NAIS and Counter-Economics

The last great false-hope of the minarchists, Ron Paul, has called attention to the latest statist aggression in the field of agriculture, the National Animal Identification System (NAIS):

The House of Representatives recently passed funding for a new federal mandate that threatens to put thousands of small farmers and ranchers out of business. The National Animal Identification System, known as NAIS, is an expensive and unnecessary federal program that requires owners of livestock – cattle, dairy, poultry, and even horses – to tag animals with electronic tracking devices. The intrusive monitoring system amounts to nothing more than a tax on livestock owners, allowing the federal government access to detailed information about their private property.

…and urges libertarian activists to waste their precious time and resources on debilitative, state-worshipping political pseudo-action:

…there’s still time to tell the Senate to dump NAIS. Please call your Senators and tell them you oppose spending even one dime on the NAIS program in the 2007 agriculture appropriations bill.

Agorists know better:

But using New Libertarian [ed: agorist] analysis, one can predict the likely outbreak of statist aggression and move to head it off by exposure or even defend or evacuate the victims. One can also predict the probable outcomes of deviations by libertarian groups and either head off the sell-outs and disasters or win respect for one’s foresight and that of New Libertarianism from potential recruits. Let the State be the forest fire; the NLA [ed: New Libertarian Alliance or Revolutionary Agorist Cadre] are the smoke-eaters who know how it burns, how to firebreak, how the winds of change affect it, where the sparks may fly, and finally, how to extinguish it. — Samuel Edward Konkin III, New Libertarian Manifesto, Chapter 4 “Revolution: Our Strategy“

Radical libertarians would be more effective urging the small ranchers about to be squeezed out of business by this manifestation of statist monopoly capitalism to prepare to covertly defy the NAIS system, study the libertarian philosophical basis for understanding why such acts would be ethical and develop tools and strategies for doing so profitably — the counter-economic approach of revolutionary agorism.

Small ranchers could, for example, take a fresh look at smaller and easier to hide breeds that require less grazing space and were specifically bred for mountain terrain, like the Dexter. They could, in theory, look to exotic solutions such as possible use of homebrew robotic aerial drones to drive herds or alliances with hacker groups to render herds “invisible” to satellite surveillance at the database level.