Sovereign Man

Anarcho-Capitalist Fiction

2009-12-28T21:45:00.002-05:00

Some an-cap fiction for your pleasure:

J. Neil Schulman's Alongside Night

Vernor Vinge's The Ungoverned

Bob Murphy's Minerva

Agorism and the ever continuing Class War

2009-12-26T20:56:00.001-05:00

Very nice essay describing a bridge from Marxist Liberalism to Anarchic Libertarianism.

Who Rules America?

2009-12-26T19:05:00.003-05:00

Who Rules America is the website of G. William "Bill" Domhoff, a respected sociologist, author and Research Professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He denounces "conspiracy theories" but personally, I don't see much deviation from the generally accepted conspiracy theories that I am acquainted with and his conclusions. Interesting to find a scholarly work on the subject, that is not discredited by the mainstream.

"Q: So, who does rule America?

A: The owners and managers of large income-producing properties; i.e., corporations, banks, and agri-businesses. But they have plenty of help from the managers and experts they hire. You can read the essential details of the argument in this summary of Who Rules America?, or look for the book itself at Amazon.com."

Merry Christmas from a Sovereign Man

2009-12-25T23:01:00.003-05:00

Merry Christmas!

As my gift to all you loyal readers :) I give you this link to the most incredibly rich depository of information about economic theory and history (that I just stumbled on). Its the Library of Economics and Liberty. Ordinarily I just post new links but this is such a treasure trove of good stuff that I never knew existed that I wanted to make an especially big deal of it.

Read and enjoy!

How States Fall and Liberty Triumphs

2009-12-23T21:18:00.002-05:00

by Lew Rockwell

"All states everywhere enjoy power only because people are willing to continue to obey and not challenge the powers that be. This means that power is ultimately based on that illusive notion called legitimacy. Legitimacy can vanish in an instant, exposed as a façade that covers up the massive looting machine that is government. It is the role of all of us to break the silence. It is the role of the Mises Institute to teach, so that young people can state the truth in a way that others find compelling. The emperor may continue his march, but he will never again do it with the confidence that he can fool all the people, all of the time. Let us work toward a time when he fools no one."

see the full article here

Why I am an Anarchist by Caleb Johnson

2009-12-23T13:27:00.005-05:00

Today I want to talk about the broad strokes behind individual sovereignty. However, it is unlikely I can improve on Caleb Johnson's excellent essay, so I instead I will let him tell you why he is an anarchist.

WHY I AM AN ANARCHIST

by Caleb Johnson

originally published at the New Hampshire Free Press

on March 12, 2008

I suppose that our evaluation of others is based, not so much on who they are as themselves, but rather on the face that they present to the world, and thus it is that often others are surprised when they learn that I am an anarchist. And I suppose that I can empathize with the initial confusion, for I myself only gradually came to accept the label of `anarchist' for many of the same reasons.

Now, I can only imagine what gruesome scenario enters the mind of each person as he envisions just what, exactly, anarchy might mean for the world, but I know what it used to mean to me. The mental picture that I formed of the anarchist was of an angry young man throwing a homemade bomb. The society he hoped for could only be one of chaos and disorder, where organized bands of thugs plundered with abandon and citizens huddled in the darkness of their homes, shivering for fear and praying for some escape back to civility and civilization. And this melancholy picture, of course, is as offensive to me as it is to you, being as I am a peaceful person, more at home sipping tea in a coffeeshop than I am burning effigies, and more inclined to vacation at a tropical paradise than to the heart of Somalia.

So, I permit the reader a degree of astonishment at the revelation that I am an anarchist. It was, in fact, only reluctantly that I adopted the anarchist label; I learned that many other anarchists have also eschewed the anarchist label, preferring a more obscure and therefore less-maligned designation. So why is it that I unabashedly claim to be an anarchist?

An ancient Jewish scripture makes what I deem to be an accurate observation, that "one man rules over another to his hurt.” At every time and at every place throughout history is found the same story: man's states achieve the subjugation of the masses under the control of the rich and powerful. War is routine. Tyranny runs rampant. Minorities are oppressed. Men are conscripted and enslaved. The belongings of the poor are plundered to pay for greater and greater extravagancies by those who enjoy the reins of power. The masses starve while a few live in shameful luxury. Justice is perverted, and people live under constant threat that their security will be undermined. We tolerate this depravity for one reason, and one reason only: We are convinced that, for as bad as the State may be, it is better than the chaos of anarchy. And it is for this reason that the state must do everything in its power to demonize anarchy, to equate it with chaos and disorder.

But it seems to me that a great lie has been perpetrated on mankind. Every war that has ever been fought was created and nurtured by states. War, that great scourge of mankind, can only exist among states. When individuals disagree with each other, the argument may escalate to fisticuffs. Yet, when states squabble, the end result is too often war, with the millions of deaths and injuries, as well as the poverty and disease that war entails. And yet the state, the sole author of the scourge of war, is held on a pedestal. We sing songs to honor it, make oaths and pledges to it, place its banner in our own places of worship. We display our loyalty to it with countless banners and emblems, placed prominently so that all may see our pride. We are not averse to even permitting our children to be sacrificed in its interests.

Meanwhile, we deride the anarchist as “reactionary”, but we do not even comprehend what we mean by such a statement. For it is everywhere acknowledged that states do evil things. Some men say, as Thomas Braden famously did in the Saturday Evening Post so many years ago, that they are glad that the state is immoral. Others say, as did one religious man with whom I conversed recently, that he prefers not to know everything that the state does for the ease of his own conscience. And almost universally, when it comes time to vote people will say things like, “I voted for the lesser of two evils,” or “I held my nose and voted.” When polled, only very few claim to be “extremely satisfied” by their rulers, most claiming to be somewhere between “somewhat satisfied” and “somewhat dissatisfied” by those who hold office. So whatever else the situation might be, it cannot be claimed that people view the state as a paragon of virtue and morality. Yet, the second a person suggests that we might dispose of the state, he is subjected to ridicule, derision, even violence. So it seems to me that the true reactionary position is the one that is averse to considering what alternatives might be available.

This situation is as puzzling as it is disturbing. It would seem that every man, seeing as he does that the state is, at best, an imperfect solution, would incline his ear to see what alternatives present themselves, hoping that the situation might improve. But this is not the case. Rather, he satisfies himself that anarchy is impracticable from the outset, then refuses to entertain any suggestions to the contrary, his reaction being to put forward any conceivable obstacle with a sort of desperate finality, as if the fact that there are obstacles to peace mandates that we continue on in our incredibly destructive course.

“What,” he asks, “are we to do about murderers? Let them run the streets?” Now, this is a curious question, because states are themselves murderers, only they accomplish their killings by the millions rather than individually. And we not only let them run our streets, as it were, but we let them patrol them. So it is as if we hire the bank robber to keep the children from stealing from our raspberry bush; not only that, we give him the key to our safe. Then we console ourselves that our bank robber is not as bad as the one that the neighbors hired to safeguard their raspberry bush.

This situation would be funny if it were not so sad. For it seems to me that men have been duped. “Listen,” says the would be ruler, “Men are very evil, and they will try to hurt you, so you need me to protect you.” But if men are so evil, then how can we trust men to rule over us? And how can we trust men to follow whatever rules are set up anyway?

Last year, I did not steal, nor did I rape, nor did I plunder or kill or defraud. Nor would I have done those things even if they had been legal. I needed no law to inform me of right and wrong; nor, I trust, did you. On the other hand, how many men did things that they otherwise would not have done, merely because the state said that it was okay? Would hundreds of thousands of young men, merely on their own initiative, have armed themselves to the teeth and journeyed to Iraq to torture, kill, and terrorize? No, to accomplish that great evil they needed a state to tell them that it was alright to do what they would otherwise find repugnant.

I am often told, once I have explained myself, that my position sounds Utopian. But I wonder if this is not merely the speaker projecting his own dilemma onto me. For I cannot help but feel that the state is able to maintain itself only as a result of Utopian thinking.

The anarchist sees crime as inevitable; there are, unfortunately a few deviants who do not care about harming others, or, worse yet, even enjoy harming others. So the anarchist accepts this reality. It is a fact of life. All he can do is try to minimize the risk to himself or to those he cares about. But the person with Utopian thinking, on the other hand, is unable to accept this reality. He continues to grasp at the illusion that crime might be eliminated if only a suitable agency can be formed. He is oblivious to the fact that any agency powerful enough to stand up to the strongest evil is also strong enough to become the strongest evil. It remains only for the criminals to seize control of this agency. He is also oblivious to the fact that by attempting to preemptively stop crime he creates the very societal conditions which allow it to flourish: fear, mistrust, division.

And with what cost does he purchase this increased threat of crime and violence? The sacrifice of his own liberty. For all of mankind's experience speaks to the fact that by far the single most common aggressor against the rights of mankind is, and always will be, states. In the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson expressed the concept that states exist for the purpose of securing our rights. Yet, what a misguided notion! To see how misguided this notion is, one merely needs to read the so-called Bill of Rights to the Constitution. This document attempts to secure for all Americans the rights to freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom of the press, freedom to peaceably assemble, freedom to bear arms, security against having the military quartered in my home, security against unreasonable searches and seizures, and security against unfair judicial proceedings. But who is it that threatens these rights if it is not states? The argument is, therefore, circular: I need a state to secure my rights, which rights are only threatened by states.

Now, before I end this essay, I need to make one thing very clear, because I think there is a very common misunderstanding of anarchists, and it a misunderstanding rooted deeply in our very language. In this essay, I have consistently used the word state. I have tried to avoid the word “government”. In the minds of many people, these words are synonymous. And it is for this reason that it is difficult to conceive of a life without the state.

It is a truism that interaction between men requires a sort of government. This is evident in all of man's social dealings. A family exists in some sort of governmental arrangement, inasmuch as there are roles and understood norms of conduct within each family. Often, government in this sense is merely informal. In larger groups of people, it is likely to be more explicit. But what distinguishes these forms of government from the state is that the state is not voluntary. The state is really a very specific type of government. It is an authoritarian model of government that enforces its rule over anyone that it considers to be within its jurisdiction, regardless of whether or not they have consented to its rule. In this respect, a state is exactly like the mafia. In fact, the state differs from the mafia in exactly one respect. The sole difference between the state and the mafia is that a majority of the people in any given area acknowledge the legitimacy of the state. If the majority of people acknowledged the mafia, it would be called “the government”. That is the sole difference between the two organizations. And the reader would do well to reflect on that. Because it is a universally acknowledged principle that the minority are entitled to the same considerations as the majority. But how can this be if the majority reserve the right to impose, at the most fundamental level, a form of governance upon the minority that is opposed to his conscience?

It is sad that all of mankind's “national governments” are states. What an anarchist objects to is being forced to adhere to an organization to which he has not given his consent, from which he may not withdraw if it violates his conscience, and which provides its “services” in a coercive rather than a voluntary way. At the heart of the anarchist argument is a desire to uphold peace and morality, freedom and brotherhood. An anarchist acknowledges a simple truth: that any relationship that is not consensual can only result in further violence; but that a relationship among a group of people that recognizes the value of each individual, that acknowledges his ultimate ability to choose whether to continue that relationship, is based on the greatest bonds of fraternity. This, and not bomb-throwing, is the legacy of anarchism.

The End of the Dollar is Near, What will that mean for US

2009-12-22T10:21:00.008-05:00

An article in Forbes a few days ago states that US debt including government, households and corporations is 840% of GDP. However, if you use the numbers from Truth in 2010, which hold that Federal Debt plus unfunded entitlements is at $73 trillion, then the total US debt would be over 1100% of GDP. Three percent interest on $110 trillion would be $3.3 trillion, one third of our GDP (assuming a GDP of roughly $10 trillion).

I am not sure which numbers are correct, apparently no one really is, but the people who are not dodging reality all agree they are much higher than the numbers being reported.

The true amount may never be known, the debt will surely be repudiated before it is ever truly accounted for. And what will that mean for the United States?

An idea of how our life would change might be provided by looking at Argentina, which repudiated its debt in 2001. Taxes will increase drastically, along with tax evasion. Governments will continue to monopolize services they provide, like water, sewer, power, roads, trash pickup, etc, but the actual delivery of these services will suffer and be nearly nonexistent at times. Police will become aggressively corrupt as they will routinely demand bribes to supplement their faltering incomes.

When the government fails, the banks will fail, and many businesses will fail. Along with massive unemployment, supplemented by massive underemployment, delivery of basic needs to the market will be interrupted. Standing for a whole day in a line in hopes of buying a loaf of bread might become common. Food prices will skyrocket.

In Argentina, people are actually starving to death. In a country that was known as the breadbasket of Europe in post-WW2 years and is known today for mouthwatering Angus steaks, people cannot afford to buy food that is produced there. A recent story describes a cattle truck that wrecked on the highway. Some of the cattle were dead, some still alive, but it made no difference to the crowd of hungry people that descended on the herd with knives like a pack of jackals, a pack of very fortunate jackals.

Violent crime is routine. Wealthy people have body guards and the average people carry guns. Where an American would stop his car if someone ran out in front of him, Argentinians speed up. It is safer to run a red light than to stop at one. Drivers in Argentina know that you never stop for any reason. If the road ahead is blocked, you turn around and always keep moving.

Kidnapping is so common its not even reported by the news anymore. Even average people are kidnapped, usually held in a van while the family is contacted, and if all goes well, will be reunited for a small amount in the same day. Virtual kidnappings have been known to happen, where a person is out of touch for a few days, the bad guys find out about it and claim to have kidnapped him.

In general, even with food shortages, it is much safer to live in the cities than in the country. Gangs of murderous thugs roam the country side looking for victims. Once they get into a house, they will probably stay several days, subjecting the victims to rape and torture before finally killing everyone and moving on. Tent cities have sprung up in Buenos Aires as refugees from the country move to the city for protection and better access to food stocks.

As bad as it all sounds, things have been improving somewhat since 2001. The economy is starting to pick up a little. Black marketeers actually open stores in old warehouses and supply hard to get items like movies, video games and jewelry. It is surprising the things on which people will spend their hard earned money. However, the government is gripped by corruption from top to bottom. There is no real attempt by politicians to try to improve anything, they are too busy looting what's left of the treasury.

Life goes on in Argentina, but with the rotting husk of the state still trying to extort protection money from any and every new enterprise, prosperity is still far over the horizon.

Wall Street Journal Debunks Conspriracy Theory

2009-12-21T16:13:00.010-05:00

In an essay appearing the in the Wall Street Journal's Life and Style section, David Aaronovitch, a columnist for The Times of London, purports to tell us how to fend off the people who insist they know the real story behind everything. As commenters point out, he never actually gives us the 'how to' but he does go to great length expounding first on the reason that such theories emerge and then different tactics used by the tin foil hat crowd to circumvent the obvious logic of the mainstream "truth" in order to appear convincing.

He tells us that the current fashion of the CT crowd is the conspiracy between Big Pharma and Big Government.

"Swine flu? The disease was created in a lab by a shadowy company, which had associations with ultra-baddies Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and Israel, and released to sell the company's top product. HIV? According to a documentary called "House of Numbers," now doing the rounds of the highbrow film festivals, the link between HIV and AIDS is a fiction developed by pharmaceutical companies and AIDS activists to boost the profits of the former and the jobs of the latter."

Commenter Liam Scheff rips Mr. Aaronovitch a new one for his characterization of "House of Numbers" as baseless conspiracy theory.

"Let me own my position here - I am in the movie "House of Numbers," because I have written about the scandalous company you call the AIDS industry. I, in fact, broke a story about orphans in New York City who were being used and who were dying in clinical trials with immensely toxic AIDS drugs. The story was picked up widely, and was verified again and again. Nevertheless, those with something to lose did their best to indicate that somehow, the whole thing was a "conspiracy theory," even though the NIH listed the trials in their publicly accessible clinical trials database. In doing this work, I did due diligence and researched the phenomena known as HIV and AIDS, and found just about everything wanting.

In the film, "House of Numbers," I am seen quoting the longest study on the supposed transmission of HIV. The study was conducted in Northern California and published in the American Journal of Epidemiology by Dr. Nancy Padian et al.

Dr. Padian enrolled 175 couples, one partner HIV-positive, one HIV-negative. These individuals had sex – vaginal and anal – with and without condoms over the study period. They were continuously tested. Drug abusers were kept out of the study, to emphasize the role of sex in transmission.

The results: At the end of the study, how many people who tested negative became positive, after repeated sexual intercourse with their HIV-positive partners?

Was it 50? 25? 20?

No. The answer is – Zero. Zero people who tested negative became positive."

None of the commenters defended the swine flu conspiracy, but I was immediately reminded of the Rolling Stone article by Bobby Kennedy, Jr. where he talks about the connection between Thimerosal in vaccines and autism and a joint cover-up by Big Government and Big Pharma.

"According to a CDC epidemiologist named Tom Verstraeten, who had analyzed the agency's massive database containing the medical records of 100,000 children, a mercury-based preservative in the vaccines -- thimerosal -- appeared to be responsible for a dramatic increase in autism and a host of other neurological disorders among children."

"But instead of taking immediate steps to alert the public and rid the vaccine supply of thimerosal, the officials and executives at Simpsonwood spent most of the next two days discussing how to cover up the damaging data."

Until Big Government and Big Pharma let Big Media report on their coverup, it will continue to only be a theory of a conspiracy, even if it is espoused by someone with as much credibility as Bobby Kennedy, Jr. And according to Mr. Aaronovitch, when your brother-in-law comes over during Christmas and starts telling you about this, you should fall back on your "instinct for nonsense" and comfort yourself by remembering that "one aspect of conspiracy theories is that it is history for losers."

Mr. Aaronovitch goes on to talk about the phenomenon of conspiracy theories, how they are spread by the internet, and a little of the history of the phenomenon. Next he talks about the mindset and the motives of the conspiracy theorist and the dishonest tactics and trickery that conspiracy theorists use to make their "nonsense" seem convincing, like circular or oblique referencing, and "exaggerating the status of their experts."

Then he suggests that even questioning itself makes you a tin-foil hat man, even if you don't espouse any theory at all:

"And then there is the violent innocence of much conspiracism, in which the theorist is "only asking questions" about the official version of the truth, and doesn't go so far as to have a theory himself—other than it is impossible that JFK was shot by Lee Harvey Oswald alone, that the moon landing happened in the way the world imagined..."

I especially like the way he lumps JFK and the moon landing together, as if to believe that JFK was not killed by Oswald alone is equivalent to believing the moon landing was a hoax.

After many more paragraphs of expert blovation, he finally sums it up with this startling insight that essentially proves that all conspiracy theories are just so much hokum, and that is that even though the conspiracy theorists know so much damaging information about so many powerful people...

"they are never seriously harmed. A fact which, readers must surely agree that, though welcome, is very suspicious."

I don't disagree with a lot of Mr. Aaronovitch's criticism of the conspiracy theory phenomenon. It is true that a lot of the conspiracy theory stuff on the internet is poorly researched and badly documented, and certainly some of it is downright dishonest. Very many of the people who run these CT websites seem to care little for documentation, and if an accusation furthers their agenda, its as good as truth to them.

However, even if I can agree with Mr. Aaronovitch that there is a lot of BS out there, I have to strongly disagree with the overall tone of this essay and with the arrogance with which he mocks those who refuse to believe anything and everything that Big Government and Big Media tell us. Not only do I find this insulting, but it completely undermines the whole profession of journalism. After all, what is (or what used to be) journalism but digging behind the official stories to find the truth? Watergate might today be nothing more than a conspiracy theory if not for the investigative work of reporters.

Personally, I don't believe anything I hear or read straight away, whether from the mainstream media or from fringe websites. I look for cross corroboration. Once many believable, independent resources, with no real motive to fool me have confirmed or denied the truth of some piece of information, then I add it (or delete it) from my personal storehouse of facts.

Some things are hidden in plain sight. Take for example, the US monetary system which relies on the Federal Reserve and fractional reserve banking. Simply reading about these two topics on wikipedia will reveal the moral hazard inherent in our monetary system. A little more research on the history of central banking in the US and the vehement opposition to it by US Presidents prior to Wilson would have to make one question whose interest was served by the creation of the Federal Reserve. Yet, until recently, no one every talked about the Federal Reserve, much less questioned its existence, except "conspiracy theory nutjobs" like G. Edward Griffin and Eustace Mullins.

Consider the movie The Wizard of Oz. What Mr. Aaronovitch is saying is that under no circumstance should you remove your green sunglasses and WHATEVER YOU DO, DO NOT PULL BACK THE CURTAIN!.

All in all, I think Mark Wilson was more correct than he realized when he jokingly posted this comment:

"Of course, this is just the sort of post we can expect from Them."