Aster: This one was merely nightmare fuel, as I said. … An ecological collapse is not a sign of our failure to be humble before nature but of our failure to be rational in regards to nature’s reality. Failing societies lose the capacity to produce to match their habitual levels of consumption, and the process of trying to hold on to effects without causes sets everything afire with debt and inflation. … I agree intensely that the only way out is forward. … But I look at the mentality of the social classes who make the relevant decisions and I tremble. … One could hope that the system will change when it realise that its disfunctionality will come at the cost of its own survival. But I’m not placing my chips on the numbers in accordance with hope, and I don’t think one needs hope to pursue happiness.

Well, maybe not, but if you’re worried about this, why not work on building an alternative for yourself and your neighbors, to the extent that you can under current conditions? I don’t know how the cost of the components varies in New Zealand, but in the U.S., you can get the basics for building out a partial off-the-grid home power system (which can be expanded out on the margin, to take over more and more capacity, as you get the money and the experience with the system) for a few hundreds of US$, and can set it all up with off-the-shelf parts with the help of a DIY manual or two. (I can point you to some resources, if you’re curious. The notion that off-the-grid home power systems cost tens of thousands of dollars is the result of the Green State trying to insist on all-at-once rather than piecemeal solutions, and, especially, on sending people to professional “certified installers” who charge thousands of dollars for the labor.)

Of course, getting up your own home energy production won’t solve the big problem just on its own. But if you’re worried about losing electricity, it will solve that part of your little end of the problem, and that’s something.

I have no hope at all for any global or national systems to change. But I do have a lot of hope for changing things by getting out of global or national systems. And, perhaps, for helping others along the way to doing the same.

Rational modes of production begin at home….

Kevin,

Thanks for the reply. Here’s mine, on the minimum wage: GT 2008-03-06: On crutches and crowbars.

On dual strategies and the medallion cartel, I agree with you that there are some potential payoffs for the legal reform approach, including some payoffs that might accrue to making the counter-economic approach easier to pursue. But it does seem to me that there are already a lot of smaller-government reform types (IJ, etc.) who are already working that angle. As I see it, it’s usually better for anarchists to specialize in what we really want, and the most direct routes to it, particularly when (as I think is the case here) there’s lots of self-consciously libertarian effort already being put into the less radical solution, while relatively little self-consciously libertarian effort is going into the more radical solution, even though the more radical solution seems to be producing more in the way of concrete results. I figure that it may be a good idea not only to mention, but really to emphasize the ultra-radical position, which doesn’t have a lot of advocates right now, and let the reformists, which there are already more than enough of, do their thing in our wake.

Kevin: Frankly, eliminating the minimum wage and food stamps is at the very bottom of my list of priorities.

I agree with you on food stamps, but not on the minimum wage. In fact it’s laws like the minimum wage which I especially had in mind when I mentioned crowbars being passed off as crutches. While I agree that a free market would almost certainly result in substantial increases in real income and substantial decreases in cost of living for virtually all workers — to the point where they would either be making well above the current minimum wage, or at least where fixed costs of living would have dropped enough that it amounts to the same — there’s also the question of what we should be pushing for in the meantime in-betweentime, when there aren’t fully free markets in labor, capital, ideas, and land. In that context, the minimum wage law is, I think, actively destructive. Conditional give-aways, like foodstamps, are one thing; the program itself doesn’t violate anyone’s rights (it’s the tax funding that’s the problem), and people can always choose not to go on foodstamps if they decide (for whatever reason) that it’s doing them more harm than good. Not so with minimum wage; the only way to shake off this so-called protection is to seek out someone who’ll let you work under the table, and hope the government doesn’t catch on. The result is forcing one class of workers out of work in favor of another, more privileged class of workers. Hence, I’d argue we should treat abolition of the minimum wage a lot differently, in terms of strategic priorities, from how we treat government welfare, food stamps, etc.

Kevin: One of the best ideas I’ve heard, as an intermediate stage in scaling back the state, was a proposal on the Freedom Democrats’ list: to scale back the licensing system, at the very least, to prohibit any restriction on the number of licenses granted based on an estimate of what the market would support, or any licensing fees higher than the bare minimum cost of administering the system. That, in itself, would utterly demolish the effect of the taxi medallion system, among many other things.

Well, sure, I guess. On the other hand, in terms of practical success, it does seem to me that, as of right now, gypsy cab drivers are doing a lot more to effectually undermine the taxi medallion system in New York City than political activists and legal reformers are. I suspect that in a lot of these cases the best thing to do is really to work on ways to route around the damage, rather than trying to push right through it.