Traditionally, entitlement referred to the condition of the aristocracy, the nobility, the landed gentry; someone with a title. The conservative public relations machine has been very successful at re-branding, in the public mind, safety net programs as “entitlement” programs, or “entitlements” for short. The liberal project started out as an attempt to make sure nobody was entitled to anything; sort of a negative equality to go with their negative liberty. I would say they’ve succeeded mainly at replacing the de jure aristocracy in land with a de facto aristocracy in currency-denominated “wealth.” I myself endorse, at least as an asymptotic goal, post-scarcity, which might be thought of as everyone being entitled to everything. Adopting (for the sake of argument, of course) the rightist credo that “utopia is not an option,” we are stuck with a “pick two” universe; entitlement for some or entitlement for none. Entitlement for some may have something to do with civilization itself, as it may take a certain level of economic surplus to support what might be called a leisure class, and it may take a leisure class to invent handy-dandy tools such as literacy, and maybe some forms of inquiry. This may be reason to believe that civilization (and technology, urbanism, literacy, etc.) are incompatible with anarchy. Be that as it may, the hunter-gatherer lifestyle simply does not appeal to me. I find technology fun as well as useful, and I’m very grateful to have had the opportunity to get educated; while respecting the overall tenor of anti-schooling arguments.

There has been some trickle-down of entitlements, but universalizing of even the most basic entitlements seems to elude the forces of progress as if by an Iron Law of Economics. A “first world” nation can be civilized enough for workers to be entitled to basic protections of labor law, but it seems there’s always a (usually migrant) workforce outside the “labor law system,” which only covers “real jobs;” permanent and/or full-time jobs, and the Central Dictate of Market Economics (even in the freed market, to some extent) is that work itself is a privilege and not a right.

From John Madziarczyk (emphasis mine):

I think that the positive features of socialism need to be emphasized. Folks have criticized socialism as being envy, greed, opposition, and potential tyranny without any real overall goal. To me, socialism, while emphasizing equality of condition, is also about the freeing of people to pursue self-realization on a mass scale. It’s about making it possible for individuals and groups to test the outer limits of creativity through liberating them to exercise their minds and their decision making power on all levels of life, through mass democratic participation. This participation will be able to constitute a true co-creation of society. In order for this to occur, society has to become a true commonwealth where all people share in the wealth created by the whole. To become a true commonwealth a socialist revolution of some sort is needed. Measures passed by government under popular pressure can bring us closer to a revolutionary situation, and can help a great number of people, but ultimately there has to be a decisive break with the present society and the replacement of the old by the new. The division of labor has to be destroyed, the domination of society by the rich overthrown, and the control of capital vested in society as a whole as opposed to private hands. Destroying the present division of labor in society, which is the foundation of the various classes in society, entails a restructuring of work on a basic level. Through these means it will be possible to chart a new course into uncharted territory with respect to art, culture, technology, and social institutions as a whole.

There does seem to be a “noble” side of nobility, and it’s a crying shame that certain luxuries are not available to every human being.

Regular readers of this blog probably know that I consider business people to be an elite subset of the population, and that I include small business in this characterization. Even the low-income or insolvent among the self-employed I regard with what can only honestly be called a certain amount of envy. I envy their independence, and I suspect that differences in independence, like differences in social rank, income, wealth and political power, can be the feedstock for hierarchies. Often people associated with family businesses talk (sometimes brag) about having worked long hours at age 7, 8, 9 etc. Sometimes this is presented as a sacrifice, sometimes as a learning experience; almost never as a privilege. Given that calls for privilege-checking are getting a bad rap from those (including some in the left) who like ridiculing political correctness, I’ll back off on any such assertion. I’ll simply say that it would seem such experiences might translate into some social and economic advantages, along with perhaps some possible disadvantages.

The legacy of a family with entrepreneurial roots goes well beyond the family business and other assets, into what must include social capital. At least as common as stories of the accomplishments of people from business families are stories of immigrants who arrived propertyless and pulled themselves up from their bootstraps. One approach to redistribution of family social capital comes from Slapstick by Kurt Vonnegut, basically in the form of a government policy assigning people to extended families. Government policy, of course, is not legitimately part of the anarchist tool-chest, but perhaps there are even better alternatives. The Anarchy and Society blog informs us:

If one’s comrades know whom to contact from other communities, this is valuable information in the search for allies and broader solidarity. Most importantly, anarchist networks are premised upon the free access to information, whether it is mere data, facts, analysis, ideas, or theory. Consequently, anarchists place an emphasis on lowering the cost to information (via free ‘zines, leaflets, internet essay archives, or guerrilla radio programs), the democratic creation of movement analyses (such as with the Independent Media Center model), and mass distribution of news (for example, the A-Infos News Service and accompanying free radio project). To the extent that these information channels permeate every sector of the anarchist movement, the more likely participants will be highly-engaged in important movement debates and theorizing, will have up-to-date understanding of current events and movement activity, and will feel a sense of unity with each other. The quality of information people can acquire in these networks will determine the level of social capital and thus influence the potential of movement personnel’s ability to achieve their goals. Movements can aspire to accomplish their goals by wielding information as a tool to combat ignorance, confusion, censorship, and seclusion.

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.