"Side by side with the word 'property' in the program of liberalism one may quite appropriately place the words 'freedom' and 'peace.'" Ludwig von Mises, "Liberalism, In The Classical Tradition"
Mises believed that property, freedom and peace are and should be the hallmarks of a satisfying and prosperous society. I agree. Mises proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that the prospect for general and individual prosperity is maximized, indeed, is only possible, if the principle of private property reigns supreme. What's yours is yours. What's mine is mine. When the line between yours and mine is smudged, the door to conflict opens. Without freedom (individual liberty of action) the principle of private property is neutered and the free market, which is the child of property and freedom and the mother of prosperity and satisfaction, cannot exist. Peace is the goal of a prosperous and satisfying society of free individuals, not peace which is purchased by submission to the enemies of property and freedom, but peace which results from the unyielding defense of these principles against all who challenge them.
In this blog I measure American society against the metrics of property, freedom and peace.
On January 14, 2014 Barack Obama, the President of the United States and a de facto Marxist, granted himself the power to rule by decree, saying: "I've got a pen and I've got a phone."
On November 22, 2013 the Washington Times reported that President Maduro "issued a decree that profit margins can be limited." The Washington Post reported:
Earlier this month, after railing against “bourgeois parasites,” Maduro ordered troops to take over a major electronics store chain and force managers to sell goods ranging from plasma TVs to stereos at bargain-basement prices.
On February 12, 2014 President Obama issued a decree that the minimum wage for federal contractors be increased to $10.10 an hour. On February 18, 2014 the White House blog stated that the minimum wage increase mandated by the President would not cause unemployment if the nation's bourgeois parasites lowered their profit margins:
In addition, businesses can adjust in other ways rather than
reducing employment (for example, by accepting lower profit margins).
Who is Rollo Tamasi? He's the Klansman under the white hood who hangs "niggers" and gets away "clean."
He's the policeman in military armor who swings a nightstick and fires
an AK-47 at unarmed, fleeing civilians.
He's the pretty, empty-headed
woman -- Andreína Tarazón -- who is the National Superintendent for the
Defense of Socio-Economic Rights.
He is Venezuela’s Dictator-President
Nicolas Maduro who rules by decree.
While you loiter in a federal food line, awaiting your turn and your portion of government rations, while you shit in a hole and wipe your ass with pages of the family Bible, Rollo Tamasi dines on caviar and wipes with tissue paper that is soft as a cloud. When the world goes to shit, thugs and thieves are always well off.
Rollo will tell you he's neither a thug nor a thief. He's a seeker of justice and fairness. Every skull Rollo cracks, every egg he "liberates" is not for his benefit, but for yours. At least that's his story and he's sticking to it.
What do you think of the following? According to the Caracas Chronicles, this is what recently gushed across the tongue of Rollo Tarazón, the National Superintendent for the Defense of Socio-Economic Rights:
She claimed that the Law of Fair Prices “doesn’t seek to limit the
private initiative, but aims to boost national production and secure the
worker’s access to goods and services.” And about the penalties
foreseen by the new piece of regulation, Tarazón said that they would be
implemented progressively under the “principles of justice” and that
“the Judicial System would play an important part in setting them.”
You see now why the world goes to shit? You allow vacant-headed morons to takeover. And when they do you are powerless or too scared to do anything about it. You've got your "socio-economic rights" but no food or toilet paper.
You want to know how and why things end badly, read this article: Venezuela: The Last Days of Private Enterprise, by Enrique Standish. That is not his real name by the way. Enrique is in Venezuela. He uses the pseudonym for "safety reasons." Enrique writes:
The private sector in Venezuela has barely managed to survive in Venezuela after 15 years of the “Chavista
regime.” Most of Venezuela’s largest companies, as well as most banks,
insurance companies, and agri-business industries were long ago
nationalized or confiscated by Hugo Chávez. Now the final death sentence
for the remaining businesses has come through new foreign exchange and
price control regulations.
And, contrary to pretty Ms. Rollo, this is how Enrique describes the Law of Fair Prices:
According to this law, no economic activity in any field can be
performed in the country without the prior permit from the Orwellian
“National Superintendency for the Protection of Socioeconomic Rights.”
Thus, if a lawyer wants to open his own firm or a farmer wants to sell
from his truck, they will need a permit, even if they have previously
registered companies to that effect.
Well? No wonder the pretty bureaucrat, Rollo Tarazón, is enamored with the law. Maybe she's not as empty-headed as portrayed.
No, in truth it is the Venezuelan "workers" who are the empty-headed numbskulls.
To me, there is only one thing worse than empty-headed Venezuelans...empty-headed Americans. Why? Because I am an American, and because Washington, DC is full of Rollo Tamasi's named Barack Obama, Kathleen Sebelius and Janet Yellen. American "workers" adore them.
Yesterday America, today Venezuela, tomorrow America. Rollo's work never ends. He never tires...
Southern trees bear strange fruit,
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,
Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze,
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.
Pastoral scene of the gallant south,
The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth,
Scent of magnolias, sweet and fresh,
Then the sudden smell of burning flesh.
Here is the fruit for the crows to pluck,
For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck,
For the sun to rot, for the trees to drop,
Here is a strange and bitter crop.
* Abel Meeropol is the pseudonym of Lewis Allan, who wrote "Strange Fruit" while living in New York in 1937. Did Allan use a pseudonym for "safety reasons?" Did he fear the wrath of Rollo Tamasi?
Speaking of Tamasi, he was created in the mind of a movie character, Ed Exley, in the movie LA Confidential. IMDB quotes a conversation in the movie between Exley and fellow cop, Jack Vincennes:
Jack Vincennes:
Why in the world do you wanna go digging any deeper into the Nite Owl killings... Lieutenant? Ed Exley:
...Rollo Tamasi. Jack Vincennes:
Is there more to that, or am I supposed to guess? Ed Exley:
[aftre gathering his thoughts]
Rollo was a purse snatcher. My father ran into him off duty, and he shot
my father six times and got away clean. No one even knew who he was. I
just made the name up to give him some personality. Jack Vincennes:
What's your point? Ed Exley:
Rollo Tamasi is the reason I became a cop. I wanted to catch the guys
who thought they could get away with it. It's supposed to be about
justice. Then somewhere along the way, I lost sight of that...
Actually, I think somewhere along the way "justice" lost its meaning.
Jakub Bozydar Wisniewski has written a paper on market anarchism which has been published in The Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics. The paper, entitled "Legal Monocentrism and the Paradox of Government" can be read here. Visit Wisniewski's blog here. Wisniewski argues that legal monocentrism, or the provision of law and law enforcement by a coercive central government, cannot overcome the problem of the "paradox of government," i.e., a government powerful enough to coerce thieves and murders would be powerful enough to become a thief and a murderer itself. He claims that only legal polycentrism, or the provision of law and law enforcement by a free and competitive market, can solve this problem. In many respects this is the same, free market argument we've heard before from anarcho-capitalists: that law and law enforcement are merely consumer goods, and that any good provided by a free, competitive market will better satisfy consumers than a good provided by a monopoly. Wisniewski puts a new face on the free market/efficiency argument for anarchism by attacking legal monocentrism from a logical and praxeological point of view. He claims legal monocentrism cannot overcome the paradox of government by means of the ballot box nor by means of structural checks and balances. Moreover, he argues it is impossible for consumers of law and law enforcement to make comparative judgments of these goods if they are provided by a monopolistic government.
According to Wisniewski, these problems
are not encountered by the system of legal polycentrism because law and
law enforcement goods and services are provided by many and varied
vendors who must compete for the consumer's business in the free market.
Interested readers can study Wisniewski's economic analysis of government and decide for themselves whether it is logically sound. For me, it misses the point. I concede that a free market is more efficient in satisfying consumer demand for goods and services than an unfree market. The problem is
that law is not, like a pair of shoes, a market commodity. Neither is law enforcement a mere consumer service, like Pinkerton rent-a-cops.
Law is the
intersubjective ethic that binds people together in a cooperative
society. Without a common ethic which outlaws murder and theft, cooperative society could not exist. Law enforcement is society's legitimate means of coercing individuals to comply with its common ethic.
From this prospective, polycentrism is an oxymoron. In a cooperative
society, the ethical code which prescribes proper behavior and
proscribes improper behavior must be commonly understood and agreed to
by all cooperating individuals. A cooperative society cannot have multiple, competing codes of ethics. Such a society would splinter into factions, each faction following a different code. In time the larger society would crack up into smaller societies.
Anarchists and non-anarchists alike seem to agree that some means of final arbitration of disputes is necessary to the survival of a society of cooperating individuals. This is because, as human beings, we all understand that it is possible for reasonable people to disagree and disagree beyond reconciliation. In a cooperative society when reasonable people disagree about the specific meaning of the ethical code, and when that dispute is intractable, i.e., the disputants will not concede their position and cannot settle the dispute by themselves, further cooperative action is impossible. The society itself cracks up.
When two cooperating partners become embroiled in an intractable dispute, resolution is elementary. The two disputing cooperators go their separate ways. Their cooperative action easily cracks up. However, when many people cooperate in a society, the problem of settling intractable disputes is not so easy. In a large, cooperative society many individuals have great amounts of time and effort invested in the cooperative action. They cannot afford to lose that investment if their cooperative action cracks up, especially if the intractable dispute is over a relatively unimportant issue when considered from their majority point of view.
Cooperating actors anticipate this situation. Large societies devise means of intractable dispute resolution and include these means in their ethical code. Also in that code, they legitimize an authority to enforce these means of resolution by coercion.
This authority may be a single individual or a council of individuals, but either way the power of the coercive authority is decisive. Intractable disputes between cooperating actors are settled. The end result is that the cooperative action -- the society -- survives. Throughout history cooperating individuals have preserved their cooperative action--their society--by granting legitimate decisive and coercive authority to varied individuals: fathers, mothers, chiefs, kings, queens, parliaments, sheriffs, etc. etc. Yes, it is a paradox of sorts, that these authoritative individuals, invested with the legitimate power to preserve society, may use that power in illegitimate ways to crack up society. But this is the nature of cooperative action. Men either cooperate or they don't. They either act in concert, or it is every man for himself. There is no third option.
Wisniewski thinks polycentrism is a third option. He imagines a market society which is anarchic, i.e., a society in which law (the common ethical code) and law enforcement (legitimate, decisive and coercive authority to enforce the ethical code) is freely and competitively traded. But how would intractable disputes between individuals be resolved in such a society? Wisniewski tells us that, due to the "superior allocative properties of the market, freely competing protection and arbitration agencies would provide these goods at a much higher level of quality than a monopoly of force does..."
Are significant disputes regarding a society's code of ethics and its legitimate, decisive and coercive authority merely a matter of "quality?" Are they merely a matter of "superior" allocation of resources and vendors?
Imagine a society in which half of the cooperators believes abortion is murder and the other half believes it is a harmless means of contraception. Their dispute is personal and intractable. If this society practiced legal polycentrism, wherein competing laws for and against abortion were marketed like shoes and many varieties of legitimate, decisive and coercive authority were available for purchase, would the intractable dispute of the cooperators stand a better chance of resolution than in a society practicing legal monocentrism?
Wisniewski's argument is slight of hand. He conflates the free and competitive market, which results in "superior" allocation and improved "quality" of consumer goods and services, to the process by which individuals make ethical choices. Ethical codes and legitimate, decisive and coercive authority are not consumer goods and services, nor can they be traded as such. Rather, they are the philosophical basis and the moral foundation of exchange in a cooperative society.
Furthermore, Wisniewski argues that "protection and arbitration agencies" -- his euphemism for providers of ethical codes and legitimate authority -- will be of a "much higher level of quality" if they emerge from a free and competitive marketplace. But how is a free and competitive market created in the first place? Certainly not in a system of legal monocentrism which is subject to Wisniewski's Paradox of Government. No, a free and competitive market can only be created in a system of legal polycentrism.
So Wisniewski is faced with another paradox of his own making: in order to create legal polycentrism he must first presuppose its existence. If not, then how can he be sure markets are free and competitive and that the protection and arbitration agencies emerging from that market will be of a higher quality?
The only way out of this logical box is to assume "freely competing" protection and arbitration agencies can emerge from legal monocentrism, which brings us back to the beginning of this logical circle. The truth is a truly
intractable dispute between cooperators cannot be resolved by means of an arbitration agency of a
higher "quality" or a "protection agency" selected from a myriad of competitors. A truly intractable dispute can only be resolved by means of
coercive action by a legitimate authority.
Toward the end of his paper, Wisniewski writes:
... just as people all over the world are very diverse with respect to, e.g., their culinary, sartorial and artistic preferences, and thus prone to patronizing different food, clothing and art providers, they are also diverse with regard to their unwritten legal and moral customs, their beliefs concerning justice and fairness..."
If people really are "diverse with regard to...their beliefs concerning justice and fairness," what leads Wisniewski to believe that legal polycentrism must result in all members of society being better off, when considered from their own point of view.
We know there are many people who believe that a free and competitive market is anything but just and fair. In a system of legal polycentrism wouldn't these people be working to subvert a free and competitive market? If people are so "diverse with regard to their unwritten legal and moral customs," how can Wisniewski jump to any conclusion at all with regard to character of the marketplace in a system of legal polycentrism or the quality of arbitration and protection agencies that may emerge from that marketplace.
In most western societies today that practice legal monocentrism individual cooperators are easily able to recognize legitimate authority. They can easily determine the territorial jurisdiction of this authority and its methods and means of enforcement. Thus, it is a relatively simple matter for traders to decide where, how and with whom to cooperate.
However, in a system of legal polycentrism any individual in the society could become an entrepreneur in law and law enforcement. He could legitimately vend law and offer his services in the marketplace as a legitimate, decisive and coercive authority. If the citizens of this society were truly diverse, the market-allocated law would be diverse in kind and quality. Law enforcement service could be anonymous, without territorial bounds or jurisdiction. Under these uncertain conditions market participants would constantly have to decide with whom to trade, how to trade and where to trade. A daunting task indeed.
The concepts of "market anarchism" or "anarcho-capitalism" have always reminded me of a "black market" which can only exist in Wisniewski's system of monocentrism. No matter how efficient or inefficient the legitimate, decisive and coercive law and law enforcement authority is in the parent monocentric market, legitimate law and law enforcement authority is non-existent in the black market offspring. It is the closest system to legal polycentricism I can imagine.
On the black market buyers and sellers make their own law and enforce it in their own way. There are no written laws against murder and theft, although the black market functions according to the "unwritten legal and moral customs" of the people who operate in it. Thus, safeguarding one's person and property is of primary concern to participants in the black market, especially if the participants belong to a disfavored ethnic or social group. The strongest and most violent participants have the upper hand. Arbitration and protection agencies -- of a sort -- exist. However, their quality is suspect to say the least. Extortion rules. Honesty and integrity are in short supply. A trader in the polycentric black market may be able to judge whether the protection agencies competing there are comparatively efficient or inefficient. A trader in a legal monocentric society may be at a disadvantage in that regard. But he will at least be able to immediately recognize legitimate authority and judge for himself whether that legitimate authority is fair or unfair according to his own standards. He can then decide whether or not to cooperate in such a society.
In conclusion, it should be clear that legal polycentrism, or black market anarchism, is not the nirvana some represent it to be. However, in some strange, ironic way, the black market may be the potential solution to the paradox of government that Wisniewski does not mention. As the ethical code and the legitimate, decisive and coercive authority of the parent monocentric society become more and more corrupted, as politicians, bureaucrats and crony capitalists in the monocentric society act more and more as outright thieves and murderers, individual traders in that society will cease cooperating in the parent society and, of necessity, begin cooperating on the black market.
As the illegitimate power of a monocentric government becomes greater and greater, and as the illicit black market grows larger and larger, the parent monocentric society is faced with the ultimate solution: reform or die.
