BradSpangler.com

I noticed and joined a group on Facebook which is named “If i get killed, no matter how evil the crime don’t seek a death penalty”.

This is what I wrote on the wall of the group:

“Capital punishment is only part of the problem. Punishment of any kind is not justice. Justice is best understood as compelling the criminal (forcibly if necessary) to make restitution to the victim. If the victim has been killed, restitution should go to the kin, associates and (if applicable) insurance company.”

The ancient custom of restitution to kin and associates for murder (or any other wrongful death, as I understand it) was referred to in Germanic tribal law as weregeld.

The Wikipedia article mentions that “The standard weregeld for a freeman appears to have been 200 solidi (shillings)…“, although it also explains that the amount could vary widely according to social status.

It seems to me that in a modern context of the understood importance of “equality before the law” and liberty as the natural right of all, the weregeld for a “freeman” arrived at in those times serves as a landmark to orient by and a potential default restitution amount for arbitration over any wrongful death. Furthermore, it seems to me that restitution amounts should only vary from that default if compelling and detailed reasons for that departure can be articulated and withstand critical analysis.

A solidi or shilling is said to have been 4.5 grams of gold. Thus, 200 shillings would be 900 grams of gold. I suggest 900 grams of gold be considered the default amount for restitution awards in cases of murder or any other wrongful death. At current rates, that works out to about $33,000 in US fiat currency.

Since labor alone doesn’t create value if it’s not used to produce what people choose to subjectively value [verb], then we might likewise ask how can labor alone create a property claim as IP advocates often seem to imply?

It can’t.

Property is a claim to that which is scarce. It doesn’t matter how much work you did to produce something — once it’s created as an item of information, it’s not naturally scarce anymore with todays information transfer/duplication technology. In similar manner, flailing my arms about as “labor” doesn’t create a claim to the not-particularly scarce air that I pass through. This despite calories being expended and despite breathing being vitally important and “valued” — because the air is, for the most part, not scarce.

J. Neil Schulman, who advocates his own version of IP that he calls “logorights“, responded on Facebook that:

“Value does not derive from labor; existence as a newly created real object does.”

To clarify, Neil regards a created, distinct, identifiable item of information as a “thing”. I’m mostly not inclined to quibble with him about that because what matters is that it’s not a naturally scarce thing.

Neil continued:

“…a new and unique thing which can be distinguished from all other things is scarce by virtue of its uniqueness.”

Not quite! With current information duplication/transfer technology, an item of information is pretty much ONLY (naturally) scarce PRIOR to the point of creation (leaving aside, for purposes of discussion, closely guarded secrets).

But Neil disagrees with my characterization of items of information as not particularly scarce.

“That its scarceness is horizontal rather than vertical is beside the point; all property rights are with respect to things that have ways in which they are unbounded.”

Above, Neil is elaborating on his already stated notion that the uniqueness of a particular item of information is a type of scarcity. That notion, though, conflates the concepts “distinct” and “scarce”. The atmosphere and the ocean are (at the scale of an individual, anyway, leaving aside large scale issues for purposes of this example) not scarce. They are, however, distinct. Distinctness is not scarcity. That the air is not the ocean does not mean I can flail my arms about to create a claim to the not-particularly scarce air around me that would allow me to charge you a toll for passing through “my air”.

We can say “property” in that which is scarce matters because it serves as a metaphorical container for labor as an aspect of its scarcity.

That is, it is wrong to forcibly take a scarce item from someone who has made it theirs via their labor (or which was gifted or exchanged to them from those who had a labor-derived original claim). To take a scarce item from someone that their own or exchanged labor brought into their possession is to take their labor from them against their will — to enslave them.

After the point of creation, duplicating an item of already created information does not remove it from the enjoyment of any other possessor — because it’s not scarce. The duplicator has not stolen from or enslaved anyone. No labor has been stolen because the labor has not been “contained” in a scarce item in the first place. No property claim, in any ethical understanding of the term “property”, has been created.

Found here:

Northern Agorists gathering
Time: January 9, 2010 from 1:30pm to 3pm
Location: Red Apple Buffet (Chinese)
Street: 161 Loudon Road
City/Town: Concord, New-Hampshire
Website or Map: http://maps.google.com/maps/p…
Phone: (603) 226-8866?
Event Type: social, planning

PDF flyer available — agorists-unite-9jan10.

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.

See also: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_depth/7656807.stm

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…”

I left the following comment on Digg in regard to this story about the Anita Dunn / Mao controversy.

Disclaimer: I’m not a fan of Beck or McCain. As a matter of fact, I hate them.

HOWEVER…

It’s incorrect to state that the objection is that Dunn merely “quoted” Mao. The issue is that she referred to Mao as one of her two favorite “political philosophers”.

Now, there might be any of several reasons to quote Mao. Among other things, his thoughts on the technical aspects of guerilla warfare make his thought on that topic something that is relevant to study by military officers (for sake of the lessons of military science that can thereby be learned and reapplied).

But it’s a wholly different thing for a high government official to express admiration for Mao’s *political philosophy*, just as surely as it would be a horror for a high government official to express admiration for Hitler’s political philosophy.

Not merely quote. Not merely study. Not merely admire his technical proficiency as a military commander.

No, this isn’t some innocent little thing like that, and it is fundamentally dishonest to attempt to characterize it that way.

Dunn expressed admiration for a “philosophy” of wholesale butchery with a resulting body count ten times what Hitler produced. The twentieth century was a historically unprecedented tsunami of innocent blood shed by governments. Mao, more than any other person who ever lived, was perhaps the single largest contributor to that hemoclysm.

Mao was a monster. His crimes exceed even the Holocaust.

There is at least one person in the White House who, by their own admission, openly admires monsters.

This is NOT a small thing. What’s WRONG with you that you feel compelled to make excuses for her and try to minimize this?

From Facebook discussions, lightly edited…

W: “…I’m trying to figure out how ‘we’re all socialists’ makes sense and fits with private ownership of property…”

Brad: I’m not against “private property” if you mean Rothbardian property theory.

With regard to the term “socialism”, reaching my view on this is a two or three step process.

1) First read Tucker’s State Socialism and Anarchism: HOW FAR THEY AGREE, AND WHEREIN THEY DIFFER.

Tucker, a figure who remains an acknowledged “libertarian socialist” to this day, described how free market anarchism (generally) is socialism, but an utterly different sort of socialism from state socialism.

2) Read Rothbard’s The Spooner-Tucker Doctrine: An Economists View

In TSTD Rothbard outlined where his views diverge from Tuckers. Much of that is in terms of differences of analysis, opinion and rationale. The only difference in terms of actual political prescription is Rothbard’s natural law based ultra-radical, anti-state Lockean property theory.

3) The third step (if it doesn’t strike you immediately during step 2) is simply to compare the full implications of Rothbardian property theory, particularly as contextually modified by Konkin’s theories of revolution and class, [with usufruct ownership] and notice that the difference between it and usufruct ownership is to subtle to push Rothbard’s doctrine out of any definition of socialism that includes Tucker’s.

W: I’ll eventually get to reading all of that, but to short-circuit where I think you’re headed, NOTHING in a truly ancap society would prevent shared ownership, socialism, mutualism, communes, etc. But all such relationships would be voluntary, not imposed from above, the typical methodology for “sharing” resources.

Brad: Where do you think I’m heading? I agree with everything you said after that point.

With regard to where I’m heading…

I’ve already explained in other posts that the revolutionary redistribution of property would be an unavoidable consequence of the rise of a non-state system of law not beholden to fake grants of title to politically favored interests.

If property title under market anarchism would derive, as Rothbard asserted it ought to, from homesteading and/or exchange from the homesteader, this necessarily supposes state granted title to politically favored interests that never homesteaded what they supposedly “own” wouldn’t be protected.

If that’s where it’s suspected that I’m heading — well, I’m already there, and I stand by the reasoning I took as my route.

And, of course, there remains the matter of other types of stolen loot other than fake property title derived solely from political privilege.

For example, if I were on a jury, I would never vote to convict someone of bank robbery who “robbed” a federal reserve bank. Of course, they may have done *other* things as part of that act which I *would* consider crimes, but that would be a seperate matter.

I’ll add here at this point that the usual response by reactionary anti-market types is to assert that the revolutionary redistribution of property doesn’t address the problem of capitalist accumulation permanently because the difference between Rothbardian property theory and usufruct ownership is “sticky” title and the rise of a new system of capitalist oppression through monopoly of capital would then be inevitable.

Such critiques only beg the question, though, of where ruling class accumulation comes from. If you blame that on free exchange, despite the ample historical record of both direct statist expropriation and state granted privilege that indirectly funneled wealth to the ruling class, then you’re just assuming what you purport to demonstrate. Such fuzzy thinking is dangerous because it fails to distinguish accumulation in the sense of stolen loot from accumulation in the sense of simple savings derived from deferred consumption and prudent decision-making. If we fail to distinguish stolen capitalist loot from innocent capital, we then undermine through such inconsistency the case for the revolutionary redistribution of property in the first place — that people are due what’s rightfully theirs.