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Tag Archives | Anarchy
No Rights For Anarchists
Is this blog banned in Russia?
I’m not sure. But a friend of mine who’s currently in Kyrgyzstan, connecting to the internet through a Russian server, says he can’t access my blog. Of course it might just be a technical glitch. But maybe Putin is really, really averse to Doctor Who spoilers.
Closer to home, here in the u.s. of a. it turns out that being a “known and admitted anarchist” is grounds for denying someone’s request under the Freedom of Information Act. (CHT François T.)
My favourite bit: the authorities want the information they inadvertently released to be “returned.” I recall a similar request being made of Wikileaks. Our rulers don’t even grasp the concept of information.
Anarchy in DC
The Molinari Society will be holding its eighth annual Symposium (or seventh or ninth, depending on how one counts; let’s just say our Year 8 Symposium) in conjunction with the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association in Mordor, I mean Washington DC, December 27-30, 2011. Here’s the latest schedule info:
Molinari Society symposium:
“Explorations in Philosophical Anarchy”
Marriott Wardman Park Hotel, 2660 Woodley Road NW
Day & room TBA
chair: Elizabeth Brake (Arizona State University)
presenters:
Kevin Vallier (Brown University / Bowling Green State University),
“The Eligibility of a Polycentric Constitution”
Eli Dourado (George Mason University),
“Anarchy and Equilibrium: When Is Statelessness Stable?”commentators:
Nina Brewer-Davis (Auburn University)
Roderick T. Long (Auburn University)
Jon Mahoney (Kansas State University)
Charles Johnson (Molinari Institute)
We’ve requested a three-hour session to leave time for all the commentators.
In related news, we’ll be announcing the call for papers for our 2012 Pacific APA session shortly.
Imagine No Taxation
The following letter appeared in today’s Opelika-Auburn News:
To the Editor:
Charlotte Ward asks us to imagine a world without taxes. (“Don’t like taxes? Imagine a world without these services,” Tuesday.)
Okay, let’s try. What would it be like?
True, the government wouldn’t be able to provide its services any more. But it also would no longer be able to forbid competitors from offering such services non-coercively. With formerly governmental services no longer insulated from market competition, their quality would rise and their prices would fall.
Government would also no longer be able to rig markets in favor of the corporate elite and against the poor and middle class. Most governmental redistribution is from the less to the more affluent, not vice versa. Getting rid of taxation and the plutocratic policies it supports would eliminate the chief cause of poverty.
Gone too would be the ability to enforce laws against “lodge practice” – laws that deprive the poor of low-cost health care in order to enrich the medical establishment. That one change would do far more for health care than either the liberals’ state-run solution or the conservatives’ corporate-run system.
Oppressive policies like harassing immigrants [deleted by the newspaper: and downloaders] and pot smokers, or bombing Pakistani children, would be unsustainable in a freed market. And police brutality would be a lot harder to maintain if security services were competitive.
Liberals claim to be advocates for the disadvantaged, but all too often support regulations that entrench established interests and make it impossible for the poor to compete.
Conservatives claim to oppose big government, but in practice support corporate welfare, anti-union laws, intrusions into personal liberties, a bloated military-industrial complex, and grants of monopoly privilege and cronyism cloaked in the language of “deregulation” and “privatization.”
And taxation makes all this possible.
To learn more, check out the websites of the Center for a Stateless Society and the Alliance of the Libertarian Left.
Roderick T. Long
That’s Anarchy!
The show I always enjoy watching when I accidentally catch it, but always forget to make a point of watching:
The Atrocity of Hope, Part 15: Toward a New Radicalism
Chris Hedges on corporate liberalism:
The pillars of the liberal establishment – the press, the church, culture, the university, labor and the Democratic Party – all honor an unwritten quid pro quo with corporations and the power elite, as well as our masters of war, on whom they depend for money, access and positions of influence. …
By extolling the power of the state as an agent of change, as well as measuring human progress through the advances of science, technology and consumption, liberals abetted the cult of the self and the ascendancy of the corporate state. …
The state, now the repository of the hopes and dreams of the liberal class, should always have been seen as the enemy. The destruction of the old radical and militant movements – the communists, socialists and anarchists – has left liberals without a source of new ideas. …
The liberal class, by allowing radical movements to be dismembered through Red baiting and by banishing those within its ranks who had moral autonomy, gradually deformed basic liberal tenets to support unfettered capitalism, the national security state, globalization and permanent war. Liberalism, cut off from the radical roots of creative and bold thought, merged completely with the corporate power elite. The liberal class at once was betrayed and betrayed itself. And it now functions like a commercial brand, giving a different flavor, face or spin to the ruthless mechanisms of corporate power. This, indeed, is the primary function of Barack Obama ….
To accept that Obama is, as West said, a mascot for Wall Street means having to challenge some frightening monoliths of power and give up the comfortable illusion that the Democratic Party or liberal institutions can be instruments for genuine reform. It means having to step outside the mainstream. It means a new radicalism. It means recognizing that there is no hope for a correction or a reversal within the formal systems of power. It means defying traditional systems of power. And liberals, who have become courtiers to the corporate state, must attempt to silence all those who condemn the ruthlessness and mendacity of these systems of destruction. …
(Celý piroh. CHT Gary Chartier.)
Money quote: “The state … should always have been seen as the enemy.”