When Hurricane Katrina struck in 2005, one victim was political scientist Daniel Aldrich. He had just moved to New Orleans. Late one August night, there was a knock on the door.

“It was a neighbor who knew that we had no idea of the realities of the Gulf Coast life,” said Aldrich, who is now a political scientist at Purdue University in Indiana. He “knocked on our door very late at night, around midnight on Saturday night, and said, ‘Look, you’ve got small kids — you should really leave.’ “

The knock on the door was to prove prophetic. It changed the course of Aldrich’s research and, in turn, is changing the way many experts now think about disaster preparedness.

Officials in New Orleans that Saturday night had not yet ordered an evacuation, but Aldrich trusted the neighbor who knocked on his door. He bundled his family into a car and drove to Houston.

“Without that information we never would’ve left,” Aldrich said. I think we would’ve been trapped.”

In fact, by the time people were told to leave, it was too late and thousands of people got stuck.

Social Connections And Survival: Neighbors Matter

Because of his own experience in Katrina, Aldrich started thinking about how neighbors help one another during disasters. He decided to visit disaster sites around the world, looking for data.

Aldrich’s findings show that ambulances and firetrucks and government aid are not the principal ways most people survive during — and recover after — a disaster. His data suggest that while official help is useful — in clearing the water and getting the power back on in a place such as New Orleans after Katrina, for example — government interventions cannot bring neighborhoods back, and most emergency responders take far too long to get to the scene of a disaster to save many lives. Rather, it is the personal ties among members of a community that determine survival during a disaster, and recovery in its aftermath.

When Aldrich visited villages in India hit by the giant 2004 tsunami, he found that villagers who fared best after the disaster weren’t those with the most money, or the most power. They were people who knew lots of other people — the most socially connected individuals. In other words, if you want to predict who will do well after a disaster, you look for faces that keep showing up at all the weddings and funerals.

“Those individuals who had been more involved in local festivals, funerals and weddings, those were individuals who were tied into the community, they knew who to go to, they knew how to find someone who could help them get aid,” Aldrich says.

The Japan Example: ‘I Was Just Running Around And Talking To People’

In Japan, Aldrich found that firetrucks and ambulances didn’t save the most lives after earthquakes. Neighbors did.

“In Kobe in 1995, if you knew where your neighbors slept, because the earthquake was very early in the morning, you knew where to dig in the rubble to find them early enough in the process for them to survive,” he says.

Because of his research, when a powerful earthquake struck Japan this March, Aldrich was certain that good neighbors would play a decisive role.
[...]
[In Michinori Watanabe's effort to save his father's life,] why not just call the Japanese equivalent of 911?

“At that time all the electricity was down, and the telephone land lines were down and my mobile was not working, so there was no other way than I myself go out running around, asking people,” Watanabe said.

Local Knowledge Is Key

Not only did no professionals come to help Watanabe those first few minutes, there was no sign of them the first day.

Watanabe emptied his house of water and blankets and started helping neighbors who were homeless and shivering. They were still without help days later.
[...]
It’s this passion for a local community and granular knowledge about who needs what that makes large-scale government interventions ineffective by comparison. It’s even true when it comes to long-term recovery.

Beloit College economist Emily Chamlee-Wright has studied why some communities in New Orleans came back more quickly than others.

“One of the communities that in the post-Katrina context was the most successful was the Mary Queen of Vietnam community in New Orleans East,” said Chamlee-Wright. “It’s important to recognize that one of the reasons why they were so successful is that they ignored government warnings not to come back and start rebuilding too soon.”

‘The Second Tsunami’

Governments and big nongovernmental organizations — which are keenly aware of the big picture — are often blind to neighborhood dynamics.

In Southeast Asia, Aldrich found that well-intentioned NGOs actually hurt the fishing communities they were trying to help. They saw the damage caused by the tsunami in fishing villages and started giving new boats to all the fishermen.

“Fishing is a very social activity. It is organized, really, not in a hierarchy but in a network,” Aldrich said. “So you have someone who drives the boat, the person who steers, you have two people fishing in the water, some person who carries the net and some person who goes — takes the fish to market. Once every person is given their own boat, you’ve gone from five people working together to each individual working by themselves.”

Fishermen who used to work together now became competitors. Trust broke down. Fights broke out.

“Some of the local activists I talked to called this ‘the second tsunami,’ ” Aldrich said.

The problem isn’t that experts are dumb. It’s that communities are not the sum of their roads, schools and malls. They are the sum of their relationships.

The Japanese government seems to get this. The government there actually funds block parties to bring communities together. [Um, isn't that kind of missing the point? Anyway...]

That might never happen in America, but Aldrich thinks each of us can do something on our own: Instead of practicing earthquake drills and building bunkers, we could reach out and make more friends among our co-workers and neighbors.

“Get more involved in neighborhood events,” Aldrich said. “If there is a planning club, a homeowners association — if there are sports clubs nearby, PTAs — those groups have us in contact with people we wouldn’t normally meet and help us build up these stocks of trust and reciprocity.”

“Really, at the end of the day, the people who will save you, and the people who will help you,” he added, “they’re usually neighbors.”

One thing I will mention about the radio segment is the introduction that the All Things Considered host gives before Vedantam begins narrating his report: She says, “New research shows there’s something more important than rescue crews and government aid.” Umm, well, obviously Aldrich’s and Chamlee-Wright’s research is new and is interesting, but research on the cooperation and altruism that people exhibit after natural disasters, the feelings of purpose and liberation that people feel as their communities rise together after disasters, the intro-level economic fact that “price gouging” saves lives and expedites recovery, and the spontaneous order that always exists absent government interference, during good times and bad (especially bad), is far from new.

Hat tip: Peter Boettke

In general, I support the “incrementalist” approach, both academically (debating/proselytizing online and in person) and practically (what I’d like to happen to government/economy/social freedom) in the future USA and every other country. When debating with actual libertarian-ish minarchists, I agree that we’re correct in actively promoting the philosophy of anarchism; they should know better by now. But because most of the world isn’t even close to minarchist, academic incrementalism and practical implementation of incrementalism might be useful and warranted.

More specifically, what I mean by academic incrementalism is: I think it is more helpful to sway people towards a philosophy of freedom in small, comfortable, easy-to-handle bits than to tell them their entire worldview (and that of 95% of the human race) is wrong. Justified or not, that leads many people to lump you in with the Alex Jones types who say everything is a lie and a conspiracy. Keep in mind that many people’s objection to libertarian ideas is not based on their opposition to increases in freedom and their support of massive violations of rights—they don’t see libertarianism as “right” or “just” and don’t see State intrusions as intrusions at all. Therefore, it is difficult to get them to see that even cutting taxes, stopping inflation, not enacting more business regulations, etc. are helpful to people’s material well-being, much less that they are more philosophically just than the opposite policies. For this reason, they are likely to be swayed by arguments saying “a little less government would be better here” and to progressively support more and more reductions in government if the initial arguments are successful.

And by practical incrementalism, more specifically, I mean that the collapse of a giant state and the sudden fracturing of society into pockets of anarchic and minarchic (and other) regions would be very jarring to most people, possibly in a way that is harmful both to the freedom movement and to people’s actual safety and well-being. Therefore, allowing people to see the benefits of low taxes and fewer regulations and fewer government handouts will lead them to support the complete elimination of all those things. Or, at least, it will lead to people being free and able to opt out of monopolistic governance more easily and smoothly. At least, it seems like it should. It makes sense to me, as I’m sure you’ve heard before, that it’s a lot easier to go from very small government to no monopolistic government than it is to go from Leviathan State to no monopolistic government. That’s why I generally support the practical implementation of incremental decreases in State power.

I don’t know whether or to what extent this conflicts with the approach that most libertarians call agorism. The way I and most other libertarians seem to use the term, agorism means gradually building “black-market” social and economic structures that don’t depend on, don’t support, and aren’t (directly) affected by the State and all its immoral laws. There are probably several reasons agorism is superior to a Libertarian Party–style incrementalism, not the least of which is that legal and “proper” reductions of State power are almost impossible to achieve in this day and age, so doing it illicitly is our only recourse.

However, interestingly, agorism should itself be considered an incrementalist strategy because gradually building economic and social connections that don’t require and don’t support the State, such that the State withers away and becomes irrelevant, is one way to implement the incremental changes that I talked about above. Also interestingly, successfully creating agorist social/economic structures (which, it must be admitted, is also nearly impossible on a large scale because of the police state we live in) doesn’t require that most participants have a firm philosophical commitment to anarcho-libertarianism. It just requires that they see the monetary benefit to operating out from under the heel of the State and act upon some of the illicit agorist opportunities they come across. This again should be considered incrementalist: recognize the benefit of not paying this tax or not following that regulation; recognize the benefits of committing more and more perfectly just and victimless “crimes”; recognize the moral justness of libertarianism.

The Big Election! “Are you for the left or the right? Are you Democrat, Republican? Are you liberal, conservative?” One of the greatest divide-and-conquers in country history. …Let me tell you something about politics: it’s no different from professional wrestling. It’s one great show. At the end of the day, they all get together, and they have their steaks, and they laugh at jackasses like you and I that think we’re important and think we’re actually doing something to change our country. … I would not be shocked, at the end of the day, Mr. Oz pulls away his curtain and says, “I fooled all you retards. All of you.”
[...]
Where’s your favorite pizza place? You know what your favorite pizza place in the world is? Are you going to vote on it? …I live in a little town in Jersey. [Leading up to] the town election, you know when you see the dumb little lawn names? …Now, the guy in the corner of my block is a builder, he had “Bill” on his thing [lawn sign], and the whole town loved “Bill”, we knew “Bill” brings his kids to play softball, and blah blah blah. Two weeks later, a lot of names changed, especially guys that were builders. Now they were for “Fred”. And I really thought, like, “Wow, maybe they’re getting paid to put these things on the lawn. Maybe that’s the deal. Let me check, because…maybe my stock’s a little higher—’Hey, I was a goat on television, and TV guide…’—might get a little extra cash, a little per diem.” So I asked my neighbor, “Why did you have ‘Bill’ on your sign?” “Oh, my god, I love ‘Bill’. I think ‘Bill’ should be the mayor, hands down.” “Why do you have ‘Fred’ up?” “Because I need permits. And when I went to go get my permit, they told me, ‘Well, if you get rid of that sign, we can help you a lot quicker.’”

Now, as much as you think, “Oh, that’s small-town stuff,” don’t think for one second that doesn’t happen in the big picture. The genius part of it all is your mind is manipulated…. And what cracks me up is [people say], “We’re all about education! And I’d like to think that I have my own conscience!” That’s what you’d like to think.
[...]
The only way you can get a full grasp on it is, honestly: do not read one newspaper…and do not watch news for two weeks. …If you stop watching news, you start realizing how ridiculous it is and how much of a scam and a scandal and an agenda it all is, just to manipulate.
[...]
[T]his is what they do: “Here’s the subject: homosexuality. This side believes blah blah blah. This side—” Why is there “this side” or “that side”? Why isn’t it just a conversation? …”Are you with them, or are you with them?” It’s professional wrestling at its genius best.”

I don’t think it’s necessarily correct or all that productive to talk in conspiracy-theory tones like many libertarians do and like Jim Breuer does there, as though everything coming from TV, newspapers, and government employees is part of a consciously designed manipulative plan, but in the end it doesn’t particularly matter if the manipulation is consciously designed or not; if the results are the same whether people’s thoughts and feelings are shaped deliberately or just the natural result of a Statist societal structure, then the effect is equally distressing. People believe that politics and governmental coercion not only can solve problems but are in fact the best way to solve many problems; people believe that Democrats care more about the common man and restraining corporate power than Republicans and Republicans care more about individual rights and economic freedom than Democrats; people believe that voting is a duty that they owe to society and is a privilege that gives them the power to change society and the right to complain about the problems they caused; people believe they are lucky to be granted this power and this privilege by their relatively caring and enlightened government; people convince themselves that voting for the lesser of two evils is not the least bit evil!

Some of that propaganda probably comes from politicians, advisors, and bureaucrats who know that the two-party system is a sham and that voting won’t change anything fundamentally, so that is conscious manipulation. However, I doubt that is the major source of all of those misconceptions. I think it’s clear that the political problems we face are more the result of an all-pervading system than a relatively few evil geniuses, and this makes them less easily surmountable because, at least in theory, the evil geniuses could be replaced with good people, whereas the all-pervading system is much more difficult to even dent, much less take down and replace. We have the advantage that the State must inevitably destroy itself with its bloat and inefficiency, at which point the society that remains must be armed with the philosophical and moral principles to form the foundation of a truly free social order, in which coercion is never an acceptable means of change and no person or group is given power that others don’t have.

What made the summer of LeBron even more annoying and worthy of space on my blag is the claim that the backlash against him was racially motivated. That is, people criticized LeBron James’s decision to become part of a superstar trio in Miami rather than staying in his home state of Ohio or going somewhere to build a championship team around himself, and his decision to make a huge deal out of this by announcing it in a 1-hour prime-time special on ESPN, because he is black and they’re prejudiced.

Cleveland Cavaliers owner Dan Gilbert overreacted to LeBron’s decision with idiotic remarks like the idiot that he is, so Jesse Jackson naturally responded with idiotic race-baiting like the race-baiting idiot that he is. Now, in an interview with CNN that aired on September 29, LeBron said he thought race was a factor in the criticism of his decision. Like any timid, untalented interviewer, Soledad O’Brien did not follow this up with anything probing for a more detailed answer. What was racially motivated? What specific comment or action was committed by a non-black person at least partially because you are black? Some suits at ESPN probably wanted to extract from LeBron what Soledad O’Brien failed to, so they sent Rachel Nichols there to ask him for specifics, but of course he declined to give any.

To my surprise, a normally pretty sensible commentator like Michael Wilbon completely agreed with Jesse Jackson. So did a lot of people. I was so surprised because no aspect of racism or plantation-owner mentality had even entered my mind. I dare say it never came close to entering anyone’s mind who isn’t a black person overly concerned with racism, seeing racism everywhere they look. You might argue that we white people don’t think about racism in these situations because it’s just subconscious, always underlying our thoughts and actions and reactions, and that the fact that we don’t consider that certain things might be racially motivated is proof of how pervasive and influential and second-nature the racism really is. That is not correct.

What is correct is that every time a black person cries “racism” when it isn’t warranted, it does contribute to making race more prominent in people’s minds instead of contributing to making it barely an afterthought. Race should only be brought to our attention when it really did hurt someone. Everyone’s goal in the realm of race relations should be to make race a complete non-factor, something people don’t notice, don’t consider, and don’t blame for anything. Instead, what Jesse Jackson and now LeBron have said will make people more likely to think of race in the future. Alerting the country that you thought racism played a role, however small, in a situation, when (in my judgment) it really didn’t, does not make people more considerate or less likely to show racism in the future. It makes the issue of race more likely to pop up in their minds the next time, which keeps it relevant. It should only be discussed when it is relevant, and our goal should be to make it less relevant every day. Bringing up racism when it shouldn’t be brought up doesn’t do anything to foster an attitude of togetherness or harmony, and it certainly doesn’t help make the issue go away. Irrelevance rather than awareness should be the goal.

Licensed spectrum came into being for a reason. In the early days of radio, unlicensed radio stations in urban areas regularly got into “power wars” with rival stations, leading to plenty of static. Compared to this free-for-all, the licensing of radio stations in the US, and then the creation of the Federal Communications Commission, helped to solve such problems.

Actually, very little of that paragraph has even the ring of truth. As B.K. Marcus and Timoguapo van Swanson have detailed, the homesteading principle based on libertarian property-rights theory and common-law tradition was perfectly capable of resolving bandwidth disputes and remains the best way to resolve them. The Federal Communications Commission served the interests of wealthy, politically connected dinosaurs who didn’t want to keep up with new types of competition, and it continues to serve the interests of large, established companies at the expense of small businesses and consumers today.

David Z. at No Third Solution and many other blaggers have expressed their due outrage at the treatment of the Michigan woman who was threatened with fines and possibly jail time for looking after neighbors’ children while they waited for the school bus. I have nothing to add to this sorry affair except these brief things: 1. This is an expected outcome of Statism; this is not a bug but a feature. 2. Crap like this is probably not as rare as Statolatrists would have us believe. 3. I just want to log this in my long list of examples of State-created divisiveness, of the destruction of voluntary cooperation and community by monopolistic government.

Slate magazine ran a series of articles about the dentistry industry (I bet you never realized those two words rhymed before…me, neither), including this one about why dentistry costs so much. Unsurprisingly, since it appeared in Slate, it is devoid of any serious economic analysis. The only two explanations I could glean from the article were: because government doesn’t pay for it and because other people don’t pay for it. The former would be because of a lack of socialization by our benighted leaders, and the latter because of the way dental insurance operates. Now, while an analysis of dental insurance in America could be of interest and could produce not only suggestions as to how to bring dental costs down but also provide guidance for our medical insurance industry, we get none of that. As far as I know, any actual explanation of the high costs of dentistry must include State-mandated certification (barriers to entry), regulations that prohibit less-educated and therefore lower-paid dental technicians from operating a simple dental-cleaning business (reduced competition), and the fact that for some reason, people purchase insurance for things that are relatively cheap, routine, and totally expected! This increases costs in the same way as it does for medical care!

My friend’s Facebook status currently says, “is definitely a nerd and looking forward to hearing Paul Krugman speak on Friday.” Paul Krugman is a dolt. Now that I’m unemployed, looking to move to Virginia to get in-state residency status to apply to George Mason University and become an economist, I have made this a solid, official, un-renegable goal: I will write a book titled Paul Krugman is a Dolt, it will be published, and it will receive wide acclaim.

It must be embarrassing to be a Statist writing about economics these days. Thomas Woods quotes one Harold Meyerson, who shared the extent of his ignorance with us in his recent Washington Post column. This is gold, Jerry, GOLD!

The problem with contemporary economics, at least with the purer strain of free-market economics associated with the University of Chicago [sic], is not simply that it failed to predict the near-collapse of the world financial system last year. The problem is that it believed such a collapse could not happen, that all risk could be quantified by mathematical models and that these quantifications could help us correctly price just about everything.
[...]
[Economists told us] there really was no need to study such things as bubbles, which only a handful of skeptics and hopelessly retro Keynesians even considered possible. Under mainstream economic theory, which held that everything was correctly priced, bubbles simply couldn’t exist.

The one economist who has emerged from the current troubles with his reputation not only intact but enhanced is, of course, Keynes.

Well, honestly, in the Austro-libertarian’s mind, yes, Keynes’s reputation is not only still intact, it has been augmented as never before.

Speaking of insatiable parasites, the government of Hawaii will now tax its residents on gross gambling income rather than net gambling income.

A Hawai’i resident who wins $10,000 in a year, for example, and loses $9,000 in the same year used to be taxed only on the $1,000 in net winnings. Under the new law, that resident would be taxed on the full $10,000 in winnings.

I imagine several other states already have similar laws, but it’s no coincidence that at least one state is enacting such a tax during the Second Great Depression. Many companies offer better deals to customers in an attempt to maintain revenues (…and, unfortunately, they also fire a lot of people to cut costs) to stay afloat. The first resort of governments is to take whatever they can from their captives. It is sad to read comments about this and other stories from people who probably claim to love freedom and justice and all those other things that, they’d say, made America great, but then when it gets down to specifics they bend over backwards to support anything and everything that helps the State at the obvious expense of its subjects.

It doesn’t matter that this is unenforceable. The intent and the attitude of these parasites in government is what should really boil your blood.

Y’see, gals, if you follow sports and know a little bit about them, then you can sail right through the interrogation about your cocaine-filled golf clubs without arousing any suspicion. Such efforts to traffic drugs would obviously be unnecessary if the drugs were legal, which would be better for everyone in society because their sale, distribution, and use would be safer and our civil liberties wouldn’t be the collateral damage of the War on Drugs.

A Maryland high-school softball coach was fired after parents drank beers that they brought to an end-of-the-year team party. Because underage high-schoolers were present, observing their parents imbibing alcohol. At the coach’s private residence. A firing over this probably wouldn’t happen in a free society. Hysterical teetotaling anti-alcohol crusaders are about as wretched as they come. Without a doubt, they are more to blame for society’s alcohol-related problems, such as underage binge-drinking and drunken driving, than any other factor. There is no way they could exert as much influence without the State enforcing their delusions upon society. All of this influence is harmful. A dead giveaway of a brain-dead Statolatrist zombie is that they suggest government school board members could rise to any position of importance in an educational system in a free society (or probably any other organization or business).

In a free society, family and community would be intimately involved in the education of children because it would be necessary and because there would be neither the inclination nor the opportunity to relinquish such responsibilities to State bureaucrats. Conversely, bureaucrats and other strangers would have no opportunity to claim authority over parents or their children. Idiotic teetotalers and other brands of moral busybodies would never be in a position to make decisions about other people’s children or, in this case, a coach who supposedly…let parents do something that was in some way bad to their own children.

Frank Hatley of Cook County, Georgia, was imprisoned for one year for failing to make child support payments for a child who, as the court was aware, was not his.

In June of last year, a judge ordered Hatley to jail for failing to reimburse the state for public assistance that was paid to support his “son,” who, as the court was aware, is not actually his son.
[...]
For 13 years, Hatley made payments to the state until learning, in 2000, that the boy might not be his biological son. A DNA test that year confirmed that there was no chance he was the father, according to court documents.

Hatley…was relieved of any future child support reimbursement but was ordered to pay more than $16,000 that he had owed the state before the ruling.

Anyone who wants to claim such absurdities as this could happen and carry on for a full year in a non-monopolistic, non-coercive legal system, and that the agency responsible could continue operating as usual after this came to light, simply doesn’t have a leg to stand on. Only coercive monopolies can get away with things like this; private, peaceful bodies cannot and would not.

The British socialized medicine system will ban private organ donations from dead donors. Basically the problem is that foreigners were paying top dollar (pound, euro, whatever) for the organs of dead Britons, and it horrified the busybodies in the UK government that scarce resources were being voluntarily allocated via the price system, and that such exchanges were taking place outside of the gentle governance of the NHS.

An independent report said the public needed to be confident that scarce donor organs were allocated fairly within the NHS.

Transplant surgeons said the ban would reassure the public that organs will go to those in greatest need.

Everything is scarce and the only sensible, practical, or remotely principled way to allocate those scarce things—yes, including body parts that their owners want to donate—is by the price system of the free market that matches supply to demand. No governing body or other self-anointed group of experts could ever allocate resources or direct people more efficiently or “fairly” than the free market’s price system does. It is simply not possible in the real world, even if the governing body had the best of intentions, and especially not when decisions will inevitably be made for political rather than economic reasons. Here is a much more logical and refreshing take on the U.S.’s screwed-up, government-run organ donor system.

Those Philadelphia cops who pulled three shooting suspects out of a car and beat them back in May 2008 have been cleared of any crimes by a grand jury. (Wow, that was almost a year and a half ago?!) The most surprising part of this case is that their chief, Charles Ramsey, fired four of the officers and suspended or demoted another four, and he’s not backing down from that decision. “I have 40 years of law enforcement experience. I kinda know what I’m looking at. In my opinion, all the actions were not justified.” Good for him.

A program that allows citizens to file anonymous complaints on the Illinois secretary of state’s website about people misusing handicapped parking spots received 114 tips in its first month and a half. People snitching on each other to punish them for disobeying laws that have no basis in natural law, no relation to right vs. wrong, and that attempt to force common courtesy on everyone? Sounds par for the course for governments. Wake me when you hear of an example of government promoting a sense of respect, community, and courtesy among its captives.

A Fort Myers Beach councilman was fired after other council members learned he was married to a former porn star. Terrible and unjust. They fire him in July 2009 “without cause” after he had been married since October 2008. The dolt who led the vilification said, “It’s a matter of how effective he becomes after this situation. How much disruption there is.” You stupid moron, there was no decrease in his effectiveness and there was no disruption until you got it into YOUR pathetic little brain to make an issue out of it. You can’t work with him and approve of his effectiveness for nine months and then decide his marriage might be disruptive to his job only after you learn of it! And soon, after his wrongful termination suit against the city, the idiots on the town council won’t have to pay for his settlement out of their pockets, oh, no; it will come from the town’s treasury, in other words, other people will pay for their stupidity directly or indirectly. Prudes are bad enough, but idiotic prudes are just depressing.

An Illinois millionaire didn’t like the $80,000 property tax bill on his mansion, so he had himself ordained by some online “church,” put a wooden cross on his house, and called it a church to get a property tax exemption. Good for him, I say! Not good for him or the rest of the taxpaying suckers, say idiotic Statolatrists everywhere. A man defends himself from a crime in a nonviolent and somewhat clever way, and the sanctimonious public responds with violence and derision. Everyone is pleased that this sham was found out and the guy will now have to pay back taxes, because nonviolent nonparticipation is a violation of their moral code. (I’ll conveniently gloss over the fact that this millionaire banker made his fortune off of the ultimate State racket, the monopoly on currency, because the principle of nonviolent nonparticipation remains the same.)

How the “buy American” attitude backfires: it spurs resentment and nationalism, whereas free, borderless trade engenders the respect, goodwill, mutual prosperity, and reciprocal interdependence that characterize true civilization. Libertarians at least as early as Frederic Bastiat have known this as a truism. Welcome to the 19th century.

Libertarianism is individual liberty, personal sovereignty, voluntary association, and moral egalitarianism for all people. By “moral egalitarianism” I mean everyone is equally imbued with and bound by the same rights and the same moral obligation to respect the identical rights of others; no one has the right to do anything that anyone else may not also do. I think the existence of those rights and the non-aggression principle that follows from them come as close to epistemological certainty as they can get, and the burden is on Statists to explain why these principles are imaginary, illegitimate, or impractical and why they have the right to threaten murder on any who would assert these rights.

I doubt very many people oppose those beliefs in principle. What they oppose are their fantastical imaginings of what those beliefs would imply in practice. At the same time they remain willfully ignorant of how the State opposes those innate rights—is essentially the institutionalization of the negation of liberty. What they refuse to grasp is that the very existence of the monopolistic State implies threats of murder to anyone who secedes or doesn’t participate. As hard as it is to come to grips with, Statists must realize that peaceful abstention is a violation of their moral code, and that this is abominable.

It would be helpful to the blogosphere and to the worldwide discourse on political philosophy in general if a significant number of Statists would challenge themselves as far as they could with this question: “If the first principles that libertarians endorse are right and just, then why does (my vision of) their practical implementation strike me as so frightening, so horrific? What experiences, conditioning, or other principles make me either (a) reject the implementation of those principles anyway, and/or (b) insist that Statism and not freedom are the natural corollary of those principles?”

Most people’s experience with states, living their whole lives under one, never considering what true freedom can do for a society and not looking too closely lest their Statist foundation be shaken, causes them to believe that states are a force of good even when the balance of evidence is against them. So they lash out in ridicule at libertarians instead of focusing their skepticism on their own beliefs, which is where everyone’s skepticism belongs at first.

In the comments to Radley Balko’s very good, polite, short post about Ted Kennedy, a few peculiar Statist sentiments blemish an otherwise sensible discussion about the lack of merit in Ted Kennedy’s career and agreement with Balko that Kennedy shouldn’t be venerated simply because he’s no longer eligible for the census. On the other hand, they did provide me a good starting point for yet another instructional blag post.

As you could have guessed, the contentious comments concerned Balko’s opinion that we shouldn’t admire Kennedy’s “ability to use politics, as opposed to civil society, to solve problems” and that “Getting elected to political office in itself adds no value to society as a whole”.

One commenter began,

Huh? How would be have better effected change via civil society? Presided over the local kiwanis club? Written the Great American Novel? Become a pundit? Blogger (journalist)? CEO?

Always interesting to hear what libertarians value, how small-minded they are – I guarantee there’s total radio silence on the passing of major business figures, however they themselves used (and use) the levers of state power to advance their interests. However corrupt and crass they are within their own sphere.

Instead of living off of the labor of captive taxpayers and voting to take and spend more of their money every year, Kennedy could have spent his inherited wealth on charity, community organizations, and private businesses that provided goods and services to people who wanted them, voluntarily. The reason people donate to non-profit organizations and do business with private companies is (usually) because they want to, because they prefer the goods or services more than they prefer the money they part with and more than the goods or services they could get elsewhere. The reason the state and federal governments have to take your taxes upon threats of murder is because the government is not voluntary and people don’t want to give their money to it. Even Ted Kennedy himself didn’t want to give more of his money to the Imperial Federal Government than he had to…otherwise he would have. He could have worked for free, but he didn’t.

In this instance, we see that the commenter’s failure to understand that “civil society” is superior to government action results from his failure to understand what “government action” implies: Submit to their edicts and give them your money, or they will take the money plus penalties and they will enter your home or business to make you comply; insist on keeping your money and living your life how you please, as is your perfect right, and they will enslave you in a metal-and-concrete cage for five or ten years; resist their beatings, kidnapping, and enslavement, as is your perfect right, and they will shoot you. It is not possible to misunderstand that the State and all its agents are the aggressors in this scenario—in the real world, every day.

If committing the atrocious offenses of not sharing much of your money and behaving or doing business in frowned-upon ways is enough to warrant the death penalty, then surely actually threatening people with murder and interfering with their lives in myriad ways is a crime against humanity that removes all pretense of legitimacy from their operation. If you would claim the latter response is necessary and proper for the former offenses, then it still remains to be explained how non-violent non-participation ranks as criminal, or even dangerous, to the Statist. The laws and the infrastructure to make and follow through on the threats precede any act by any citizen; in fact, they predate even the birth of every citizen (except at the founding of a new state); so they cannot reasonably be passed off as a response to a preexisting danger.

Doubtless the true believer would respond, “But it is in man’s nature to be contentious and violent; the preexisting State with its threat-and-punish infrastructure keeps everyone civil, cooperative, and happy.” Glossing over the fact that this is simply false, it is obvious that elected and unelected officials are not angels; they are impaired by the same shortcomings as everyone else. Further, it is obvious that the types of people who are attracted to the violent, deadly police power of the State suffer from even greater hubris, intolerance, greed, and megalomania than the average person and in proportion to the power they aspire to attain.

I have stated what principles libertarians value and gone into a little detail about what we oppose in the State. So we’re “small-minded”? Believing in the strength of community, free exchange, voluntary cooperation, and the physical, emotional, and psychological independence from the controlling hubris of others—the conviction that the answer to many of our material and psychological problems is in ceasing to kill, threaten, and coerce each other—this is small-minded? You can’t possibly comprehend what is implied by our statement “peaceful action is a better way to effect change than is governmental coercion”—what’s implied is an all-encompassing, revolutionary conception of community, law, economics, war, peace, and everything else about human interrelationships—and still refer to it as small-minded.

The better libertarian thinkers (and those of us who follow them) rail against “major business figures” who “used (and use) the levers of state power to advance their interests” as fervently as we do against the government agents themselves. See, for instance, this masterful essay by Roderick Long, this Kevin Carson column, and this post of mine. Maybe my fellow libertarian blaggers can leave some more links in the comments; there must surely be 100 easily accessible anti-corporatist writings that I can’t think of off the top of my head.

The commenter continued,

You could say the same you said here about FDR or Lincoln: proper management of the state, and the main institution that’s capable of dealing with collective action problems in a connected, fast moving world – it’s oh-so-dirty. Libertarians would rather sit on a perch apart from it all, sometimes hiding their eyes, sometimes throwing peanuts, or pretending like all problems can be solved via a little Mill or communitarianism. And that there’s a nice clean wall between politics and everything else.

7/15/2050: Radley Balko dies, contributed not much of anything because he spent his life as a journalist, and on the basis of a little Rand and Econ 101 and utilitarian philosophy decided that it would be of some value to humanity or even his community to give the stock libertarian take on whatever was at the top of the news cycle. And what do journalists really do for us anyway?

Obviously you are not paying attention.

We could say the same about FDR or Lincoln? Child, much, much worse has been said about FDR and Lincoln, and deservedly so. They are more responsible for our corporate-military-socialist state than any other two people. The death and impoverishment they permitted to be visited upon innocent people is, quite possibly, incalculable.

It is almost unfathomable to me that anyone could think the State is “the main institution that’s capable of dealing with collective action problems in a connected, fast moving world.” I shall take the liberty of assuming this statement refers mainly to economics—the allocation of scarce resources to satisfy our needs. The claim is that the government can take care of any problem or need that arises in a community better than the free market—especially in the 21st century with technology making the entire world more connected than ever and the pace of business faster than ever. Though my libertarian readers are already familiar with Ludwig von Mises, Statists would benefit—if only to bring a little more knowledge and sophistication to the debate—from reading Mises’s seminal essay on why socialism can’t calculate and Murray Rothbard’s perspective on Mises, his opponents, and the calculation debate.

Without reading an entire economics essay, Statists could just answer me this: How is it that elected officials and coercive referendums voted for by “the people” are better able to govern society than the cooperative choices and economic exchanges made voluntarily by “the people”?

If the “collective action problems” he refers to are legal and court systems, his position is no less secure. Check out my posts about Anthony de Jasay’s masterpiece The State (here) and Bruce Benson’s masterpiece The Enterprise of Law (here and here).

Another commenter answered his smear that libertarians, journalists, and others outside of the professional criminal class do nothing for society:

MLK never had to get elected to spur social change.

And BTW, Radley helped get a guy off of death row because of his work. More than I can say for Ted Kennedy. Other journalists have also managed to force a president’s resignation over Watergate and bring to light the massacre at My Lai just to name a couple of things. I would say that journalists have done more to expose corruption and spur change than any politician ever has.

We don’t just sit on our perch either. Go check out the work that Libertarians have done at the Institute for Justice and FIRE. Real results that actually matter to every day people who are being mistreated by peaceful legislators and their good intention regulations.

The discussion was mostly downhill from there:

“Working as a legislator isn’t a peaceful way to make change. After all, the laws that Sen. Kennedy helped passed (all of them) required our compliance or else we would be imprisoned or fined. There isn’t anything peaceful about that at all.”

And here’s the reason folks, why libertarians will never have any serious chance as politicians in the country. Nutters.

“the laws that Sen. Kennedy helped passed (all of them) required our compliance”

And he was elected to do so as public official by you, we, the people of the country, along with the other 99 senators. You’re acting like this is a dictatorship.

It is more common than I would have thought, though no less peculiar, for Statists to justify a rights-violation because multiple people commit it rather than one. What difference does the number of people committing it make? Seriously. Blags have comments for a reason. I like getting comments.

Referring to the same passage that the previous person thought was “nutters,” the original Statist commenter wrote:

This is childish. You need to grow up. It’s not different from me saying that prisons are bad because people get locked up against their will, but refusing to take on what to do about murderers.

What to do about power and how one should distribute power is the paramount question for any society at any time in history, and solutions are judged in terms of bad and less bad. If you can’t bring yourself to stare it in the face and maybe try to make the best of it, your opinion on anything to do with politics is worthless. You don’t get to complain and be taken seriously if you want to hide.

What is childish is the Statist attitude that the majority should rule, that people who peacefully abstain are somehow doing some unspecified thing that endangers your person or property, and that everyone who disagrees with your grand vision of how to run the world should be punished and made to comply. I can think of nothing more childish in the political arena. You have made no effort to understand any theory of ethics or morality, nor anything like property rights or economics. Literally the only framework you go by is “majority rules.” You don’t appreciate that people have good reason to object to their freedoms being put to a vote and to complain after losing the vote. You refuse to see how pointing guns at, restricting the preexisting freedoms of, and taking property from people who haven’t harmed or even threatened anyone is worse than the hypothetical harm that they might have done; that the government agents are committing aggression even by their own standards. You are unable to understand how anyone could object to being lorded over by a charlatan with a bright smile and a fancy suit, nor have you shown any ability to grasp how rights or freedoms could exist prior to and independently from a monopolistic state. Your political philosophy begins and ends with “majority rule.” This is the single least nuanced idea in the history of the world since “woman submit to man because he is stronger.” You are a childish buffoon who should have NO SAY in how I or any other human being run our lives.

Our objections to the aggression that defines states are very different from objecting to locking real, actual aggressors up in prison (though you just said “people” and libertarians know that governments should lock up their own people before anyone else). Your analogy looks, to me, like this: illegitimacy of legislation : no alternative to legislation :: illegitimacy of prison : no solution to murder.

Okay, analogies weren’t your strong point in fifth grade. You are ignoring stuff YOU WROTE, in the same discussion thread. Our alternative to governmental legislation is offering a goddamned product to people and selling it to them for an agreeable price. Writing a book. Starting a charity. Educating your own children instead of leaving it to the State. Et cetera, et cetera ad nauseam. These are the things you ridiculed in your first post as being ineffective compared to coercive legislation. Libertarians have plenty of solutions to murder, and all crime. Eliminating the police state is a nice first step.

Distributing power is not the paramount question for all societies. It is protecting individual rights, which allows real community to develop voluntarily and “organically” and which allows for the material progress that has increased our standard of living over the centuries. When private property rights are protected and individuals have a sincere, personal, reciprocal interest in the well-being of their neighbors, then power and many other things will be distributed more heterogeneously. Surely you don’t think giving power to politicians and taking it away from the public will distribute power in any just way? If you’d like a scholarly but brief and accessible discussion on the distribution of power in society, read the first part of Our Enemy, the State by Albert Jay Nock.

You seem very dissatisfied with this country. There are plenty of other ones out there. Why don’t you try the libertarian oasis of Somalia? You won’t have to worry about the pesky ‘dictatorship of the majority against the minority” (also called Democracy) there! You’ll be free to do as you please. No pesky governments to get in your way (they won’t even bother to build your roads!)

If things get too tough, you can always try your luck in the socialist hellhole of Sweden or Norway :)

Seriously, most of you sound like Ruby Ridge wannabe’s under a guise of reading a few Ayn Rand books, which is why you won’t be taken seriously.

Personally, if I were going to compete for a Special Olympics medal on a political website, taking the contradictory stance from what I know most readers there take, I would go to some effort to gussy up my arguments and review my thought processes to make sure I was representing my ideology well. You know, being a good ambassador for libertarianism.

None of that for these Statists. Why don’t you try the Statist’s wet dream of North Korea, or Cuba, or Zimbabwe? You gave the worst example of (what you misunderstand as) anarchy; it isn’t fair to counter with the worst examples of your beloved monopolistic States? Oh, there’s only one type of anarchy but many varied and sundry types of states. I see. And that American and Ethiopian military force attempting to impose order but, somehow unsurprisingly, only supplying murder, terror, and destruction to Somalia—you gonna pin that one on the anti-military, non-interventionist libertarians, too? You haven’t made sense yet; you might as well shoot for the moon and hope some more of your hysterical mischaracterizations of libertarianism stick for your Statist brethren.

We have observed no fewer than two of the classic inane, ignorant dismissals of libertarians in a single comment thread about Teddy freaking Kennedy: “You’re always free to move elsewhere” and “Oh, you’re just a stupid Randroid.” Add a third item to the list of ideologies Statists don’t understand. OBJECTIVISM IS NOT LIBERTARIANISM! WE ACTUALLY DON’T LIKE EACH OTHER VERY MUCH!

Sorry for rambling. I got up on my soap box for the first time in a while and wanted to flesh out my thoughts thoroughly. It’s clear from reading the whole discussion thread that brief, pointed criticisms of their statements are insufficient to sway them in the least. I know this was old hat for my libertarian colleagues; this was written to any and all non-libertarians, so I hope they read it and find some sense in it, coming away with a better understanding of freedom and the State than Radley Balko’s commenters came with.

Ordered by Congress to “buy American” when spending money from the $787 billion stimulus package, the town of Peru, Ind., stunned its Canadian supplier by rejecting sewage pumps made outside of Toronto. After a Navy official spotted Canadian pipe fittings in a construction project at Camp Pendleton, Calif., they were hauled out of the ground and replaced with American versions.
[...]
This week, the Canadians fired back. A number of Ontario towns, with a collective population of nearly 500,000, retaliated with measures effectively barring U.S. companies from their municipal contracts—the first shot in a larger campaign that could shut U.S. companies out of billions of dollars worth of Canadian projects.
[...]
Take, for instance, Duferco Farrell Corp., a Swiss-Russian partnership that took over a previously bankrupt U.S. steel plant near Pittsburgh in the 1990s and employed 600 people there.

The new buy American provisions, the company said, are being so broadly interpreted that Duferco Farrell is on the verge of shutting down. Part of an increasingly global supply chain that seeks efficiencies by spreading production among multiple nations, it manufactures coils at its Pennsylvania plant using imported steel slabs that are generally not sold commercially in the United States. The partially foreign production process means the company’s coils do not fit the current definition of made in the USA—a designation that the stimulus law requires for thousands of public works projects across the nation.

In recent weeks, its largest client—a steel pipemaker located one mile down the road—notified Duferco Farrell that it would be canceling orders. Instead, the client is buying from companies with 100 percent U.S. production to meet the new stimulus regulations. Duferco has had to furlough 80 percent of its workforce.

“You need to tell me how inhibiting business between two companies located one mile apart is going to save American jobs,” said Bob Miller, Duferco Farrell’s executive vice president. “I’ve got 600 United Steel Workers out there who are going to lose their jobs because of this. And you tell me this is good for America?”

The Democrats’ goals of winning more votes and securing more power over economic affairs has led them to force policies on American individuals and businesses that limit their trading partners, pit people of different nations against each other where mutually beneficial trade would normally take place, replace self-interested and more-informed decisions with political edicts from on high, and reduce economic efficiency by punishing the increased division of labor that necessarily emerges in a free (global) economy. The number of correct policy decisions made by this bumbling idiot in the White House remains steady at one: to close the prison camp at Guant&#225namo Bay, and that’s just a promise at this point.

Raise your hand if your economic philosophy openly and proudly promotes mutual prosperity, complete freedom of trade, and a worldwide division of labor, with all the peace and cooperation that come along with it.

Why are our chances of reaching a great age so affected by wealth and status? The obvious answer is that more income buys better health. But it is a lot more subtle than that, as shown three decades ago by the Whitehall Study, in which epidemiologist Michael Marmot examined the death rates of British civil servants. To the surprise of many, he found that his subjects—all in continuous paid employment and with equal access to health care—were more likely to die in any given year if they were in a lower-grade job than a higher one. Marmot concluded that the employment hierarchy itself created status-dependent stress that affected the workers’ health.

In their new book, epidemiologists Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett extend this idea with a far-reaching analysis of the social consequences of income inequality. Using statistics from reputable independent sources, they compare indices of health and social development in 23 of the world’s richest nations and in the individual US states. Their striking conclusion is that the societies that do best for their citizens are those with the narrowest income differentials—such as Japan and the Nordic countries and the US state of New Hampshire. The most unequal—the United States as a whole, the United Kingdom and Portugal—do worst.

Many measures of the quality of life, including life expectancy, are correlated with the degree of economic equality in each country. A variety of problems such as mental illness, obesity, cardiovascular disease, unwillingness to engage with education, misuse of illegal and prescription drugs, teenage pregnancy, lack of social mobility and neglect of child welfare increase with greater inequality. Violence, from murder to the bullying of children at school, follows the same pattern. These trends are tied up with issues of trust: the authors chart a profound decline in trust in the United States from the 1960s to the present, which matches rising inequality during the long Republican ascendancy.

The review continues:

How can inequality affect such a diverse set of social problems so profoundly? The authors make a compelling case that the key is neuroendocrinological stress, provoked by a perception that others enjoy a higher status than oneself, undermining self-esteem. This triggers the release of the hormone cortisol, which raises blood pressure and blood sugar levels, from which myriad health and social problems unfold. This seemingly hard-wired response has been well studied in social hierarchies of monkeys; low-status animals become predisposed to atherosclerosis and cardiovascular disease. Humans experiencing chronic stress exhibit similar symptoms, accumulating abdominal fat under the influence of a part of the brain associated with addiction.

Cortisol overrides ‘feel-good hormones’ such as oxytocin, involved in establishing trust, and dopamine, the reward signal that reinforces memory, attention and problem-solving ability. Cortisol-induced stress predisposes some individuals to mental illness or violent behaviour. It can hasten the arrival of puberty, which may prompt premature sexual adventures, providing a plausible explanation of the high prevalence of teenage pregnancies in the most unequal societies. Cortisol also transmits stress to a fetus, with lasting consequences for physical and emotional development.

The research with primates showing that animals lower in their social hierarchy are less healthy than the higher-status animals offers one good argument against mine, namely, that monkeys might not have the higher cognitive functions and psychology that allow humans to differentiate between, and fret over, different types of stress like socioeconomic stress, the pressure to succeed at a difficult job/school, the stress of having little free time, raising kids, your country descending into a poverty-ridden police state, etc.—but the monkeys still suffer from their hierarchy-related stress, which I think has been shown to be correlated with (maybe caused by?) cortisol. This would at least partially invalidate my notion that cortisol affects our organs and nervous systems the same regardless of what our higher-level (uniquely human) psychologies perceive as the causes of our stress, because if monkeys, with their sub-human brains and incapacity for understanding subtle differences between stressors, are still harmed by the stresses of being lower on the totem pole, then maybe different stressors affect humans differently in some fundamental way, even though the hormone (cortisol) is the same and all of our other organs, including the brain, are basically similar across a large population. (If there were some fundamental, neurological differences between people who end up wealthy and those who don’t, which is absurd, then those would likely be the causes of their bad health, not the inequality.)

(Then again, maybe we should give primates more credit because maybe they can differentiate between different stressors about as well as we can.)

One aspect of the primate studies that might make them invalid to be compared with human societies is: I don’t know that higher-status monkeys experience all that much stress, the way higher-status people do. Do wealthy humans in executive-level jobs have lower cortisol levels than others? Does this relate to the higher-status monkeys in any meaningful way? Probably not.

The book also addresses the impact of inequality on the hormone oxytocin, dubbed the “trust hormone.” Cortisol reduces the effectiveness of oxytocin, which the authors skew to imply that mediocrity- and poverty-induced stress makes humans less trustful of others and exacerbates their psychological, and therefore physiological, problems. Same thing for dopamine.

Not surprisingly, libertarian social and economic theory offers solutions to both the problems addressed by the book and the problems with its analysis. Libertarians have explained extensively how certain Statist policies increase inequality. Four such things are inflation, government schooling, dependence-inducing social-welfare programs, and outlawing of vices (prostitution and the War on Drugs, which keep urban minorities poor and in a state of war with police and each other). Libertarianism also explains that nations that extend their welfare states to such an extent that these inequalities are mitigated (France, Scandinavia) make everyone poorer, not everyone richer. Wilkinson and Pickett would argue that the greater good is evidently served by making society poorer but equaler rather than making everyone richer but some more than others. That isn’t a metaphysical impossibility, but the problem is that this can only be true in the short run; as Mises and Hayek showed, a middle-of-the-road policy must lead to totalitarian socialism.

To dispense with the odd claim that a massive welfare state can make people more trusting and friendly towards each other, one only needs to peek out of his ivory tower and look at the world for a minute or two. Almost everything the State does causes demonstrably more strife and divisiveness among its subjects, as political instead of economic decision-making pits factions against each other and each new interference with our freedoms of exchange and association lead us to seek more of the pie, more control over others—lest they take our slice along with our control over ourselves.

Lastly, libertarians of all stripes assert that true market anarchism would reduce the sizes of the upper and lower classes, putting more people into the middle class while making everyone richer in the long run. I have never seen anything in any Statist theory or governmental program that would reduce the influence of the power elite while enlarging the economic pie for everyone. Government takes and redistributes; it doesn’t create wealth or facilitate the growth of wealth. It rewards the rich and powerful by giving favors, protection, and barriers to entry into most industries; it limits the options of the poor by insisting on running their schools and providing for them while turning our cities into police states; and it squanders everyone’s wealth by inflation and immeasurable waste.

Her friends’ responses: “hear hear!” “No guns and arms? That settles it, no more gym.” (admittedly, kind of funny) “But then what the hell am I going to do in Texas? Ah well at least I can still drink and drive.” “True dat!”

No kidding! We should probably also make murder illegal—that would really dissuade demented psychopaths from murdering anybody!

This country sucks because its citizens suck, and it’s only going to get suckier in my lifetime. I am more afraid of fascist police-state advocates like these than I am of gun-wielding maniacs. Mainly because the government will always have guns.

Do these people ever notice that the frequency of maniacal public shootings like the one in Binghamton, NY, has only increased in recent decades along with the increase in police-state measures like gun-control laws? Correlation does not prove causality, but it sure as hell doesn’t prove that the measures prevent mass murders! Get it through your head: We already have somewhat strict gun-control laws, no additional number or severity of gun-control laws will keep guns out of the United States, murderous psychopaths are never swayed by the existing laws against murder or against owning the guns, they will simply turn to bombings or something else if they can’t get ahold of a gun easily, the government will ALWAYS have guns and that is a bad thing (which was the entire point of the Second Amendment), a society would be better off trying to keep people from wanting to shoot 30 people instead of preventing anyone from owning a gun, and the increasing influence that the State has had in our lives during the last century is most definitely a significant source of the strife, hatred, poverty, desperation, isolation, and psychosis that drives people to public mass murder.