... Like most of the rest of the Obama administration, the Secretary of War refuses to believe in or loudly argue for the righteousness of murdering thousands

... Well, right, just as a round-table of "military analysts" in the run-up to the war on Iraq might have turned out rather differently if the people who get

... I must say, I can't imagine any way that a segment consisting of interviews with "four experts on national security and government transparency" was going

... To be fair, I've seen this happen at a lot of political outreach tables, not just those which were doing an OPH-style issues survey. Three-fourths of the

... To be sure, attempts to improve the test simply by adding more questions to it are going to be of limited usefulness, since the more questions you add, the

... Well, it's natural enough that Twain would think such a thing. I mean, what with the importance of Twain's own personal experiences to his own writing

Shyla: How do libertarians propose to counter “the competition-inhibiting partnership between influential businesses and government officials?”

Well, one possibility is to get rid of the government officials.

When positions of power are held in place, I think it’s a fool’s errand to try to devise strategies for keeping the wealthy and well-connected from corrupting and exploiting the power of these offices to their own ends. Political processes tend to benefit the politically-connected, and every federal regulatory agency, from the FTC down to TARP, has a long and sorry history of being captured and exploited by the trusts, cartelists, monopolists, robber-barons and financial sharks that they were supposedly concocted to restrain. So rather than worrying about how to stop influential businesses from capturing the regulatory apparatus for their own ends, better to abolish the regulatory apparatus, and refocus on economic, rather than political, means of responding to economic crises.

Of course, you may want to ask the question one step back: how, then, do you get rid of the government officials? (I.e., how do you stop admittedly influential players from exerting their influence over the legislative process, in order to assure that the offices they want created and sustained are created and sustained, in spite of popular indifference or popular objections?) Well, that is admittedly a hard problem. My answer is that in order to get rid of the government officials, you ought to get rid of the government.

I don’t doubt that as long as a legislative process is monopolized by a single, professional political apparatus, that apparatus will be an attractive prize and a willing tool for the influential and wealthy. Concentrated power will always be vulnerable to co-optation, corruption, and exploitation by those who are well-placed to take advantage of it. Attempts to vest all political authority in a single, professionalized, territorial monopoly, but then to turn around and strictly limit that government (for example, by means of a written constitution, or regular elections of officials) have always and everywhere failed. If initially limited, it will grow; legislation will multiply officials, establish bureaucracies, and ratchet up the level of political control, in response to pressure from the concentrated interests (chief among them influential businesses) that benefit from all that. Not because power cannot possibly be limited, but because concentrated power cannot be counted on to limit itself in the absence of any ultimate accountability or threat of competition. The solution, then, is not to find ways to insulate concentrated power from outside influence (which, even if achieved, would make an even worse problem: an absolutely unaccountable absolute state). It’s to diffuse power throughout civil society, rather than concentrating it all in a single, professionalized, territorial monopoly government.

Of course, you may now want to ask the question one further step back: if the solution to business-regulatory collusion is to get rid of the regulatory offices, and the way to get rid of regulatory offices (in spite of business pressure to create them) is to get rid of government, then what’s the way to get rid of government? Well, that is a hard problem, and I don’t have an easy answer. Perhaps it is impossible under present social and economic conditions. I’m inclined to doubt that, but if it is, then surely the answer is to work towards changing present social and economic conditions, around the edges and where possible, by means that avoid the corporate-political nexus, and in ways that undermine the corporate-political nexus’s control over our thoughts and everyday lives: spreading libertarian ideas, educating people about the ways in which bankers and other influential businesses have never been subject to free market conditions, how influential businesses have used the state for their own ends, helping people become more self-sufficient, materially secure and culturally respected while working “outside the system,” encouraging forms of protest, social activism and community organization that operate outside of conventional electoral politics or legislative lobbying, etc. Some of my fellow Anarchists call this “building the new society within the shell of the old”; if anarchy is not now possible, that’s no reason to imagine that even more fanciful utopian schemes (e.g. “progressive regulation,” “good government,” or “limit government”) are any more plausible or likely to succeed. And if anarchy is not now possible, there is no reason why we should give up on working anarchistically to make it possible in the future.

Did you mean to post this to r/BoringlyConventionalProgressivePolitics? The Democracy Now interview is an extended discussion about a declaration by one bunch of insane warmongering usurpers (Republicans in the U.S. Senate) that they will block all legislation in the Senate unless and until another bunch of insane warmongering usurpers (the Democratic Party majority in the U.S. Senate) agrees not to raise top-bracket income taxes. A silly spectacle, to be sure, but I do have to wonder why you would think that the point of Anarchism is to ensure the smooth operation of the United States Senate, or to make sure that as much tax money as possible can go to the U.S. government's treasury? As for the middle class: there is no such thing (*). It is a ridiculous propagandistic lie made up by the bosses, in order to convince one faction of the working class that they have more in common with the ruling class than they have in common with even-more-thoroughly-exploited fellow workers. That conventional state liberal and "progressive" politics are endlessly obsessed with a ridiculous propagandistic fiction, and its relationship to parliamentary politics, is not surprising. But Anarchist politics should not be. (*) In the U.S. "Middle class" has a coherent meaning in places that are still subject to a residual or active aristocracy. It has no coherent meaning in places that are not: its purpose is purely propagandistic. I'm speaking in a U.S. context here, since the article is about the stupid shouting match that passes for U.S. government politics.

Did you mean to post this to r/BoringlyConventionalProgressivePolitics? The Democracy Now interview is an extended discussion about a declaration by one bunch of insane warmongering usurpers (Republicans in the U.S. Senate) that they will block all legislation in the Senate unless and until another bunch of insane warmongering usurpers (the Democratic Party majority in the U.S. Senate) agrees not to raise top-bracket income taxes. A silly spectacle, to be sure, but I do have to wonder why you would think that the point of Anarchism is to ensure the smooth operation of the United States Senate, or to make sure that as much tax money as possible can go to the U.S. government's treasury? As for the middle class: there is no such thing (*). It is a ridiculous propagandistic lie made up by the bosses, in order to convince one faction of the working class that they have more in common with the ruling class than they have in common with even-more-thoroughly-exploited fellow workers. That conventional state liberal and "progressive" politics are endlessly obsessed with a ridiculous propagandistic fiction, and its relationship to parliamentary politics, is not surprising. But Anarchist politics should not be. (*) In the U.S. "Middle class" has a coherent meaning in places that are still subject to a residual or active aristocracy. It has no coherent meaning in places that are not: its purpose is purely propagandistic. I'm speaking in a U.S. context here, since the article is about the stupid shouting match that passes for U.S. government politics.

In a message dated 12/3/2010 9:42:15 AM Central Standard Time, ... Thanks for this. I haven't read the novel but it is now on my "get" list. It seems this