Bianca,

If I’d been able to make it to my local Tea Party, I would have done so, unironically.

The reason I would have done so is that I don’t approve of 30% of my income being taken away from me in order to fund the U.S. government’s ongoing efforts to blow up innocent people in foreign countries. Or to throw a few trillion dollars at failing corporations, so as to force me and my fellow workers to cover the costs of their bad investments, all for the explicit purpose of trying to use the force of the state to preserve the economic status quo.

Of course, you could say, “Well, aren’t there some things the government does that you do find useful?” Sure; I drive on the roads like everyone else. But if you total up the numbers, the government is spending more money — a lot more, by several orders of magnitude — on things that I find foolish, destructive, or morally appalling, than it is on things that genuinely help people. If I had a choice, I would certainly be happy to direct my money money away from the government’s war-machine and its corporate bail-out machine and direct a fair amount of that of my money towards things like roads and liberal education and mutual aid for my fellow workers. But, then, if I had a choice, we wouldn’t be talking about taxes anymore. We’d be talking about donations. The distinguishing feature of taxation is precisely the fact that the government makes me pay taxes in, whether or not I approve of the uses that they’ll be put to; and that I have no direct control over what purposes the government puts my money towards.

GT 2009-04-19: Men in Uniform #3, (possible trigger warning) in which an L.A. county sheriff’s deputy stalks, terrorizes, and forces unwanted sexual contact on a woman he singled out at a bar, flashing both his badge and his gun along the way, and, by way of consequences, gets to plead out to “disturbing the peace” and return to work after a two-week vacation. Malestream media treats the case as if it were an example of a problem with alcohol abuse on the force, rather than, you know, sexual predators being allowed to roam around the city with badges and guns.

<a href=”http://radgeek.com/gt/2009/04/17/death_by/>GT 2009-04-17: Death by Homeland Security #3: The Disappeared, in which the United States government’s border Securitate leaves a man to die from a heart attack while in immigration lock-up, because they just couldn’t be bothered to get a mere immigrant medical attention, and then spends the next few years denying that the man ever even existed.

Brandon:

I can’t see much evidence of any exploitation of women by men.

Of course you can’t. Sex-class is so deep as to be invisible.

If you want to find evidence of systemic male oppression of women, there’s a lot of detailed discussion of it in those feminist books that you haven’t read. I can make some suggestions for places to start, if you’d like.

Brandon:

If there really is a male conspiracy against females …

There is as far as I know no serious feminist theorist in the world who believes, or who has ever claimed, that there is any kind of conscious global conspiracy by men against women. Feminist theory, especially radical feminist theory, makes frequent use of concepts like “patriarchy” and “rape culture,” but that’s not the same thing as a deliberate plan to keep women down. You don’t need a conscious global conspiracy in order for there to be large social structures with intense systemic effects that tend to benefit men as a class and hurt women as a class. The second article that Roderick refers you to, Women and the Invisible Fist, specifically discusses this point at some length.

Hope this helps.

Well, I can speak only for myself, not for American political culture as a whole. But I oppose and hate taxes because taxes pay for the government. I’m an anarchist, so I oppose and hate the government. So I also oppose and hate the taxes that make it possible.

You mention that taxes pay for social welfare programs. Sure they do; they also pay for missiles to blow up houses in Pakistan and for bombs to murder Iraqi children with. You might say that what you’d like to do is to pay in for the welfare and not pay in for the warfare. I’m sure you would; so would I. But if you got to pick and choose which projects your money went to, that would be a fine thing, but it wouldn’t be taxes anymore, would it? If you get to choose where it goes, then it’s voluntary mutual aid, and for that you need neither a government nor taxes, which necessarily entail that money is taken from people and put to purposes which the government, not those people, decide on.

Take this example: a village council decides that the farmers who live there have to give a certain percentage of their grain crops for a common grain storehouse for use in emergencies. The chief and elders request it and it’s done by the citizens. This is an example of taxation.

No it’s not. Tax collectors don’t “request”; they threaten. If people voluntarily agree to support a common project, then you’re not describing taxation anymore. You’re describing donations.

Gracchus:

The problem is, the most hardcore and prominent libertarians are so narrowly focused on the economic aspect that not only do they brush aside the social aspects as “nice to have, but not central,” but also their viewpoint that every bloody activity, including male-female relationships, is a financial transaction leads to some extremely misogynistic views.

Could you tell me who, specifically, you’re thinking of when you mention “the most hardcore and prominent libertarians”? (Obviously, I don’t need an exhaustive list, but some representative examples would help.) It’s easy to talk about your impression of amorphous groups, but I suspect that discussing specific people might be productive for mutual understanding. In part because I also suspect that your list of “the most hardcore and prominent libertarians” might be different from the list that people who are more directly involved in the libertarian movement would offer.

“I have no idea whether this is enough to appease the communists, the mutualists, the uber-left libertarians. I hope it would be, primarily because I’m simply not sold on the idea that individuals shouldn’t have the right to own and acquire productive assets, at least not on any moral grounds.”

Well, sure, but which anarchists are trying to sell that idea? Maybe some of the commies (although, remember, most anarcho-communists do believe in, or at least nod at a principle which declares, the right of individuals to withdraw from communist arrangements if they desire; the idea is usually that they imagine communist arrangements would be so obviously superior that nobody but a few lone weirdos would want to, and that even if those lone weirdos somehow amassed enough resources to build a factory under private proprietorship, that nobody would want to toil in it). But in any case, I certainly don’t know of any mutualists or “uber-left libertarians” who think that individual people shouldn’t have the right to own and acquire productive assets. If you do, I’d like to hear some names and quotations.

Of course, there is a separate question, as to what forms of organization and what levels of centralization of control over machinery and technology, would be most likely to flourish within a market freed from government privileges and increasingly distant from the shadow of past government subsidies. That question is interesting and important, but separate from the moral question of what individual people ought to have the right to do or not to do. For what it’s worth, though, I think it would be absolutely wrong to claim that, on the predictive (as opposed to the normative) question, mutualists ad “uber-left libertarians” somehow imagine that there wouldn’t be any individual ownership of capital in a freed market. Actually, the position is generally that individual ownership of capital would become much more widespread than it currently is, because forms of collective ownership that currently dominate the market (e.g. large centralized corporations) would be undermined by the collapse of state privilege. To take an example, as I understand it, Carson’s view (for example) is that vastly more productive assets would be owned individually in a free society than are today, because he envisions that, absent government intervention in favor of large centralized operations, a much larger portion of production would be carried out within households and small family shops.

GT 2009-02-21: how professional social workers colonized the maternity home movement, and what came after looks at a long passage from Ann Fessler’s book on women who surrendered children for adoption in the decades before Roe v. Wade. In particular, it has to do with what happened to the maternity home movement during the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, and how a movement that originally started, in the early 1900s, as a sympathetic refuge, a form of mutual aid between ordinary women, and a way for unwed mothers to find sources of relief and economic support, was gradually taken over and transformed into a means for professional social workers to sequester pregnant women, to aid and abet the social practice of secret-keeping and slut-shaming, and to separate young mothers from their children.

GT 2009-02-18: Public schooling #2: Criminal texting, in which a 14 year old girl in Wisconsin is detained by the police at her high school, interrogated, searched by a male police officer, arrested for “disorderly conduct,” then body-searched by a female police officer, all in order to find a cell phone that it turns out she was hiding in her pants. The charge is that she was sending text messages in class after the teacher told her to stop, and then hid her phone from the teacher when the teacher tried to confiscate it. This minor classroom management issue apparently was considered a police matter and a cause for arrest, for which the girl could in principle be fined up to $5,000.

David,

When I write that “voluntary mutual aid societies and workers\’ unions” are among the “myriad other ways for free people to choose individually to cooperate without cash exchanges,” I do in fact mean for the word “voluntary” to mean something. I agree with you that government labor bureaucracy, and government agencies (such as the National Labor Relations Board in the U.S.) that force employers to bargain with unions based on a majority vote of the workers, are violations of the rights of employers to chose who or who not to bargain with. But that’s no more an indictment of unions per se than the existence of government-supported monopoly corporations or government-created captive markets for large corporations (such as government-protected electrical, gas, water, local cable, or telecom monopolists; or such as the government’s use of force to, e.g., force unwilling customers to buy auto insurance) is an indictment of corporations per se.

Labor unions, as a form of voluntary association, existed and flourished in the United States (to take one example) for about 65 years before the Wagner Act was passed, and during that time they did their work without government patronage, and, indeed, often in the face of government persecution and tremendous amounts of violence, directed against even nonviolent strikers. Today, there exist successful fighting unions that do not participate in the NLRB system, either because they object to the bureaucratic process (as with the Industrial Workers of the World), or because the workers they represent are legally excluded from NLRB recognition (as with farmworkers’ unions such as the UFW, FLOC, and the Coalition of Immokalee Workers). In fact, in an age of plummeting union membership and constant schism among establishment unions like the AFL-CIO or “Change to Win” (ha, ha), these non-recognized unions are among the only unions that can report any real success in recent organizing drives. I conclude, therefore, that labor unions can and do exist without “government sanctions of monopoly and compulsion.” You admit as much at the end of your comment; but given that it is true, it’s curious that you’d object to including them on the list of forms of voluntary association that free people might choose to engage in. Do you also object to saying that free people might set up private schools, since after all schooling is mostly carried on these days by government and at taxpayer expense?

That said, while I agree, again, that the NLRB and its regulations are instances of coercion, I can’t agree with your claims about union shop or agency shop contracts. (That is, contracts in which a union and an employer agree that new employees must become a member of the union, or must pay in a fee as a substitute for their dues if they choose not to become a member.) There is in fact absolutely nothing in free-market theory which would forbid an employer from making such a contract as part of a bargain with a labor union; in a free market, employers and workers can make any kind of contracts about hiring and firing that they want to make. The fact that unions have an artificially strong bargaining position due to NLRB coercion is, of course, a violation of the rights of the employer; but adopting a particular kind of restrictive hiring agreement as a result of that bargaining, even in the existing unfree market, is not a violation of the rights of non-union workers. Prospective workers do not have a right to override private contracts in order to secure some particular job, and bosses have no moral obligation to give jobs to workers who won’t join the union, if they have have agreed to sign on to a more restrictive set of hiring practices.

Nor can I agree with your claim that a strike is an “example of union coercion.” This is absurd; all workers have a right to quit working, either individually or en masse; thus they have a right to go on strike. And if workers decide to join a private association, like a labor union, which has private disciplinary procedures for members, then that association has every right to hold them to their agreement. If you don’t like it, you should quit the union. If you can’t quit the union without quitting your job, you should quit your job. Losing a job is sad, but it’s not a violation of your rights. The world doesn’t owe you a living and if, in order to get a job you wanted, you agreed to sign on to a contract stipulating that you’d join the union and abide by union decisions to strike, then you can hardly complain that you’re being “coerced” just by being held to the terms of your contract. Nor can I agree with the claim that a union picket line is, just as such, a threat of violence against those who would choose to cross it. Of course, there have been cases in the past where people who nonviolently crossed picket lines were subjected to vigilante violence against their persons or against their property. That sort of thing is wrong, dead wrong, and should be condemned as invasions of the freedom of those who would chose to cross them. But there is nothing about a picket per se that demands or threatens that kind of bad behavior: there are lots of perfectly peaceful picket lines, and I can’t for the life of me see why the violence of some picketers should be used to impugn other picketers who never threatened anything of the sort, or who conscientiously swore off any kind of violence whatever. Certainly the form of unionism I have in mind, when mentioning labor unions as one potential form of voluntary cooperation, is the form of unionism that FW Joe Ettor proposed, when he said, during the great Lawrence textile strike of 1912:

“If the workers of the world want to win, all they have to do is recognize their own solidarity. They have nothing to do but fold their arms and the world will stop. The workers are more powerful with their hands in their pockets than all the property of the capitalists. As long as the workers keep their hands in their pockets, the capitalists cannot put theirs there. With passive resistance, with the workers absolutely refusing to move, lying absolutely silent, they are more powerful than all the weapons and instruments that the other side has for attack.”

Finally, I think it is a mistake to claim, as you do, that government labor laws unilaterally put a “heavy thumb … on the unions’ side of the scale.” It’s true that government labor laws grant substantial privileges to a certain kind of labor union (the kind that wants and can get NLRB recognition). But it also imposes substantial regulatory burdens; the government patronage comes with government strings attached. For example, it is completely illegal for NLRB-recognized unions to engage in wildcat strikes, secondary strikes, or secondary boycotts; they are absolutely forbidden from holding out for closed shop contracts and, in “Right to Work” states, are legally forbidden from even getting a union shop contract; union hiring halls are illegal; declared strikes can be, and have been, declared illegal by the arbitrary fiat of the President of the United States. All this means that some unions are privileged by the NLRB system — generally, relatively conservative business unions, like those in the AFL-CIO and “Change to Win,” who operate mainly through collective bargaining processes with management, who limit their tactics to backroom negotiations and limited strikes, who limit their goals to job security clauses or benefit packages in a conventional labor contract, and which retain a team of professional labor lawyers, union bosses, and full-time “organizers” to do their work. Meanwhile it burdens or outright criminalizes other kinds of unions, which used to be much more prominent in the pre-Wagner era — rank-and-file-run unions like the I.W.W., who generally refused collective bargaining, favored minority unionism, direct action on the shop floor, solidarity strikes, general strikes, union hiring halls, and other forms of action that didn’t depend on maintaining any kind of bureaucratic interface with the boss or the State.

For more on wildcat unionism and free market principles, see my articles “Free the Unions (and all political prisoners)!” [1] and “In reply to a reply by Walter Block and J.H. Huebert” [2], my series of articles on the Coalition of Immokalee Workers and the series of victories it has won through government-free wildcat unionism [3], and Kevin Carson’s essay “The Ethics of Labor Struggle: A Free Market Perspective” [4].

Hope this helps.

It’s certainly an injustice that former soldiers who turn to drugs as a way of coping with the return to civilian life should be thrown in prison for a nonviolent offense that hurts only the drug abuser himself.

But I think I have a better suggestion for how to deal with that injustice. Instead of inventing special courts so that former soldiers can be treated as if they were legally superior to everyone else — why not just stop imprisoning anybody at all for nonviolent drug offenses?

Any reason you could give that would make it reasonable not to imprison former soldiers with non-violent drug problems would be just as good a reason not to imprison anybody else with a non-violent drug problem. You don’t need special courts; you just need to realize that the government’s campaign for drug prohibition is stupid, destructive, and is destroying the lives of all too many peaceful people.

Whatever the virtues or the vices of unions, and whether or not the motives of the Culinary make sense to outside observers, and whether or not Obama would approve, there remains one basic issue that the redevelopment machine and its apologists always dodge: whether or not taking millions out of workers’ pockets, in order to build nicer offices for Oscar Goodman and his cronies, is actually a productive use of our money.

You won’t hear anything about this, because it’s much easier to impugn the motives of your critics, or appeal to a popular politician, than to defend such a ridiculous and self-serving claim.

We are told that this will provide “construction jobs.” Of course it would; so would building a 40-foot golden statue of Oscar Goodman in downtown; so would digging a giant hole out in the desert and then filling it back up. But every dollar Oscar Goodman forces you or I to spend on his new office is a dollar that won’t be spent on providing for our own lives, or patronizing businesses that provide us with genuinely useful goods or services. Meaning a few more jobs in construction come at the expense of fewer jobs and a worse living for everyone else.

City government has no power to wish wealth into existence; they can only take wealth from taxpayers and apply it to some particular project. If they didn’t take it, it wouldn’t disappear; it would be applied to different projects. The question to ask is whether this project actually improves my life or yours in any way. If this project has any benefits worth mentioning for anyone other than city politicians, they ought to be able to persuade me those benefits are worth paying for. Not force me to pay for it by means of taxation and lawsuits.