Brad,

Thank you for the mention. And for the kind words.

I also have a problem with the “free-market anti-capitalists” assuming that there would be no hierarchical firms in a freed market…

Well, I think the claim is usually not that there will be no “hierarchical firms” in a free market, but rather that firms will be (much) less hierarchical on average, and that hierarchical firms will be (much) less prevalent and (much) less central in the broader economy than they are today under the rigged state-capitalist economy. At least, that’s my view. (Similarly, it’s not that I think a free economy with a rich bed of mutual aid networks and wildcat unions will result in there not being any employer-employee relationships anywhere at all; rather, what I think is that those kind of relationships will no longer be the overwhelmingly predominant means for workers to make a living, and that those workers who do agree to them will be much less dependent on them for their economic survival.)

In any case, these theses aren’t just something that we’re “assuming.” They’re the conclusion of an argument. (Or rather, of several converging lines of argument. Having to do with, e.g., ways in which the state burns out informal-sector alternatives to hierarchical firms, subsidizes hierarchical firms over grassroots alternatives through government-granted monopolies, cartelized captive markets, corporate welfare, “development” policy, etc., privileges politically-connected big landlords, mobilizes tremendous amounts of money to support capital-intensive forms of production, big agribusiness, large-scale resource extraction, and long-distance shipping, etc.) Maybe these arguments don’t go far enough to establish their intended conclusions; but I think that they are at least a pretty substantial line of argument that needs to be engaged with by those who predict business-as-usual to continue, even if with greater competition from the bottom, when the gigantic firms you see running today pretty much all depend very heavily (as in fact they do) on government privileges that would be abolished in a freed market.

Many poor people are pretty much responsible for their own problems insofar as they haven’t made the best of things within the current system.

Well. Everybody makes mistakes. Certainly I’ve made my own, and I have lots of friends who got themselves into all kinds of financial trouble through their own bad decisions. Not least the college-educated kids from well-off families who enter their mid-20s with tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt to repay and no clear plan on how to do it. But I think the interesting thing is how far people have an economic support structure, or available economic opportunities, to cushion the fall and to get back up on your feet after it, once you’ve made your mistakes.

But the situation faced by the economically comfortable, and the situation faced by the poor, in these respects are very different. Things like whether or not you have access to credit, whether or not you have access to alternative housing, what your options are for alternative ways of making a living if your current arrangement falls through, whether or not you are constantly being socked with new expenses that knock you back, whether or not you have access to insurance to cover emergency expenses, etc. And I’d say that in each case, the differences between rich and poor in these respects are in no small part the result of either direct government assaults on poor people’s property rights and alternative survival strategies (as I discuss in “Scratching By”) or else indirect ripple-effects of cartelizing, rigidifying, and subsdizing interventions by the state into the market. Everyone walks a tightrope, and people of all classes fall off from time to time; the real question is whether you’re allowed to work with a net, or whether the government has cut it down and taken it out from under you.

Richard,

Well, part of the reason that so many native Russian and Ukrainian anarchists were excited about the October Revolution is that they had participated in making it, and figured that the Revolution was a big step towards the realization of power in their lifetimes. In 1917, the issue was not so much that they trusted or were excited about the Bolsheviks or Party communism, but rather because the Bolsheviks were only one of many different factions involved in the October Revolution, and often not the most important. Their enthusiasm about the whole project started dropping off in mid-1918-1921, as the state socialists started seriously putting together their workers’ state, the Bolsheviks started moving to consolidate power within it (with the Civil War serving as the health of their state), and the Bolsheviks formed up the Cheka and the Red Army and put them to work imprisoning and shooting anarchists. Most of the exiles from out of the country started arriving toward the end of that period (e.g. Goldman, Berkman, and most of the other exiles from the Palmer raids arrived in January 1920).

Vin Suprynowicz:

Because I am taxed to pay for them.

This is pretty rich, coming from someone who vocally insists on the right of tax-mooching immigration bureaucrats and a jackbooted federal police agency to reach their hands into the tax slush fund to enforce immigration policies that I never asked for and don’t want, and then tax me to pay for it against my will.

In any case, in a welfare statist system, it is true that government forces to pay for everyone–and that it forces everyone to pay for you. But this is true regardless of immigration status. Every time some pair of Officially Approved Citizens send their Officially Approved children to government schools, the government spends money which is ultimately extracted from your pockets and mine. I have no idea why you would blame this on people who could not possibly have shaved one cent off of your taxes by refusing to accept government hand-outs — do you suppose that if government doesn’t spend tax funds on schools, it’ll give the money back to taxpayers? ho, ho, ho — rather than blaming it on the people who are actually taxing you.

But in any case, if you are going to blame the people who reclaim government-seized money, rather than the government that seizes the money in the first place, then you do realize, don’t you, that illegal immigrants aren’t special in any particular way on this count? That you could use this argument just as easily to justify government force against just about anyone — government-enforced population control (since children receive big tax subsidies for education, healthcare, etc.), internal passports (since immigrants from poorer states tend to move to richer states and take advantage of the more plentiful welfare benefits), summarily jailing and exiling everyone over the age of 65 (seeing how they mooch of Social Security and Medicare, usually far in excess of what they paid in when they were working), or any other collectivist horror you might dream up.

Perhaps, rather than creating a police state in order to hunt down, round up, and punish those who take receive welfare payments funded by taxation, the thing you should be doing is focusing on the real problem — the welfare state and confiscatory taxation?

Illegal immigrants … tend to vote socialist, because they are looters.

Dude, what you are talking about? Illegal immigrants don’t tend to vote at all in the U.S., because illegal immigrants can’t legally vote.

Maybe you’re worried about what would happen if currently undocumented immigrants were able to become citizens, and then to vote. The fact is that right now, in the real world, immigrants from California pose a much bigger threat to freedom in Nevada than immigrants from Mexico do. And the real threat is not immigrants from anywhere, but rather from unlimited majoritarian democracy, which is always going to have these problems regardless of who can or cannot immigrate. Maybe you would be better served by focusing on the real problem, rather than on trying to get government to police political beliefs (!) or on getting government to inflict punishment on all members of a population for the bad thoughts or bad behavior of some of them?

Ask those charged with collecting hospital bills how many illegal aliens make good faith efforts to pay their bills.

You know, as it turns out, there are already perfectly just laws against refusing to pay your bills, without getting the federal bordercrats involved.

Surprisingly, it turns out that the appropriate punishment for this is not exile from the country.

Also, surprisingly, they don’t take a federal police state or “Papers, please” checkpoints to enforce.

Also, as it turns out, the laws against running out on your bills generally only allow for you to go after the individual person who actually defaults on the bill, or occasionally close family members — in any case, not against complete strangers and entire populations on the collectivist premise that everybody in that population can be held to account for the bad behavior of a bunch of perfect strangers who just happened to come from the same country as they did.

I have no idea what the hell you think this kind of collective guilt-by-association smear, let alone your proposal for addressing it by means of collective punishment of both the innocent and the guilty, has to do with the politics of individual liberty.

If there is no right to exclude looters from our midst;

You have a perfect right to exclude anyone you want from your private property, for any reason, or for no reason at all. What neither you, nor the United States federal government, has any legitimate right to do, is to go around excluding people from my private property, let alone inflicting a massive system of “Papers, please” documentation requirements and checkpoints on me in order to do so, without my permission and indeed against my will.

So, please, exclude whoever you want from your midst. But who’s “we”, kemosabe? Keep your preferences on your own property.

if we must allow free entry of anyone who wants to come to our community

You have a perfect right to evict trespassers from your own property.

The problem is, you see, that “the community” as a whole is not your private property. Or the United States federal government’s. Sorry.

… and then allow them to decide how my stuff shall be redistributed “by majority vote,” then freedom of a family of three can last only until four “guest workers” break down their front door and “vote” on how to divvy up the food in the refrigerator.

This is of course a ridiculous strawman of my position. I explicitly argued above that private property owners should have a right to exclude anyone they want from their own private property.

It’s also pretty rich, hearing this stirring defense of the sanctity of the family home and private property, come from someone who is so angrily insisting that the federal government has a right to send federal police agencies around and stage stormtrooper raids on my private home or workplace, if some elected government passes a “perfectly constitutional” law that says that I can’t invite who I damn well please onto my own damn property.

Or those who violate our perfectly constitutional immigration laws.

Your immigration laws, maybe. Not mine. I wasn’t asked, I didn’t pass them, I don’t enforce them, and I don’t support them; they are inflicted on me and on people I care about without my permission, against my will, and over my explicit protests. Keep that “our” to yourself.

organizing a campaign to track down and punish lawbreakers is inherently “collectivist.”

It is when the laws you’re trying to enforce are collectivist.

Illegal immigrants, who are trespassing because they come where they have no legal right to be, violating the laws of the place to which they travel ,

Again. Trespassers against whom? You can only trespass against the will of an aggrieved property owner; that’s part of the meaning of the word “trespass.” But the laws you’re talking don’t come from the owners of the property on that illegal immigrants live on, or work on. They are passed by government.

Staying somewhere in the U.S. that the United States federal government doesn’t want you to stay is “trespassing” only if you think that the United States federal government is in fact the rightful owner of all the land in the United States. Do you?

I don’t. My view is that the government is not the rightful owner of my home or my business. I am. If I want to invite anyone to peacefully move in on my land (for love or money), or to work for me in my shop, that is exactly none of the government’s business, and the fact that people have not gotten a permission slip from the federal government doesn’t make them “trespassers” on my land — when they have permission from me.

As for whether or not It’s The Law, who gives a damn? Seriously? So’s tax evasion; so’s nonviolent drug use; so’s owning an unlicensed fully-automatic AK-47; lots of things are Against The Law that government actually has no legitimate right to prosecute or punish people for doing. When that happens, the problem is with the government law, not with the law-breakers.

“Rad Geek” is a pseudonym, but it’s hardly a “cloak of anonymity.” If you spent a minute searching for it on Google, you’d find my website, which (among other things) talks at length about what my views are, who I am, where I live, what my real name is, and what I’ve published under my name. I don’t usually post comments on the Internet under my given name because it’s a common name, which happens to be shared by at least one prominent blogger with radically different views from mine, so that “Rad Geek” actually provides you with a more reliable way of finding out who I am and what I stand for than “Charles Johnson” would.

Not that your sniping about pseudonyms as against big manly signatures, or your thuggish anti-intellectual sniping at “ivory-tower twits” has anything to do with the argument; these are simply textbook examples of argumentum ad hominem (abusive form).

Warning of — heck, simply observing — the consequences of allowing unlimited millions of people to violate American immigration laws, arriving here to flood the government welfare schools and enormously expensive tax-subsidized hospital emergency rooms every time they come down with the sniffles, means I want to “save” these evil redistributionist schemes?

The question is simple. If you don’t want to save government welfare schools and tax-subsidized hospitals, then why in the world do you care whether or not they are flooded? Are you normally in the business of advising government bureaucrats about how to keep their unsustainable socialist schemes running?

By this logic, if you believe the Constitution forbids government agents from restricting your right to carry a loaded firerarm into a federal courthouse (as it most certainly does), you MAY NOT leave your firearm in the car; you MUST carry it into the courthouse in defiance of the orders of the armed guards there, lest you stand accused by “Rad Geek” of “wanting to save all their unconstitutional gun laws.”

Well, no. All that I think you “MUST” do is refrain from cheering on government agents when they go to arrest, exile or kill those who DO choose to exercise their rights.

If you stand by government police when they do try to enforce tyrannical gun laws on innocent people exercising their rights, then yes, you are trying to save tyrannical gun laws. Otherwise, no, you aren’t.

Of course, the problem here is that you ARE explicitly calling for bigger and more aggressive government when it comes to monitoring, policing and punishing illegal immigrants. Even though you haven’t anywhere stated who they are “trespassing” against by living in the U.S. without a permission slip from the federal government. And one of the reasons you give for this is the alleged effects of free immigration on cockamaimey socialist schemes that you yourself consider wasteful and foolish.

Yes, if there were no tax-funded “commons,” and none of us were numbered or taxed, the arrival of a million strangers seeking work would do me little harm, provided they maintained reasonable sanitary safeguards.

It’s true that when you combine something basically moral (free immigration) with something completely immoral (government subsidies for education and medicine) you may get bad results from the combination. But why spend your time attacking the moral part of the combination, instead of the immoral part?

Are they fighting to free us, as well as themselves, from unconstitutional tyranny? I haven’t noticed them doing that. What I notice them doing is walking away from car crashes and hospital bills and orders to appear in court to answer for their crimes, refusing to take any responsibility for the damage they cause.

I don’t care whether or not illegal immigrants fight to free me from tyranny. A little help is always appreciated, but I don’t think that fighting for everybody else’s freedom is necessary for people to be justified in breaking unjust laws. Do you think the American Revolutionaries should have been expected to fight not only for their own freedom but also to free the Irish, the Scots, the Welsh, the English commoners, or any number of other victims of tyrannical English government? Do you expect Ford to make cars for GM?

As for those fighting for their own freedom, maybe it’s a matter of who you know. I know plenty of undocumented immigrants who are actively engaged in pro-freedom politics and against the bordercrats’ “Papers please” police state.

And as for irresponsibility, I’m sure there are some individual illegal immigrants who are irresponsible. So what? I hear some native-born Americans are irresponsible, too. In a free society, institutions work to hold individual people responsible for what they do. They don’t launch massive collectivist campaigns to hunt down and exile whole populations regardless of whether or not they have ever actually done any of the things you mention.

But if we WERE allowed to take one state of 50, and make it a Libertarian state, hasn’t it occurred to you that we’d have to require new immigrants to forswear socialism, under oath, and upon penalty of immediate exile, before granting them the right to vote?

No. I don’t believe in using government to police political thought.

I also don’t know how you intend to enforce these immigration restrictions you plan on implementing without exactly the sort of Officially Permitted Citizen, “Papers-please” documentation requirements that you claim you would prefer to abolish.

Those employers and landlords soon find themselves in an Alice-and-Wonderland world, threatened with fines by the EEOC and other alphabet bureaucracies, you simpering innocent.

Oh, please. If you think that Tyson wouldn’t be hiring any illegal immigrants but for the nefarious manipulations of the EEOC, I think you probably need to think about this harder.

Of course, in specific cases where a landlord would like to exclude illegal — or for that matter legal — immigrants from renting apartments, or a boss would like not to hire them, I think that he or she ought to have the right to do so, and that if the EEOC tries to interfere, the EEOC is violating the rights of that boss or landlord. But of course this doesn’t answer the question of who illegal immigrants are “trespassing” against. If the landlord doesn’t give a damn where the tenant comes from as long as she pays her rent — and many landlords don’t — and if the boss doesn’t give a damn where the worker comes from as long as she does her job — and many bosses don’t — then just who the hell is left for this “trespasser” to trespass against?

honeybrown1976:

It’s hilarious. The tribe of choice is always Cherokee as though they were the only ones. … As far as AAs making claim, the likelihood is a little greater considering that many runaway slaves were protected by Native Americans.

Well, that, and also because some Indian nations, notably the Cherokee and to a lesser extent the Muscogee, enslaved black folks prior to Emancipation.

The attitude towards slavery varied a lot from nation to nation. (The nation that most famously protected black refugees from slavery — the Seminole — were deeply divided on the question of slavery, and partly as a result of that Seminole bands eventually ended up dividing and fighting on both sides during the U.S. Civil War.)

macon d.:

I’ve read that the Cherokees were considered less “savage” than others,

They were the largest groups in what were called the “Five Civilized Tribes” by white slave-owners. The main reason white slave-owners considered them especially “civilized,” as compared to other American nations, was the fact that the Cherokee also practiced field slavery and settled agriculture, just like the white slave owners.

Tristan,

Thank you for the mention, and for the kind words.

For what it’s worth, I agree with you about “real socialism,” for reasons that I discuss at [1] and [2] (which are basically just riffs on Tucker’s “State Socialism and Anarchism”).

meika:

The reality in Tasmania is that we have a free market corraled by an alignment of interest which, for example, sees a puported private company (Gunns Tasmania, I suppose the profits are privatised) bankrolled by Tas Government pension money …

So, in other words, you don’t actually have a free market?

Markets in which purportedly private companies are bankrolled by big government slush funds aren’t free markets. At most what you have is an example of state-capitalist privateering. And consistent free marketeers are against that as much as they are against any other state-controlled or state-manipulated mode of production.

If we, the market, are stupid (Tasmania is an island all the bright ones leave or are left on the dole) then the ‘real left’ is also stupid, mediocre and falling into a hole.

Well, if everyone is stupid then widespread stupidity may lead to stupid outcomes on the aggregate. (Although this isn’t guaranteed; to infer that individual-level stupidity must lead to aggregate stupidity would be to commit a fallacy of composition. Sometimes a process can counterbalance individual stupidities in order to get a smart aggregate result. A lot of “wisdom of crowds” research tends to show that this happens more often than you might think, and that even when individual answers stand a good chance of being wildly wrong, on aggregate the results tend to converge around the right answer.)

But, in any case, I don’t see how this is an objection to free markets. If most people are stupid, then presumably democratic politics will also produce stupid results (indeed, stupider results, since unlike markets, majoritarian democracy provides no way for the minority to try out alternative experiments on a small scale). And anti-democratic politics will only produce non-stupid results if you have some reliable method for making sure that the ruling elite will tend to come from the few who are non-stupid rather than from the majority who are stupid. If it fails, then non-democratic regimes will tend to produce even stupider results than democratic regimes, since they allow one stupid person, or one select class of stupid people, to magnify their peculiar stupidities without any means for others to check, neutralize, or countervail against them. But I would submit that no reliable non-democratic method for filtering out stupid rulers has ever been devised in the history of world politics.

So if people tend to be mostly smart and good, then it seems like statist “solutions” are unnecessary. If people tend to be mostly stupid or wicked, then it seems like statist “solutions” are far too dangerous. In either case, freedom is preferable.

The people to whom Ms. Arguello-Kline refers as “immigrants” aren’t “immigrants,” by that sensible definition, at all. They’re trespassing illegal aliens,

A “trespasser” is someone who intrudes on another person’s property against the will of the property-owner.

Let’s pretend I’m an illegal immigrant renting an apartment, working for a meat-packing plant, shopping at the local grocery store, et cetera. Presumably my landlord is willing for me to live on his or her property: if the owner didn’t want me to live there, he or she wouldn’t have signed the lease. Presumably, also, my boss is willing for me to be inside his or her plant; otherwise he or she wouldn’t be paying me to do it. Presumably, also, the stores I shop at are willing for me to be inside their stores: otherwise, they wouldn’t welcome my business.

So just whose property, exactly, am I “trespassing” on?

How does giving amnesty to a couple million knowing law-breakers not encourage the next set of knowing law-breakers, inviting them in no uncertain terms to “Come on in and enjoy all the free stuff; after a few years you can get ‘amnestied’, too!”?

You say “knowing law-breakers” like it’s supposed to be a bad thing to knowingly break the law. Coming from someone who so vocally praises the American Revolution, this seems odd.

If the radicals who gathered downtown on June the first want to demonstrate in favor of a mass amnesty — for open borders, over which hundreds of millions of the world’s poor and oppressed would be invited to come here and swarm our free public schools and free hospital emergency rooms until our current socialist policies drive us finally, completely, bankrupt — let them at least say what they mean.

That sounds like a problem with the socialist policies, not a problem with free immigration.

Why exactly do you want to save socialist policies like government control over schools and hospitals?

Amp:

Thanks for the link, and for the kind words.

I also think that Bartlett’s case about CATO is fair. Since CATO and the Libertarian Party are hardly small and irrelevant parts of American libertarianism, I don’t think it’s true that Bartlett’s argument is, as Rad Geek says, a “ridiculous strawman.”

Well, I don’t dispute that CATO and the LP are significant parts of American libertarianism. But you don’t have to find some crazy-ass Red-card-carrying left-mutualist anarcha-Dworkinist like me to find self-identified libertarians who speak out vocally and repeatedly on the specific political issues that Bartlett claims libertarians aren’t speaking out about. You can find that standpoint among many people in the LP (including pretty much all LP presidential candidates prior to Bob Barr), or in any issue of Reason, which is not even remotely a radical publication, which you can find on the newsstand at any Barnes and Noble, and which is, as far as I know, the highest-circulation libertarian publication in the United States. These aren’t small or irrelevant parts of American libertarianism either, and if Bartlett can’t find the kind of libertarians that he’s looking for, then my suspicion is that he’s not looking very hard.

The claim that libertarians don’t speak out often enough about the War on Drugs, of all things, strikes me as particularly loopy and ill-founded.

For what it’s worth, Charlotte was a sympathetic interviewer who among other things took time to contact Dana Ward before she ever interviewed me, in order to get some background on anarchist ideas. She didn’t miss or misrepresent my distinction between senses of “law”; rather, I used the phrase “lawless order” several times in the course of the interview without stopping to mention the distinction between law-as-general-prescription and law-as-government-edict (although I did mention the importance of private mediation and arbitration along the way), because I figured (rightly, I think) that spelling out the distinction would only introduce complications that couldn’t be very well captured in the story — not because of any problem with the reporter, but simply because of the format of a short newspaper feature is such that the medium won’t bear the message.

The only thing that really baffles me, actually, is the headline. I mean, yeah, down with “The Man” and all, but my appropriation of New Left argot hasn’t gone that far yet, and I don’t think those two words were ever even uttered in that order at any point during the meeting.

Those who are curious about how Anarchists expect their ideas of lawless order and consensual cooperation to work out peacefully in a free society, those who are sure they have a knock-down argument that Anarchism cannot possibly work, and those who are just interested to learn more are all invited to come to our upcoming Anarchist Cafe event tomorrow at 6:00pm at the Coffee Bean (4550 S. Maryland Ave.). Part of the night’s event will be a freewheeling “Ask An Anarchist!” Q&A session in which you can ask your questions directly, and you can find out more about how Anarchists would respond to them.

(For example, questions such as “How would people defend themselves from violence without government law-and-order?” is nothing that Anarchists have not heard before. Our literature table, in fact, carries pamphlets that address precisely that question.)

goingbust, regardless of what I, personally, am or am not capable of defending myself from, if you think that Anarchists advocate a society without peace or social order, then you have misunderstood what Anarchists advocate. We advocate a society without rulers, not a society without rules. Perhaps you think that without government laws, there can be no rules of orderly social conduct and no organized defense against violence; but if so that claim is something you’ll need to prove.

Anarchists (or at least, those who believe in the kind of Anarchism that I advocate) have no beef with peace, order, civilized society, or organized self-defense. What we believe is that peace, order, and civilization can emerge from the social connections between free and equal people, without having to be imposed by a central government. In such a society order is achieved by means of community-based (rather than government-based) self-defense, a peaceful and competitive selection of private mediators and arbitrators for disputes (rather than monopolizing mediation in an overwhelmed and constantly rigged government court system), and voluntary associations for community, trade, and mutual aid (rather than government welfare bureaucracies, government-privileged-and-government-subsidized corporations, and government-controlled “public spaces”). If you think that such an arrangement is impossible or impractical, again, that’s fine, but you’ll have to give some explanation of what’s wrong with it, rather than simply assuming it away, if you want anyone else to agree with you.

mred, I agree with you that the American Right is not consistently opposed to invasive big government. That’s part of the reason why I’m an Anarchist rather than a Rightist.

Anarcha-feminists believe that government should not intervene in any way in women’s decisions about their own bodies or about their own reproductive healthcare. So they oppose any form of government prohibitions on birth control (or abortion). There is no one particular anarcha-feminist position on whether women ought to choose to use birth control, and if so what methods they ought to choose; that’s something that each individual woman needs to work out for herself in her own life. The important thing is that she be free to choose and able to get all the relevant information needed to make the choice.

Hope this helps. And if you’ve got more questions, again, come on down to the A-Cafe tomorrow night and you can ask them directly.