in a word—spam. In the last three days there seems to have blossomed an epidemic of a form of blogspam they call “referrer spam” here at WordPress. A spambot of this type references its spam (or java exploit or malware or virus) page as the ‘referrer’ in the http headers. The fake referrer page is inevitably wrapped in a shortened URL. A sort of master decoder ring to shortened URL’s is the invaluable LongURL website. Domains associated with the current spamwave include statisticscounters.com, xtrmzone.net, maxfos.com—all of which should be considered spam domains, along with rogue link shortener domains pendek.in and ilnk.me and migre.me.

Via Liberation Frequency:

Government is as unreal, as intangible, as unapproachable as God. Try it, if you don’t believe it. Seek through the legislative halls of America and find, if you can, the Government. In the end you will be doomed to confer with the agent, as before. An agent is usually held accountable to his principals. If you do not know the individuals who voted for you, then you do not know for whom you are acting, nor to whom you are accountable. If any body of persons has delegated to you any authority, the disposal of any right or part of a right (supposing a right to be transferable), you must have received it from the individuals composing that body; and you must have some means of learning who those individuals are, or you cannot know for whom you act, and you are utterly irresponsible as an agent.

Voltairine de Cleyre

I guess this is the unintended [?] consequence of separation of powers. The “government” itself is a diffuse organization with no official, identifiable center, sort of like Al Qaeda. But is this impossibility of identifying agency not also characteristic of the Invisible Hand? The Invisible Hand is said to be an agent, whose actions are the “aggregate” of certain actions of the “individuals composing that body” (or that hand, anyway), but seek through the executive suites of businesses, the day-books of the merchants or even the grocery lists of the millions, and find, if you can, the Invisible Hand. I have always said the Invisible Hand is amoral. Perhaps I should also describe it as irresponsible and unaccountable.

At the intersection of autism and economics there have been some unfortunate choices of terminology. Happily, the people behind that have changed the name of their house organ from “Post-autistic Economic Review” to “Real-World Economic Review.” [A post in a now-defunct blog], tells us the following:

Most stick to their positions, even in the face of intense social pressure, and their values aren’t shaped by financial, social, or political influences.

“Aren’t” sounds like it might be an over-generalization; even something that could be inferred as a guarantee. A flattering stereotype is still a stereotype. I would nevertheless be willing to stick my neck out far enough to suggest that autistic persons, on average, are harder to buy off. This seems counterintuitive given some estimates of an autistic adult unemployment rate north of 90%. If autistic people are under more financial pressure than most people, perhaps it is reasonable to believe they are more likely to be able to be bought off. This may be the case, but somehow it doesn’t seem to be the case. Wondering out loud, could it be that a certain relative guilelessness that might be associated with autistic folk, might be a large contributor to the shocking employment statistics? It seems a reasonable guess that companies choose employees not just for what they’re able to do, but what they’re willing to do. Could it be that having values that “aren’t [generally] shaped by financial, social, or political influences” makes one somewhat unemployable? It raises questions, like what percentage of employed people were hired specifically for what they’re willing to do? What percentage were hired mainly for that tendency, or partially, etc.—and how could one go about empirically testing such a hypothesis?