Is the so-called “Islamic Jihad” / al Qaeda in Yemen a front for Israeli Intelligence? That’s what the Yemeni government investigation of the group behind the Underpants Bomber says. It would explain a lot, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s true. I will be interested in seeing if we get any sort of computer forensics followup from non-Yemeni investigators.
I would have liked, in this blog post this morning, to be comparing Kevin Carson’s recent commentary, “Libertarians for Junk Science“, and Stephen Kinsella’s response. I believe that would have been a far more interesting and productive piece for me to write, particularly in the context of Sheldon Richman’s recent blog post (which I highly recommend).
Instead, though, I’ll be weighing in on a little squabble between J. Neil Schulman and Carson that erupted in the reader comments under Carson’s item, and which Schulman pursued in further comments on Facebook, via email and in a post on his own blog.
First things first…
There were some insults exchanged. Schulman has apparently apologized, saying:
“I let my emotions get the better of me today and wrote insults to you that I am ashamed of. I take it back.”
That’s just as well. If J. Neil Schulman hadn’t apologized we might have had to tell him to go argue with J. Neil Schulman, who wrote:
Moral and political questions often hinge on such differing
perceptions of reality. This is one reason such discussions are
often so heated: differing premises at these levels will make one
question the sanity and logical faculties of someone who
disagrees with one’s own obvious conclusions. The feeling for
someone who has a divergent vision of reality is: “He must be
blind or crazy if he can’t see something as clear as daylight!”So it is that on an issue involving “rights,” one feels an
opponent is not merely wrong, but unbelievably wrong. Even among
professed advocates (and practitioners, one hopes) of reason, it
makes it hard to understand how one who disagrees can be so
obstinate on so easy a question.That there are disagreements about natural rights even among
strict advocates of them proves that the question is harder
than we might have originally thought.Therefore, let advocates of human rights not trade insults,
but get down to the business at hand, which is establishing the
premises from which we’re arguing. Then one can either see
whether our views are fundamentally incommunicable to another, or
find basic agreements and proceed from there.
Unfortunately, the line between pure insults and strawman arguments isn’t always clear. As a result, I’m going to attempt to summarize the actual points of contention from the comment thread and address them. I believe Carson mostly did a pretty good job of addressing those points. Hopefully, then, this post will serve as just a summary of the disagreements — as well as a demonstration that (in my case) being someone who advocates subjective value theory and leans more towards Schulman’s views on global warming doesn’t mean one has to act the way Schulman has.
Schulman started things off by concluding what would have been an otherwise fine comment with the following bit at the end of it:
What I find most troubling, however, is why “mutualist” Kevin Carson — who clearly shows himself once again to be a socialist aligned with the United Nations — is regarded by anti-statists as in any sense being either an anarchist or pro-free-market.
Carson’s reply was solid:
Neil: If you’ve “discovered” me to be “a socialist aligned with the United Nations,” it must have been a secred message from your old buddy God rather than anything in the actual wording of my post.
If you can find any evidence of my affinity for the UN, I challenge you to produce it.
I’ve never concealed the fact that I consider myself a socialist in the same sense as Thomas Hodgskin, Benjamin Tucker or Dyer Lum.
But I’d like to see the UN Security Council down on the bottom of the Indian Ocean right along with every carrier group in the U.S. Navy.
At this point, one should take note that my own view is that Carson, myself, Schulman (to whatever extent he remains an anarchist) and Rothbard are all de facto libertarian socialists in the tradition of Hodgskin, Tucker and Lum — at least in terms of the implications of the body of theory advocated. If one has acquired reactionary biases at odds with that theory through a process of cultural osmosis due to long standing but wrong-headed reformist alliances with statist conservatives, that’s just one’s own individual mental problem as I see it.
Schulman proceeded to attack Carson for his labor theory of value advocacy as well as accusing him of advocating “mass murder” over Carson’s partial hyperbole about U.S. Navy carrier groups. Let’s look at the latter…
Schulman:
But the statement that Kevin Carson makes that he’d like to see every carrier group of the U.S. Navy on the bottom of the Indian Ocean shows what a vulgar radical Kevin Carson is. Kill thousands of men and women merely to satisfy his radical flash?
Carson:
My comment on the aircraft carriers was part hyperbole, as Andrew says, but if a literal version of the outcome described were the only alternative to a successful projection of power against Iran or Venezuela, I’d prefer it–no matter how many decent people died on those carriers. I’m sure there were some nice guys in the Wehrmacht, too.
Schulman:
I’ll let it rest here, now that Carson has proved himself willing to commit mass murder.
In a followup comment I received via email Schulman continued:
And since Kevin Carson is now on the record stating that it’s worth the life of xxxxxxx xxxxxxxx and thousands like him to save the command rule of Hugo Chavez and the command rule of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, I call on all anarchists and libertarians to reject him as having any proper role in our movements. He’s a stealth statist invading our movements with bullshit economics and outright advocacy of murder.
Upon looking at the actual words of both Carson and Schulman, I can only conclude that Schulman hasn’t noticed that any standard by which Carson’s remarks can be construed as advocating mass murder of American troops ALSO points to Schulman advocating mass murder of Iranians and Venezuelans (by refusing to agree with Carson). I advocate neither, because it’s a bullshit standard.
Now, we come at last to the subjective value theory versus LTV dispute. As an advocate of subjective value theory, I consider Schulman’s remarks an embarassment. Carson and I came to an understanding several years ago that neither of us are wrong, much like a photon of light can be described as a particle or a wave. We both, as I understand it, believe that value is subjective and that the relative similarity of objective human needs (such as food) will tend to cause the subjective valuations of various goods to statistically gravitate toward certain relative norms absent market distortion from the state — because the relative valuations other people assign (including valuation of the disutility of labor) go into the costs that have to be considered when making ordinal choices.
In other words, Carson and I have approximately the same ideas in our economics cabinets. He likes to put everything in his cabinet on the particular shelf labeled “value theory” where I put some on the value theory shelf and some on the shelf labeled “generalized description of market behavior”. I mainly advocate subjective value theory because I see it as a more elegant way to make the emphases I choose to make. Carson has a different approach, but he’s not wrong — and any definition of libertarian, anarchist or free-marketeer that doesn’t include Carson simply fails in my book. Schulman would do well to adopt a similar outlook.
Pay attention, boys and girls. The training wheels are now off…
The US Supreme Court has caved in to the Obama administration demand that it make itself irrelevant:
American civil liberties were gutted last week, and the media failed to take note of it.
The development? If the president or one of his subordinates declares someone to be an “enemy combatant” (the 21st century version of “enemy of the state”) he is denied any protection of the law. So any trouble-maker (which means anyone) can be whisked away, incarcerated, tortured, “disappeared,” you name it.
This means there is no politically safe middle-ground for anti-authoritarians of any stripe anymore, and even loyal gov-drones can be sent to the gulags based on any mistaken suspicion or a bureaucrats personal vendetta.
We’re all in great danger. There is now only one path to safety for America — revolution.
An edited version of a Facebook conversation…
the Critic:
“One issue I have with anarchist communists is their failure to reflect on the de facto power they can end up having, and their ability, by power of majority rule to start imposing on others. If you start producing economic networks of producers and consumers you start having power over others that can override their own autonomy by issuing pressure on them to conform to your standards. Not much opposition to that because again, free association. But if your little commune has a local monopoly, that’s a lot of power over others.”
the Anarchist Communist:
Communes are not mere geopolitical regions - they are economic networks of producers and consumers and they can exist in and outside geopolitical regions… Free association is the freedom to NOT associate with people you don’t want to associate with and the freedom TO associate with people you DO WANT to associate with… Show one example where a ‘monopoly’ held by anarcho-communists has any power to oppress someone into ‘conforming to [our] standards’.
the Agorist:
This would seem to be an instance in which a strict ‘free market’ analysis supports the anarchist communist position (as I understand the anarchist communist position, anyway).
That is, a ‘monopoly’ that arises and is maintained by strictly voluntary / non-invasive means can only be such if it is excelling at ‘customer’ (stakeholder in this case) satisfaction. Strictly speaking, it’s not really a ‘monopoly’ if there is no force-backed grant of state privilege.
Assuming you’re not anti-organization or anti-civ, there are going to be discrete particular groups that do different things in the production and distribution processes. An economist would call these groups ‘firms’ (regardless of how horizontalist they are internally or the matter of whether they relate to other firms via gifting or via conventional exchange).
The concern we’re replying to, as I understand it, is that a ‘monopoly’ in the colloquial sense of ‘the only X firm in town’ could be abusive in the sense of throwing its weight around without actually committing a direct act of aggression.
The word ‘anarchist’ in ‘anarchist communism’ indicates people would be free to start another X firm if they didn’t like the existing one. And, well (and I apologize if this sounds like nails on a chalkboard to communist ears) that’s ‘open competition’. That is, the nominal ‘monopoly’ in the colloqial sense is not a true monopoly if there is no state backed privilege discouraging or prohibiting competitors from arising. If the option is there to compete and nobody is making use of it (and assuming the ‘monopoly’ isn’t unjustly state subsidized or something like that), then it can only be in that ‘monopoly’ status if it’s doing a very good job of satisfying human desires.”
An outraged correspondent sent me this link. Their general point of view, seemingly not uncommon, is that fisting kits are not an appropriate part of the public school curriculum.
You ever wonder about the canned peaches issue?
We don’t have a canned peaches issue, for the most part.
Approximately the right amount of canned peaches gets produced and distributed because people decide for themselves how much they want to buy using their own money (not counting food stamps).
[Sure, there are probably lots of agricultural subsidies for peach growers, but we can ignore them for purposes of this example.]
As peach consumers, we don’t have to organize to protect peach production against hostile political activity from the pear and pineapple lobbies.
We don’t have to worry about the federal peach budget getting cut.
People who like pears don’t have to resent us and wonder why their hard-earned tax dollars go to fund peaches they don’t even eat.
We don’t have to be morally outraged when we find out some peach farmer is cheating on his wife. In fact, we’ll probably never even hear about it, because nobody gives a damn.
You might think the above has nothing to do with education.
It has everything to do with education.
And now, by means of my evil powers of mind control, you will think of the relationship between free market economics and social harmony every time you hear the song “Peaches” by the band “Presidents of the United States of America”.
“Movin’ to the country. Gonna eat a lot of peaches…”
