@Ethan,

There are many definitions of socialism on offer. (Some common definitions get little beyond a kindergarden-level praise of “sharing”; others include everything from “opposition to monopolistic corporatism,” to “centralized state planning for its own sake,” from “the abolition of private property in the means of production” to “all-encompassing gift economies for most or all goods and services” to “systems of production which ensure that a worker receives the equivalent of the full marginal productivity of her labor” (with this last goal usually to be achieved by abolishing of government-backed monopolies over land and capital), etc. Some are for global-scale top-down “rational” planning and “expert” management in all things; some are for abolishing all forms of coercive planning and relying on the spontaneous harmonization of interests. If you’re curious as to what this wealth of conceptions all have in common, I’d say that the concept they are all riffing on is the concept of opposition to actually-existing monopolistic big business, because of a sense that it rigs the system in favor of a class of idlers who live off of a skim from the work of common workers, and a desire to adopt new forms of living which better serve the material and social needs of those common workers. The vast differences amongst conceptions of socialism have to do with the analysis of how the rigging and skimming happen, and what ought to be done about it.

Those who couch their understanding in terms of ownership of the means of production generally do not have in mind “public” (if that means “governmental”) ownership of the means of production; rather, the proposal is typically either for worker ownership of the means of production (among mutualists, syndicalists, and autonomists), or else for common ownership of the means of production (among communists). “Common ownership” may mean ownership managed by a political apparatus, supposedly at the direction of “the people” or “the proletariat” — ha, ha, ha. But it may also mean, as in Bakunin or Kropotkin — genuine common ownership by everyone within the community, with some sort of agreed-on joint decision-making process and backed by common consent, rather than a professionalized political body with coercive powers.

In the worker-ownership and the anarcho-common-ownership versions, I think it ought to be easy to see how these things can come about without coercion. These are just different ways of arranging what laissez-faire economics would call a “firm.” Firms can be owned jointly among many shareholders, and there’s no requirement that those shareholders be absentee investors; as with existing co-ops, the joint owners might be the workers in the firm; or they might be the regular consumers of the firm’s goods and services, or might be a very broad class of community “stakeholders,” etc. Firms can also be run more or less directly by their owners; although most very large firms have a significant separation of ownership from management (that is, the shareholders hire on an agent or a handful of agents to make executive decisions on their behalf), worker-owned or community-owned co-ops are different sorts of beasts, and might well opt for more participatory, hands-on management by the worker or community owners themselves. Hence, worker-ownership or common-ownership of the means of production within a freed market and without coercion.

@aaronman:

This suggests it is a matter of principle,

No doubt. But what’s the principle?

If it’s something like “The U.S. government should be as efficient as possible in spending what it steals from innocent victims,” I can’t see why that principle is worth defending or acting on. The primary problem isn’t profligacy; it’s the stealing.

The money he sends back only delays the theft and destruction that has to occur for the government to continue

No, it doesn’t. It is not as if the IRS is going to collect $100,000 less in taxes or the Treasury is going to issue $100,000 less in government bonds thanks to the windfall. It’s not as if government returns surpluses back to taxpayers when they have surpluses; they just look around for new things to spend the extra money on.

Well I didn’t see this was just for his office budget, but if he inflated the value of staff labor just because he had extra money lying around he would be abandoning his market principles.

What market principles? In my view, there is no way whatsoever to live up to “market principles” when you are distributing stolen loot. All government spending is by definition a command economy, not a market economy, and no price that Paul chose to pay for labor or goods in his office budget, whether small or large, would be a “market” price, because (as Mises teaches us) there’s no way for a command economy to approximate market outcomes.

but you’re acting like what the Fed spends money on is worse than what Paul would spend money on locally

The money went to Treasury, not to the Federal Reserve. In any case, what the U.S. government spends money on is definitely worse than what Paul would have spent it on locally. Paul’s spending would merely be wasteful. The U.S. government’s spending is actively evil and destructive; it goes towards imprisoning, surveilling, hurting, maiming, and killing innocent people, both within the United States and abroad.

Paul spending money that is neither his nor should be spent is central planning as well.

Yes, I agree. There’s no way around central planning when government allocates money. All you can do is get the money away from government as quickly as possible — and, preferably, try to get it into the hands of some those net taxpayers it was originally stolen from. But that’s precisely why Paul shouldn’t give the money back to Treasury for more government allocation.

But I get what you’re saying and it’s not a bad thought, he could have paid himself the $100,000 and spent it at every business in town or something…

I think that would be better than giving it back to Treasury, but the best thing for him to do would be to just give it away directly to randomly selected net taxpayers without demanding any consideration in return.

@Sir Elliot:

He can’t keep the money. If he doesn’t use it, it must be returned to whatever general office staff budget is in place, since the books have to be balanced out.

I’m aware. What I’m suggesting is that it would be better for Ron Paul to use it on something wasteful but non-destructive, rather than giving it back to the U.S. government, which will use it for something both wasteful and destructive.

Maybe if the featherbedding gets too egregious, it would make it difficult for Ron Paul to keep his government job. But then, I’m not especially interested in figuring out ways to help Ron Paul keep his government job.

Maybe I’m not understanding OP’s point?

Maybe not. If it helps, my primary point is that it’s misleading (and indeed stupid, if not dishonest) to describe paying $100,000 back to the U.S. Treasury as “paying back the American people.” What it is, is paying back the American government, which is a different entity, and one which happens to be antagonistic towards, and parasitic on, the “people” it claims to rule.

@Kylesa:

That’s a pretty massive leap in logic to suggest that Ron Paul’s fiscal conservatism is aiding bankers.

I didn’t say it’s aiding bankers. I said it’s aiding the U.S. government. (The U.S. government, of course, does aid bankers — hence my mention of them — but it also does lots of other things. Like blowing up Afghan children.)

So in an essence, you’re faulting Ron Paul for sticking to his ‘guns’ (Being an honest politician).

No; I’m faulting those who claim that giving stolen money back to the pirate who originally stole it is a form of “honesty.” There is no “honest” way for any politician to spend tax monies; the only thing to do is to get them out of political hands.

Anon73:

Well, Aster mentioned the word “pogrom” before you did, so it’s natural you would repeat it. But I asked because I am unsure about what would count as a “pogrom” in your light.

E.g. would a pogrom against women in prostitution have to involve large-scale murders and massacres (which certainly has happened, many times, but is rarer than other forms of mass violence against women in prostitution)? Or would it be enough if large numbers of women in prostitution were being forcibly rounded up, restrained, beaten or tortured, forced out of their homes and livelihoods, and locked away in prison camps for months or years at a time? If the latter sort of dispossession and terrorization counts, then that’s been the official policy and program of countless patriarchal states throughout the world — among them the state of Denmark until the 1999 partial decriminalization.

Tim Starr: China was vastly better off under Chiang Kai-Shek (before Japan invaded) than under Mao.

Tim, you ignorant fuck.

The “before Japan invaded” is an interesting little clause there. I don’t know whether this is supposed to refer to Japan’s 1931 invasion of Manchuria (in which case we’re only talking about three years total, from Chiang’s capture of Beijing in 1928 to 1931), or the beginning of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937. In either case, I’m not sure whether mentioning the Japanese invasion here is meant to make it seem as though Chiang and the KMT weren’t responsible for any of the mass murder in China while fighting the Japanese (which is absurd; they personally killed millions of people), or if it’s meant to suggest that the mass killing carried out by the KMT’s forces should be blamed on the Japanese invasion rather than on Chiang’s regime (which, if so, is as ridiculous as blaming the Allied military advance for the Holocaust, or blaming U.S. foreign policy for Castro’s repression).

In any case, let’s take a look at what life was like in “vastly better off” China under Generalissimo Chiang and the KMT:

In many ways, the Nationalists were no different than the warlords. They murdered opponents, assassinated critics, and employed terror as a device of rule. Moreover, the Nationalist soldier, like many warlord soldiers, was considered scum, lower than vermin. They were beaten, mistreated, often fed poorly and ill paid; and if wounded or sick they were left to fend for themselves, often to die slow and miserable deaths. In turn, soldiers often treated civilians no better. Looting, rape, arbitrary murder, was a risk helpless civilians faced from passing soldiers or those occupying or reoccupying their villages and towns.

But killing by the Nationalists was also strategic and ideological. After the initial cooperative period, they especially sought out communists or communist sympathizers for execution. When defeating the communists in a particular region and occupying or reoccupying it, they went so far as to kill anyone they felt had cooperated with the communists or had been tainted by them. In one military drive against the communist in 1934 to 1935, they slaughtered or starved to death perhaps as many as 1,000,000 people.2 Moreover, especially during the 1940s, landlords and former officials who had fled from communists or Japanese would follow in the train of Nationalist soldiers and under military protection murder those peasants who they feared or had a grudge against. While such killing may have numbered a few from village to village, when these victims are added up over all the villages and districts involved for well over a hundred-million people, than hundreds of thousands were probably killed, just from this cause alone.

Then there was the process of conscription. This was a deadly affair in which men were kidnapped for the army, rounded up indiscriminately by press-gangs or army units among those on the roads or in the towns and villages, or otherwise gathered together. Many men, some the very young and old, were killed resisting or trying to escape. Once collected, they would be roped or chained together and marched, with little food or water, long distances to camp. They often died or were killed along the way, sometimes less than 50 percent reaching camp alive. Then recruit camp was no better, with hospitals resembling Nazi concentration camps like Buchenwald.3 Probably 3,081,000 died during the Sino-Japanese War; likely another 1,131,000 during the Civil War–4,212,000 dead in total. Just during conscription.

Although this fantastic total is overwhelming enough, we still must add those that died from famine. Famine was treated as a state of nature for China, something to be expected as an Act of God. But where famine was indeed a natural calamity during these Nationalist years, the greed of Nationalist officials, the continued imposition of impossible taxes, the seizing of all the peasants grain, the refusal to provide aid for political reasons, all contributed massively to the death toll. In Honan Province during the famine of 1942 to 1943, Nationalist officials took grain by force from the starving peasants to sell for their own profit, and officials in a neighboring province refused to release their store of grain because of a “delicate local balance of power.”4 Quite likely the Nationalists overall were responsible for 1,750,000 to 2,500,000 famine deaths.

While these deaths from conscription and famine may seem to be the residual of a thoroughly corrupt and incompetent political system, the Nationalist in fact did kill en masse with cold blooded calculation. Perhaps the most remarkable example of this is their dynamiting of the Yellow River dikes in order to stall a Japanese offensive during the Sino-Japanese War. The resulting, calamitous flood likely drowned or otherwise killed 440,000 people, even possible 893,000 according to a Chinese Social Science Institute.5 The flood having washed out a new channel, leaving the old one for peasants to farm and develop. Indeed, over the following years villages and towns were established in or near the old river bed. Then during the subsequent Civil War, near nine years later, to create a barrier between two communist armies by forcing the river to flood back into its old channel, the Nationalists repaired the dikes. As those peasants downstream tried to build dikes against the coming flood, they were bombed by Nationalist planes.

From the earliest years to their final defeat on the mainland, the Nationalist likely killed from 5,965,000 to 18,522,000 helpless people, probably 10,214,000. This incredible number is over a million greater than all the aforementioned 8,963,000 war dead in all the hundreds of wars and rebellions in China from the beginning of the century to the Nationalist final defeat. It ranks the Nationalists as the fourth greatest demociders of this century, behind the Soviets, Chinese communists, and German Nazis. This democide is even more impressive when it is realized that the Nationalists never controlled all of China, perhaps no more than 50 to 60 percent of the population at its greatest.

— R.J. Rummel, “China’s Democide and War,” Chapter 1 of China’s Bloody Century

Of course he might point out that, while Chiang and his thugs killed 10 million, the Chinese communists and their thugs have killed even more — somewhere around 40-60 million. But if Tim Starr’s notion of “vastly better off” is being starved and tortured and murdered by a regime that killed 10 million in the course of 20 years with effective control over half of China, rather than being starved and tortured murdered by a regime that killed 40-60 million in the course of 60 years of effective control over all of China, then I have to wonder what sort of real difference this is supposed to make for the millions of people dead at Chiang’s hands. In any case, this ridiculous nostalgia for the fourth greatest mass murderer in the history of the world is deeply regrettable.

As for whether Zinn’s stupid comments about the Communist victory in China are some kind of decisive reason for rejecting Zinn’s work out of hand, of course they are not. They are evidence that he was wrong about the Chinese communists. They are not evidence that his work is worthless. Individual claims can be assessed on their merits, and the notion that Zinn’s work as a whole ought to be treated as worthless, or that everything Zinn said ought to be rejected, if he was wrong about one thing — even really wrong about one thing that really mattered — is of course idiotic.

vidyohs: I guess I have to spend more time with Lysander, as so far in my readings I haven’t got to the part about him being an anarchist, or least I have come to that interpretation yet. . . . Note I didn’t say you were wrong about Lysander, I just said that, in my quite likely more meager reading of Lysander, I had not made that interpretation. Now that you’ve suggested it, I’ll look closer.

Well, from the sounds of it you’ve already read No Treason. If you haven’t yet gotten the anarchistic implications of Spooner’s view, you might consult his later books, in which he most clearly argues that he views any form of government whatever as illegitimate, e.g. his “Letter to Thomas F. Bayard: Challenging his right — and that of all the other so-called senators and representatives in Congress — to exercise any legislative power whatever over the people of the United States” at http://praxeology.net/LS-LB.htm or his short book “Natural Law; or The Science of Justice: A Treatise on Natural Law, Natural Justice, Natural Rights, Natural Liberty, and Natural Society; showing that all legislation whatsoever is an absurdity, a usurpation, and a crime” at http://praxeology.net/LS-NL-1.htm . Spooner makes it pretty clear there.

I know that workers at various times have risen up and seized the farm from its owners, but my point was that in most cases they probably didn’t get a whole hell of a lot from it, hardly worth the effort unless life in general where the farm is located is also just a living hell for everyone. I guess I am saying that in my view, and in general, while a farm may produce a tidy wealth for one man, typically that wealth divided amongst many men isn’t going very far.

Well, um, in situations where peasants get together and seize control over farms, it has typically been the case that they were seizing control over farms that they were already working on as their primary means of subsistence. The difference is that before they had to work according to the requirements set by a government-privileged landlord, and to turn a hefty share of the fruits of their labor over to him, whereas afterwards they didn’t have to do that. They were already surviving on shares of the income generated from a single (typically very large) farm or plantation; the difference is that, after the expropriation, the shares they got were no longer reduced by the leeching of government-appointed tax farmers and landlords. (* Government-appointed because the landlord typically owed his control over the land to a grant from the Crown or the State based on nothing more than the naked exercise of government power and privilege (to conquest and feudalism in Russia or France; to conquest and colonialism in European-colonized territories in Latin America or Africa).

Francois

Well, don’t look so surprised. It’s not exactly unusual for Lew Rockwell to say kind things about anti-war revisionist historians, including those on the populist Left. He’ll typically say kind things about almost anyone who he thinks is on the right side of the war issue.

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….

SO,

I broadly agree with most everything you suggest. Generally speaking, with or without technological leaps in green energy, I definitely think it’s the case that decentralizing power production is both do-able for a surprising number of people under present circumstances. And that it’s certainly the best way by far to address peak-oil related concerns.

Soviet Onion: I imagine they’ll like that solution much better than the current environmentalist fixations which, among other things, include glorifying AIDS and pesticide-ban enabled malaria epidemics as forms of “natural population control”

I don’t think it’s fair to describe this kind of anthropocidal stuff as “current environmentalist fixations.” Any more than it would be fair to describe a Ra’s al-Ghul scale mass die-off of humanity as a “current Anarchist fixation,” even though I can think of some doofs who published calls for that sort of thing in Earth First! and other deep-ecology journals while self-identifying as Anarchists. The movement has a lot of different facets and shouldn’t simply be defined by its worst exponents.

Soviet: We’ve only got about a half-billion years before the sun boils the oceans and turns “Mother Earth” back into the lifeless rock she used to be.

Fortunately we apparently only need about 1,000,000 more years before we can all relocate to the Vorlon homeworld, anyway.

Jeff: I have a little bit more of a social-contract view of taxation. If you live here, you’re bound somewhat by the will of the majority, and if the majority wants to deficit spend a little temporarily, you should pay the taxes to support it. This will-of-the-majority stuff is a dangerous road to tread, of course, but I’d hope a broad enough reading of the Constitution provides protection against tyrannies of the majority.

Well, since this conversation has been about setting out limits, what I’d be interested to hear from you is how far the suppression of minority preferences by the majority would have to go before you considered it “tyranny.” How gravely do my wishes have to be violated in order to satisfy the wishes of the majority, before I count as being tyrannized?

For example, do profound violations of conscience count? I ask because one of the things the Constitution clearly has not protected me from, and could not plausibly be expected to protect me from (given the basic list of enumerated powers) is being forced, by the will of the majority, to provide taxes that materially support the U.S. government’s wars and occupations in Afghanistan and Iraq. I am forced to cover the costs of these wars even though I oppose them as a matter of conscience; even though I consider what is being done with my money nothing short of an act of mass murder being carried out against innocent people. Set aside for the moment the question of whether or not you agree with me on the wars — I’m new to your blog so I wouldn’t know. But given that I believe what I believe does the fact that majoritarian politics has forced me to pay for acts that so fundamentally violate my conscience that I would die before committing or facilitating them voluntarily — from Bagram to Fallujah to Abu Ghraib — does that rise to the level of being tyrannized? If not, what would?

Jeff: … paying taxes is part of the social contract you’re in by living here. If you don’t want to have the government offer a service, fine, but if a majority of your fellow citizens do want that service offered, you’re bound to pay for it by that contract. By instituting a government, we’ve agreed to fund our collective endeavors. It’s up to the voters and their representatives to figure out what, exactly, those endeavors are.

Well, wait. Who’s the “we” here? I didn’t institute a government; I was never asked, and if asked, I would have declined. So if I’m not part of the “we” who instituted the government, how did I end up part of the “we” who allegedly agreed to the taxes and spending?

Tom: It also demonstrates why people who claim to be libertarians, but do not take the concerns of the black civil rights movement seriously, aren’t really libertarians at all. A policy that allows police to arrest a black man on his own property for verbally asserting his rights is not a libertarian policy; it is a radically authoritarian policy, one that would be more at home in a police state than in a liberal democracy. If the black civil rights movement is concerned about this sort of thing, while the mainstream libertarian movement is not, then it’s reasonable to ask who the real libertarians are in this country.

Hey, man, I agree with you about all that, but what makes you think that the antecedent of that last if-then statement is true? What libertarians do you have in mind who are ignoring this?

Radley Balko posted about the Gates arrest repeatedly (1, 2, 3), Randall McElroy posted about it on the same day as Balko’s first post (4), Lila Ravija posted about it on the same day (5), Sheldon Richman wrote about it yesterday (6), as did Gary Chartier (7). I posted about it just today. Of course, I’m not a “mainstream” libertarian (or much of anything else); and you couldn’t be expected to know about posts that went up Friday or today when you were posting on Thursday. But I have read plenty of libertarian commentary about this story, and just about all of it has been intensely critical of the police; moreover, I’ve read a lot of libertarian commentary on policing generally (some of which, e.g. Balko’s stuff, is incontestably part of the libertarian “mainstream,” if any such thing exists), and I can’t think of anything written in the last, say, 15 years or so, that would lead me to any kind of general conclusion that libertarians typically aren’t concerned with this sort of thing, or that they wouldn’t typically side with Gates on this issue. The libertarians I hang out with certainly are, and certainly would, and I think most recent libertarian writing on policing reflects the same trend.