What is the logic, the driving force, the agent of change?

Yes, the software works fine, and yes, the managers and owners have entrepreneurial minds. But the real secret to Facebook is its internal human gears — the individual users — which turn out to mirror the way society itself forms and develops.

The best way to see and understand this is to compare the workings of Facebook with the workings of the democratic political process. Watching Facebook’s development has been fun, productive, fascinating, useful and progressive. The election season, in contrast, has been divisive, burdensome, wasteful, acrimonious and wholly confusing.

That’s because Facebook and democracy work on entirely different principles.

Facebook is based on the principle of free association. You join or decline to join. You can have one friend or thousands. It is up to you. You share the information you want to share and keep other things from public view. You use the platform only to your advantage while declining to use it for some other purpose.

The contribution you make on Facebook extends from the things you know best: yourself, your interests, your activities, your ideas. The principle of individualism — you are the best manager of your life — is the gear that moves the machine. Just as no two people are alike, no two people have the same experience with the platform. All things are customized according to your interests and desires.

But of course, you are interested in others too, so you ask for a connection. If they agree, you link up and form something mutually satisfying. You choose to include and exclude, gradually forming your own unique community based on any selection criteria you want. The networks grow and grow from these principles of individualism and choice. It is a constantly evolving, cooperative process — exactly the one that Hans-Hermann Hoppe describes as the basis of society itself.

Democratic elections seem to be about choice in some way, but it is a choice over who will rule the whole mob. It provides the same user experience for everyone, regardless of individual desire. You are forced into the system by virtue of having been born into it. Sure, you can choose to vote, but you can’t choose whether to be ruled by the voting results.

In this democratic system, you are automatically given 220 million “friends” whether you like it or not. These fake “friends” are given to you because of a geographic boundary drawn by government leaders long ago. These “friends” are posting on your wall constantly. Your news feed is relentless series of demands. You cannot delete their posts or mark them as spam. Revenue is not extracted from advertising but collected as you use the system.

Nothing is truly voluntary in an election. You are bound by the results regardless. This creates absurdities. This is incredibly apparent in the Republican nominating process. If people under 30 prevailed, Ron Paul would win. If religious families with several kids prevailed, Rick Santorum would win. If chamber of commerce members prevailed, Mitt Romney would be victor. It all comes down to demographics, but there can be only one winner under this system.

Therefore, an election must be a struggle between people, a fight, a wrangling around, a push to assert your will and overcome the interests and desires of others. In the end, we are assured that no matter the outcome, we should be happy because we all participated. The individual must give way to the collective.

We are told that this means that the system worked. But in what sense does it work? It only means that the well-organized minority prevailed over the diffused majority. This is about as peaceful as the kid’s game “king of the mountain.”

Facebook has nothing to do with this nonsense. Your communities are your own creation, an extension of your will and its harmony with the will of others. The communities grow based on the principle of mutual advantage. If you make a mistake, you can undisplay your friend’s posts or you can unfriend him. This hurts feelings, sure, but it is not violent: It doesn’t loot or kill.

Your friends in Facebook can be from anywhere. They “check in” and plot their journeys. Whether your friend lives in or moves to Beijing or Buenos Aires doesn’t matter. Facebook makes possible what we might call geographically noncontiguous human associations. Language differences can be barriers to communication, but even they can be overcome.

Democracy is hyperbound by geography. You vote in an assigned spot. Your vote is assembled together with those of others in your county to produce a single result, and therefore, your actual wishes are instantly merged. They are merged again at another geographic level, and then at the state level and, finally, at the national level. By that time, your own preferences are vaporized.

Sometimes people get sick of Facebook. They suddenly find it tedious, childish, time wasting, even invasive. Fine. You can bail out. Go to your system preferences and turn off all notifications and take a sabbatical. People might complain, but it is your choice to be there or not. You can even delete your account entirely with no real downside. Then you can sign up again later if you so desire or join some other system of social networking.

Try doing that to democracy. You can’t unsubscribe. You are automatically in for life, and not even changing your location or moving out of the country changes that. It is even extremely hard to delete your account by renouncing your citizenship. The leaders of the democracy will still hound you.

We can learn from Facebook and all other social networks that the Internet has brought us. These are more than websites; they are models of social organization that transcend old forms. Make the rest of life more like a social network and we will begin to see real progress in the course of civilization. Persist in the old model of forced democratic community and we will continue to see decline.

Regards,

Jeffrey Tucker

Why Facebook Works, And Democracy Does Not was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder. Visit Laissez Faire Books for the best selection of libertarian book titles.

So what? Well, none of this could have happened 10 years ago. Not only that, you would probably wouldn’t have understood the paragraph in the slightest because it contains words and actions no one had heard of. Had I told you in 1992 that in 20 years, virtually anyone would be able to speak in wireless real-time video to anyone else on the planet, even to the point of sharing a real-time digital experience, you would not have believed it.

And if I had added that the technology was not outrageously expensive, but rather being carried around in the pockets of students and commuters everywhere, this would have seemed too outrageous for science fiction. What amazing force in the universe hath rained down such blessings on us mere mortals?

The truth is that we all live in a world today that would have been unimaginable to us only very recently. It is so much woven into our lives that we don’t think about it much anymore. And contrary to the rap on the digital age, that it is all about geekery and gadgetry, the real driving force behind this innovation is the flesh-and-blood human being and the oldest desires known to humankind (such as wanting to stay in touch with family).

Another quick example. I was emailing with a U.K. choir director two nights ago, and I mentioned a book of chanted music. He hadn’t heard of it, so I sent him a link, from which he downloaded the material (that magic click that creates a copy!). This morning, his choir sang the piece in church halfway around the world, and he let me know that it was fabulous.

Here we have it: digits flying over oceans in a matter of seconds, and then embodying themselves in beautiful music, sung now with the same human energy as music was sung in the ancient world, that transforms real lives. The person kneeling to prayer didn’t know and didn’t need to know how the music arrived there. The technology is just the means; the end is the improvement of human life.

Such cases like this are only a tiny snapshot of two things I can briefly recall. Just today so far, I’m sure I’ve read articles I never would have seen, talked with people I would have long ago lost touch with, found out about events that would have remained forever unknown to me, connected with someone who found something I said interesting enough to consider…and just now, I recall that I heard word that a friend with asthma is out of out a Shanghai hospital all safe and sound. None of this would I have known only a few years ago.

Again, ask the question: What is causing all of this amazing change? What is the driving force, the source of the manna, the wellspring of all this avalanche of human progress?

I’ll tell you what is not causing it: politics. It’s the great lie, the most-gigantic drain of valuable human energy ever conjured up in the mind of man. What is politics but a grand argument about how we should rule each other? Meanwhile, every step forward in history has come not from this task, but a completely different one.

American politicians are always running on a platform of change. They explain how their policies will make your life better. They map out timetables. They present a portrait of a future. Above all else, they presume that the future is theirs to control, and voters often go along with this idea. As an example, look no further than the history of the State of the Union address.

What if none of it is true? Just think about education. Everyone has a plan for how to improve what exists. So it has been for a hundred years. Meanwhile, the private sector, through physical and digital technology, is reinventing the entire enterprise from the ground up through every possible means. This decentralized, private-sector-driven, technologically sophisticated education reform is making it almost impossible not to be educated about something with each passing hour.

Online academies are opening by the day. Universities are putting their courses online for free. For-profit companies are distributing every manner of teaching tool one can imagine. For-profit learning centers are opening in every town, all making a buck from teaching kids what the public schools have failed to teach. For that matter, the History Channel alone offers more sweeping programs than any public school textbooks two generations ago.

Anyone in the world can be a teacher to the world today, with a laptop and an Internet connection, and so, too, anyone can be student.

It’s true in health care reform, too. For all the problems in the pricing system and terrible insurance system, health care is getting better, mainly due to private-sector innovations. The best radiologists in the world can examine your scans in minutes, no matter where they actually happen. Access to medical information is no longer trapped in a dusty book but flies all over the world from hand-held devices. Error is more likely to be corrected this way, saving and changing lives.

Society is not waiting for the politicians. When you listen to what they say, when you watch what the bureaucrats do, when you look at what the agencies are regulating, you suddenly realize that the political monstrosities that burden the world are hopelessly out of touch with the kind of progress that people are experiencing in their daily lives now.

Politicians can make the world a worse place, to be sure. But if you look at the actual trends that are driving change in a positive direction in our world today, none of them is inspired by political initiative. They take place outside the public sector, and even outside the purview of the politicians and bureaucrats. Sometimes it seems as if the political class is clueless that the world has long ago moved on.

What is driving the world in a forward direction? It is people connecting with people through free association, communication, money exchange, enterprise, risk taking, commercial aspirations and the practical arts. And from these forces, we are newly discovering the wonderful fruits of civilization: arts, music, philosophy, faith.

And truth. Truth above all. The truth that is all around us, the one that the public-sector machinery somehow cannot and will not see, is that global society is making a future for itself without the help of the world’s self-described public servants. The state in all its manifestations struts and preens — builds monuments to itself and waves its flags — but when it comes to really making change, we must look elsewhere.

Regards,

Jeffrey Tucker

How Change Happens was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder. Visit Laissez Faire Books for the best selection of libertarian book titles.

“It may come as a shock …” wrote John Flynn, “to be told that[you] have never experienced that kind of society which [our] ancestors knew as the American Republic …” Flynn, the editor of the popular weekly the Saturday Evening Post, had already come to this conclusion in 1955. In his book The Decline of the American Republic, Flynn observed that Americans needlessly “live in the war-torn, debt-ridden, tax-harried wreckage of a once imposing edif ice of the free society which arose out of the American Revolution on the foundation of the U.S. Constitution.”

An empire needs a source of income suff icient to fund its military campaigns, regulatory regimes, and domestic schemes. It also needs a strong central authority to direct its ambitious new programs. In one short 12-month span, a year the writer Frank Chodorov calls the “Revolution of 1913,” the empire got the tools it needed. That year—the same year European countries abandoned the gold standard in preparation for World
War I—the old Republic ceased to exist.

WHERE THE MONEY COMES FROM

America’s current system of income tax is a twentieth-century invention. Previous attempts at creating a national tax had failed or had been thrown out because they violated tenets of the Constitution deemed essential by the founders. In its f irst 100 years, the United States supported its federal government with a series of what we would call “sin taxes” today, on

whiskey, tobacco, and sugar. By 1817, all internal taxes were abolished by Congress, leaving only tariffs on imported goods as a means for supporting the government.

The first income tax that citizens of the young Republic were forced to endure came about because Congress had been asked to fund the War between the States. In 1862, a tax on incomes between $600 and $10,000 was assessed at the rate of 3 percent, and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) was created. The war was costing $1.75 million per day.2 The government sold off land, borrowed heavily, enacted various fees, and increased excise taxes, but it simply wasn’t enough. The income tax seemed like the only way to finance the war and service the country’s then-staggering $505 million debt. That tax was promoted as a temporary wartime measure. Temporary it was. In 1872, after servicing the Reconstruction, Congress yanked the “temporary” tax.

But that was not the end of it. The income tax appealed to empire builders because it alone offered enough cash to finance the enterprise. But it had another appeal—to the larceny and envy in the hearts of ordinary citizens. Following a banking panic in 1893, Senator William Peffer of Kansas, supported the progressive income tax in this way:

Wealth is accumulated in New York, and not because those men are more industrious than we are, not because they are wiser and better, but because they trade, because they buy and sell, because they deal in usury, because they reap in what they have never earned, because they take in and live off what other men earn… . The West and the South have made you people rich.

That sentiment was puffed up by Nebraska’s bellicose worldimprover William Jennings Bryan, who argued against the “equal taxation” requirement in the Constitution, in favor of the current progressive one:

If New York and Massachusetts pay more tax under this law than other states, it will be because they have more taxable incomes within their borders. And why should not those sections pay most which enjoy most?

This logic is simple. People who are more productive should be forced to pay a bigger share of their common expenses. But this kind of logic had no place in a free republic where all men were supposedly created equal; if they were equal they could each carry their own share of

the burden of central government. Under this new regime, men were no longer equal, but given differing loads to carry based on the whims of elected hacks.

With considerable foresight, one member of the House of Representatives predicted:

The imposition of the [income] tax will corrupt the people. It will bring in its train the spy and the informer. It will necessitate a swarm of off icials with inquisitorial powers. It will be a step toward centralization.

… It breaks another canon of taxation in that it is expensive in its collection and cannot be fairly imposed … and, finally, it is contrary to the traditions and principles of republican government.

When the tax was again introduced in 1894, a challenge went to the U.S. Supreme Court. In 1895, even among the cacophony of appeals in Congress to “soak the rich,” the Supreme Court declared the bill unconstitutional in a 5-to-4 ruling. In writing the majority opinion, Justice

Stephen J. Field quoted another case to support his conclusion:

As stated by counsel: “There is no such thing in the theory of our national government as unlimited power of taxation in congress. There are limitations, as he justly observes, of its powers arising out of the essential nature of all free governments; there are reservations of individual rights, without which society could not exist, and which are respected by every government. The right of taxation is subject to these limitations.”

But when the winds of empire blew, the old yellowed paper of the U.S. Constitution went f lying. Following The Panic of 1907, President Theodore Roosevelt sided with a faction in the Democratic Party that wanted to amend the Constitution to allow a national income tax. In

1909, President Taft stated that he had “become convinced that a great majority of the people of this country are in favor of vesting the National Government with power to levy an income tax.”

Of course, politicians are always able and willing to argue that “the people” want a government to have more power. If the voters see a free lunch in the deal, they’re for it. By 1913, just in time for Wilson’s emergence on the world stage, the Sixteenth Amendment had been ratified by enough states to put the income tax into law. The Amendment states:

The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several states, and without regard to any census or enumeration.

It wasn’t long before Congress exercised its new powers. Wilson even convened a special session of Congress to rush through the f irst tax law under the Sixteenth Amendment, in which earnings above $3,000 were subject to a 1 percent tax, gradually moving up to 7 percent on higher income levels.

With its rather modest rates, the original income tax was viewed as a benign inconvenience. As early as 1916, however, the top rate was more than doubled from 7 percent up to 15 percent. Then as cash was needed to send Pershing to France, the rate was hiked to a staggering 67 percent in 1917 and 77 percent by 1918. Even the low rates were raised. From their microscopic origin of only 1 percent, the rate settled into a “modest” 23 percent by the end of World War II. But by that time, the people of the old republic had grown to accept an income tax as a necessary evil. Now that the nation was an empire, it needed the money.

In our present era, the complexity of the Internal Revenue Code (IRC) has created an army of specialized lawyers and accountants. Even attempts at reform are out of control. A “technical corrections” bill exceeds 900 pages of adjustments. In fact, by the beginning of the twentyfirst century, the tax codes exceeded 7 million words, about nine times longer than the Bible; and the IRS was sending out about 8 billion pages of forms and instructions every year—at the cost of about 300,000 trees! All this effort translates to about 5.4 billion hours spent every year by Americans just complying with the tax rules.

From 1913 to 2005, the income tax has enabled, entitled, empowered, and engorged the federal government, states, and local governments, private enterprises, and millions of private citizens. Spending has grown by more than 13,592 percent.

The income tax gives the federal government a blank check to spend money, even money it does not yet have. The federal government lays a claim on all future economic activity of its citizens; its massive debts are a lien on the earnings of people who have not yet even drawn their first breaths. What’s more, the income tax could be used as both an economic tool and as a political weapon. Tax rates could be manipulated, for example, to punish or reward favored political groups.

When the Constitution was ratified in 1789, the colonists in the New World believed they had won for themselves a measure of freedom and independence. “A republic, if you can keep it,” Benjamin Franklin warned.

But by the end of 1913, a scant 124 years later, Americans were happy to lose their republic; an empire was what they wanted.

Regards,

Bill Bonner

Addison Wiggin

The Revolution of 1913 was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder. Visit Laissez Faire Books for the best selection of libertarian book titles.

Let me make a secret confession right here. For years, the producer of my radio talk show and I would draw straws each January to see who would “have the high privilege and distinct honor” of watching the president’s State of the Union address.

Do I have to clarify that the loser had to watch?

In case the president said something important – which almost never happened – I felt an obligation to play some audio clips and talk about it on the show the next morning. But, personally, watching Republican and Democrat presidents recite their laundry list of promised giveaways for the year ahead was more than I could bear.

I learned early on that I could avoid all of the ovations and applause, save time, and still capture what substance there might have been in a written paragraph or two. Soon, I’ll give you such a written account, a perennial synopsis that will allow you to watch something else – like American Idol – and still have a handle on what the president says.

And you might even have time left over to keep an eye on the real news.

While We Were Watching…

The State of the Union is treated with utmost seriousness by the dominant news media. All four major TV networks and the cable news channels carry the event. My local newspaper devoted most of the front page and big chunks of the inside pages to its coverage: photos, accounts, sidebars, response, and analysis.

But it’s actually a spectacle that crowds out the real news. News about the impact American diplomacy is having on our future standard of living. News about the U.S. dollar’s reserve status winding down.

On the day of the State of the Union address, news flashed around the world – but not on your favorite network or in your morning paper – that India and Iran have agreed to end-run the U.S.-imposed sanctions on Iran.

They will use gold to do so.

Those [U.S.] sanctions, which have now been agreed to by the European Union as well, will ratchet up in July. Their enforcement means that banks and financial institutions involved in oil transactions with Iran will be barred from doing any business with financial institutions in the United States and Europe.

According DEBKAfile, a news source based in Israel, Iran has taken steps to bypass American and European banks and their currency desks altogether, agreeing instead to sell its oil to India for gold. China is expected to soon agree to use gold in buying oil from Iran as well. It’s a move that would leave the long-standing global dollar pricing of petroleum in tatters.

The gold-for-oil agreement means a three things:

1. It hastens the unwinding of the U.S. dollar’s global reserve currency status.

The rest of the world is actively developing alternatives to the U.S. dollar. Although it will mean a falling standard of living for the American people, U.S. policies and secretaries of state, like Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton, have spurred what will become a stampede away from the dollar. DEBKAfile also reports that both China and Russia have secret mechanisms already in place to pay Iran in non-dollar currencies for its oil. And only a month ago, China and Japan, the world’s second- and third-largest economies, agreed to develop direct yen/yuan trading, forgoing the dollar as the reserve currency intermediary.

2. It accelerates the global monetization of gold.

Both China and India have been aggressively adding to their gold reserves. Other countries are following suit. The Keynesians, who have been in charge of American monetary policy, having destroyed the value of the dollar and enabled our ruinous debt, may actually believe that gold is a “barbarous relic.” But it is clear that their opinions have little functional value in the real world. The world is turning to gold more and more as U.S. debt continues to mount. Indeed, is there a better alternative monetary unit to be found? Certainly, it’s not the euro. Jim Grant of Grant’s Interest Rate Observer says gold is the only answer to the question, “if not the dollar, then what?”

3. It reveals the growing global impotence of the U.S.

Long able to enforce reluctant countries to adhere in its missions and embargoes around the world, the U.S. is finding its will frustrated. Nations that once had to weigh the favor of the U.S. against their own commercial and domestic political interests are increasingly ignoring the global dictates of the U.S. State Department. In 2003, Turkey, where the prospect of a U.S. invasion of Iraq was wildly unpopular, refused even bribes to allow the U.S. to stage the invasion from its soil. Today, the threat of a U.S. or Israeli strike on Iran is meeting with growing disapproval, especially from countries like China and India which rely heavily on Iranian oil.

Routine. Tired. Repetitive.

It may be that the State of the Union’s falling ratings – Obama’s speech the other night was down 12 percent from the year before, and was down 21 percent from 2010 – are a sign that people in large numbers have discovered there are better sources of important news than network television and Washington’s lapdog press.

Or, even better, maybe they’ve had about enough of the Washington party.

Or, maybe it’s simply because it’s all so routine, so tired, so repetitive. Even American Idol, entering its 11th season, has more surprises than the State of the Union. Consider:

Obama, who clearly doesn’t understand anything about markets, offered to have the government interfere with the real estate market in brand new ways in 2012. What could be more predictable than some president announcing a scheme to screw up the real estate market again in the new year?

It’s so routine. So tired. So repetitive.

And while the contestants on American Idol are fresh every year, the promises that make up the State of the Union are just reruns, season after season.

Now, if you’d like to be free to pay attention to the real news that actually affects your freedom and prosperity, let me provide you the following short, beginning-to-end account of this year’s State of the Union. You’ll be able to refer to it year after year, so that while you’ll still be informed about the president’s address, you can skip the show and save yourself time.

Time to follow the real news. Or to watch American Idol.

“Thank you so much. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you.”

The president agreed to do something for (to?) homeowners. He also has decided to help teachers. And students. And women. Workers, too. The president wants to help workers, for sure. And jobs galore. The president is all about creating jobs in 2012. And more jobs in energy. Oh, they’ll be clean ones for sure!

Plus, he’s going to reform regulations so that regulators will be able to regulate better. And he wants to get a handle on the bureaucracy. And he wants to reform education. And both make government more effective and still grow the economy. Did he forget men and women in uniform? The president most certainly did not!

“Thank you, God bless you, and may God bless the United States of America.”

Regards,

Charles Goyette

Source

The State of the Union, Just Another Reality Show was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder. Visit Laissez Faire Books for the best selection of libertarian book titles.

But here there still be monsters. Before another day had passed, the FBI and DOJ made a show of intellectual property force under existing law (specifically the PRO-IP Act signed by Bush in 2008). They shut down the popular site Megaupload and jailed its principals, who happen to be non-U.S. persons not living in the U.S.

On Black Wednesday itself, the Supreme Court handed down a decision in Golan v. Holder that authorized Congress to re-copyright works that had long been in the public domain.

Then, last week, Poland joined with seven other nations — including the U.S., Japan and Canada — by signing ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement), the international trade agreement that criminalizes intellectual property theft across borders. The U.S. signed in 2010 when the negotiators termed ACTA an “executive agreement” instead of a “treaty”…because that allowed them to skip merrily around the Senate ratification that would have been required for a treaty.

As Timothy B. Lee explains on the Ars Technica site:

“If ACTA becomes a binding part of international law, it will create a precedent for future treaties that avoid basic principles of transparency and democratic accountability.

“More generally, the treaty continues the one-way ratchet toward ever-stronger copyright protections. ACTA establishes a new, higher minimum of copyright protections and enforcement that countries must provide, but it doesn’t require countries to preserve mechanisms like fair use and intermediary immunity that protect intellectual freedom.

“If Congress ever decides that IP rights have swung too far in one direction, it can always re-balance them by changing the law, right? Not exactly. International agreements like ACTA bind the hands of legislators unless the U.S. is willing to withdraw from them first.

“That’s why Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) last week called ACTA ‘more dangerous than SOPA.’ He added, ‘It’s not coming to me for a vote. It purports that it does not change existing laws. But once implemented, it creates a whole new enforcement system and will virtually tie the hands of Congress to undo it.’

“Unfortunately, these arguments are hard to explain to the general public. So too many ACTA opponents are, perhaps unknowingly, attacking ACTA for provisions that aren’t in the treaty. We’re not going to shed too many tears if this misinformation helps to kill a bad treaty, but we’d rather win the debate honestly — and prepare people for the upcoming ACTA sequel.”

Hmm. We agree that the poor treaty (or executive agreement for those U.S. presidents who can’t be bothered with Senate ratification) ought not be maligned for what it doesn’t contain. Especially when the wretched thing is detestable for what it really does contain…and for what it represents.

What the Internet has forced us all to confront is this: Free expression and the sharing of information that drives progress are not compatible with the notion — and state enforcement — of intellectual property. The cognitive dissonance is wide and growing between defense of intellectual property and the defense of liberty and acceleration of progress.

In today’s feature article, Stephan Kinsella explains more and, in doing so, throws down the gauntlet against the defenders of IP.

The SOPA Wake-Up Call to Abolish Copyright
by Stephen Kinsella (Source)

I’ve blogged quite a bit lately about SOPA and PIPA and the recent Internet blackouts and other protests against these bills, which threaten free speech and the open Internet (Mike Masnick et al. at Techdirt have also been great on exposing and analyzing SOPA).

As Jeffrey Tucker noted recently, the protests against SOPA started not with conservatives or even “libertarians,” but with civil libertarians of the “left,” as well as Silicon Valley tech types. Of course, some libertarians have been opposed to SOPA (and copyright) from the beginning — the more-radical and anti-state libertarians, in particular Austro-libertarians and left-libertarians.

Aside from the anti-state libertarians, however, most of the protests against SOPA concede that copyright is good, intellectual property is important and piracy is bad…but then they bemoan that SOPA “goes too far.”

For example, consider this article in PC Magazine, providing the response of 11 PC Mag staffers asked for their take on SOPA. The response to SOPA was universally negative, but most of them first prefaced their opposition to SOPA by genuflecting to copyright and recognizing that IP piracy “is, of course, a real problem.” For example:

• “Yes, theft of intellectual property is wrong, but it shouldn’t be protected at the cost of free speech and an open Internet”
• “SOPA is a perfect case of a disproportionate reaction to a real problem. Lawless websites full of pirated content are a real problem, but breaking the Internet isn’t the solution”
• “This proposed legislation is akin to having libraries monitored, or even shut down, because there is a chance that a book may contain a piece of plagiarized work”
• “IP is a precious thing. For example, every writer on PC Mag has had their work pirated at one time or another. However, this legislation goes” too far
• “There is definitely a need for content owners like movie studios and music labels to protect their content from piracy, but the proposed legislation isn’t the answer.”

This is the type of response that almost all the SOPA opponents have taken, such as Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg, which said that

“‘…rogue foreign sites that pirate American intellectual property or sell counterfeit goods pose significant problems for our economy,’ but PIPA and SOPA ‘are not the right solution to this problem, because of the collateral damage they would cause to the Internet.’”

This type of argument is extremely common. Depressingly common.

And not only do most opponents of SOPA accept the basic legitimacy of copyright, they also accept the RIAA/MPAA propaganda about “piracy” imposing billions of dollars of “cost” to the economy every year — even though there is no evidence of this.

The problem is that copyright obviously infringes free speech and other individual rights. This is no surprise, given its origins as a tool of censorship. As the Supreme Court recognized in its most-recent copyright decision, Golan v. Holder (the case authorizing Congress to re-copyright public domain works), “Concerning the First Amendment, we recognized that some restriction on expression is the inherent and intended effect of every grant of copyright.”

It is widely recognized that copyright (and even patent) restricts freedom of speech and expression. By assuming that copyright is legitimate — as the courts do — and that the First Amendment protects freedom of expression, a balance must always be found between freedom and censorship. And this is the dilemma most people find themselves in when they start with the premise that we must protect intellectual property rights, but we can’t “go too far” because otherwise we would harm free speech (and the open Internet) “too much.”

Obviously, there is a conflict between copyright and censorship and government control of ideas on the one hand, and freedom of expression and the open Internet on the other. This is being increasingly recognized. Leo Laporte recognized this in a recent episode of This Week in Tech. You have to choose: the Internet or copyright, he observed (opposed to technocrat Nilay Patel).

In the aftermath of the SOPA battle, we have people finally asking important questions. The Washington Times questions copyright abuse in its opposition to the Golan decision. The Daily Caller questions copyright’s legitimacy. Mark McKenna at Slate, in “Don’t Stop at SOPA,” asks: “SOPA and PIPA are (almost) dead. Now can we talk about the law that already exists?” Glyn Moody at Techdirt asks the important question: “OK, So SOPA and PIPA Are Both on Hold: Where Do We Go From Here?”

And what is the answer? Some people are hinting at it, or directly suggesting it: Abolish copyright. As Rick Falkvinge observes in “It Is Time to Stop Pretending to Endorse the Copyright Monopoly”:

“…the copyright industry is actually right that these ridiculous laws are needed to sustain the copyright monopoly. General-purpose networked computers, free and anonymous speech and sustained civil liberties make it impossible to maintain this distribution monopoly of digitizable information. As technical progress can’t be legislated against, basic civil liberties would have to go to maintain the crumbling monopoly. And these are the laws we’re seeing on the table.

“There comes a tipping point when somebody says that this entire system of cultural monopolies is absurd. A tipping point where the part before the ‘but’ is unceremoniously and collectively dropped, the part that didn’t count, anyway. A tipping point in which everybody just stops pretending to support it. I think it is time to create that point on the history line.”

Falkvinge here recognizes that if you support copyright, you should support SOPA. And conversely, if you oppose SOPA, you should oppose copyright. Copyright is the problem, people.

We are at a moment in history when people who have absorbed the idea of copyright, but who are not ideologically committed to it, have seen that it conflicts with more deeply held values: freedom of expression, commerce, digital life, the Internet. They are seeking a framework, a way to coherently express what they sense is wrong with escalated copyright enforcement. We need to let them know: The problem is copyright itself. If you have copyright, of course you want to enforce it. All the problems we see are merely symptoms of the copyright mentality.

We must press our fleeting advantage to let our halfhearted allies know that their intuitions are right: Censorship and SOPA and state control of private property and SOPA are wrong. And this means copyright, which is the engine behind all these things, is wrong, and must fall, or at least be radically scaled back, not strengthened.

The argument against patent and copyright is not a socialist or liberal one. It is, in fact, rooted in respect for private property rights, capitalism, the free market and competition. A coherent understanding of private property and free markets reveals that copyright is an anti-competitive grant of state power for purpose of censorship or favoritism that can only seek to undermine private property rights and empower the police state — as we are seeing now.

I remind our anti-SOPA brethren that the battle is far from over. They opposed SOPA and PIPA, but where were they when the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which has led to so much persecution and harm to the Internet, was enacted? Where were they in 2008 when George Bush signed the PRO-IP Act, which was instrumental in the FBI raids in New Zealand on the Megauploads principals, a day after the alleged SOPA blackout protest victories?

And what about the Golan decision, released the day of the SOPA blackouts, authorizing Congress to re-copyright works long in the public domain? What about the one-year federal prison sentence handed down to a man for uploading a copy of the Wolverine movie? What about the British student faced with extradition to the U.S. for having the wrong links on his website?

Where were they when President Obama signed ACTA (unconstitutionally, without Senate ratification), a global Internet treaty even worse in some ways than SOPA? Right now, nations are negotiating in secret the TPP (Trans-Pacific Partnership), an “agreement that the entertainment industry is betting on to get SOPA-like laws introduced around the globe.”

In other words, the dangers of SOPA are already here. This is because of copyright.

The problem is that all the people opposing SOPA undercut their opposition by acknowledging the importance of copyright and IP by condemning piracy. It is admirable that they are taking the ride side of the chasm caused by their cognitive dissonance, but dissonance it is. If you support copyright, you oppose piracy, and you support the state’s existence and its attempts to enforce these “property rights.” You cannot have both copyright and Internet freedom/freedom of speech.

The threat here to property rights, to individual rights, to Internet freedom and freedom of speech and expression and the press comes from copyright itself. We must strike at the root. SOPA is just a symptom of the disease. The disease is copyright.

Everyone is trying to treat the symptom — enforcement efforts like SOPA — with halfhearted treatments like labeling the response “disproportionate” or going “too far.” This is like trying to treat a brain tumor by taking Tylenol — sorry, acetaminophen — in response to the headaches caused by the tumor. All opponents of SOPA and censorship, all denizens of the Web and proponents of freedom, must oppose copyright itself (and patent too). Those libertarians and others who oppose SOPA and who are for copyright reform, but who are not for copyright abolition, should realize that a modest, fair, efficient, “reasonable” or “sensible” copyright system is completely impossible.

Since the dawn of copyright, its scope, length, penalties and enforcement have only increased, because of the relentless pressure by special interest factions like Disney, the RIAA, the MPAA, and other content providers and entrenched interests. As we can see with the pressure to adopt SOPA, PIPA, PRO-IP, DMCA, Berne, WIPO, TRIPS, COICA, Sonny Bono/Mickey Mouse Copyright Term Extension Act, ACTA, TPP and other measures (see “The Mountain of IP Legislation”), the Big Content interests are relentless and will not stop pressuring Congress and other legislatures to expand the war on information sharing and the Internet.

Even if we had a less-noxious copyright system — say, one with 10-year terms and less draconian penalties and enforcement — it would soon metastasize into what we have now, just as it has done (originally 14 years, now it is over 100). So a modest, “reasonable” copyright system is really off the table.

The question that SOPA opponents have to ask themselves is would you rather have today’s copyright system, with its draconian terms and penalties and continual pressure to expand and internationalize it, or no copyright at all? Only one of these choices is compatible with opposition to SOPA and to censorship. The only way to stop SOPA-type provisions and to maintain Internet freedom is to get rid of today’s copyright system.

- Stephen Kinsella

This is bound to generate some discussion and argument (Oh, our aching inbox! ggibsonagora@gmail.com). Heck, as quite a few of our Whiskey Shooters have noticed and emailed us about, there’s a little copyright warning at the bottom of these very missives and everything Agora Financial publishes.

This is still fairly new territory we’re exploring. A couple of years ago, we were far more in the Ayn Rand/Objectivist camp when it came to intellectual property (though not as far as the entertainingly pro-IP libertarian Andrew Joseph Galambos, who reportedly changed his name from Joseph Andrew Galambos so as not to infringe on his father’s claim to the specific name and who dropped a nickel in a box every time he used the word “liberty” to pay the estate of the reputed coiner of the word, Thomas Paine). It’s only recently that our friend Jeffrey Tucker got us thinking — and rethinking — the issue.

There are a couple of ways to approach it. We’ll undoubtedly have cause to explore them all in future issues (like Stephan points out, there are too many state-backed monopolists with too much money on the line for these kinds of legislation to go away), but here’s one way of thinking about it that we really like…

Property rights are the natural way to deal with scarcity in a world of scarce physical resources. Without property rights — based in first occupancy, not labor or use of material — ownership reverts to a temporary condition determined by might. Property rights aren’t natural in the sense that gravity is, and not as fundamental, but very nearly so, in the context of human existence. They are as natural, as essential to peaceful co-existence as your right not to be beaten, killed and possibly eaten by your stronger neighbor.

Ideas — even complex ones — are nonscarce, unlike physical property. They are literally infinitely reproducible without damaging the original in any way or depriving the owner of its use. Yes, potential income is damaged in the absence of intellectual property monopoly enforcement, but that could be said about a great many things that aren’t protected by this notion of intellectual property. It takes some serious mental contortion and far-reaching legislation to make ideas and thought patterns scarce. This is what SOPA, PIPA, ACTA and all the rest are making us all realize.

When you see how far the state has to go to enforce monopoly use on nonscarce things…when you see how this monopoly enforcement really hampers progress and restricts the way people use their own property, as it does with these threats to a free Internet (people are now actually afraid to send links to public websites in private emails)…you have to start to wonder at the soundness of the premise.

The arguments for intellectual property strike us as about as sound as arguments for a flexible state-run currency…or for military adventurism…or for gun control…or for prohibition. That is to say, they are fundamentally unsound in that they rely on the force of the state to interfere with the natural forces of the market…with all the distortions you’d expect, along with a continual growth in state power to wage effectively.

At least that’s how we see it here in the Whiskey editorial room. We suspect the world is waking up to this fact as this unsound, indefensible idea gums up the engine of the digital world.

The only way to defend intellectual property in this digital age is for the states of the world led by the U.S. to keep on pushing this invasive, punitive legislation.

We don’t think that’s such a good idea. The entire world that benefits from a free Internet seems to agree, even if most of that world holds onto a belief in intellectual property.

We’re curious to see how this will play out. We suspect strongly that progress will win. Eventually. In fact, we’re willing to put our money where our big mouth is on that one. Those who bet on progress tend to win. Those who bet early win the biggest.

To Save the Future, Abolish Copyright was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder. Visit Laissez Faire Books for the best selection of libertarian book titles.

The first shock was the realization that the gigantic protest against legislative moves (SOPA and PIPA) that would smash the Internet turned out to be superfluous. The thing everyone wanted to prevent is already here. SOPA turns out not to be the unwelcome snake in the garden of free information. The snakes have already taken over the garden and are hanging from every tree.

The second shock took a few days to sink in. It could mean that the whole way in which the digital age has functioned is in danger, or even doomed. This is not a forecast. This doom is all around us right now.

The problem is this: Megaupload was accused of violating copyright through its file-sharing technology. This permits users to upload their own content and permit other users into their space. If anything that one person uploads is of uncertain copyright status — it could be anything, really — sharing it would then seem to amount to a crime.

For some years, the feds have unnecessarily harassed people for nonviolently streaming or sharing content. This has had something of a chilling effect and increased the use of IP-scrambling proxies to keep online habits from being traced. College kids know this all too well. Masking IPs is just the way they live and work.

The attack on Megaupload takes all of this to a different level. This was not some wholly surreptitious, sketchy institution that was trying to get around the law. It was already becoming a legitimate service for launching careers in music and art generally. It seemed to be doing exactly what we expect in the digital age. It was reinventing an old model for new times through innovation in production, delivery and profit sharing.

As I wrote before, this was most likely why the old-line industry came after them. It was not the illegal activities, but their legal ones that made them a target. The moguls do not want change. They crushed the competition.

At the same time, the actual legal rationale that the feds used to blast these people away was their supposed violation of intellectual property through file sharing.

Which raises the question: Is every site that makes file sharing possible in danger? Consider Dropbox, the hugely popular service that allows you to put your files in the cloud and create special folders that share them with others. This allows people to work on shared folders in a collaborative way, and prevents the inevitable problem of version control that comes with emailing back and forth.

How exactly is Dropbox different from Megaupload? It is not that different. It is staid and scholarly, rather than flashy and jazzy. It’s interface is plain and neat, rather than colorful and upbeat. Otherwise, it is hard to qualitatively distinguish one from another.

Dropbox is hardly alone. As TechCrunch puts it:

“Several digital locker services operate like Megaupload. RapidShare and MediaFire are two of the larger services. But these sites have undergone a face-lift recently and at least appear to be much less nefarious than they once were. Other services like Dropbox, iCloud, and Amazon S3 are open to hosting any file type a user uploads. They also make sharing easy, but in a way, that’s a lot more private than Megaupload. Still yet, there are sites like Zoho in which users can easily share content, content that could be copyrightable. But the prime goal of all these sites is open file sharing — just like Megaupload.”

It is hard to see how any file-sharing site can pass muster under the new regime. There are plenty more like SugarSync and FileSonic. As Ghacks points out, users of the latter were greeted with the following ominous message just this week:

Question: What value is a file-sharing site if it doesn’t permit the sharing of files? It becomes a thumb drive in the cloud. Maybe that is a bit of convenience, but it is not highly marketable or useful.

Another tactic that file-sharing sites are using after the Mega attack is to outright ban U.S. users in hopes that this will somehow immunize them from the terror attacks being used by the U.S. government. Thus were American users greeted with the following:

Americans look at China with shock that the government doesn’t allow access to a huge amount of the World Wide Web. But look: It is happening right now in the United States, but in an indirect way. This has been called a “virtual Iron Curtain” that is being thrown up around U.S. borders. It has already happened to banking. We are seeing the first signs of this on Internet access.

Another site called uploadbox.com has decided that it will no longer deal with the risk of these kinds of terror tactics and plans to shut down completely at month’s end.

What else? Google Docs allows file sharing and has solved so many problems as a result. This has been a great advantage of this innovation. I use it every day. It is essential. But it is in danger. What about Facebook? I could post a copyrighted image there right now and share it with thousands. Facebook thereby becomes an accessory to the same crimes that Mega is alleged to have abetted.

For that matter, what about email? When I send a file, it doesn’t remove it from my machine. A copy is made and made and made again. Who and what is to say whether what is sent or received is proprietary and made it through all the legal hoops? In the last several weeks, I’ve actually received emails expressing fear of sharing links to public sites!

All these changes go beyond the traditional “chilling effect” of random attacks on free speech and free association. This is a sudden and outright freeze, one that is devastating for the whole way in which the Internet has come to exist. What is called “file sharing” is the unique service that the Internet provides. Without that, the Internet becomes an efficient post office or another means of delivering television-style content.

The reason that the Internet has been the driving forced behind economic growth, political change, social progress and the general uplift of humanity is its capacity for taking scarce goods and converting them into nonscarce goods of infinite duplicability and availability. Information, media, data and images that were once captive of the physical world — paper and ink, film and bankers boxes — have been freed into another realm so that they can serve and enlighten the whole of humanity.

This has happened because of the miracle of duplicating digital goods that are driving economies in the digital age. To ban duplication and file sharing today is no different from banning flight in the 1920s, banning steel in the 1880s, banning the telegraph in the 1830s, banning the printer in the 1430s and banning the wheel and sail at the beginning of mankind’s advance out of the cave.

It will set humanity back. It violates liberty. It attacks everything that constitutes and defines the times in which we live. It replaces a world of sharing and thriving with a world of violence and technological regression. The Internet will continue to exist, but it will take a different form. Large sectors will have to thrive behind very secure pay walls and only within private digital communities.

And who is doing this? The U.S. government. Government in league with old-line corporate elites.

And what is the official reason? To enforce “intellectual property.” It has really come down to this: Either the whole basis of copyright, trademark and patent are scrapped or we could see the death of the digital age as we know it. So long as IP is enforced, the U.S. world empire can continue to roam the world seeking whom it may devour.

Regards,

Jeffrey Tucker,

The Death of File Sharing was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder. Visit Laissez Faire Books for the best selection of libertarian book titles.

“Joe Lieberman is not a Democrat. He is an independent, as he resigned from the Democratic Party. Don’t you ever check things out before stating them as facts?

“Wish you the best with your paranoia,”

“– Steve K”

This comes from one of our most-faithful, unswerving, persistent critics. A man who has dutifully read our material for years so he can tell us why we’re wrong about the economy, politics, art, science and love.

Our copy editing department called us on this, too. In our rush yesterday, we copied and pasted the pre-edited version of Jeffrey’s article…instead of the one that the copy editors had edited. So our apologies for that.

But if we were to be honest with you (and we always are), we would have to admit that while it may be technically inaccurate to count Lieberman among the Democrats, it is a matter of semantics that doesn’t amount to a hill of beans.

These political labels can be distracting. Personally, we don’t care what Lieberman calls himself. We care about what he does. The man is as well intentioned as he is clueless…which makes him especially dangerous. He bends most of his energy to coming up with more powers for the state under acts with comically Orwellian names.

Note that the reader who pointed out our error also wished us well with our paranoia. We suppose he means our worry about things like Lieberman’s insistence that the state should strip Americans of citizenship based on no evidence, should the state feel it necessary.

We are amazed at how the state grows from an annoying goblin into a sulphur-spitting archdemon…how it can start biting people in half (figuratively, of course) and spear infants on its trident, while its victims shrug their shoulders and mutter, “I really don’t see that there’s any cause for alarm.”

But that’s not what we’re here to talk about today. As disagreeable as it may be, we turn our attention to yet another political figure…

Mitt Romney recently released his tax information for the past couple of years. Wouldn’t you know it, he managed to lower his effective tax rate to 13.9%…by giving away millions to things he cares about.

That’s not what the headlines blare, however. What you see is that this man who earned millions of dollars per year paid far, far less a percentage of that income to the feds than middle-class suckers.

This is supposed to rouse the rabble. That’s certainly what the impressively eyebrowed Sage of Omaha, Warren Buffett, meant to do when he compared his tax payments with those of his secretary.

During our regular morning confab, LFB executive editor Jeffrey Tucker said of this, “The only really fair tax would be a fixed-dollar head tax. Like $1,000 per year. Or whatever.”

We had to push our seat back away from the table to give ourselves the room to laugh uproariously. A fixed-dollar head tax? Ha!

Sure, it makes perfect sense. But this is modern America. We are all progressives now, comrade. From each according to his ability. To each according to his need.

A man who makes more can afford to pay more. And he must. At least until he makes enough to employ some impressive loopholes in the purposely convoluted tax code.

“Of course,” Jeffrey pointed out concerning the progressive tax payment model, “if private enterprise did this, we would all see this as unfair exploitation.”

And of course, Jeffrey is right. Could you imagine if you had to pay more for your gas, meat and bread because you earned more?

Now, individual merchants can discharge their goods as they see fit, giving discounts to whomever they wish based on whatever criteria they wish: height, age, looks, degree of familiar relation…

A butcher may give his elderly widow neighbor endless credit that he never means to make her pay (like the Fed does for the U.S. government). Or that same butcher may give the shapely, unattached 20-something with the playful smile an extra cut of meat at no charge.

But those are the minute decisions of the free market based on factors that only the individual players know and can adjust to. Government with its heavy hand — and with eyes that can’t see all the details — just across the board charges more for its “services” based on the “customers’” ability to pay. And it’s not like you can take your business elsewhere if you don’t agree…

The individual seller’s rationale for any progression in pricing will reflect his intimate knowledge of conditions surrounding the sale and the marginal benefit to him of the price variance. And it’s important to note that the market itself will bear only so much progressive pricing. Most folks won’t mind that the butcher gives the widow a free ride…or even that he gives the prettiest girls a bit more meat…

But should that butcher charge the higher earners more, he would quickly lose the business of those higher earners. That’s the market at work. Buyers and sellers determining what’s fair. This kind of market democracy we like! (It’s the political kind that leaves us cold.)

The government’s pricing rationale (taxes are the price we pay for government…which is not synonymous with civilization), however, is not quite so sound…

The government says that it should take more from the rich than the poor on grounds that the marginal dollar is actually worth less to the higher earner than it is to the lower earner. But how can we know this for sure? Value is subjective, and you can’t compare the worth of money between any two people.

Further, one could argue with more substance that there is even less reason to take money from the wealthy since that money is likely to be invested, saved or donated. Taxing the rich thereby taxes society more directly than when you tax poor people who mostly consume all they earn.

So back to Jeffrey’s fixed tax on each person…

“$1,000 per person per year would yield,” he notes, “about $300 billion all together. That was the cost of government during the Ford administration. Was government too small then?”

“Not sure,” we replied, “We’d say it was already too big by the Washington administration. And that the wooden-tooth bastard ought to have been hanged for treason after the Whiskey Rebellion…

“But I’m assuming that children would be subject to the tax, too,” we continued, “and that either parent would have to pay for them…?”

“Precisely so, but not that it matters that much. Say it’s only on everybody over 18 or some arbitrary age at which the state allows people to sell their skills in the marketplace. There were only about 75 million persons under 18 in the U.S. in 2011. So you still have very nearly $300 billion in taxes collected with just $1,000 per eligible taxee.”

“Hell, even panhandlers can come up with that,” we said. “Or would they even have to pay? They certainly don’t file income tax forms now…”

“Fine, reduce it to official households. There are over 130 million of those. So $130 billion in tax revenue. Which puts us squarely in the middle of LBJ’s crazed plan to bankrupt the country with guns and butter: 1966.

“One thing I want to make clear,” Jeffrey said. “Say you have a tax of 10%. Flat, right?

“No. 10% of $1 million is far more — 10 times more — than 10% of $100,000. High-income earners are punished far more. That’s why a head tax — as strange as it may seem to some — is the only flat tax.”

And we’re not really offering solutions. Because our suggestions amount to theorizing for now. We do, however, try to make sense of the degrees of our disgust.

We never saw a tax we actually liked. But there are taxes that make us want not quite want to revolt. If we had to pay some centralized warmongering nannies (and we do), we could live with a fixed tax like the one described above.

We hate when the government tries to incentivize anything, but a truly flat, fixed tax would indeed incentivize people to try to earn more. Earning more would reduce the impact of a fixed tax as a percentage of their incomes.

Of course, this won’t fly in modern America. The rich can pay more for the government we all get. So pay more they shall!

Local and even state taxes are another good example of taxes we can’t hate as much as the progressively looted chunk we send off to the feds every quarter. With more local taxes, we are clearly getting something of use for our money after all.

We can argue till our brown face turns blue about how much more efficiently the market would provide every single service the government does (though the shape of these things would likely be quite different)…

But concerning local government services — and the money extracted to pay for them — at least we can overwhelmingly agree with what our tax money pays for. This includes things like the sidewalks and roads we use and the police and fire protection.

Federal taxes are quite a different beast, however. The bullets used to tear into foreign brown skins…the guns used to fire them…the food and clothing of the soldiers holding the guns…the bombs dropped on insurgents and collateral wedding party attendees and teenage goatherds.

Which brings us to a letter we received today…

“Hi Jeffrey, Gary et al.,

“As always, I love your articles and critiques of how the America we love is slowly eroding away.

“I have a query, but first a little background…

“I am an Irish-American citizen living and working in Ireland since 2006…so I have seen this Irish economy collapse in sync with the economy I left in Michigan back in that hazy summer…

“To cut to the chase, my wife and I were blessed with our first child, born December 2011…

“Now she is eligible for Irish citizenship and she has her birth certificate to prove this. BUT she may also obtain her U.S. citizenship, care of me..

“My query?

“Given the near- and long-term future of the U.S….endless wars, increased poverty, insurmountable debts, increased taxes (and filing taxes even if she never lives/works in the U.S.) destruction of the middle class and the $$…etc.

“Why should my daughter become an American citizen?

“What are the reasons, given the glum future of the USA, to become one of us?

“Do the same reasons, land of the free and the brave, still hold through, or should she just stay Irish till her dying days?

“Would love to get your and your readers’ views on this..

“Cheers,

“Tim”

We would love to get views from the Whiskey patrons as well! Good patrons, please send those views here. ggibsonagora@gmail.com

And a hearty congratulations on the arrival of your daughter, Tim! We’ll buy you a shot should the chance present itself.

As for her citizenship…your Whiskey editor is torn on the subject. And far from qualified to offer any real advice. Especially in a legally binding sense. But we can share our biased, but considered opinion, for this is a matter we struggle with all the time.

We aren’t even U.S. citizens. Merely a legal resident who has lived here since he was a toddler. Many of the people we respect have been cutting their ties to the U.S., either just leaving physically…or actually giving up the legal right to live and work on these shores indefinitely.

Our own situation is different. Our own native land is small, poor and given to collectivist politics. We thus effectively possess refugee status. Our options for a long-term home should we fling our green card at a border guard and spit, “Here! Take it, for I no longer want any part of your warmongering, police-nanny state!”…well, those options are limited and poor.

We wouldn’t go back to the Caribbean. We suppose we could bounce around South America as long as someone paid us to write…and we could afford to leave various countries every few months to satisfy the visa requirements.

We are not experts (and we suggest you talk to one about this)…and we hesitate to be hypocrites. We do not even have U.S. citizenship, yet we remain in the U.S. Our first inclination is to tell you to spare your daughter of the burden (for the benefit-to-cost ratio of U.S. citizenship may continue to mount for the worse as she approaches adulthood).

But note that despite it all, we remain in the U.S. unwilling to break the inertia of our own living habits. We cast about the nation in search of a comfortable, quiet corner to call home. But we’re not quite ready to leave just yet…though each outrage brings us closer to the limits of our tolerance…

There is a good case for you to keep your daughter from ever becoming a tax cow for the U.S. Again, let’s put this to our Whiskey Shooters and see what we can come up with. We’ll probably run your responses this weekend. So get cracking: ggibsonagora@gmail.com.

In the meantime, let us consider this letter, which we received just minutes later…

“Mr. Gibson.

“It appears that you use the words citizen and national synonymously. They are not.

“The 14th Amendment (proposed by a Congress that lacked a quorum) was a solution to the 1850 Dred Scott decision, wherein the Supreme Court ruled that negros of African descent could not be citizens. The amendment granted a form of citizenship to those who were born in the United States and completely subject to its political (lawmaking) power. (It was a subsequent decision in which the court ruled that the subjection of the 14th Amendment was complete subjection in the feudal sense.)

“Before the 14th Amendment, citizens of the states established the qualifications for citizenship within their respective states, not the federal government. Citizens of the United States were so because of their immediate citizenship in the political body known as a state of the union. The sates of the union created the United States, so these sovereigns could not be completely subject to the lawmaking power of the United States in the feudal sense. Under certain circumstances, they could be subject to its civil, but not its political, jurisdiction. The United States was not their sovereign liege lord; sovereignty was vested in them, not in the government, state or national.

“As the court ruled in the Slaughter-House cases, the 14th Amendment gave nothing to state’s citizens. What it did do, and what you evidently do not see, is that the 14th Amendment created a new class of citizenship: citizen-serf, a human resource, part of the capital of the federal government, PROPERTY of the United States, aka, U.S. person.

“National is the word used by government today to describe what was formerly known as a state citizen, the person in whom the sovereignty is vested. He may or may or may not elect to be treated as though he is the property of the United States. According to the 13th Amendment, he has a choice.”

Wait a minute. Are you trying to tell us that the U.S. government, like every government everywhere else all throughout history, see itself in a feudal relationship with its citizens? That to the political class, we are not “purchasers of order and civilization,” but instead nothing more than cows to be milked for tax money?

OK, yeah, we see where you’re coming from.

Regards,

Gary Gibson

Hooray for the Rich Who Don’t Pay Taxes was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder. Visit Laissez Faire Books for the best selection of libertarian book titles.

Here we are struggling to put food on the table, cultivate a civilized private life, support things we care about, manage our households, and otherwise meet all the challenges of modern life, and then some jerk politician pushes some dangerous legislation that poses an all-out attack on everything we take for granted.

One of those things we take for granted is the freedom to disagree with the government and its policies.

Consider now the Enemy Expatriation Act now being pushed by Republican Charles Dent of Pennsylvania and Democrat Joe Leiberman of Connecticut. This act adds to existing law that makes it a crime to support materially governments with which the U.S. is at war.

As Dent explains, the U.S. no longer limits its wars to governments. It takes on what it calls terrorists without regard to national identity. Therefore, he says, we need a new law that grants broader power to the state to crush its home-grown foes.

The Enemy Expatriation Act therefore allows the U.S. government to strip citizenship from anyone who is found to be “engaging in, or purposefully and materially supporting, hostilities against the United States.”

This proposal is surely the worst proposed law since the Alien and Sedition Acts, against which the entire citizenry reacted by making Thomas Jefferson president in 1800 so that he could bring some sanity back to public life. The new version of these old laws would effectively forbid speaking or blogging against any foreign-policy related policy of the United States, with the unthinkable penalty of permanent banishment.

When I heard the name of the law, I also thought of the World War I law called the Trading with the Enemy Act. It was designed to bring about speech controls during wartime. You would get jailed for expressing any doubt about the war. But the law never went away, and was the thing invoked by FDR in 1933 when he confiscated gold. So far as I know, this law is still on the books.

So anyone who tells you that the Enemy Expatriation Act is actually narrow, that it doesn’t forbid civil disagreement with the government, that it won’t actually bring about routine banishment of responsible critics, that anyone who sounds alarm bells is hysterical…don’t believe a word of it. Every new power government has government will use, and always and eventually in the worst possible way, if not immediately then eventually.

Bureaucracies love this sort of law. “It is the invariable habit of bureaucracies, at all times and everywhere,” wrote H.L. Mencken, “to assume… that every citizen is a criminal. Their one apparent purpose, pursued with a relentless and furious diligence, is to convert the assumption into a fact. They hunt endlessly for proofs, and, when proofs are lacking, for mere suspicions.”

I’m not even sure that it is necessary to read the fine print to discover this. The chief sponsors are actually rather open about it. Their slogan seems to be “Government: love it or we’ll destroy you.” In their view, these are extraordinary times that call for extraordinary measures. One of those measures is for the U.S. government to begin acting exactly like the terrorists that the government claims to oppose.

This isn’t unusual. It always seem to happen in wartime. We fight tyranny abroad by becoming more tyrannical at home. We oppose internment camps abroad by building them at home for those who doubt the merit of the policy. We oppose the creation and proliferation of dangerous weapons abroad by creating and proliferating more of them ourselves. We fight Islamic extremism by instituting national thought and speech controls, punishable by expatriation.

The more objectionable and egregious a government policy is, the more the government depends on brute force to enforce it. So you can know for sure that when such laws are proposed that there are plans for the wars of the future to be even more objectionable, immoral, and unjust than the wars of the past. If you have to criminalize and banish dissent, it is likely that every intelligent person is going to be a target.

But what of those people who really are seething in anger to the point that they actually do feel some sympathy for enemies abroad? Are the bill’s sponsors correct that such a person has relinquished his right to be a citizen?

Again, let Mencken speak: “The notion that a radical is one who hates his country is naive and usually idiotic. He is, more likely, one who likes his country more than the rest of us, and is thus more disturbed than the rest of us when he sees it debauched. He is not a bad citizen turning to crime; he is a good citizen driven to despair.”

This seems about right. The traditional notion of American citizenship is very different from that of the old world. It is not about loyalty to the regime. It is not about the willingness to hold your tongue when you disagree with the civic priority of the moment. It is about the love of liberty, and surely being wholly free to disagree with the powers that be is the core of what it means to be free.

The ironic effect of a law like this is that the best citizens we have will end up being stripped of their citizenship, leaving only the cowards, sycophants, and brainless as the model citizens with full rights to live here and vote. Granted, it is the dream of every government that all its subjects obey without question. That day that dream comes true is that day we should all welcome banishment.

Regards,

Jeffrey Tucker

It’s Treason to Disagree was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder. Visit Laissez Faire Books for the best selection of libertarian book titles.

The FBI and Justice Department, on their own initiative, shut down megaupload.com, the biggest of thousands of file-sharing sites online, and arrested four of its top officials. The FBI is hunting down three others who seem to be on the lam. They all face extradition and 20 years in prison. As part of the sweep, the feds issued 20 search warrants and arrived at individual houses in helicopters. They cut their way into houses, threatened with guns, confiscated $50 million in assets and outright stole 18 domain names and many servers.

And what is the grave crime? The site is accused of abetting copyright infringement — that is, permitting the creating of copies of ideas expressed in media. No violence, no fraud, no force, no victims (but plenty of corporate moguls who claim, without proof, that their profits are lower as a result of file sharing).

Megaupload had millions of happy users. It was the 71st-most-popular website in the world. Only 2% of its traffic came from search engines, which means that its customer base was loyal and collected through the hard work and entrepreneurship of site owners. For its users, it was a wholly legitimate service. For the owners, their profits were hard earned through advertising.

But the government saw it differently. And contrary to what many people believe, the already-existing law permits the government to do pretty much whatever it wants, as this case shows. The government relied on a 2008 law to make criminal, instead of civil, charges. A newly created IP task force is the one that worked with the foreign governments to seal the deal.

In the end, it was a presentation of exactly the nightmare scenario that anti-SOPA protesters said would happen if SOPA had passed. It turns out, as the deeper realms of the state already knew, that all of this was possible with no congressional action at all. Congress doesn’t need to do anything. We can watch the debates, go to the polls, elect people to represent us and perform all the rest of the rituals of the civic religion, but none of it matters. Power is here, active, oppressive, in charge and permanent, regardless of what you might believe.

Might it be that some of the users’ shared content on Megaupload was copyright protected? Absolutely. It is nearly impossible not to violate the law, as shown by SOPA sponsor Lamar Smith’s own campaign website, which used an unattributed background image in technical violation of the law. The leading opponent of piracy might himself be a pirate!

But the trend line with Megaupload was clearly toward using the space to launch new artists with new content — not piracy, but creativity. As Wired.co.uk wrote, this crackdown:

“came shortly after Megaupload announced music producer Swizz Beatz — married to Alicia Keys — as their CEO. They had rallied a whole host of musicians, including Will.i.am, P. Diddy, Kanye West and Jamie Foxx to endorse the cloud locker service. Megaupload was building a legitimate system for artists to make money and fans to get content.”

What‘s this all about? It is some powerful corporate lobbyists trying to prevent the emergence of an alternative system of art and music delivery, one powered by people, rather than merely the well connected.

The Internet’s great glory is its seemingly magical capacity for distributing information of all sorts universally unto infinity. The idea of the state’s regulations on information — instituted by legislators in the 19th century — is that this trait is deeply dangerous and must be stopped. So it is inevitable that the powers that be will try to shut it down; copyright enforcement is only the most-convenient Taser of choice.

This is the battle for whether the digital age is permitted to exist in an atmosphere of free speech, free association, free enterprise and real property rights or whether it will be controlled by government in conjunction with aging media moguls from monopolistic corporate oligarchies. The lines are clearly drawn, and the battle is taking place in real-time.

Example: Within minutes after the Megaupload officials were arrested, a global hacker group called Anonymous shut down the Justice Department’s website and the sites of the Motion Picture Association of America, the Recording Industry Association of America, Universal Music and BMI — the major lobbying forces in Washington for restriction of and reaction against the Internet.

In another stage of the great battle over information freedom, the Supreme Court, on the very day of the SOPA protests, handed down a decision that could have a devastating effect in the months and years ahead. It permitted the re-copyrighting of works that are already in the public domain so that the domestic law accords with the international law. If that sounds like no big deal, consider that many local orchestras have already changed their season lineups to remove some major works from their repertoire because they can no longer handle the licensing fees.

It’s hard to know what to call this but cultural masochism.

Regardless of how the legal struggles turn out, a culture of rational and irrational fear has gripped the Web. I’ve noticed this growing over the last months, but just this week, it has become worse, to the point of paranoia, and even mania. The successful protests against SOPA ended up only causing the censors to redouble their efforts, and the message is getting out: Almost everything you want to do online could be illegal.

A small sample of what I mean… Just this morning, I received the following email: “BBC Four recently broadcast a stunningly beautiful documentary called God’s Composer (Tomás Luis de Victoria), hosted by Simon Russell Beale. A friend in Rome sent me a link to it, but I’m not sure I’m free to share it. Have you seen this documentary? It is stunning both visually and musically.”

Not free to share a link? What? To be sure, I don’t know whether he intended to send me to the BBC or some other site that is hosting an additional copy of it. Regardless, this is what it has come down to: a belief that every email is traced, every site is monitored, every act of individual volition on the Web could be a crime, every website is vulnerable to an overnight takedown, every domain owner could be subject to arrest and jail.

The battle between power and freedom dates to the beginning of recorded history, and we are seeing it play out right before our eyes in the digital age. It’s as if at the beginning of the Bronze Age, the leading tribal chieftain made smelting ore illegal; or if at the transition from iron to steel, the ruling elite put a cap on the temperature of refining ovens; or if at the beginning of flight, some despot declared the whole enterprise to be too risky and economically damaging to the industry that depended on land travel.

In the current version, the issue of “intellectual property” is at the forefront of this battle. The first most people heard of this was on Blackout Wednesday, when Wikipedia went black. This is a foretaste of the future in a world in which power achieves victory after victory while the rest of the world cowers with fear in darkening times.

Regards,

Jeffrey Tucker

Power vs. People in the Digital Age was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder. Visit Laissez Faire Books for the best selection of libertarian book titles.

He’s ponied up $49,000 to help pay down the national debt. He’s simultaneously matching voluntary contributions already made by Rep. Scott Rigell of Virginia.

Yes, $49,000 to Mr. Buffett is the equivalent of 49 pennies to the rest of us (Mr. Buffett is a billionaire and most Americans are thousand-aires or hundred-aires at best, so this is actually pretty accurate).

Buffett had issued a challenge in Time Magazine recently in which he promised to match voluntary contributions for reduction of national debt made by all Republican members of Congress an impressive three for one.

The image below is of the actual letter from Warren to Scott.

Buffet claims that rich folks and politicians competing to see who could donate the most to the feds is a form of competition the American people would applaud?

A competition to see who can throw the most of their money down the grand canyon of federal government deficits? That’s worse than watching reality tv and finding out which sap can make the biggest ass of himself in front of millions of viewers.

And what sort of example is this setting? What is the message? That if any of us have any extra cash lying around you ought to send it to the government? The same government which already takes around 40% of your nominal income off the top? We suppose if wrapping foreign aggression and subjugation to a police state in patriotism works, then making this sort of inanity seem patriotic will work, too.

We know there are those who defend taxes no matter what. We hear these people on the radio, see them on political talk shows and read their words in print (mostly in the New York Times). A few of them regularly read this letter and send us notes to stop whining about paying our “fair share”.

Of course our own decidedly Austrian stance feeds our love or the agora, the market place, as the best use of all funds, including those funds we can no longer use because the government took them under pain of imprisonment and death…

We maintain in our free market zeal that all needs would be met and all goods and services improved upon via the free market far, far better than they could by taxation and central planning.

(We also call upon history to lighten our burden of proof. The more centralized the economy, the poorer and less sustainable it has been. The freest economy the world had ever seen has become poorer and poorer the more centralized it’s become.)

Many would even agree. To a point. Except for things like infrastructure, national defense, public safety and security. And education. And medical services. And retirement income.

Ah, see. That list can keep growing. But let’s pretend that most of us can agree on just infrastructure and national defense (the things that even many libertarians would let the feds handle). Do we really buy that the federal government needs nearly half of most of our incomes in order to maintain infrastructure and an army?

Most of us normally don’t question how much of our money disappears down the federal maw. Because it generally does no good. We accept that what we supposedly get in return – highways and not going to jail – makes those taxes money well stolen.

But what happens when the cry comes to give even more of our earnings voluntarily? Might not a few us wonder why the enormous chunk we’ve already been forced to part with proved to be not enough? Just what is happening to all that money? Why are the central government’s debt equal to the amount of money the private sector upon which it relies generates every year…while that private sector has already been handing over nearly half its income to the selfsame central government?

We’d warn Mr. Buffett that therein lies the danger in encouraging “voluntary” contributions. People might be willing to let the government take as much as the government decrees it legally can…

They may be willing to lie to themselves about how that legally stolen money is being used…because if they don’t pay it, they will surely lose their property and freedom. So they wrap themselves in a comfortable fable in order to blunt the psychological trauma. In this respect they are like the prison punk who after each episode of forced buggery tells himself that his rapist cellmate really actually loves him.

But suggest that what the government needs is the voluntary offering of as much more as possible…and then people might start wondering what they’re getting for their money. After all, in every other area of their lives when they voluntarily hand over their money, they get something in return, something that they value more than the money they just handed over.

It could be a cup of coffee, a sandwich, the use of a space for living or to conduct business, a car, a piano, or a laptop, repair of an existing item or building of a new one, performance of a song, and so on. But there was something that the money-giver wanted more than a given amount of money he had on hand. Thus the voluntary exchange was made.

Heck, it could even be an act of charity like the one Warren is trying to encourage among rich people and Republican Congresspersons. But even then the voluntary contributor commits a charitable act, he gets something he values more highly than the money he parts with: the sense of having helped someone far less fortunate than himself. It’s the same reason he would give to a relative or other loved one in need. And – this is very important — we assumed that he’d want the money to be used responsibly, and not enable the recipient to remain eternally dependent.

Note that Mr. Buffett has sheltered the bulk of his billions in a charitable foundation, sheltered from federal tax. Even Mr. Buffett feels that this sort of charity is a better way to give the vast majority of his money away. Else he would have taken those billions out of the foundation and handed it over to the Treasury. He could have added this to any amount he’d match from Republicans who met his challenge.

But it’s not like the federal government is some hard luck case who deserves our sympathy and help. If it were a person, the federal government would be the guy in a natty suit, who comes to your store every few weeks to collect “protection” money from you. He would then use that protection money to keep his favorite prostitutes well fed and happy and to make turf war on the other guys running protection rackets.

Further, this shameless gangster would also be hopelessly indebted because of an impressive gambling habit! Never mind that the protection racket he’s running is a scam at gunpoint…He’s simply a horrible credit risk!

So here is the message:

“Help our government stop having to be in constant debt for its worldwide military presence (among other outright destructive redistributions). Give them more than they already demand from you.”

That’s right, citizen. Forget buying patriotic war bonds. In times like these, lending the government your savings isn’t enough. You ought to give the money and never ask for it back. We’ll start by asking the rich.

Granted, Mr. Buffett is only asking this sacrifice of those who actually have significant amounts of money left to spare. We suppose it’s assumed that “the rich” have tons of money that they’re not putting to good use, even after gold-plating their billion-dollar mansions. So why not throw it at the debts the government has run up?

Further he’s issued his challenge to Congressional politicians, people who draw paychecks from the government credit card.

But there are plenty of “progressive” thinking people who applaud the example Mr. Buffett is supposedly setting. Entire Web sites are devoted to garnering support for a Buffett-inspired increase in taxes on “the wealthy”.

We’d recommend all income earners who aren’t already at Mr. Buffett’s level of wealth to be very wary of this. The federal income tax itself started as a tiny burden on only the richest in the U.S. Within a century it grew to consume nearly half the income of the middle class as well. The truly wealthy, meanwhile, managed to find ways to shelter most of their money from the income tax after setting the initial example and bearing the initial burden.

Mr. Buffett even uses this point to make his own…that the situation must be re-addressed so that they wealthy are once again paying their “fair share”. We note with dismay that the first attempt to soak the rich via the IRS resulted, over time, in those of us making anything above subsistence wages having to fork over half our earnings to the feds.

Not that we think anything particularly sinister is at work here. Though we do find it less than coincidental that this $49,000 show of support comes the day after a popular uprising against wholesale federal-corporate control of the Internet.

Maybe Mr. Buffett really is a paid shill, but we suspect that he’s more likely simply an enthusiastic one. He believes. For all his financial and investing acumen, Mr. Buffett rests his economic understanding on some faulty foundations. Like we said, he believes. He honestly believes that money generated privately ought to be then funneled through the central planners to find its best use.

Those who get excited about Mr. Buffett’s suggestions and find inspiration in his example also imagine that the federal government would do a better job with the money…that the federal debt as it stands is just a matter of bad luck and not the inevitable result of economic law (As sure as gravity causes objects with mass to be attracted to each other, money stolen by elected officials at gunpoint will allocate resources worse than private interests working under pressure of profit and loss).

You can’t really argue with someone who would say these things. Well, you could, but you’d be wasting your time and theirs. It’s like the old joke. Don’t try to teach a pig to sing. It wastes your time and annoys the pig.

It’s not a matter of facts for the facts support liberty and free markets if you want to abolish poverty and raise standards of living across the world. It’s a matter of philosophy. Just as it is hard to argue about the nuances of evolutionary biology to a fundamentalist holding his holy text, it is equally hard to talk to a true believer in central planning about why the nuances of human freedom and free markets to improve everything…and why they shouldn’t so enthusiastically hand the central planners their money.

Regards,

Gary Gibson

Buffett Puts His Loose Change Where His Government-Kissing Mouth Is was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder. Visit Laissez Faire Books for the best selection of libertarian book titles.