An Introduction: Welcome Crooks & Liars Readers
Posted: September 7, 2012 Filed under: Personal, Politics | Tags: #OccupyWallStreet, anarcho-capitalism, Burt Worm, Crooks & Liars, Democratic Underground, John Perr, justice, Libertarianism, Ron Paul, Tragic Farce, zombie Leave a comment »Thanks to John Perr over at Crooks & Liars for rounding my last post up along with Nevada Progressive, Kevin Drum and The Political Carnival. I’m flattered and honored to be included in such distinguished company.
Some of you may have encountered me before over at Democratic Underground, where I went by the handle Burt Worm. For the rest of you, I’ve been keeping this blog for a little over a year, sometimes with more attentiveness than others. If you look at the word cloud down the right margin a ways, you’ll get an idea of my interests. As of today, #OccupyWallStreet is still my most covered topic (tangentially, usually, these days anyway). But I also obsess over Ron Paul, libertarianism and “anarcho”-capitalism because the ideas at the heart of their philosophies, which I tend to argue with, I think are essential for understanding what’s going on in the US and the world today. I’ve also been a bit obsessed with justice lately. And I won’t even mention my dabbling in theories about the face-eating Miami “zombie.”
I hope you’ll have a little look around the joint, and if you like what you see, you’ll come back and engage with me here. Otherwise, maybe I’ll be seeing you on Twitter.
Ron Paul’s Racist Backers (and Backstory)
Posted: February 29, 2012 Filed under: Election 2012, Politics | Tags: anarcho-capitalism, Civil Rights, Freedom, Friederich Hayek, herrnaphta, Libertarianism, Ludwig von Mises, Murray Rothbard, Race, Republicans, Ron Paul Leave a comment »
Michael McAuliffe at Huffington Post reports on some sizable donations in Ron Paul’s campaign war chest from the sorts of racist fringe dwellers the notorious Ron Paul newsletters of the early 1990s were designed to appeal to:
Paul’s 2012 campaign has received more than $6,000 from people who have identified themselves as white separatists or supremacists, or who are listed on anti-hate group sites such as the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Two prominent donors are leaders in what may be the most ambitious white nationalist political movement in the U.S., American Third Position. One is William Johnson, the group’s chairman. Another is Virginia Abernethy, a former Vanderbilt professor who is listed as a director of the party.
Abernethy has given Paul at least $2,451 for this election. Johnson has donated at least $3.349.
…
Most presidential campaigns reject what they regard as money from tainted sources. Paul has not done that, even though Abernethy and Johnson are well known for their views and Paul has encountered Johnson before.
It doesn’t look as though Paul will be gaining any more traction as a Republican. He’s got his solid fan base in the party, which doesn’t seem able to grow or shrink or bear any sign of sensitivity to the currents of the primary race. So, unless the anti-Romney contingent decides to throw over Santorum and Gingrich finally, this news is likely to have zero impact either way. And the way things are in the GOP, it would likely be more of a reason to move toward Paul than away from him, if only because Republican rank-and-filers love to side with anyone under attack from the “liberal media” for being too outrageously right-wing.
We have a hint as to how Paul intends to handle this, according to McAuliffe. Read the rest of this entry »
Must Read: David Graeber’s “Debt: The First 5,000 Years”
Posted: December 12, 2011 Filed under: Books, Economics, Politics | Tags: #OccupyWallStreet, Anarchism, anarcho-capitalism, David Graeber, debt, Freedom, property, revolution 2 Comments »
I’m reading a book that is so good, so well-written, so relevant to the zeitgeist, that I can confidently recommend it to anyone who reads, though I’m just a bit more than halfway through it myself: Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber.
Before I tell you why you should go now and buy, borrow or reserve this book and get reading, I’ll call your attention to an interview Graeber gave the British magazine The White Room which gives an interesting peek into his background and main political ideas. Graeber, a well-respected anthropologist, is becoming better known as one of the influencing thinkers behind #occupyWallStreet. A couple of sentences from the introduction of the White Room interview beautifully make a point about OWS that I less successfully try to make when people criticize its “fuzziness” and lack of demands:
…Graeber has put the spotlight on the anarchist principles of the Occupy movement, explaining that the lack of concrete demands is part of a pre-figurative politics. The protestors act as though they are ‘already living in a free society’, and thus refuse to accept the legitimacy of existing political institutions and legal order – both of which, he says, are immediately recognised in the placing of demands. Read the rest of this entry »
Anarchism, Capitalism and Human Rights: A Discussion
Posted: August 11, 2011 Filed under: Economics, Politics | Tags: Anarchism, anarcho-capitalism, capitalism, Freedom, government, justice, Libertarianism, property, Rights Leave a comment »There’s a lively little discussion going on in the comments for this post. Here’s a little sample: Read the rest of this entry »
Is Government Property Always Unjust?
Posted: August 9, 2011 Filed under: Politics | Tags: Anarchism, anarcho-capitalism, capitalism, Freedom, government, justice, Libertarianism, property, Rights, Ron Paul, socialism 1 Comment »
I want to spend a little more time on the notion in Paul’s third principle that “justly acquired property” is “privately owned,” which implies that government (or public) property can only be unjustly acquired. I suspect the primary libertarian principle at work here is “taxation is theft,” a right-wing perversion (or theft, if you will) of Proudhon’s original libertarian socialist principle that “property is theft.”
It seems to me a bit sneaky of Paul not to put his cards flat on the table and admit that that is precisely his meaning here, if that is his meaning. Of course it would open him wide up to the charge of supreme hypocrisy for having accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars over the years of “unjustly acquired” income as a representative to the Congress from his district in Texas. Read the rest of this entry »
Fruits of One’s Labor: Possession and Property, Use and Usury
Posted: July 21, 2011 Filed under: Economics, Politics | Tags: Anarchism, anarcho-capitalism, capitalism, Freedom, Libertarianism, possession, property, socialism, use, usury, value, worth 2 Comments »
Jan C, a self-described “prioritarian” and “voluntaryist” (new terms on me, I confess) who inspired the previous post, opened another can of worms in his comments that I’d like to look into more deeply. He was responding to this assertion of mine:
“The difference between possession and private property in real anarchism, is the difference between use and usury. Real anarchists believe that what a person uses, a person possesses”
He asked:
So if you don’t use ‘your’ hammer, I can pick up and walk away with it?
I really don’t understand you people. If you’ve worked your ass of and got something for it in return (money, or goods), than you simply own it, and that means you can do with it whatever you like (either use it, trade it, give it away or destroy it). How can anybody not agree with that?
I do see that there are grey area’s. What constitutes property is not always clear-cut in every case. But I find ‘fruits of labour’ a much better rule of thumb than ‘use’. Read the rest of this entry »
The Commons and Individual Rights
Posted: July 20, 2011 Filed under: Economics, Politics | Tags: Anarchism, anarcho-capitalism, Freedom, government, Libertarianism, Rights, rights of the individual, rights of the society, slavery, the commons 5 Comments »
I received an interesting comment from Jan C on the previous post which I’d like to respond to in part here. There’s a lot to unpack in Jan’s comment, so I may take another post to elaborate on the question of “property” vs. “possession” and “use” vs. “usury.” But here I want to address a crucial point Jan made about “the commons” and “the individual.”
Read the rest of this entry »
“Anarcho”-Capitalism: The Boss’s and Landlord’s Paradise
Posted: July 18, 2011 Filed under: Economics, Politics | Tags: Anarchism, anarcho-capitalism, Freedom, government, jobs, Libertarianism, possession, private law, privatization, Rights, rights of the individual, rights of the society, Ron Paul, use, usufruct, usury 6 Comments »
Continuing the discussion I began here and continued here, in this installment, I present for your consideration more of the debate I participated in nearly a decade ago over the inherent contradiction in the term “anarcho”-capitalism.
I should say a little more about why this debate remains relevant. If you listen to the rhetoric of some of the “intellectuals” in the Republican party, you will hear echoes of “anarcho”-capitalism’s sacred principles: private property is a natural right; the state is an impediment to freedom; taxation is theft; freedom to associate with persons of one’s choosing is a natural right. Ron Paul‘s Ten Principles of a Free Society almost reads like a Ten Commandments for anarchos. It’s not surprising given that Paul is a Libertarian and “anarcho”-capitalism is also a product of Libertarian philosophizing, is, in fact, Libertarianism taken over the side of the slippery slope. Paul and his son Rand are far from the only Libertarianism-espousing politicians in power. One other very powerful Libertarian in the Republican party is Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan, whose budget aims to dump social welfare programs from the government’s repertoire of services for the citizenry. These ideas are as close as they’ve ever been to America’s power center. Are we all comfortable with that? Read the rest of this entry »
“Anarcho”-Capitalism (Proprietarianism) vs. Real Libertarian Anarchism
Posted: July 15, 2011 Filed under: Economics, Politics | Tags: Anarchism, anarcho-capitalism, capitalism, debt ceiling, deficit, Entitlements, equality, Freedom, government, jobs, justice, Libertarianism, privatization, Rights, rights of the individual, rights of the society, socialism, taxes 14 Comments »
An American's sacred right to property being profaned.
Continuing from my last post, here reproduced are excerpts from the Usenet debates I had in the summer and fall of 2002, mostly, with self-described “anarcho”-capitalists. The original argument concerned “rights” and “freedom,” but it quickly led, as most debates with “anarchos” go, to the question of property. As I mentioned yesterday, these issues, I believe, lie at the very heart of the debates going on presently over the debt-ceiling (actually over revenues vs. spending) in Congress and the media. But you won’t hear our pundits or politicians for the most part bring it down to the very ground it all springs from. Read the rest of this entry »
The “Anarcho”-Capitalist Conundrum
Posted: July 14, 2011 Filed under: Economics, Politics | Tags: Anarchism, anarcho-capitalism, debt ceiling, Democrats, Freedom, government, guns, Libertarianism, private property, privatization, property, republic, Republicans, Rights, rights of the individual, rights of the society, taxes 4 Comments »In the wake of September 11, 2001 and continuing through the lead-up to the Iraq War and into 2003, I was involved in an intense debate on several political Usenet groups (my involvement in political Usenet, actually, goes back to the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal of 1997-1998), in which there was a clique of rabidly right wing libertarians holding forth on what they called “anarcho-capitalism.” Many believe that the only logical conclusion to right libertarianism (and to history, actually) is capitalism completely unfettered by government. In a sense, they’re right (except for the history part): If you think government is bad for business and you think business is the best way to distribute resources, then the best government is no government at all. Of course a lot of Libertarians believe government is necessary to provide for the defense of business interests, but the anarchos would argue that if businesses need to be defended, they should do it themselves. Abolish government, they say, abolish borders, open all the world to capitalism. Let the market determine the value of everything. Read the rest of this entry »
