We’d only been trying to help. We were passing through Houston on our way from Acapulco to the Agora Financial Symposium in Vancouver.

We’d opted out of the Rapiscan irradiation machine and so had to be felt up by an agent. We meant to call attention to how absurd the entire security theory was by playing the part of compliant victim with scorn in his eyes. So we slowly stripped until we were told to stop. We only got as far as unbottoning our shirt.

Our host in Acapulco had been Jeff Berwick of The Dollar Vigilante. Jeff had been to something like 140 countries in the past few years. He’d sailed his own boat to quite a few of those and only used a plane after the shipwreck. He had found the closest thing to freedom in agreeable surroundings in Acapulco.

“The U.S. is toast, amigo,” he’d told us, “You need to take advantage of your status as a mobile, contract internet writer and get out while the getting’s good…

“And Canada is even worse, by the way.”

Jeff wasn’t kidding, especially about that last part as I would discover upon entering Canada today. (More on that later).

We could tell things had gotten a lot worse with the border patrols this year from the very start of our international travels several days ago. The TSA thug who checked our passport on the way from Las Vegas to Acapulco was a hatchet-faced twentysomething with a buzzcut. His eyes bulged slightly but he kept them hooded as he looked back and forth with suspicion between our passport photo and us. He reminded us of a lizard: predatory and untroubled by higher thought.

After twenty seconds of the back and forth reptilian gazing, we inclined ourselves slightly toward him and slowly raised an eyebrow. He waved us through.

“Welcome to freedom,” Jeff had told us on our first day in Mexico. He was spot on there too. If there was something you couldn’t do in Mexico–as long as you didn’t molest anyone else–we certainly didn’t discover it. Relevant to this part of the story is how spoiled Mexico had gotten us. In only a week we’d gotten used to not having to worry terribly much about the state’s goons telling us how to behave.

Then we made the mistake of reading some quotes from Albert Jay Nock among others in Jeffery Tucker’s Bourbon For Breakfast en route between Houston and Vancouver.

The personal freedom experienced in Acapulco…reading hours of anti-state musings…and then being faced with state thugs at a couple of borders. It was a dangerous mix. By the time we landed in Canada, we were fairly seething. Good thing we hadn’t been drinking too.

After telling us to button our shirt back up the Houston TSA agent asked if we wouldn’t rather have him feel us up in private.

“No, no…right out here is fine,” we said.

He instructed us to hold our arms out to the side with palms up and then he began. We tried our best to maintain eye contact the entire time. Some people stopped to watch.

But that’s nothing compared to what happened when we actually got into Canada. If the U.S. is bad, Canada is worse.

At least in the U.S. they pretend to care about things like personal sovereignty. There remains outrage over things like the TSA and more nationalization of medical services.

Mexico seems to have real liberty where it counts. (If it weren’t for the U.S.-led Prohibition-style war on drugs, Mexico’s cartels would be no more powerful or violent than Rite Aid and Mexico itself could be a paradise.) The U.S. pays liberty some lip service.

In Canada we find no such sentiment about liberty. It seems things just get worse the farther north you go, as if freedom can’t stomach the cold.

Canadians have gleefully committed their lives to the care and direction of the state as far back as anyone cares to remember. Perhaps that long-nurtured nationally socialist spirit is why Canada’s border guards are the scariest we’ve yet encountered.

They were to a one young, wearing bullet-proof vests over their crisp uniforms and serious as heart attacks. If the USA’s thugs seem a little bumbling as they do their government’s dirty work, the Canadian versions make up for it. Those young men and women processing passengers gave us the impression that they’d just as efficiently process undesirables into concentration camps.

It was 1 am local time when we had our turn with an unsmiling Canadian border guard. Perhaps we didn’t answer snappily enough. Perhaps we were a bit surly after having read those selections from Nock. Whatever the reason, we were marked for further processing, something we didn’t find out till after waiting another 45 minutes to get our luggage. At that point we were not in the right frame of mind to deal with state agents docilely.

And sure enough there was trouble.

“Sir, you seem to have a problem with me,” said the not un-pretty customs lady in the backroom after she’d asked us the same questions the first customs agent had asked us an hour ago.  We were having tremendous trouble hiding the anger in our voice even though we’d managed to speak slowly and quietly so far. We probably looked pretty wound up too, like someone ready to swing at a square off in a bar.

“I don’t like being treated like this,” we answered, “Don’t you think I should be bothered by it? Doesn’t it bother you? The way the state is bringing down the hammer lately?” Stupid questions, especially the last one.

We had already long ago resigned ourselves to going to jail and being sent back to the U.S. So we continued, “I am going to the same conference in the same hotel I’ve been coming to for the past three years. Why treat me like this now? Why treat anyone like this? I mean, here I am trying to go about my business and now anything I say wrong can land me in jail.”

“Sir, I don’t know you. You don’t know me. There’s no reason to be upset with me,” she said.

Ah, but there was. While we rant about the state, it all really comes down to individuals. It’s individuals who have rights, not groups. It is individuals who are are responsible for their actions. She was enforcing the bad laws, imposing the duty, the fines, the forced detention. She was the low-level muscle helping run a protection racket for the state.

She took our passport and U.S. resident alien card and disappeared into a secured office with a couple of her cronies. She returned about five minutes later and told us that we were free to go.

“So why did this happen?” we asked. “What did I do to call attention to myself and make you guys want to detain me? Is there a way to avoid this and go about my business (without molestation) in the future?”

“No, nothing,” she said, “This was random and we have the power to stop anyone we wish upon their entry into this country.”

We couldn’t stop hearing Jeff’s words in our head:

“Give up the green card. Go live for cheap in Asia or Latin America and live your life as free from government interference as you can. Stay the hell away from the U.S…Canada too. And Western Europe. What’s going on in New Hampshire with the Free State Project is exciting, but I don’t know if it’s worth sticking around when you have the opportunity to get out entirely.”

We’ve been entertaining the same thoughts on expatriation for years, with the same sorts of destinations in mind. We’re not under the delusion that any of these places are perfect. But the little bit we’ve seen tells us that they are…different…And in the ways that matter to us better.

Albert Jay Nock wrote in Memoirs of a Superfluous Man:

“As a general principle, I should put it that a man’s country is where the things he loves are most respected. Circumstances may have prevented his ever setting foot there, but it remains his country.”

Too true. And what a shame it would be for circumstances to allow a man to live where it suits him and for him to remain instead where it doesn’t.

Fun with Customs and Border Guards in the U.S. and Canada was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder. Visit Laissez Faire Books for the best selection of libertarian book titles.

Americans long ago settled for convenience over freedom: Paved roads and more commercial space per capita than any other nation on earth… to go along with various prohibitions on personal behavior, expanded domestic spying by police, the TSA and the biggest prison population per capita in the world.

Why be concerned with the prison population? Because the state is caging a lot of people who have neither killed, nor raped nor stolen. According to Wikipedia:

Perhaps the single greatest force behind the growth of the prison population has been the national “war on drugs.” The number of incarcerated drug offenders has increased twelvefold since 1980. In 2000, 22 percent of those in federal and state prisons were convicted on drug charges.

But don’t drugs get to the enduser by criminal means that often involve violent cartel conflict somewhere along the line? Absolutely, but only because the state makes drugs illegal, resulting in extralegal black markets. The state says it’s for own good, but we can’t help but notice that it also serves to increase the power of the state to monitor and to police.

It’s bad enough that inflation-fueled nationalizations have become the norm in the U.S., that the government crowds out real job growth by stifling small business while bailing out failed big ones.

But what about the other legal indignities, all the other ways the authorities remind you that you and your property aren’t really yours?

Why can’t we drink on the sidewalk? Or smoke in bars? They manage to do it in other parts of the world without civilization collapsing around their ears…or even an increase in violence or cancer rates!

In Acapulco at night the streets are crowded both with parents, their young children, the elderly and tipsy young men holding bottles of Corona. It is lively but peace reigns. Perhaps people are just nicer when they aren’t constantly stressed out by being over-regulated.

People smoke in restaurants and as long as the air is circulating, no one else seems to be bothered.

Since 2006 it has been legal to possess varying amounts of “hard” drugs for personal use–though, comically, selling these drugs technically remains illegal.

Prostitution is also technically illegal, but pretty open. Every strip club doubles as a bordello, and of course there are the actual bordellos!

A mark of true civilization is civility. The people peacefully seeking their own enjoyment are able to mingle with people raising their families, all without discomfort or conflict. Sure their officials are all probably to a one thieving criminals–this is still Latin America–but the people of Acapulco themselves live blissfully free of the state’s heavy handed interference in their personal goings-about.

“All well and good for the rest of the world,” says the American conservative who claims to love “freedom” (as long as it’s done his way), “but I don’t want to be surrounded by drug use and prostitution!”

But, dear conservative control freak, you already are! This stuff goes on all around you anyway. It’s probably going on in at least one house within a couple miles of yours as you read this. And it manages not to bother you because it really isn’t any more your business than other habits and pleasures your neighbors may have.

No amount of “war” on the arbitrarily declared vice crimes (alcohol is okay, but marijuana is not?) by the state with your blessing will end practices you don’t like…unless maybe you turn the joint into a theocratic tyranny of the Middle East variety.

Criminalization just drives the behavior underground while giving the state the authority to regulate more and to seize property and cage any of us in an effort to fight “wars” against personal practices. Such laws are just prejudices backed by guns.

And in the U.S. we get it with both barrels, both financial and personal interference a la the state. They overtax us, steal from us by means of inflation and then tell us what we can do with willing partners and with ourselves. The liberals cheer on the seizure of property for redistribution while the conservatives cheer the government’s ownership of our bodies.

Yet Americans are still convinced that they love freedom. Personally we scarcely know anyone in the States who has a clue what that particular word means. And most of that small number who do are heading for the exits so they can experience it.

When they leave they leave the white, white world of Western Civilization entirely. They head for Asia…or Latin America. The latter seems to be especially popular.

Maybe it’s something just basic to the essence of the West. It’s the West after all that prides itself on being the birthplace of democracy. As if that’s something to crow about! Democracy is just a system of mass mutual slavery. Everybody owns everybody else and this power of ownership is represented by the vote. Woe be to the people–and their property–in the minority group when it’s time to count those votes.

Maybe it’s genetic. The typical American comes from European stock and though he reflexively yells “liberty” and “freedom”, he has a hard time letting go of slavery. He stopped thrusting it on imported Africans, but seemed to miss it so much that he started inflicting it on himself and his kin.

He enslaves the unborn to debt, the worker to the unproductive, the hedonist to the moralist, and so on.

Yet it’s this same set of hypocrites who gave us a higher standard of living due to technological innovation in robust free markets. It was their European ancestors who gave the world most of the advances in the hard sciences in the first place.

We’re not entirely sure what to make of it. It warrants further consideration. We suspect this would best be undertaken on beach somewhere south of the U.S. border.

Regards,

Gary Gibson
Managing editor, Whiskey & Gunpowder

Slavery, A First World Tendency was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder. Visit Laissez Faire Books for the best selection of libertarian book titles.

Lew Rockwell writes this week on the Obama Administration’s crackdown on businesses who hire “illegal” immigrants. According to the New York Times, federal immigration officials raided 14 Chuy’s Restaurants in Arizona and California, arresting not immigrant workers but the owners of the businesses.

Of course, those familiar with Barack Obama’s past sympathies with “illegal” immigration might find bizarre his wanting to actually crack down on businesses hiring “illegals,” given how beneficial such a voting bloc would be for Obama’s party, the Democrats. On the other hand, Obama seems to want more socialist government control over businesses and their relationships with employees. And, as Rockwell notes,

Socialist ideology plays a role here, and another authoritarian anti-market ideology, protectionism. But…The unions hate any employee who works for the going market wage…

You can see, then, that this crackdown has nothing to do with nationalism or racialism or securing the borders or anything else. It is all about bolstering the power of the state and its unions over the American economy, and making the rest of us poorer.

The supposedly “pro-business” conservatives support laws punishing businessmen for employing “undocumented workers,” and those laws were recently upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court.

The problem with today’s immigration and border control hysteria is that Americans are going after the wrong people. The problems are not caused by the immigrant workers or those Americans who are hiring them. It is the other socialist controls – the Drug War, mainly – that is the problem, and is causing many people in Arizona and other border states to be victimized and terrorized.

Future of Freedom Foundation President Jacob Hornberger has written on the destructive nature of socialist central planning in immigration and labor:

As Mises, Hayek, and the Austrians showed long ago, central planning can never succeed because the planner can never possess the requisite knowledge to centrally plan a complex market, especially one as complex as an international labor market. All the planner inevitably does is produce chaos, distortions, and perversions into the market process…

(The free market) doesn’t rely on central planners. Instead, it simply uses the price system to enable people to coordinate their activities with others. Farm workers needed in Wyoming? The price of labor goes up. Mexican workers learn of the wage increase and immediately travel to Wyoming to earn the money. No central planner, but instead people planning and coordinating their own lives.

Apparently, the conservatives support central planning socialist government intrusions in employment matters that should be the right of businesses to control. We have seen that recently in New Hampshire’s proposed “right to work” law, in which the conservatives do not really support the right of businesses to control their employment matters.

Unfortunately, some people just seem to think that the State owns both the people who currently live and work in the U.S., as well as those who wish to come here to live and work.

Some questions to ask are: Who owns a business? And who owns the contract between employers and employees? And who owns the life of an individual who wants to work at a job that is available?

Here are my answers: The business is owned by the one who purchased it or built it up from one’s own assets or capital. It is not owned or even partially co-owned by the State, by the community, the neighborhood or by others who did not contribute capital to the business and participate in a voluntarily-agreed-upon contract of ownership with the actual owner. Therefore, economically and morally, the control over the business and every aspect of it is solely that of the owner(s). Any law or ordinance, regulation or mandate, regarding how the owner deals with one’s business or employment contracts, is a property intrusion – a trespass by the State – and is in violation of the businessman’s right of sovereignty over one’s busines

And the contract between employer and employee and the terms of the contract are morally and economically the property of and under the sole control of the employer and employee by voluntary agreement, and no one else. Those matters are no one else’s business. Any intrusions by laws, regulations, or mandates by the government are trespasses, and should be forbidden.

And that brings me to the American Declaration of Independence. In the Declaration, Thomas Jefferson wrote that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Each individual has an inalienable, inherent right of ownership of one’s own life, person, labor and justly-owned property, and pursuit of happiness, and the right to be free from the aggression against one’s life by others, including agents of the State. With the right to life and the right to sustain one’s life, each individual has a right to trade his labor with others for a compensation or good in return for such labor, within a voluntary and mutually-agreed-upon contract, as long as one is peaceful and does not interfere with any other individual’s equal right.

Here is where we lose the conservatives. The Declaration of Independence does not state that such rights apply to “only Americans.” No, such rights are inherent in all of us, regardless of where we are on Earth. Unfortunately, some people do not believe that non-”American citizens” possess such rights.

Here is an example of a Mexican who is in need of work, and can’t find a job or get hired in Mexico but doe s find a job and gets hired at a business in Arizona. Now, as we saw in the Obama regime’s raids at the Chuy’s  Restaurants in Arizona and California, some people apparently do not believe that the Mexican here should be permitted by the U.S. government to work at the American restaurant, even though the owners of the business voluntarily hired him and are satisfied with his work, and the happily-paying customers enjoy their food there.

Please place this image to the right of the preceding paragraph.

So, who is it exactly that owns the Chuy’s Restaurant in Arizona? Is it the government? In that case, then I suppose it is the government’s right to control the employment status of that business. But if the ownership of the restaurant is of the businessman himself, and not in partnership with the community or with the government, then shouldn’t the businessman have the sole authority over the business, including who works there and who does not? Should his right to decide what’s best for his business and his customers be trespassed by others, including the State?

And does not the individual in Mexico have a God-given right to sell his labor to a voluntarily-contracting employer for a mutually-agreed-upon wage, so the individual can sustain his life and provide for his family? If one believes in the truly moral right of self-ownership, then one must answer yes, because all individuals have a right to work, including Mexicans, and including businessmen who must provide for themselves and their families.

Now, just where do the other members of the Arizona community or the federal government get such authority over the contract between the Mexican worker and the American businessman? The U.S. Constitution? But, as referred to in the Declaration of Independence, all people have a right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

But if one is saying that the community or the State shares in the ownership of the business with the business owner, then one must say that, really, the State is the true ultimate owner, because the State out-powers the businessman, and the community or the collective also are the ultimate owners because they outnumber the individual.

Unfortunately, in the socialist conservatives and statists’ belief that the government should prevent non-”American citizens” from entering the U.S., they are really advocating that the government should control labor and employment, and that individuals do not really have sole sovereignty ownership of their lives and that someone’s business is really co-owned by the community and the State.

I know that conservatives and others are concerned about increased crime rates because of “illegal” immigration, especially from the Mexican border. But in their control-freakish hysteria they are neglecting the real problems that need to be addressed: No, the problem isn’t the jobs that are available for immigrants in the U.S. The problems are the tax-funded welfare and social services that attract many people into the country. An even worse problem is the War on Drugs – which many conservatives also support, because they believe in a Nanny Police State, in which we need government officials to decide for us what chemicals we may or may not ingest into our own bodies. Like the 1920s Prohibition against alcohol, the current War on Drugs causes black markets, incentivizing the pushing and trafficking of drugs for huge profits, the corrupting of the police, and the terrorizing of innocent Mexicans and Americans by drug cartel criminals as well as corrupt government criminals.

Instead of repealing drug control socialism and welfare socialism, and thus removing all the problems those policies cause, too many misguided Americans like the conservatives call for more socialism in immigration, and in turn more restrictions on individuals’ and businessmen’s right to work and do business, more restrictions on everyone’s freedom of movement and right to travel (and the right to not be searched and asked, “Your papers, please”).

As we have seen years ago in the U.S. government’s using immigration central planning to turn away Jews attempting to escape from Nazi Germany, and more recently in the U.S. government’s prevention of Americans from leaving the U.S., the more control we allow governments to have over the people, including their right to travel and right to work and do business, and the more power of intrusion we give to the government-monopolized police, the less freedom, security and prosperity we will have.
We must repeal each and every socialist control over our lives and businesses, and that includes not only the drug war, but central planning in immigration and labor.

Regards,

Scott Lazarowitz

Scott Lazarowitz is a commentator and cartoonist at Reasonandjest.com.

Repealing Socialism in Immigration, Employment, and Drugs was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder. Visit Laissez Faire Books for the best selection of libertarian book titles.

My own starting point for this is the belief that in the years just ahead any sociopolitical entity organized at the giant scale will flounder — this includes everything from the federal government to global corporations to factory farms to centralized high schools to national retail chains. So even expecting Mr. Obama’s government to act effectively may be asking too much in a situation that will require mostly local action.

The meta-situation will be the overall decline of energy resources and the necessary downscaling of our activities. We are obviously in a transitional period between the old profligate energy economy and the new economy of relative scarcity. We have no idea how disorderly this transition will be, but there is certainly potential for tremendous instability in daily life.

For a while, perhaps, the federal government may retain some ability to affect the way things go, or give the appearance of doing so. This raises the issue of what Mr. Obama and his team really know about our energy predicament. The president-elect has made some noises — recently on the 60 Minutes show — that he understands something about the current price dislocations in the oil markets resulting from the larger financial turmoil. He alluded to the public’s erroneous notion that current low-ish oil prices mean the oil problem is over. But does the incoming president know some of the following details?

For instance, does Mr. O know that global oil production appears to have peaked at around 85 million barrels a day, with poor prospects of ever getting beyond that? This single naked fact has broad ramifications, above all whether we can continue to think in terms of industrial “growth” as the benchmark for economic health. There are many interpretations of the current financial fiasco. Some of them are based on long-term technical wave theories. A more down-to-earth view suggests the shock of peak oil — though it doesn’t exclude wave theories.

Does Mr. O know that world oil discovery has fallen to insignificant levels after peaking long ago in the 1960s. Does he know we are finding no more super-giant oil fields on the scale of Arabia’s Ghawar or Mexico’s Cantarell, which have supplied most of the world’s oil for the past forty years and are now running down? Does he know that you can’t produce oil that hasn’t been discovered?  Does Mr. O know that virtually all the oil-producing nations have entered production decline. Surely someone has whispered in his ear about the IEA’s projection that global oil production would fall 9.1 percent in the coming year.

Does Mr. O know that oil exports have been trending to decline at a steeper rate than oil depletion? That is, the exporting nations are losing their ability to send oil to the importers (like us) at a rate mathematically greater than the run-down in their production. They are using more of their own oil even while their production is going down. For example, Mexico is depleting overall at more than 9 percent a year (with the Cantarell field alone running down at more than 15 percent annually). Does he know Mexico’s net exports are crashing? Mexico has been our number three leading source of imports. In a very few years they will not be able to send us any oil. A deluded American public has no idea that this is happening. Will Mr. O explain it to them?

Does Mr. O know that the “old major” oil companies (Exxon-Mobil, Texaco, Shell, et al) produce less than 10 percent of the world’s oil now — the other 90 percent coming from the foreign nationals — and that blaming them for the situation is a waste of time. The foreign national companies are changing the landscape of the oil markets. They’re making special contracts with “favored customers” rather than just putting their oil up for auction on the futures markets. One thing you can infer from this is that we’re entering a period of national oil hoarding based on coming scarcity. The futures markets were based on relative abundance, and they will not operate very well in a climate of scarcity. Consider that the USA will probably not be among the “favored customers” for several oil producing nations. Figure that in with the coming loss of imports from Mexico (and Venezuela and Nigeria).

Does Mr. O know that the current drop in oil prices (due to massive financial deleveraging) has resulted in the cancellation or postponement of the very oil production projects that were hoped to offset the coming depletions? It’s not worth it for an oil enterprise (private or foreign) to drill in deepwater or venture into arctic regions when oil is priced at $50-a-barrel — if it costs $80 to get the stuff out of the ground. It’s not worth digging up tar sands in Canada at that price. This halt in activity is going to boomerang back on the US in a year or so, with depletions ongoing everywhere and no new oil to take its place. Does Mr. O know that we’re just as likely to see shortages as a resuming rise in oil prices here in the US during his coming term?

Does Mr. O know that the current re-inflation program being run by the Treasury and the Federal Reserve is so egregious that it may lead to loss of the dollar’s legitimacy, to the renunciation of dollar holdings by other nations, to the down-rating of US Treasury debt instruments, and finally to an inability of the US to purchase foreign oil — which comprises two-thirds of all the oil we use every day?

Does Mr. O know that we are not going to run the US automobile and truck fleet on any combination of alt.fuels? Continuing it by other means is a fantasy that will only disappoint us. The motoring era is coming to an end. Heroic investments in highway infrastructure to create jobs will be a tragic waste of our dwindling capital. The pressure for Mr. O to make these misinvestments will be enormous, perhaps insurmountable. There are probably not a thousand people in the US who agree with what I am saying — meaning the consensus to keep the cars running at all costs overwhelms reality at the moment. Does Mr. O’s concept of “change” include the possibility that we may have to live very differently in this society?

Chances are, if Mr. O knows any of these things he might be crucified in the polls and the media by acknowledging them. The only “change” that America really wants to hear about is evicting George Bush from the White House. They’re sick of him and all the disturbance he has caused in their financial affairs. But beyond that, the American public is deathly afraid of the kind of changes we actually face — such as, the end of consumer culture, the gross loss of value in suburban real estate (which forms the bulk of the middle class’s private wealth), the prospect of food and fuel scarcities, the need to re-localize our lives, the need to physically shape up to stop the costly and unnecessary drain on our medical resources, to grow more of our own food, to work harder at things that actually matter, and to save whatever we can for a difficult future.

If Mr. O introduces any of these themes into the national discourse, the public and the media and the bloggers will all dump on him for failing to prop up the wild party that American life became in recent decades.

Regards,
Jim Kunstler
December 04, 2008

Does Obama Understand Oil Scarcity? was originally featured on Whiskey and Gunpowder. Visit Laissez Faire Books for the best selection of libertarian book titles.