BradSpangler.com

As followup on my recent Open Letter to Señor Joaquin Guzman, I’d like to note where it has been reported that Señor Guzman recently said the following:

“I couldn’t have gotten so stinking rich without George Bush, George Bush Jr., Ronald Reagan, even El Presidente Obama, none of them have the cajones to stand up to all the big money that wants to keep this stuff illegal. From the bottom of my heart, I want to say, Gracias amigos, I owe my whole empire to you.”

I doubt that my insignificant little blog post had anything to do with his statement, but regardless of whether it did or not, I extend my deepest thanks to Señor Guzman for his frank remarks. He’s a busy man with a lot to deal with, so his contribution to the debate is particularly welcome.

A post on the Mises blog prompted me to notice a post on Brad DeLong’s blog and the discussion in its comments section. I then decided to re-post my own comment here.

Rockwell is a Rothbardian, and Rothbard’s conception of his radical libertarianism was that it occupied the furthest left point possible on the political spectrum, with statist conservatism on the right and Marxism in the confused middle.

To understand why, one only need understand that libertarianism is simply the more rigorously consistent application of classical liberal (in a modern context, “market liberal”) ideas.

Conservatism = statist values, statist methods
Marxism = liberal values, statist methods
Libertarianism = liberal values, liberal methods

Further context is provided by the understanding that Marxism was not the only school of socialism. Nineteenth cenury individualist anarchists, most notably Benjamin Tucker, correctly understood their pre-Rothbardian free-market anarchism as “libertarian socialism”. Despite Rothbard deciding to call his updated version of their doctrine “anarcho-capitalism” (in line with the Misesean definition of capitalism as, basically, just free exchange), his deviations from their thought do not render his ideas pro-capitalist in any more fundamental sense than Tucker with regard to definitions of capitalism used by anti-capitalist thinkers.

Reference “The Spooner-Tucker Doctrine: An Economists View”
http://mises.org/journals/jls/20_1/20_1_2.pdf

Lew Rockwell has a better claim on the word “liberal” than most so-called liberals do — because they’re more correctly understood as social-democrats.

ADDENDUM: I also posted additional comments in reply to commenter Neil B on how the agorist application of Rothbardian property theory in the context of Konkin’s counter-economic theory of revolution throughly addresses the land monopoly issue — but Brad DeLong appears to have now deleted those comments!

Just a reminder that libertarianpapers.org is open to submissions from left-libertarians. This is an online scholarly journal, so submissions should be in accord with that as well as the rest of the submission guidelines.

Some media reports are trying to spin today’s stock market activity as a “rally” tied to what is purported to be good news — that the U.S. Federal Reserve will be buying $300 billion in U.S. Treasury bonds.

Don’t believe the hype. There was no stock market rally today.

The Dow and S&P 500, indexes of dollar denominated stock prices, increased by only 1.2% and 2.1%, respectively, on the same day gold futures rose 4.2% — which means stocks declined in value today, but not as fast as actual dollar bills did.

Today I posted the first installment of an Audio Clip of the Day feature at the web site of the Center for a Stateless Society — Audio Clip of the Day, 03-16-09: AIG, Barney Frank and Rewarding Failure. I will try the best I can to post a new clip every weekday morning.

Speaking of C4SS, our Spring 2009 Fundraising Drive has been going well, but time is running out and we haven’t reached our goal yet. Please donate to fund our work!

An Open Letter to Señor Joaquin Guzman

Señor Guzman,

I write to send you much respect, sir, and to thank you.

News reports indicate your business is doing very well, though you reportedly face constant risks and hazards I can not even begin to understand. What little I do know is that your struggle to overcome such reported obstacles to your productive activity shows you are a man of very rare ability, creativity and resourcefulness.

While politicians, police and their sycophants condemn you, I want to celebrate what you do that is right. You are an entrepreneur. You produce. You successfully plan and organize the productive activities of many people. You do this in spite of huge risks. While your enemies in governments economically burn the world around them for sake of their own power and the false economic theories that excuse their power, you provide what consumers want in trade. You are no doubt aware that the world economy is suffering greatly now. I want to say it is because of the banditry of those same people in government who persecute you and your business.

I am under no illusions that you are a perfect or wholly good man. All people are complex. I am not calling you a saint or a hero because I have no doubt that your circumstances lead you to do much that is not right. But you do much that is right and that deserves praise. Thank you.

I also send you an invitation, sir. I invite you to read this book and think about it.

Regards,

Brad Spangler

Text of the above follows en Español, courtesy of Maria Blanco…

“Señor Guzmán,

Le escribo para mandarle mis respetos y darle las gracias.
Las noticias informan de que su negocio va muy bien, aunque al parecer se enfrenta a constantes riesgos y peligros que no puedo ni empezar a entender. Lo poco que sé es que la lucha que usted mantiene para superar esos obstáculos a su actividad productiva le muestra como una persona con una escasa habilidad, la creatividad y el ingenio.

Mientras que los políticos, la policía y los sicofantes (aduladores) le condenan, quiero celebrar lo que hace que sea correcto.Usted es un empresario. Usted produce. Planifica y organiza las actividades productivas de mucha gente. Y lo hace a pesar de grandes riesgos. Mientras sus enemigos en los gobiernos queman económicamente el mundo que les rodea en aras de su propio poder y de teorías económicas falsas que justifican su poder, usted proporciona a los consumidores de lo que necesitan en el comercio. Sin duda usted es consciente de que la economía mundial está sufriendo mucho últimamente. Quiero decir que esto es debido al bandolerismo de las mismas personas que le atacan a usted y a su negocio.
No tengo la ilusión de que usted es perfecto o un hombre completamente bueno. Todo el mundo es complicado. No le estoy llamando santo o héroe porque no dudo de que sus circunstancias le habrán llevado a hacer cosas que no está bien. Pero usted hace muchas cosas que están bien y que merecen un elogio. Gracias.

También le mando una invitación, señor. Le invito a leer este libro. A pensar sobre él.

Saludos,

Brad Spangler”

I’ve been working on trying to condense several notions down into simple chunks.

In response to the description of this story on Digg:

The significant stimulus package signed into law by President Obama marks the beginning of the end in an era of an unregulated free market driven system.

…I wrote:

There has never been anything like a true free market (zero government intervention in the economy) in this country or anywhere else. Even the so-called “laissez faire capitalism” of the 19th century was DEMONSTRABLY a government driven regime of wealth transfer from the productive class to a parasitic elite spread across both government and business.

Marx understood this and principally only erred in assuming that government control was a given pending redistribution of wealth from the looters back to the producers. Yet a free market for court services and defense, the “polycentric order” of market anarchist thinkers, would accomplish true socialist redistribution by recognizing the natural property rights of the producers and nullifying the fake ones ascribed by government.

…and:

I should add that advances in economic theory indicate the productive class are both workers and entrepreneurs, yet it ought to also be understood that entrepreneurship with wealth stolen via government necessarily places the capitalist (monopolist of capital) in the political class rather than the productive class.

Discuss how I might have better expressed those ideas.

From George Donnelly (Twitter: @georgedonnelly ), who has been live-tweeting some of the New Hampshire Liberty Forum, I’ve learned that Libertarian Party founder David Nolan has been speaking there, denouncing the Libertarian Party’s current leadership (at least) and calling for libertarians to form a mutual aid network, vote with their feet by moving to smaller-government states and form enclaves to facilitate local mutual aid and activism. He reportedly announced the formation or upcoming formation of something he calls the “December 11th Group” — which name I’ll asssume was chosen as a reference to the founding date of the LP and not for sake of it being the date in 1994 that Boris Yeltsin ordered Russian troops into Chechnya.

From what little I’ve heard of it, I’m generally supportive of this approach, with some qualifications. There’s more than this that needs to be said about libertarian strategy (that is to say, agorist revolutionary strategy), but this fits in well with what myself and other left-libertarians have been saying for a while now. While it presumably leaves the door open for electoral activism for those that haven’t got that particular monkey off their backs yet, it’s also a not-particularly electoral approach. That ambiguity keeps the radicals and the moderates in contact, potentially aiding our efforts at further radicalization of the libertarian movement generally.

Konkin foresaw in New Libertarian Manifesto that, at the correct stage of revolutionary development (that is to say, at the correct stage of market pre-development for adjudication and defense enterprises), agorist enclaves would naturally condense out of the general population as a result of popularizing our views — yet still leave the general population thoroughly contaminated with agorists and counter-economists.

Where that particular notion becomes potentially problematic is if it’s premature or the condensation process otherwise makes people bigger targets rather than smaller ones. Pie in the sky “anarcho-zionism” — in which we supposedly all get together in Galt’s Gulch or whatever — wouldn’t be economically viable without sufficient numbers of people involved and doesn’t necessarily make people safer from the state. Of particular concern is the understanding we must make our views popular enough for such a project to attract enough people while still leaving a significant number of supportive sympathizers back in the more statist areas. All of us remember the Waco Massacre, after all. Isolation and self-segregation potentially just makes you easier to dispose of for your enemies, which is precisely why mutual aid networks are a good idea (besides being prefigurative of agorist underground mutual surety enterprises — i.e. “insurance companies“). With New Hampshire as the model, though, particularly the heroic voluntaryists in Keene, we’re more or less on the right track.

For those looking to see which states are comparatively more or less statist than others, the Mercatus Center has recently published a comprehensive ranking of U.S. states, as well as their raw data that the study is based on, just in case you take issue with the way their scoring system is weighted. Missouri is in the top quintile, so I’m probably staying put for now.

UPDATE: Just in case you don’t want to wade through that long PDF from the Mercatus Center, here are their top states overall.

1. New Hampshire
2. Colorado
3. South Dakota
4. Idaho
5. Texas
6. Missouri
7. Tennessee
8. Arizona
9. Virginia
10. North Dakota

And here’s a map.

Most of my last post and the original post on foreclosure resistance have been republished together on Little Alex in Wonderland. Stephan Kinsella commented and I posted some responses in comments.

UPDATE: Additionally, commenter yzERp had two comments that were delayed in posting by my spam filter. You can now see them here and here.

Following up on my previous post, I should first note that the Playboy.com article accusing Rick Santelli of fronting a Kochtopus astroturf campaign has apparently been pulled, although it’s still (as of 1:17 AM Central time on March 3rd, 2009) available through Google cache. The latest reports I’ve seen indicate Playboy.com hasn’t yet commented on the matter. Megan McArdle has what seems to be, so far, the best skeptical take on the claims (and also a copy of the Playboy.com article posted in its entirety).

I can, at this point, only speculate about why the article is no longer on Playboy.com. It very well may turn out to be that Santelli and others have a good libel case against Playboy.com and the article lacked good research and shouldn’t have been published. If that’s the case, I stand by what I said in reaction to what I took as a credible media report, given that Hefner’s empire isn’t exactly a fly-by-night operation:

“Playboy magazine points to [emphasis added] the Koch group as, shall we say, the groundskeepers for Rick Santelli’s astroturf…”

That said, after I made my post discussion elsewhere ensued regarding an earlier post I had linked to.

Stephan Kinsella posted “Is Foreclosure Resistance Libertarian?” on the Mises blog, comparing my take on ACORN’s foreclosure resistance campaign to some suspect reasoning by Rand. He starts:

Here we have a left-libertarian hailing the leftist group ACORN’s campaign promoting civil disobedience to resist home foreclosures–that is, they support mortgagees squatting on property owned by the mortgage holder. Argues our left-libertarian:

“This is a case where real property rights don’t agree with property titles as recognized by the state. The banksters are a government-backed cartel whose profits principally accrue from their illegitimate (government granted) monopoly privileges — so claims that the homes in question are property of the banks have no merit in terms of libertarian theory. Resistance to foreclosures is thus fully libertarian. Please support ACORNs foreclosure resistance campaign.”

And what about renters? Renting is economically similar to holding a mortgage. Should deadbeat renters be able to squat in their apartments, and tell the evil, capitalistic slumlords “go away, you’re not the real owner”? If not, then I guess banks ought to switch from granting mortgages to just doing lease-to-own contracts.

This seems unduly obtuse of Kinsella on at least two counts.

First, I don’t “support mortgagees squatting on property owned by the mortgage holder” because my argument is that nominal ownership by recipients of mammoth state subsidies is not valid ownership in terms of libertarian theory in the first place. If he wanted to argue that my point was flawed and therefore amounts to de facto support for “mortgagees squatting on property owned by the mortgage holder”, that would be an interesting debate. He never actually does that, though, prefering to instead build his assumptions into his rhetoric like a master illusionist practicing ideological sleight-of-hand.

Secondly, with regard to the following:

“And what about renters? Renting is economically similar to holding a mortgage. Should deadbeat renters be able to squat in their apartments, and tell the evil, capitalistic slumlords ‘go away, you’re not the real owner’?”

Here, Kinsella seems to want people to incorrectly think the objection is to wealth per se rather than the way wealth is obtained by the political class. My argument is not at all against the principle of property (or its rental), but rather that some (but not all) property titles are illegitimate. He apparently wants to refute someone who denies the legitimacy of all property and its rental and I hope when he finds them he gives them a sound intellectual thrashing. Meanwhile, those of us who wish to defend justly acquired property by promulgating an understanding of why it’s legitimate have a concomitant responsibility to denounce unjustly acquired property held under mere color of law and in defiance of that same understanding of property.

Stephan — Dorothy, the Cowardly Lion and the Tin Man all called for you. They want their straw man back.

Kinsella then explains Rand’s somewhat suspect assertion that:

“…the Western oil companies were the ‘real’ owners of the Arabian oil fields…”

…in order to try to then paint that as analogous to my position on ACORN’s foreclosure resistance campaign. In doing so, he trails off into a series of questions that end his post.

“Rand basically felt that the Arab states were primitive and “bad”; therefore the good, heroic, individualist Western oil companies are the “true” owners. Likewise, our left-libertarians are arguing that because the banks are illegitimate and have no proper title to homes they hold mortgages on, the current possessor is the “true” owner. Now, no doubt the banksters and Arab states all have unclean hands. But why does the defect in the claims of such actors mean the current possessor of property own it? In the case of homes, why is the renter or mortgagee the “owner”? Why are workers the owner of the factory? Why are the oil companies the owners of the oil fields? After all, when you develop an oil field with the permission of the surface owner, the surface owner retains mineral rights. In the case of a home currently occupied by a deadbeat Democrat or Republican, why is that statist the owner, even if the banks aren’t? Maybe the employed taxpayers are. Maybe the Iraqi citizens with dead family members obliterated by US war supported by typical US homeowners have a better claim to these assets than the possessor has.”

The answer to these questions in aggregate (the meta-answer?) is that as a libertarian commenter on these issues I approach them most correctly (in a strategic sense) by doing so in a way prefiguring the libertarian system of justice I seek to build. There very well might be superior claims, to any piece of property, far better than either those of the banksters or the current possessors. The matter is framed in our discourse, though, as a large collection of disputes between two sets of parties. I’ve given my general opinion on whose claims (between those two sets of claimants) I would tend to uphold as an arbitrator and why, pending specifics in any given case that would sway me the other way.

Other odds and ends…

Kinsella:

“Nevermind the existence of a contract.”

That’s right. Nevermind the existence of a contract, because if systematic favoritism towards one party over another (such as, for one of several possible examples, license to commit fraud — i.e. fractional reserve banking) by the bloodthirsty killing machines we call “states” doesn’t count as something akin to duress or undue influence, nothing ought to.

Commenter newson:

“…to disrespect, or advocate disrespecting valid contracts is to disqualify yourself as a libertarian…”

Considering my principal point is that the property claims by the banksters (and, thus, contracts with them) are not ethically valid in the first place, the commenter would seem to be doing a remarkable impression of a puppy by chasing their own intellectual tail.

Commenter John starts off well and maintains for most of his comment:

“What Brad Spangler and ACORN’s left-libertarian cheerleaders are saying is, basically, that owing anything to a State-sponsored enterprise, which is basically owing something to the State, is illegitimate and therefore you can absolve that contract on your own and renegue on the contract and take what property you can and pay what you wish for it. That holds some water.”

…despite some confusion at the end:

“The bank’s employees and other people (maybe real estate company employees) don’t necessarily deserve to get screwed over by your reneging on your contract.”

Of paramount concern here is whether “screwed over” is a violation of the bank’s employee’s natural rights or not. If the bank fails as an enterprise because people are somehow successfully defending legit property claims against the illegitimate ones of the bank, would John argue that the economic dislocation the bank employees might suffer justifies ongoing theft from those with a better claim to the property than the banks? John above comes perilously close to falling into the fallacious social-democratic thinking behind the recent government bank bailouts.