On the bus, I pass by, literally dozens of small businesses who have somehow managed to deal with the regulations that come with opening a business. And I’m pretty sure only a small amount of them are rich and well-connected.

Nobody is claiming that there is no such thing as a small business. The left-libertarian claim is, generally, that in a freed market there would be many more small businesses, including a rich set of “microenterprises” far smaller than the storefront businesses that you seem to be thinking of, than there currently are. Not because it’s impossible to start one now, but because it is both difficult and costly. Not (just) because of the costs and risks that are inevitably involved in any business venture, but because the regulatory market makes it overwhelmingly more difficult, more risky and more costly than normal market factors would make it.

When I walked around my old neighborhood in southeast Las Vegas, I saw a fair number of “small,” locally owned businesses in which hardworking but relatively privileged and comfortable “small businesspeople” had set up shops. (These are in small storefronts that typically cost about $1,000-$2,000/mo for rent, or in out-parcel buildings that cost much more.)
But of course those who make enough money at their business to pay $1,000-$2,000 a month for a small storefront are already people who have, and are making, a fair amount of money, or at least have decent access to credit. I also saw a lot of the local homeless people who barely scratched by by gathering up discarded goods from dumpsters and curbsides, loading them into grocery carts, and carrying them down to an impromptu swap meet on some of the empty parking lots in the neighborhood. I suppose you can guess which of these two groups was more likely to have cops show up and force them to close up shop because they hadn’t paid out a hundred bucks for a business license. You probably also can guess which group of entrepreneurs was, relatively, more wealthy and more well-connected than the other.

Anyway. Where the regulatory state really cuts against small businesses, on the margin, is amongst people who would be able to make a living, in a very small scale business, but don’t have tends of thousands of dollars a year to spend on commercially-zoned storefronts, licenses, inspections, etc. etc. etc. And amongst those who can afford these things for the moment, but whose business is constantly on the edge of failure because of the very high fixed costs that the regulatory structure forces upon them.

(About 50% of small businesses fail within the first five years; but the reason for that is not just because it’s so hard to start a business. It’s because businesses face a cost structure that is extensively rigged in the direction of high compliance costs and potentially disastrous legal punishments.)

Right now, the kind of regulations that left-libertarians typically complain about (e.g., those that effectively require food vendors to have a separate, extraordinarily expensive commercial kitchen; those that exclude them from running businesses out of their homes; those that require them to spend hundreds of dollars on a business license before they can so much as sell things off a folding table or out of the back of a truck) cut against small businesses in general, and most of all against the kind of worker-run microenterprise that many ordinary people might easily be able to engage in, were it not for legal restrictions that effectively require you to be in a socioeconomic position to join the ranks of established “small businesspeople.”

So let’s check in on the conversation about Lemonade Freedom Day.

Libertarian: You know, I don’t think the police should be threatening or arresting children for setting up lemonade stands without asking government permission.

DensityDuck: Oh yeah? By that logic, you must not have any problem with BUMS squeegeeing windshields, or people COMPETING WITH wealthy established brick-and-mortar businesses, or ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS [sic] making a living without paying taxes.

Libertarian: You know, you’re right. I don’t have any problem with that. I kind of like it when the poor and socially marginalized are not harassed or arrested by police for peaceful attempts to make a better living for themselves. And I don’t think government should mainly be in the business of busting working folks or criminalizing their survival strategies, for the sake of the aesthetic sensitivities or the business interests overwhelmingly more privileged people and “established businesses.”

DensityDuck: You libertarians are all a bunch of capitalist tools!

Incidentally, I’d like to encourage you to get rid of the racist, scapegoating crap about “illegal immigrants” (i.e., undocumented workers) trying to make a living for themselves. There is nothing wrong with being from another country, and the problem with so-called “illegal immigration,” insofar as there is one, is the government’s brutally racist and classist persecution of desperate, marginalized people. Not the immigrants themselves.

DensityDuck: Congratulations, you’ve identified the difference between fee simple and allodial title.

Well, no, the comment you’re quoting had nothing in particular to do with the legal distinction between fee simple and allodial title. My remark was not limited to real property at all, but intended to encompass property in chattels as well as in land and other immovables. The point rather has to do with the distinction between claims based on moral right and claims based on superior force.

In your earlier comment, you first claim that “Property is something you have no matter how many guns either side has,” but then you say that it has to do with the what the government says belongs to you, because (?) the government has more guns than anybody else. The difficulty here, you see, is that if you’ve just said appeals to force are just a matter of “who’s the bigger monkey?” and not really a matter of property rights, then it seems odd to try to justify government’s exclusive say-so on questions of property rights by appealing to its full-spectrum dominance in the use of force. My own approach is, by contrast, that property rights are not a matter of anyone’s say-so, but rather a matter of what people have earned the right to, and what they’ve earned the right to is a matter of what they do, not a matter of what first, second or third parties say about it.

Which, when acting in the role you suggest they could play here, are functionally identical to a government and can be treated as one.

Functionally identical for your purposes, maybe; not for mine. Government is not just a matter of what an institution does but how it does it; governments are institutions which claim not only the right to settle disputes, but a special kind of sovereignty over dispute-settling, and they are thus, among other things, centralized, monopolistic, territorial, tax-funded, and non-consensual. But it is perfectly possible to conceive of social institutions that do various things that government claims to do (e.g. protecting rightful claims of property) while lacking one or some or all of those features — that are, for example, non-territorial, or funded only by voluntary contributions, or don’t make any claims of an exclusive prerogative, or…. Now, maybe you want to claim that a non-governmental institution would be ineffective at defending property claims if it didn’t have all the features that sovereign governments have (e.g. territorial monopoly or non-consensual sources of funding). You can do that, but if you do, you need to argue for that position, not simply define the alternative out of existence. Or you might want to use the word “government” in a broader sort of way — for example, not to mean a territorial monopoly on the legally legitimated use of force etc. etc., but rather just something like “any institution that offers effective settlements of interpersonal or social conflicts, no matter how it does so.” If that’s how you want to use the word, you can do that too, but you should then realize that you’re now discussing many institutions that are “governments” by your definition, but not “governments” in the sense that free-market Anarchists oppose.

Ah-heh. Your “view” lets me justify taking anything from anyone, because all I have to do is declare that they haven’t got the moral right to it.

I don’t know why you put “view” in scare quotes. I promise you that it really is a view, not something else. (What else would it be? An end-table? A duck?) And it really is mine.

Anyway, all this would be an accurate criticism if I held that moral rights are a matter of what you personally declare moral or immoral. I don’t, so it’s not.

In fact I specifically contrasted moral relationships (as I use that term) with relationships which are defined either by force or by arbitrary say-so.

If property is a moral concept rather than an objective one then it doesn’t exist. The whole point of property is its objectivity.

And this would be an accurate criticism if I agreed with your (apparent) view that moral relationships are somehow “not objective” relationships. But I don’t, so it’s not.

There are probably too many cans of worms already open at the moment, so let me table the word “moral” for the moment, and just repeat that on my view property rights are not a matter of “declaration” at all (not by you, not by the state, and not by any other party). They are a matter of what, objectively, you have done or have not done with respect to the stuff that you are claiming as your property. Not what the government says about what you have done, but what you have in fact done.

That’s not “property”. That’s “I’m a bigger monkey”. Property is something you have no matter how many guns either side has, …

Well, there’s the part where you say it….

because the government (who has more guns than anyone) …

… And there’s the part where you take it back.

My own view is that ownership is primarily a moral, not a legal, relationship, and doesn’t depend on what some authority declares you have a right to, but rather on what you have earned the right to by your actions. Getting a declaration from the biggest monkey of them all is no doubt a clever way to secure your position, but it has no strong relationship to the moral question of property rights. Sometimes governments respect rightful property claims; a lot of the time they don’t (I would argue that they are especially likely to ignore or bulldoze over the rightful claims of the poor and socially marginalized).

Considering that the kind of abstract concepts like “property” can only be protected by non-private actors (i.e. a government)…

I don’t know what justifies the “i.e.” instead of an “e.g.” here. Government is not the only kind of “non-private actor” that might involve itself in questions of property claims or disputes over questions of legal right. There are lots of social institutions other than government; what Anarchists generally suggest is not that we do away with all social institutions in favor of everyone for herself and devil take the hindmost; rather, what we propose is that one particular social institution (the coercive monopoly known as the State) should stop usurping control over all other institutions, and should stop demanding the unique privilege to confiscate the material support for its activities by means of force. Part of the reason for this is because we value sociality so much and would like to see free association able to flourish and address social needs outside of the coercive confines of political government.

Second, I would venture that nearly all government favors to corporations come through the regulatory system, not through subsidies (we’ll set aside the military-industrial complex for now, though we shouldn’t).

Tracking the regressive effects of the regulatory state is really important, but even if we are just comparing chunks of the budget, I’d also note that if you include subsidies to J.P. Morgan Chase, say, or AIG, the balance looks … somewhat less tipped in the direction of so-called “social spending.” I hear those guys got a little bit of money from the government a couple years back.

"Though I do not have any evidence to prove it, I personally believe and would not be surprised if websites such as Antiwar.com and groups that further conspiracy theories about 9/11 are having money funneled to them via indirect means from political Islamist groups as part of an effort to undermine US military and clandestine efforts in the middle east to stop terrorism in order to create doubt in people's minds about U.S. foreign policy in the court of public opinion."

Good God. So let's just pretend, for a moment, that you did not< just admit that this is a completely unsupported bare-ass guess on your part. Let's just pretend that this were not a smear based on nothing but insinuation and what you openly admit to be evidence-free wild speculation. Let's pretend, for the moment, that when you said this you were holding a list in your hand with the names of 205 organizations who had been proven to have received money from some particular jihadist or Islamist group at some point (let's say Hamas, Hizbollah, Jemaah Islamiyah, whatever), and that you saw Antiwar.com's name on it.

Well, OK. If that were true, then so what? What crime would they have committed? What would justify their being held, raided, arrested, or jailed by federal agents?

People have a right to publish opinions which "create doubt in people's minds about U.S. foreign policy in the court of public opinion." And people have a right to take donations from others who share the same doubts. And it is the height of anti-libertarian police-statist garbage to propsoe that people's right to engage in peaceful free speech is somehow contingent on their first thoroughly investigating every single donor in order to make sure that those donors are not on the government's public or secret blacklists. Are you accusing Antiwar.com of participating in any form of violence against person or property? Are you accusing them of providing material support to groups who do? Or are you really just doing what it looks like you are doing -- trying to smear people on the basis of who might agree with them on one or two isolated issues?

If the Mafia orders pizza from your restaurant, that's not a reason to investigate your restaurant, and if jihadist groups choose to channel some of their money away from carbombs and into peaceful contributions to public discourse over the warfare State, then they damn well ought to be encouraged to do so, rather than the (witting or unwitting) recipients of the donations being surveilled or raided by federal agents.

Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?

Hume:

There are many legal posivists, Hart included, that specifically reject any connection between legal statements and moral statements

Well, I know that they say that, but saying that you reject any connection between legal obligation and moral obligation is not the same thing as actually giving an account of legal obligation without “smuggling in” moral principles. The point of calling it “smuggling,” after all, is to say that the importation is concealed rather than explicitly acknowledged, and it’s not uncommon, you know, for a philosopher’s arguments to tacitly rely on premises which the philosopher would not explicitly acknowledge, or would even, if asked, try to deny.

Tom Cuddy:

What is the libertarian position on environmental protection?

I don’t think that there is just one answer to this question, because I don’t think that there is just one environmental problem to solve, but rather a lot of problems that are in some ways related and in some ways quite distinct. (E.g., the best approach to pollution problems may not have much to do with the best approach to conservation problems; something that copes fairly well with problems from concentrated point-source pollution or water pollution may not deal as well with air pollution or with diffuse, multisource pollution over a wide or global expanse, etc.) But, to give you the start of an answer, I can say that what I take to be the most promising libertarian approaches to environmental problems — specifically, the approaches offered in some of the market anarchist literature — is to treat it with a combination of (1) abolishing the Land Monopoly and the subsidies that facilitate ecological destruction (subsidized logging-roads; clear-cuts, strip-mines and mountaintop removal of government lands; etc.), that protect polluters, that dispossess individual, small-scale owners, and that amass ownership in a relatively few, privileged hands; (2) enabling individual property-owners to go after polluters for compensation for damages; and (3) practicing conscious, grassroots activism to address community problems directly through nonviolent social action, to boycott destructive practices and to reward sustainable alternatives in the marketplace.

For a broad discussion of some of the things that might mean in practice, see my post, “The Clean Water Act Vs. Clean Water,” Kevin Carson on “Fred Foldvary on Green Taxes,” etc.

Hope this helps!

Hi Fernando,

Thanks; I'm definitely interested to check out the chapter. As for the terminological issue of "Left," "Right," and Other -- well, that's definitely quite a can of worms to open! But briefly, I think that anarcho-libertarians are indeed the real Leftists, on at least one common understanding of what being "on the Left" means. Of course, it has nothing to do with state-driven social engineering or centralized expert control of society (the typical goals of the "Progressive" movement, the corporate liberalism of the mid-20th century, or today's "center-Left" political parties). But "Left-wing" means a lot of things to a lot of people. In its original context, it referred to liberal and radical anti-statists, who opposed mercantile privilege, supported free trade and free association, defended the right of revolution against tyranny, and opposed the principle that political authority was instituted by God Himself, and political dissent barely distinguishable from blasphemy. Bastiat sat on the Left in the  Assembly; and so did Proudhon. Of course, the meaning of "Left" has shifted over time, but I think that there are a lot of current conceptions of Leftism which I think are genuinely anti-authoritarian, and either explicitly anti-state (on the Anarchistic Left), or based on principles which are ultimately anti-statist in their tendency, even if their proponents don't explicitly draw the inferences that they ought to.

To slip into autobiography for a moment, unlike many market anarchists, I actually originally came to market anarchism not from small-government conservatism, or from classical liberalism, or mini-governmental libertarianism, but rather from the radical Left (in particular, from radical feminism and the post-Seattle social anarchist movement). Not because I had some Road to Damascus moment where I suddenly turned my back on Leftism as I had understood it, but because I got more radical, and what I found in the work of the individualists and mutualists offered what I thought were some really important insights into the nature and origins of economic inequality and social domination; into  the ways in which political and bureaucratic regimentation really
served to disempower the poor and socially marginalized, and to corral
and domesticate once-radical social movements; and into ways in which genuinely grassroots alternatives to the State might function (without simply turning the whole of social life into one endless god-awful meeting of the Coalition Steering Committee).

So as I see it I am a Leftist who became a libertarian for Leftist reasons, as my commitments to what I took to be Left-wing values (challening arbitrary authority, promoting grassroots solidarity and mutual aid, dismantling the warfare State, returning the land to those who till it, all power to the people,  etc. etc. etc.). On which, see this comment and this dialogue, and, more programmatically, the discussions of "Left" and its various meanings in In a freed market..., ALL I need to know about the Revolution is what I heard in Vegas..., I am shocked! shocked! to discover that politics is going on in here, etc.

Hyena,

If you're thinking of Kevin Carson, that's not an accident. Besides a lot of similarities in general economic outlook, we're both members of the IWW, and we've been corresponding about state-free wildcat unionism and bouncing ideas off each other for some years now. I discuss some of the application of these ideas to free-market unionism in Free the Unions (and all political prisoners), Re: Individualism Clashes with Cooperation? It Just Ain't So!, El pueblo unido jamás será vencido!, Anarquistas por La Causa, In reply to a reply by J.H. Huebert and Walter Block, King Ludd's Throne, etc.

One issue, however, is that grassroots solidarity tends to be
overwhelmingly anti-trade; Caplan points out that anti-market and
anti-foreign bias probably do the work here, so it's not clear that this
is a "governments only" problem.

Well, I think that economists like Caplan tend to get a lot of mileage by conflating opposition to particular fetishized and subsidized forms of commercial activity, or the nasty products of government-juiced commerce, with an opposition to "commerce" or "trade" as such. (I think Caplan's usual metrics for "anti-foreign bias," for example, are really egregious.) Insofar as they do, I think that this is not really a problem for grassroots solidarity, but rather a problem for our metrics.

However, to be sure there are also a lot of genuine problems with people's sense of what solidarity would mean (hostility to market relationships, etc.).

Now, sometimes this is because people wrongly think that markets per se lead to some genuinely nasty consequences (structural poverty, exploitative and reckless business practices, persistent large-scale inequalities of wealth, dehumanizing or alienating forms of commercialism, workplace hierarchy, etc.). In those cases I think the thing to do is for defenders of markets to get clearer about what they include and how they might facilitate outcomes different from the stereotyped features of actually-existing corporate capitalism; and to make the case more clearly to people who criticize markets for allegedly having those features. (The question here is whether they oppose market relationships just as such; or whether they oppose them because of false beliefs about their likely consequences. If the latter, then better thinking and teaching about the likely consequences will tend to make people more open to the value of market relationships.) In this case the problem isn't with the commitment to solidarity but with the (false) belief that it conflicts with markets; so best to be clearer about markets.

On the other hand, sometimes the opposition results from beliefs that markets relationships produce things which the speaker fears or loathes, but which are not really nasty consequences. Market relationships do bring people into closer contact with foreigners, encourage all kinds of weird cultural cross-pollination, etc., and there are some people who don't like foreigners, have idiotic ideas about monolithic and impregnable Kultur, etc. etc. And I agree that this doesn't just come from government, or from the ripple-effects of government. But in those cases, the thing to do is just to dig in and defend a better, more humane, and more radical conception of class and solidarity than the stupid, belligerent, and largely politically-fabricated notions that are common in nationalistic and other phobic circles. Here, the problem is not false beliefs about what markets produce so much as irrational or malicious reactions to what they do. But then the problem is not, as I see it, the ideal of grassroots solidarity per se; it's rather the stupid, limited, and limiting political identities that people have been handed as bases for it. And the solution is doing cultural and organizing work to challenge the stupidity and offer better bases for cooperation.