The story revolved around the town of Lac-Etchemin, Quebec, which prided itself on being the first Canadian municipality to ban “unhealthy” food from its arena. “Now, in an admission that paninis are outmatched against poutine, the town council has lifted the ban and french fries will return before the end of the month.”

You might chortle at the hubris of a Quebec town trying to ban the delicious French Canadian staple of french fries laden with cheese curds and smothered in gravy. You should applaud the victory of rebellious Canadiens against the Nanny State municipality. In doing so, however, it is important to realize that the attempted ban is neither humorous nor trivial. It is merely one instance of government’s creeping encroachment into what goes onto your dinner plate. In the ’80s, people protested under the slogan “Get government out of the bedroom,” meaning that the state had no proper business monitoring or punishing the consenting sexual choices of adults. Today, the protest should read “Get government out of the kitchen.”

FOOD AS SELF-EXPRESSION

The governmental censoring of food choice is often viewed as a trivial, or even benevolent, matter. After all, what is one french fry more or less? And the goal as stated seems well-intentioned.

There is nothing benevolent, however, about state-imposed control over one of the main ways in which human beings express themselves. Food choices are personal; they define our identity as surely as our choices in attire or reading material. “Food is love” is a hackneyed saying that conveys the basic truth that eating is about far, far more than sustaining life.

Food is an integral aspect of transmitting culture and ethnicity. From Italian pastas to Indian curries, from poutine to falafels, a rich array of dishes form a part of your family’s history and the background of who you are. Often the mere smell of a dish as you walk by a restaurant can elicit a flood of childhood memories, including how recipes or cooking techniques were passed down from one generation to the next.

Food is also a form of cultural exchange through which diverse ethnic groups can automatically appreciate each other’s heritage. The appreciation happens spontaneously, without tax funding, laws or government programs. It happens every time someone chooses a Chinese restaurant or expresses preference for a Jewish deli. During World War II, sauerkraut was widely banned in North America as “unpatriotic” because of the deep hostility toward anything German. Equally, the approval of ethnic food is a form of acceptance of a culture, or at least one significant aspect of it.

Food is also a moral choice, as every vegan knows. It is a religious choice, as Orthodox Jews will attest. Food is also a political statement, as any farmer who produces raw milk will tell you.

One of the most important functions of food choice returns to the saying “Food is love.” When a spouse or mother celebrates your birthday, it is through making “a favorite meal” or baking a cake. When a man proposes, it is over a romantic meal at an expensive restaurant. When you express sympathy at a post-funeral gathering, you do so while holding a casserole that you’ve brought over. It is commonplace for those who are emotionally distressed to seek “comfort food” that allows them to “feed themselves” when the world is not. How many women have recovered from a broken heart over tubs of ice cream?

Precisely because of its strong emotional pull and roots in culture, food choice has become one of the most important rituals in our society. From Thanksgiving to Christmas, from Halloween candy to chocolates on Valentine’s Day, food and ritual are inextricably linked.

Ultimately, food is also one of the main forms of self-control you exercise over your own body. Through these choices, you express a personal judgment on what benefits your body and/or fits your lifestyle; for some, the judgment leads to an Atkins diet, while for others, it is organic lentils. Even people who make allegedly ‘bad’ choices are expressing themselves.

The bounty and diversity of food available in every grocery store and on each passing street corner should cause joy because it demonstrates the richness of society itself — not merely in terms of prosperity, but also in terms of choice.

Thus, when government dictates what you may or may not eat, it is restricting your heritage, your religious and political choices, the control over your own body, telling you that a choice every bit as personal as freedom of speech or the art you view is not yours to make. That decision is theirs.

Why? For your own good. Even as an adult, you cannot be trusted with choosing the food that goes into your own mouth at your own expense. That’s what government experts are for.

ARE THE EXPERTS CORRECT?

Politically speaking, it does not matter whether the food “experts” are correct about poutine any more than their opinion on a specific work of literature should matter…at least politically speaking. You have an inalienable right to read graphic novels about a dystopian future rather than be force-fed Ibsen’s writings on dysfunctional families. You have a similar right to eat food bought at your own expense.

Nevertheless, almost all discussion of government’s censorship of food choice revolves around whether or not the claims being made are true or false. This would be a fascinating and valuable discussion if it did not always seem to end at the conclusion “There ought to be a law.” Thus, otherwise interesting discussions about the value and risks of raw milk result in farmers being arrested and driven out of business by huge fines. Otherwise interesting discussions about the calorie count or artery impact of poutine end in the banning of a cultural choice. This is akin to banning literature because a government book reviewer finds the contents to be “unhealthy.” Society should cease to have discussions that end in such conclusions.

Those who are in the “there ought not to be a law” camp often encounter the following argument: We live in a society that offers (to varying degrees) free health care. This means that taxpayers bear the consequences of providing health care to those who are reckless with their bodies through drugs, alcohol, smoking or unhealthy diets. In short, your neighbor has a vested and financial interest in what goes into your body.

This line of reasoning — rather than justifying a Nanny State or a nosy neighbor dictating your personal choices — constitutes a powerful argument against socialized medicine. If socialized medicine had been “advertised” decades ago as a government mandate to control the minutia of your daily life, then it would probably have never been implemented. If socialized medicine had announced itself as the right to usurp parental control over what to feed children, then it would have met the same “rink-revolt” that occurred in Lac-Etchemin.

Tell the government that it is not a welcomed guest in your kitchen. There is no room for bureaucrats at your dinner table.

Regards,

Wendy McElroy

All Power to the Poutine! was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder. Visit Laissez Faire Books for the best selection of libertarian book titles.

An unhealthy cultural myth has flourished that says everyone must go to college and get an advanced degree, even if it’s something for which there is virtually zero market demand. Meanwhile, below-market interest rates and government-backed loans have lured a couple generations of Americans down the road to higher education.

Further, the kind of education colleges provide — indeed, all of American schooling from kindergarten onward — doesn’t produce innovators, entrepreneurs and job creators.

In a recent article for The New York Times titled “Will Dropouts Save America?” Michael Ellsberg writes:

• “American academia is good at producing writers, literary critics and historians. It is also good at producing professionals with degrees. But we don’t have a shortage of lawyers and professors. America has a shortage of job creators. And the people who create jobs aren’t traditional professionals, but startup entrepreneurs.
• “No business in America — and therefore, no job creation — happens without someone buying something.”

Wealth is only created when value is added (You didn’t think it was when money was printed, did you?) The Austrian school of thought reminds us that value is subjective. People, ultimately, buy what’s worth buying to them with the money they’ve earned.

We cannot put too fine a point on this. It doesn’t matter what the seller thinks the item is worth. It doesn’t matter how much time, energy and material went into making the product or service. You can waste a lot of time, energy and material producing something no one will want to buy. The buyer determines the ultimate value…and whether he will part with his money for it.

There can be misallocations of resources. And when the central bank and government get involved, these allocations can grow very large and go on for a very long time before violently correcting.

So it is that, increasingly over the past couple of generations, there has been a gross misallocation of time and resources into higher education, aided and abetted by the central bank and the federal government.

Millions have been misled into pouring their young adulthood into endeavors that won’t pay off…and going deeply into debt for it. The federal government has encouraged this higher “education,” much like it did home “ownership.” The central bank made the borrowing easy with low interest rates — which powered the real estate bubble as well as the higher education bubble — while government entities backed the loans.

Now the education bubble is bursting. The bubble’s start can be traced to the GI Bill, whereby the government got into the business of shoving more people into college than the market would bear. Over time, the same easy loans and guarantees got extended to most of the population.

Over time, some bad notions gained traction. College came to be seen as the ticket to the good life as opposed to something that people already destined for greater things might undertake to help get them there. As often happens, causation became confused with correlation.

In the last 30 years, higher education has come to be viewed as a human right, something that governments are obliged to guarantee. Lost is the notion that a higher education is a path for the exceptional, particularly those exceptional people going into the hard sciences.

Of course, this doesn’t do anything to change the essential ability of the people now being shoved through the system. All it’s done is water down the quality of what’s being offered so that everyone can join in.

Exceptional people still become scientists and engineers. Everyone else gets a master’s in some field that was recently invented to meet the artificial demand for advanced degrees, for people who couldn’t be scientists or engineers, but who had a head full of misguided notions and a boatload of borrowed money.

Worse, this “education” came to supplant things like entrepreneurship, initiative, the willingness to take risk, to accept and learn from failure. As Ellsberg says in his article:

“But most students learn nothing about sales in college; they are more likely to take a course on why sales (and capitalism) are evil.”

Indeed. We hate to keep turning to the Occupy movement, but it is full of the poster children for this. They came out on the other side of the system unemployable and in debt. They feel lost and angry, unable to think of life past the burden of their student loans. And many of them (not all) feel that “capitalism” is somehow to blame, that the world of profits is somehow divorced from the well-being of people.

It’s criminal when “profits” are doled out to banks and “too big to fail” businesses by the government, with money taken from the taxpayers. But what about the real profits — not stolen goods — in which entrepreneurs take risks and business people add value, when the profits are the reward for serving people’s needs?

So the bamboozled have taken to the street. They would like their student debts to be wiped out, that “the people” be bailed out like the bankers and crony big businesses were. Or even worse, they get it in their heads that all higher education, henceforth, should be paid for by the government. It doesn’t matter whether there is a market demand for expertise in a course of study or not.

Here at the Whiskey Bar, we often rib today’s grad students for having expensive but, essentially, financially worthless degrees in things like transgender studies. We’re often accused of right-wing/conservative close-mindedness for it, too…

But we joke to underscore the point. We’re not disparaging such courses because of cultural bias, but because of economics. We suspect that without the inducement of easy money from the central bank, and the channeling of debt expansion into wrong-headed zeitgeists, the price of a course of study would reflect its inherent economic value. Art history and gender studies would be a lot cheaper to acquire expertise in.

A system has grown up that encouraged enormous debt for nonperforming assets, namely, schooling in things that won’t pay off. People are still falling for it. But markets aren’t mocked forever. There has to be some painful write-down in central bank-distorted asset values before the economy can regain solid footing. This is just as true for higher education as it is for real estate.

It won’t be pretty. We’re not sure how this will play out for those who’ve misallocated their time and energy based on false signals, and with nothing but debt to show for it. But the stories that we told ourselves about what’s valuable were built on distortions that are now coming to an end.

Reality is asserting itself. And the reality is that entrepreneurship is what drives wealth creation, not going into debt to be taught that wealth creation is secondary to cultural studies or worse, that wealth creation is downright evil.

Regards,

Gary Gibson

How College Has Killed Wealth Creation was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder. Visit Laissez Faire Books for the best selection of libertarian book titles.

In the first place, we may ask, “public sector” of what? Of something called the “national product.” But note the hidden assumptions: that the national product is something like a pie, consisting of several “sectors,” and that these sectors, public and private alike, are added to make the product of the economy as a whole. In this way, the assumption is smuggled into the analysis that the public and private sectors are equally productive, equally important and on an equal footing altogether, and that “our” deciding on the proportions of public to private sector is about as innocuous as any individual’s decision on whether to eat cake or ice cream. The State is considered to be an amiable service agency, somewhat akin to the corner grocer, or rather, to the neighborhood lodge, in which “we” get together to decide how much “our government” should do for (or to) us. Even those neoclassical economists who tend to favor the free market and free society often regard the State as a generally inefficient, but still amiable, organ of social service, mechanically registering “our” values and decisions.

One would not think it difficult for scholars and laymen alike to grasp the fact that government is not like the Rotarians or the Elks, that it differs profoundly from all other organs and institutions in society, namely, that it lives and acquires its revenues by coercion and not by voluntary payment. The late Joseph Schumpeter was never more astute than when he wrote, “The theory which construes taxes on the analogy of club dues or of the purchase of the services of, say, a doctor only proves how far removed this part of the social sciences is from scientific habits of mind.”

Apart from the public sector, what constitutes the productivity of the “private sector” of the economy? The productivity of the private sector does not stem from the fact that people are rushing around doing “something,” anything, with their resources; it consists in the fact that they are using these resources to satisfy the needs and desires of the consumers. Businessmen and other producers direct their energies, on the free market, to producing those products that will be most rewarded by the consumers, and the sale of these products may, therefore, roughly “measure” the importance that the consumers place upon them. If millions of people bend their energies to producing horses-and-buggies, they will, in this day and age, not be able to sell them, and hence, the productivity of their output will be virtually zero. On the other hand, if a few million dollars are spent in a given year on Product X, then statisticians may well judge that these millions constitute the productive output of the X-part of the “private sector” of the economy.

One of the most important features of our economic resources is their scarcity: land, labor and capital-goods factors are all scarce, and may all be put to various possible uses. The free market uses them “productively” because the producers are guided, on the market, to produce what the consumers most need: automobiles, for example, rather than buggies. Therefore, while the statistics of the total output of the private sector seem to be a mere adding of numbers, or counting units of output, the measures of output actually involve the important qualitative decision of considering as “product” what the consumers are willing to buy. A million automobiles, sold on the market, are productive because the consumers so considered them; a million buggies, remaining unsold, would not have been “product” because the consumers would have passed them by.

Suppose now that into this idyll of free exchange enters the long arm of government. The government, for some reasons of its own, decides to ban automobiles altogether (perhaps because the many tailfins offend the aesthetic sensibilities of the rulers) and to compel the auto companies to produce the equivalent in buggies instead. Under such a strict regimen, the consumers would be, in a sense, compelled to purchase buggies, because no cars would be permitted. However, in this case, the statistician would surely be purblind if he blithely and simply recorded the buggies as being just as “productive” as the previous automobiles. To call them equally productive would be a mockery; in fact, given plausible conditions, the “national product” totals might not even show a statistical decline, when they had actually fallen drastically.

And yet the highly touted “public sector” is in even worse straits than the buggies of our hypothetical example. For most of the resources consumed by the maw of government have not even been seen, much less used, by the consumers, who were at least allowed to ride in their buggies. In the private sector, a firm’s productivity is gauged by how much the consumers voluntarily spend on its product. But in the public sector, the government’s “productivity” is measured — mirabile dictu — by how much it spends! Early in their construction of national-product statistics, the statisticians were confronted with the fact that the government, unique among individuals and firms, could not have its activities gauged by the voluntary payments of the public — because there were little or none of such payments. Assuming, without any proof, that government must be as productive as anything else, they then settled upon its expenditures as a gauge of its productivity. In this way, not only are government expenditures just as useful as private, but all the government needs to do in order to increase its “productivity” is to add a large chunk to its bureaucracy. Hire more bureaucrats and see the productivity of the public sector rise! Here, indeed, is an easy and happy form of social magic for our bemused citizens.

The truth is exactly the reverse of the common assumptions. Far from adding cozily to the private sector, the public sector can only feed off the private sector; it necessarily lives parasitically upon the private economy. But this means that the productive resources of society — far from satisfying the wants of consumers — are now directed, by compulsion, away from these wants and needs. The consumers are deliberately thwarted, and the resources of the economy diverted from them to those activities desired by the parasitic bureaucracy and politicians. In many cases, the private consumers obtain nothing at all, except perhaps propaganda beamed to them at their own expense. In other cases, the consumers receive something far down on their list of priorities — like the buggies of our example. In either case, it becomes evident that the “public sector” is actually anti-productive — that it subtracts from, rather than adds to, the private sector of the economy. For the public sector lives by continuous attack on the very criterion that is used to gauge productivity: the voluntary purchases of consumers.

We may gauge the fiscal impact of government on the private sector by subtracting government expenditures from the national product. For government payments to its own bureaucracy are hardly additions to production; and government absorption of economic resources takes them out of the productive sphere. This gauge, of course, is only fiscal; it does not begin to measure the anti-productive impact of various government regulations, which cripple production and exchange in other ways than absorbing resources. It also does not dispose of numerous other fallacies of the national product statistics. But at least it removes such common myths as the idea that the productive output of the American economy increased during World War II. Subtract the government deficit instead of add it, and we see that the real productivity of the economy declined, as we would rationally expect during a war.

But how is it that only government agencies clamor for more money and denounce the citizens for reluctance to supply more? Why do we never have the private-enterprise equivalents of traffic jams (which occur on government streets), mismanaged schools, water shortages and so on? The reason is that private firms acquire the money that they deserve from two sources: voluntary payment for the services by consumers, and voluntary investment by investors in expectation of consumer demand.

If there is an increased demand for a privately owned good, consumers pay more for the product, and investors invest more in its supply, thus, “clearing the market” to everyone’s satisfaction. If there is an increased demand for a publicly owned good (water, streets, subway and so on), all we hear is annoyance at the consumer for wasting precious resources, coupled with annoyance at the taxpayer for balking at a higher tax load.

Enterprise makes it its business to court the consumer and to satisfy his most urgent demands; government agencies denounce the consumer as a troublesome user of their resources. Only a government, for example, would look fondly upon the prohibition of private cars as a “solution” for the problem of congested streets. Government’s numerous “free” services, moreover, create permanent excess demand over supply and therefore permanent “shortages” of the product. Government, in short, acquiring its revenue by coerced confiscation rather than by voluntary investment and consumption, is not and cannot be run like a business. Its inherent gross inefficiencies, the impossibility for it to clear the market, will insure its being a mare’s nest of trouble on the economic scene.

In former times, the inherent mismanagement of government was generally considered a good argument for keeping as many things as possible out of government hands. After all, when one has invested in a losing proposition, one tries to refrain from pouring good money after bad.

Most economists have two basic arguments on behalf of the public sector, which we may only consider very briefly here. One is the problem of “external benefits.” A and B often benefit, it is held, if they can force C into doing something. Much can be said in criticism of this doctrine, but suffice it to say here that any argument proclaiming the right and goodness of, say, three neighbors, who yearn to form a string quartet, forcing a fourth neighbor at bayonet point to learn and play the viola, is hardly deserving of sober comment.

The second argument is more substantial: Stripped of technical jargon, it states that some essential services simply cannot be supplied by the private sphere, and that, therefore, government supply of these services is necessary. And yet every single one of the services supplied by government has been, in the past, successfully furnished by private enterprise. The bland assertion that private citizens cannot possibly supply these goods is never bolstered, in the works of these economists, by any proof whatsoever. How is it, for example, that economists, so often given to pragmatic or utilitarian solutions, do not call for social “experiments” in this direction? Why must political experiments always be in the direction of more government? Why not give the free market a county or even a state or two, and see what it can accomplish?

Regards,

Murray N. Rothbard

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

Stimulus might appear to work for some people for a short time. It worked for a short time for Solyndra. For a time, they could pretend to be engaging in productive activities that would help the economy. For a time, unemployment was 1,100 people less. But the recent bankruptcy of Solyndra shows that the government is a terrible venture capitalist. This charade cost the American people over half a billion dollars they could not afford, yet there is no mea culpa. The administration is not questioning its calculations, or how they could have been so wrong on their unemployment predictions in the wake of the last stimulus.

Instead, they want more money. Once again, we are hearing the cry that if we care about our country, we will approve more spending and more taxes and that will create more jobs. They promise.

Yes, you could have gone to the Solyndra factory and you would have seen jobs. What you could not have seen were the productive jobs that were never created. Real venture capitalists make decisions based not on politics and photo opportunities, but on complex economic estimations of risk and reward. They don’t simply throw piles of other people’s money at a factory and expect magic to happen. The uncreated jobs you can’t see might still be around. Instead, we have more government debt, which will lead to more inflation and more taxes. These, in addition to an already hostile regulatory environment, only add to the burden and risk of job creation in the private economy.

It has been said that when all you have is a hammer, everything is a nail. Our government is full of people who sincerely believe big government and more spending is the answer to every problem. They automatically look to government for every solution. Government is their hammer, and all they know to do is to keep hammering. When government “solutions” still don’t solve the problems, they are unfazed. They keep calling for more government, more laws and more programs. Americans are tired of being treated like nails.

This government-centric mind-set is the root of the problem. People who think this way are naturally drawn to politics and government. To them, the Constitution is an annoying roadblock, something to get around, or ignore.

We must become interested in real, lasting, productive jobs — careers that allow families to build up a solid foundation of prosperity and economic security — not pretend make-work government jobs that waste resources and vanish overnight. We have to choose one or the other.

Regards,

Ron Paul

Government As Venture Capitalist was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder. Visit Laissez Faire Books for the best selection of libertarian book titles.

Faith in the free market isn’t something that the United States has a lot of right now – with government stepping in with bailouts, stimulus packages and the like at any sign of a downturn. It’s even become fashionable to think of free markets as dangerous, an idea the government is in no hurry to dispute. After all, taming the markets with regulation gives government a raison d’etre and plenty to do. Never mind that what the government does often amounts to folly (and we are hard pressed to think of an instance when it doesn’t).

Government follies were a big topic of discussion at last week’s Freedom Fest, where Addison Wiggin’s new documentary Risk! had a focus group screening. Risk! picks up where Addison’s last film, the critically-acclaimed I.O.U.S.A left off – in the wake of the financial crisis. The documentary features insights from some of the world’s top economic minds, including Harvard professor and author of the Innovator’s Dilemma, Clayton Christiensen, economic blogger and pundit, Alex Tabborok; and Gary Shapiro author of The Comeback: How Innovation Will Restore the American Dream.

Using Odyssey Marine Exploration, a commercial shipwreck salvage company, as a case study, Risk! explores what has happened to the uniquely American model of risk, reward and failure in the current economic environment – an environment where the role of government has mutated into something the founders of the United States would never have imagined.

While Odyssey Marine has a set of very unique obstacles standing in the way of their innovative business model (and ultimately, their success), as the film unfolds it becomes clear that all entrepreneurs and small businesses are facing similar challenges. Though the U.S. government keeps reminding the public that job creation will get us out of this financial mess, over-regulation, litigation and a barely-understandable tax code make it almost impossible for entrepreneurs–the biggest contributor of wealth creation and jobs–to make an impact on the economy.

“The government does not create jobs,” Shapiro tells us in Risk!. “They take money from one person to give it to another person.  That’s not creating a job. Government’s role is to encourage people, and make sure we have the raw materials of innovation, which are bright people challenging the status quo.”

Shapiro – and the entrepreneurs featured in the film – remind us that the role of government is to “get out of the way” and to provide these wealth creators with a level playing field–one that punishes theft and force, but otherwise allows competition–so that they, and the country as a whole, can reap the rewards of their innovations.

The focus-group screening was well-received by the audience at Freedom Fest, and during the Q&A with Addison afterwards, many members of the audience echoed the frustration that the entrepreneurs featured in the film feel.

“It’s not too late for the U.S. to get it right,” said Addison during the Q&A after the film. “But if the rules of the game keep changing, and the incentives for small business aren’t there, we are looking at a long road ahead of us.”

Doug Hill, Business Manager
Laissez Faire Books

P.S. Risk! is scheduled to be released to the public before the end of the year. Stay tuned for updates. In the meantime, if you’re joining us at the Agora Financial Investment Symposium in Vancouver next week, you’ll get to attend a special focus-group screening. We hope to see you there!

P.P.S. Gary Shapiro will be speaking and holding a book signing at next week’s Symposium – and to hold you over until then, check out his excellent new book The Comeback: How Innovation Will Restore the American Dream. Click here now to see a special sneak peek at what Gary has to say in Risk! – and for a 20% discount on his book.

Federal Punishment for Risk was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder. Visit Laissez Faire Books for the best selection of libertarian book titles.

What we have in common is the need to protect one another’s inviolability from governmental force. When we understand that the woman being groped by a TSA agent stands in the same shoes as our wife, mother, or grandmother; when the man being beaten by a sadist cop is seen, by us, as our father or grandfather, we become less willing to evade the nature of the wrongdoing by invoking the coward’s plea: “better him than me.”

The state owes its very existence to the success it has had in fostering division among us, a topic I explored in my Calculated Chaos book. Divide-and-conquer has long been the mainstay in political strategy. If blacks and whites; or Christians and Muslims; or employees and employers; or “straights” and “gays”; or men and women; or any of seemingly endless abstractions, learn to identify and separate themselves from one another, the state has established its base of power. From such mutually-exclusive categories do we draw the endless “enemies” (e.g., communists, drug-dealers, terrorists, tobacco companies) we are to fear, and against whom the state promises its protection. By becoming fearful, we become existentially disabled, and readily accept whatever safeguards the institutional fear-mongers impose, . . . all for our “benefit,” of course!

Look at the title of this article: do you find any governmental program or practice therein that is not grounded in state-generated fear? Each one – and the numerous others not mentioned – presumes a threat to your well-being against which the state must take restrictive and intrusive action. Terrorists might threaten the flight you are about to take; terrorist nations might have “weapons of mass destruction” and the intention to use them against you; your children might be at risk from drug dealers or from sex perverts using the Internet; driving without a seat-belt, or eating “junk” foods might endanger you: the list goes on and on, changing as the fear-peddlers dream up another dreaded condition in life.

It is not sufficient to the interests of the state that you fear other groups; it is becoming increasingly evident that you must also fear the state itself! Governments are defined as entities that enjoy a monopoly on the use of violence within a given territory. Implicit in such a monopoly is the recognition that there be no limitations on its exercise, other than what serve the power interests of the state. In relatively quiet and stable periods (e.g., 1950s) the state can afford to give respect to notions of individual privacy, free speech, and limitations on the powers of the police. In such ways, the state gives the appearance of reasonableness and respect for people. But when times become more tumultuous – as they are now – the very survival of the state depends upon a continuing assertion of the coercive powers that define its very being.

For a number of reasons – some of it technological – our social world is rapidly becoming decentralized. The highly- structured, centrally-directed institutions through which so much of our lives has been organized (e.g., schools, health-care, government, communications, etc.) no longer meet the expectations of many – perhaps most – men and women. Alternative systems, the control of which has become decentralized into individual hands, challenge the traditional institutional order. Private schools and home-schooling; alternative health practices; the Internet, cell-phones, and what is now known as the “social media,” are in the ascendancy. With the state becoming increasingly expensive, destructive, economically disruptive, oppressive, and blatantly anti-life, secession and nullification movements have become quite popular.

Of course, such transformations are contrary to the established institutional interests that have, for many decades, controlled the state – and, with it, the monopoly on violence that is its principal asset. Having long enjoyed the power to advance their interests not through the peaceful, voluntary methods of the marketplace, but through such coercive means as governmental regulation, taxation, wars, and other violent means, the established order is not about to allow the changing preferences of hundreds of millions of individuals to disrupt its traditional cozy racket.

Because the institutional order has become inseparable from the coercive nature of the state, any popular movement toward non-political systems is, in effect, a movement away from the violent structuring of society. The corporate interests that control the machinery of the state may try to convince people that government does protect their interests vis-à-vis the various fear-objects. Failing in this, the statists must resort to the tactic that sustains the playground bully: to reinforce fear of the bully, who controls his victims through a mixture of violence and degradation.

Neither the TSA nor the alleged “war on terror” have anything to do with terrorism. The idea that the TSA came about as a consequence of 9/11 ignores the fact that the state’s practice of prowling through the personal belongings of airline passengers goes back many decades. I recall how upset a friend of mine was – in the early 1970s – when government officials went through his hand-luggage, and ordered him to unwrap a birthday gift he was carrying home to a relative. The purpose of such a search then, as now, was to remind passengers of the bully’s basic premise: “I can do anything I want to you whenever I choose to do so.” It is for the purpose of keeping us docile – an objective furthered by degrading and dehumanizing us – that underlies such state practices.

The groping of people’s genitals and breasts is but an escalation of this premise, and should the TSA later decide that all passengers must strip naked for inspection, such a practice will go unquestioned not only by the courts, but by the mainstream media who will ask ” . . . but if you don’t have anything to hide . . . “ Those who cannot imagine state power going to such extremes to humiliate people into submission, are invited to revisit the many photographs of German army officers at such places as Auschwitz, who watched – as “full body scanners” – as naked women were forced to run by them.

The extension of wars – against any enemy that any president chooses as a target – serves the same purpose. It is not necessary that there be any plausible rationale for the bombing and invading of other countries: it is sufficient that Americans and foreigners alike be reminded of the violence principle upon which government rests. “I will go to war against you if it serves my interests to do so, and any resistance on your part will only confirm what a threat you are to America!” The state directs its wars not so much against foreign populations, as against its own. War rallies people into the mindset of unquestioning obedience because, by engaging in such deadly conduct, the state reminds us of its capacities to destroy us at its will.

You can apply this logic to any of the aforementioned government programs. The state – and the corporate order that depends upon the exercise of state power – is fighting for its survival. Rather than treating this as a “war against terrorism,” it is more accurate to consider it as a “war to preserve the hierarchically-structured institutional order.” There are too many trillions of dollars and too much arbitrary power at stake for those who benefit from controlling the state’s instruments of violence to await the outcome of ordinary people’s thinking. If the survival of the corporate-state power structure required the extermination oftwo billion people, such a program would be undertaken with little hesitation. Destructive violence becomes an end-in-itself to an organization that is defined in terms of its monopoly on such means.

On the other hand, I continue to remain optimistic that these institutional wars against life will come to an end. I believe that the United States of America is in a terminal condition; its fate already determined. But America – whose existence predates the United States – may very well survive in a fundamentally changed form. What is helping this transformation process are innovative technological tools for the decentralized exchange of information; mankind is rapidly becoming capable of communicating with one another in the most direct ways, methods that make traditional top-down forms less and less relevant. The Internet is one system that is the tip of an iceberg whose deeper challenges have thus far not captured the attention of crew members of the ship-of-state.Wikileaks is another step in the evolution of decentralized information systems that will bring greater transparency to the activities of the ruling classes. In the process, men and women will discover just how liberating the free flow of information can be. When the rest of the world has access to the same information that political systems try to keep secret, the games played at the expense of people begin to fall apart.

An awareness of the dynamics of change being brought about through decentralizing forces has not, however, managed to inform members of the established order. For all of their pretended knowledge and expertise about the world, they just don’t get it. They seem to imagine that their decline-and-fall can be prevented by keeping the Bradley Mannings and Julian Assanges locked up; and that the political ramifications can be deterred by distracting attention away from a Ron Paul – who does understand the nature and direction of these changes – and toward a comic-opera Sarah Palin.

In the meantime, in an effort to keep Boobus Americanus and other members of the herd within their assigned stalls, the ever-present threat of force and its consequent degradation of the individual will be invoked as the state works feverishly – and futilely – to shore up its collapsing foundations.

Regards,

Butler Shaffer

Butler Shaffer  teaches at the Southwestern University School of Law. He is the author of the newly-released In Restraint of Trade: The Business Campaign Against Competition, 1918–1938 and of Calculated Chaos: Institutional Threats to Peace and Human Survival. His latest book is Boundaries of Order.

Why TSA, Wars, State Defined Diets, Seat-Belt Laws, the War On Drugs, Police Brutality, and Efforts to Control the Internet, Are Essential to the State was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder. Visit Laissez Faire Books for the best selection of libertarian book titles.

Vast amounts of those drugs that people should be permitted to purchase of their own free will are withheld from the market. Instead, people who know what they need are forced first to fork over to a physician — who then gets overpaid by insurance — then part of the buck is passed to the overtrained checkout clerks at the pharmacy. We are all treated like babies in order to sustain and fund an industry filled with bamboozlers in white coats.

The commercial Internet in its early days (perhaps 1998 to 2008) represented a wonderful alternative to this apparatus. Suppliers all over the world popped up to give us what we want, bypassing the whole cage of government regulations and private monopolists who rule them like prison wardens. You know what you need, so just click and buy it!

So the pharmaceutical industry solicited the help of government. Together, they worked to crack down on “counterfeit” medicines — meaning the real thing that bypasses patent restrictions and supplier monopolies. In their view, people must not be allowed to get prescription medications without doctor approval — or else an entire fake industry could collapse. So they banded together and instituted a medieval guild system for the digital age.

Over the years, Google has accepted some advertising from some of these so-called rogue elements. In a free market, they would be perfectly legitimate advertisers. Google makes no guarantee of the exact nature of the goods and services of all those who choose to advertise on its network. It has some degree of interest in quality control, of course, but if the customers are buying and happy, what could be the problem?

Well, the medical cartel, of course, and it asked for the Justice Department to intervene. As of this writing, Google is assuming that it is going to be in hot water very soon. Its recent report to stockholders says that it has put half a billion dollars in escrow to deal with the Justice Department investigation. The presumption here is that Google is going to be held liable for permitting ads to run from market-based drug sellers.

There are so many ways that this is wrong that one hardly knows where to begin. But let’s start with pharmaceutical prices, which continue to go through the roof and which are driving forward increased pressure for socialistic forms of cost spreading. Using the Internet, there are tens of thousands of companies that could immediately begin distributing name-brand drugs and also derivative products at a fraction of the price imposed today.

Why not let them? More to the point, why should government resources be devoted to making sure that the price of prescription drugs remains as high as possible? If you thought that the regulators were truly concerned about consumer welfare (ha ha), this action alone should put that idea to rest.

What about the allegation that these are counterfeit drugs being sold? Well, it is seriously doubtful that any consumer who is buying a prescription medicine from an online source is being defrauded; there is an understanding that the drug in question is most likely generic. Consumers have no problem with this, as the aisles of generics at the drug store suggest. What the government really means by “counterfeit” is that the generic drug is being introduced prior to the expiration of the patent that inflates prices as much as 100 times.

We all have stories to share about such things. A cream that is $100 one day is $5 after the drug enters the free market. A nasal spray that is $200 is suddenly $10 after it becomes part of the market. And so on. The term “counterfeit” should be reserved for fraud; it doesn’t apply to goods that are brought to market before a government-imposed embargo expires.

The same is true of the notion of real and fake pharmacies. Drug dispensaries should be businesses like any other, subject to free entry and exit and governed by the principles of profit and loss. But just as with the medical profession itself, drug stores want to avoid being treated like commercial ventures. Instead, they want to be part of a tight cartel that rules who gets in and who stays out.

The only way to maintain a cartel is through government regulations, and this is what the pharmacy industry has long relied upon, much to the detriment of consumer well-being. The attempt to crack down on free-market advertising of prescription drugs is all about protecting an industry from competition, and has nothing at all to do with protecting the consumer.

It is not a coincidence that so much Internet spam comes from companies that purport to be selling drugs that people do not necessarily want to get from their doctor. There are privacy concerns. There’s also a perfectly normal desire to avoid embarrassment. But the government will have none of it: you must confess to a doctor; you must look the drugstore clerk in the eye.

People commonly blame the markets for all this spam, but they really should have been fingering the government for having created the black and grey markets for these drugs in the first place! This is what creates the incentives to dump trillions of unsolicited emails on the world. The spammers knew that their product was valued, but without normal markets they resorted to globalized promotions.

In fact, this is why Congress made spam illegal. The antispam law had absolutely nothing to do with keeping your inbox clean. It was all about protecting the medical monopoly against competition.

Finally, there is the very serious matter of the presumed liability held by Google. Maybe there is a precedent somewhere for a magazine or newspaper being held responsible for the claims of its advertisers. But I’m quite sure that there has never been a case where the fees are anywhere near this range. Five hundred million dollars? This is crazy, and a clear example of government’s looting of deep pockets.

The claim is that Google had disobeyed its own policy of making sure that every drug advertiser had passed through its own internal checks. But those checks were clearly instituted under government pressure, direct or indirect, so how is it an allegation against Google that it didn’t obey them across the board? This is nothing but harassment in order to preserve the privileges of a very powerful cartel.

People imagine that the United States has a free market in prescription medicine. This case is a very clear example of how and to what extent this is absolutely untrue. A free market permits anyone to advertise anything through any mutually agreed-upon means. Google is being investigated and hounded and fined solely for doing business in a way that benefits society at large. What matters to government is that doing such business harms a favorite client of the state.

Regards,
Lew Rockwell
Whiskey & Gunpowder

May 18, 2011

Pharmaceutical Cartel Sics Government on Google was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder. Visit Laissez Faire Books for the best selection of libertarian book titles.

Consider the timing of this attack by U.S. Navy SEALs, and then consider recent events. First, the economy is in shambles, unemployment is sky high, price inflation is excessive, and the U.S. military has been bombing civilians in an attempt to assassinate Gaddafi, including murdering innocent little children. Our money is being destroyed before our eyes. The wars are not going well for the ruling elite, and Obama’s ratings are horribly low at the beginning of his presidential crusade. One very important factor is that criticism of these wars has been growing at an accelerated pace. Hatred of the insidious TSA is also becoming much more evident. While civil liberty destruction is still rampant, it is being questioned more often, and with increased intensity.

What better reason then for an event to solidify the masses, and put them on guard for the now coming “terrorist” attacks due to the death of bin Laden. This stone kills a lot of birds it seems, and in my opinion this is no coincidence. In a matter of a few hours, the serfs were in the streets carrying flags, and screaming “God bless the U.S.A.” All the media was abuzz with fervent displays of renewed patriotism.

But what came next should have been expected. We were told that the scourge of the east was dead. One would think that the head of the monster had been forever severed, and that the war would end, but that would not be the case. The politicians and talking heads in the media immediately went on the offensive, and stated that we should be even more vigilant in the war on terror because there will be more attacks due to bin Laden’s death.

Hillary Clinton began her talk this morning by praising the troops for their “courage and commitment.” Yes, the troops had once again become our saviors, literally pulling us from the mouth of the beast. In her next statement she strongly exclaimed “we will continue taking the fight to al Qaeda and their Taliban allies.” She next talked about even more massive interference and imperialistic goals. “All over the world we will press forward, bolstering our partnerships, strengthening our networks, investing in a positive vision of peace and progress, and relentlessly pursuing the murderers who target innocent people.” (Emphasis added) Really! The U.S. killing machine is going after all those who target innocent people, and all over the planet? That is hypocrisy beyond understanding.

These events are shaping future foreign policy, and the window of opportunity in my opinion is short. All that is necessary is to rally the sheep around the flag, and that was accomplished by the charade in Pakistan.

Police in some areas have already increased security measures, and intelligence gathering has intensified. In New York, more police have been sent to patrol subways, airports, and bridges. This is just the beginning. More fear has been instilled in the minds of Americans once again, and conditions are ripe for a false flag event staged by those who would gain power and money with more war. Certainly, Obama has an obvious incentive to be the protector of the country given his current presidential run. But many others stand to gain from such an event as well.

All that is now necessary to prosecute the next war by the U.S. Empire is an attack or threat of an attack. Whether manufactured by our own government or not, that event would serve as the lynchpin of yet more U.S. aggression. Aggression not just against those in far away lands, but aggression here at home aimed at our liberty and our freedom.

Nothing is what it seems, and the risk to us all is great. Much scrutiny should be evident concerning anything coming out of Washington D.C. or the mainstream media. Lies abound, but this set up is obvious, and is staring us square in the face. Believing otherwise is foolish as far as I’m concerned, and this is no time for gullibility or flag waving.

What the triggering event will be is not easy to discern, but whatever it is will be obvious once it occurs. Any event that heightens the terror alert or brings calls for retaliation should be examined carefully. It could be a downed airliner, an attack on a U.S. embassy, a bomb inside our borders, or any number of other things. Regardless of the type of aggression, take heed, and don’t assume anything. The government lies continuously, and any attack is in this government’s, its military, and its corporate partner’s best interests.

I understand that many are afraid, but we should not fear any foreign invader. We should only fear our own government because the threat will come from within. We are in a very precarious situation, but because this new threat is so conspicuous, we should be able to see it coming. We are moving inexorably toward the next false flag, but this time even more could be at stake. Nothing should be taken for granted, and none should be surprised by anything that happens.

The monster of the east is gone, but the beast that is the U.S. government is alive and well, and planning chaos. Our eyes should be open and our minds clear, for what is coming is vile. War is criminal and it is unholy, and our government is planning even more aggression. This bin Laden farce is evidence enough. Those who purposely cause and wage war, and do so to gain money and power, are savage, depraved, and evil. But those who applaud the murdering of others in the name of false defense are the enablers. Without the consent of the people, the government would be forced to stand down. It is time to stand up and stop this insanity!

Naturally the common people don’t want war… Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders… All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism.

~ Herman Goering

Regards,
Gary D. Barnett
Whiskey & Gunpowder

May 4, 2011

In Death Osama bin Laden Causes Another War was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder. Visit Laissez Faire Books for the best selection of libertarian book titles.

Ah, the drumbeat of worry over shutting down our wonderful federal gummint!

Poor g-man souls…  it’s “scary.” They might get locked out of the federal building, unable for days on end to place the yellow-tinted papers in the yellow basket, or the blue-tinted papers in the blue basket.  Unable even to play solitaire on the computer screen, once the right-colored papers are all in the right-colored baskets.

And those flinty Congress-bubbas may not give them back pay for the work they don’t do.  Alas.

I begin by thinking of all those oil workers along the Gulf of Mexico, “locked out” of their offshore drilling jobs for the past year or so, by the total moratorium on drilling permits. (OK, a few tokens here and there.) Yep, ask the folks at Seahawk Drilling, which just got sold in a bankruptcy sale.  It’s no fun to get locked out.

Oh well, back to the government shutdown…Too bad that the Democrat-controlled Congress didn’t pass a budget last summer…before the 2011 fiscal year kicked in on October 1, which was 5 weeks or so before the election that changed the political dynamic.

Too bad that the Democrat-controlled Congress didn’t pass a budget last November or December, during the lame duck session — when the votes were there — but the worthies were too busy passing “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” legislation and other such matter that’s so vital to the future of the republic.

So now the affected government workers are worried that post-Friday, the gravy train grinds to a halt.

No mo’ gravy! Yep, on a personal level, that sucks. Paychecks are nice. No argument from me on that narrow point of life.

But then again, a stable, growing, productive economy is nice too. Balanced books are nice. Responsible governance is nice. Humility in public affairs is nice. Understanding that the best form of politics is good, efficient government? That’s very nice.

On a personal level, it’s “scary” to me to ponder the exploding expenditures of the feds. Budgets and cost structures that NEVER go down, in good times or bad.

It scares me to think of the deficit spending, the devaluation of the dollar, the inflation in prices for goods, the lack of investment across the economy because of distorted tax policies, the strangle-hold that government unions have on public discourse.

It scares me to think of the demagoguery coming out of the White House, and the Democrat caucus in the Senate & House — the distortions of truth: “The researchers will put down their test tubes and stop seeking the cure for cancer.” Sheesh! A few days or weeks, until Congress hashes out some budget cuts? And therefore it’s the end of the line for scientific research? Gimme a break, you LSOS! [Lying Sack of Stuff—ed.]

It scares me to think of how many politicians’ solution to the national problem is to make me work longer and harder… for them. Really, who the hell are THEY, to tell MOI that I have to put more skin into the game that they’ve rigged against me. Screw ‘em.

Yes, it scares me to think of what a mess things become when bubbles pop, including government — the final frontier.

Then again, sometimes you just have to roll the dice and see what comes up.

Regards,

Byron King
Whiskey & Gunpowder

Why You Shouldn’t Worry About a Federal Shutdown on Friday was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder. Visit Laissez Faire Books for the best selection of libertarian book titles.

Pushing Buttons Like The Jetsons

In the classic and futuristic television series from 1962 to 1963 – I admit that I adore this show and could watch every episode 100 times – people work only a few hours a day, travel at 500 miles per hour in flying cars that go as fast as 2,500 miles per hour, and the main job is “pushing buttons.”

The galaxy is their home. Healthcare is a complete free market with extreme customer care. Technology was the best (but of course it still malfunctions, same as today). Business is rivalrous, prosperity is everywhere, and the state largely irrelevant except for the friendly policeman who shows up only every once in a while to check things out.

The whole scene – which anticipated so much of the technology we have today but, strangely, not email or texting – reflected the ethos of time: a love of progress and a vision of a future that stayed on course. Appropriately, it was the first show shown on ABC television in color instead of black and white. It was neither utopian nor dystopian. It was the best of life as we know it projected far into the future. People did not dress in uniforms or obey some dictator on a monitor in their homes. The people in the show were as fashion conscious as any American. Their food was not embedded in pill form. They had the equivalent of fast-food delivery services in their homes.

The message is a true one. Human nature and the structure of reality itself don’t change. Only the gizmos we use change. We can become poorer or we can become richer. But the fundamental facts of how the world is built are immutable. Things are scarce but the possibilities for economic creation are infinite in a world of trade, boundaries, law, and private innovation.

Why is it so fun to watch? Because it is a cartoon, because neat gadgets are everywhere, but mostly it amuses us because everyone seems so strangely blasé about all the miracles that surround them. They are living in postmodern houses that seem to be braced on some giant poll in the sky, and yet they think and act just like the rest of us who live on the ground. They aren’t surprised by anything, no matter how amazing.

And despite the extraordinary conveniences of life, the essential problems are the same, the human vices documented since the beginning of the written human language. The kids have the same trouble as our kids. “Daughter Judy” is spoiled and pouts too much; “his boy Elroy” gets into trouble; George tries in vain to solve all troubles but is mainly concerned about keeping his job; and “Jane his wife” keeps the home together.

The persistence of choice leads to complaints that there isn’t enough. “Pushing buttons” is the main thing everyone complains about. When they want to get away and relax, they usually choose some enterprise that offers the experience of a made-up world of the past that seems to take them back to the Old West (the “Beta Bar Ranch”) – but it is only pretend. We have the equivalent with our fantasies of “returning to nature” by shopping at grocery stores with philosophies, or believing that by not printing “this email” we are saving the planet.

In what other ways is our world like theirs? We too are surrounded by amazing miracles generated by private enterprise and entrepreneurship. Every day we wake up to some overnight development that makes our lives slightly better. The advances have come along so quickly that articles on technology written just a few years ago now strike us as old-fashioned.

Boy Elroy has a machine that can conjure up real-time worlds that allow him to play baseball and tennis with family members. We call that the Wii. The vacuum cleaners work without pushing them, and, sure enough, we have those, too. The video phone is the great dream that this show dreamed up. You had to pay. When you call long distance (does anyone remember that?) “collect” (does anyone remember that?), you had to accept or reject the charges. The video phone was strapped to the ceiling and couldn’t be moved, just like telephones were until the day before yesterday.

Peter Sidor, a heavy hitter at the Mises Wiki, recently called my Skype app on my iPhone, something I downloaded the other day just to test it out, and I answered and, voilà, I’m video talking to a colleague in Germany. I walked around with my phone. The app was free. Skype begs me to use the service. The iPhone 4 came with FaceTime built in, not that the appearance of this miracle created much chatter at all.

All this stuff is amazing. It is astounding and beyond belief – more outrageously advanced than anything the makers of The Jetsons could even imagine. With this tiny box in my hand, I can do a real-time video chat with anyone on the planet and pay nothing more than my usual service fee. This means that anyone on the planet can do business with and be friends with any other person on the globe. The borders, the limits, the barriers – they are all being blasted away.

The pace of change is mind-boggling. Email has only been mainstream for 15 years or so, and young people now regard it as a dated form of communication, used only for the most formal correspondence. Today young people use instant messaging through social media, but that’s only for now – and who knows what next year will bring.

Oddly, hardly anyone seems to care, and even fewer care about the institutional force that makes all this possible, which is the market economy. Instead, we just adjust to the new reality. We even hear of the grave problem of “miracle fatigue” – too much great stuff, too often. Truly, this new world seems to have arrived without much fanfare at all. And why? It has something to do with the nature of the human mind, which does not and will not change so long as we live in a world of scarcity. We adjust to amazing things and don’t think much about their source or the system that produces them.

The Jetsons’ world is our world: explosive technological advances, entrenched bourgeois culture, a culture of enterprise that is the very font of the good life. But there is one major difference, and it isn’t the flying car, which we might already have had were it not for the government promotion of roads and the central plan that manages transportation. It is this: we also live in the midst of a gigantic leviathan state that seeks to control every aspect of our life to its smallest detail.

The government is still Flintstones, an anachronism that operates as this massive drag on our lives. With its money manipulations, regulations, taxation, wars (on people, products, and services), prisons, and injustices, we similarly look the other way. We try to find the workaround and keep living like the Jetsons. Oftentimes things don’t go right, and the reason is the anachronism that rules us. And yet, unless we understand cause and effect in the way that the old liberal tradition explained it, we can miss the source.

Regards,

Jeffery Tucker
Whiskey & Gunpowder

Pushing Buttons in The Libertarian Utopia of The Jetsons was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder. Visit Laissez Faire Books for the best selection of libertarian book titles.