104 Years Ago – G.K. Chesterton on Ideas and Ideals

Christopher Houseman

A wonderful answer to all the proud pragmatists who dismiss the power of ideas – including libertarianism.

Ideas are dangerous, but the man to whom they are least dangerous is the man of ideas. He is acquainted with ideas, and moves among them like a lion-tamer. Ideas are dangerous, but the man to whom they are most dangerous is the man of no ideas. The man of no ideas will find the first idea fly to his head like wine to the head of a teetotaller. It is a common error, I think, among the Radical idealists of my own party and period to suggest that financiers and business men are a danger to the empire because they are so sordid or so materialistic. The truth is that financiers and business men are a danger to the empire because they can be sentimental about any sentiment, and idealistic about any ideal, any ideal that they find lying about. Just as a boy who has not known much of women is apt too easily to take a woman for the woman, so these practical men, unaccustomed to causes, are always inclined to think that if a thing is proved to be an ideal it is proved to be the ideal. Many, for example, avowedly followed Cecil Rhodes because he had a vision. They might as well have followed him because he had a nose; a man without some kind of dream of perfection is quite as much of a monstrosity as a noseless man.

Chesterton, G. K. (2010). Heretics (297–298). Bellingham, WA: Logos Research Systems, Inc.

7 Reasons HMV Closed

by Carps
http://www.itsafamilything.co.uk/

HMV was part of the fabric of the British high street but – like Woolworths, Jessops, Currys, C&A, Ethel Austin, Borders, Virgin Music and a slew of lesser known names – at some point in the last decade time caught up with its business model. A lot of people speculate as to why it failed.

Here are my thoughts.

Why is the State Involved in Childcare?

by D.J. Webb

Women are forced out to work by house prices. This is the real subtext to absurd plans for the state to pay £2,000 to each working woman for childminding. With high taxes and council tax, high transport fees and high childminding bills, it is hard for women to make work pay — and the only result of their trying to do so is to push up the income on which mortgage loans are calculated, thus supporting the property Ponzi scheme.

WHY LIBERTARIANS SHOULD SUPPORT A LAND VALUE TAX

by D.J. Webb

Libertarians support low taxation on principle, in order to free people and the economy from the burden of the state. If the writings of Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill are anything to go by, however, there is an important exception: land taxation. Land taxation is not just a necessary evil that affords the state some revenues with which to perform the very few necessary functions of government; it is a positive good, in that it tackles monopoly and speculation, and should ensure efficient use of land. If land taxation had remained the key source of government revenue in the UK, the current economic crisis would not have taken place.

Dark Satanic Cubicles – It’s time to smash the job culture!

Note: O Loompanics! When will we see thy like again? SIG

Dark Satanic Cubicles was originally published in 2005 on Loompanics Unlimited, written by Claire Wolfe.

You load sixteen tons, and what do you get?
Another day older and deeper in debt.
St. Peter don’t you call me, ’cause I can’t go.
I owe my soul to the company store.
– Merle Travis, chorus of the song Sixteen Tons

Back in 1955, thunder-voiced Tennessee Ernie Ford recorded that song as the B-side of a single. Soon, nobody could even remember what the A-side was. DJ’s all over the country began flipping the disc – and within two months of its release Sixteen Tons had become the biggest single ever sold in America.

Sixteen Tons is a John Henry style fable about a coal miner who’s tough as nails – one fist of iron, the other of steel.

He’s able to do the most back-breaking job and slaughter any opponent. But even though he’s been working in the mines since the day he was born, he can’t get ahead. Merle Travis wrote and recorded the song in 1946. But until Ford covered it, Sixteen Tons hadn’t done Travis a bit of good.

Far from it. Although Travis was a patriotic Kentucky boy, the U.S. government thought any song complaining about hard work and hopeless debt was subversive. The song got Travis branded a communist sympathizer (a dangerous label in those days). A Capitol record exec who was a Chicago DJ in the late 40s remembers an FBI agent coming to the station and advising him not to play Sixteen Tons.

Pretty big fuss over one little song.

Power Doesn’t Just Attract Mean and Stupid People — It Makes Them That Way

by Kevin Carson
http://c4ss.org/?p=10803

In “Empire of the Rising Scum,” Robert Shea observed that, regardless of their ostensible mission, hierarchical institutions tend to be headed by people whose primary skills are careerist climbing and bureaucratic in-fighting. As I’ve said before, you simply cannot become a President of the United States, or a Fortune 500 CEO, unless there’s something fundamentally wrong with you. The same is true of the intellectual capacity of those who manage to advance upward within hierarchies. Being a team player, engaging in groupthink, demonstrating an ability to shut off critical thinking when evaluating the communications of a superior — these are qualities that authoritarian institutions select for.

In Praise of Credit Checks

by Jeffrey Tucker
http://mises.org/daily/5789/In-Praise-of-Credit-Checks

“The credit report is the best friend of the responsible in the same way that it is the worst enemy of the irresponsible.”

There is No Disinterested Authority

by Kevin Carson
http://c4ss.org/?p=8744

In a recent discussion, someone proposed “a political system comprised of professionals rather than career politicians.” Policy-making bodies, she suggested, might be equally divided between professionals and elected politicians.

Battle for the Heart of the Occupy Movement

by Kevin Carson
http://c4ss.org/?p=8737

Center for a Stateless Society Media Coordinator Tom Knapp, summarizing his experience with the Occupy St. Louis movement, reported a movement “with an ideological center of gravity somewhere in the neighborhood of ‘mild reform Democrat.’” Most of the people there, apparently, were basically Coffee Party people with better signs and slogans.

Robbing Us Blind

by David D’Amato
http://c4ss.org/?p=8712

Calling attention to the crises spawned by contemporary global capitalism, the Occupy movement provides an opportunity for more than mere response to the symptoms of that system. Just as doctors would be remiss to merely attend to symptoms on an ad hoc basis, we who are concerned with social and economic justice must set ourselves upon the underlying disease.

2011 Index of Economic Freedom

http://attackthesystem.com/?p=11153

As determined by the collection of neocons, theocons, vulgar libertarians, and stooges for the military-industrial complex that comprise the Heritage Foundation.

It isn’t a crisis of capitalism but a crisis of globalism

by Robert Henderson
http://livinginamadhouse.wordpress.com/?p=1116

It isn’t a crisis of capitalism but a crisis of globalism

Amongst the wailing and gnashing of teeth from all parts of political mainstream over the ongoing economic crisis its prime cause goes unmentioned. Free market capitalism, which has been accepted , whether enthusiastically or resignedly, by Western elites for the past quarter of a century as the only economic theory worthy of support, is being questioned. Even some of its firmest adherents are questioning whether there has been too much freedom of individual action in the economic sphere. Some mainstream commentators who write for resolutely “free market” supporting newspapers like the Daily Telegraph and Daily Mail, are even beginning to wonder if capitalism is in a crisis from which it may not recover:

Which Side Are You On?

by Kevin Carson
http://c4ss.org/?p=8630

Occupy Wall Street has come under fire from some libertarians, on the grounds that it’s relatively silent about the role of big government, and its proposed remedies lean heavily toward increased government intervention.

When the Mafia Can’t Compete With the Chamber of Commerce

by Kevin Carson
http://c4ss.org/?p=8150

I’ve written frequently on the national regulatory state as a source of monopoly rents to big business. But the true nature of regulation as a naked power grab by incumbent businesses is nowhere more apparent than at the local level. At the lower levels of government, conventional, brick-and-mortar business establishments are heavily involved in using regulatory enforcement to shut down low-cost competition.

What to Make of “Capitalism”

Note: This posting has generated nearly a hundred comments, and has been viewed by pushing towards 10,000 people. We are not surprised, as the issues discussed are central to the future direction of the libertarian movement. For this reason, we are pinning it to the top of the blog until the comments and views fall away. SIG

by David D’Amato
http://c4ss.org/?p=8156

For the United Kingdom’s The Guardian, Pankaj Mishra says the world is “looking at a fresh political awakening,” citing examples from Egypt and Greece to Israel and China. “[E]xtreme and seemingly insurmountable inequality,” Mishra argues, are the source of the new “public anger,” and that inequality is itself the result of “the west’s model of consumer capitalism.”

Personal Perspectives 27, Austrian Economics and Anarcho-Capitalism: Peace, Prosperity and Freedom (2011), by Michael McKay | www2.libertarian.co.uk

 

Austrian Economics and Anarcho-Capitalism: Peace, Prosperity and Freedom
Michael McKay

Personal Perspectives No. 27
ISBN 9781856376372
ISSN 0267-7156 (print)
ISSN 2042-275X (online)

© 2011: Libertarian Alliance; Michael McKay

Personal Perspectives 27, Austrian Economics and Anarcho-Capitalism: Peace, Prosperity and Freedom (2011), by Michael McKay | www2.libertarian.co.uk

Kevin Carson in Forbes Magazine

 

As Kevin Carson has noted in the past, the IMF’s “actual purpose was to subsidize the disposal of surplus American goods and capital in foreign markets. The World Bank and IMF were created as an adjunct of William Appleman Williams’ “Open Door Imperialism,” a safety valve for the chronic overproduction and overaccumulation under state capitalism.”

Should We Abolish the IMF? – E.D. Kain – American Times – Forbes

Back in the USSA, by Kevin Carson

http://c4ss.org/?p=5477

Politicians and talking heads, of both the mainstream liberal and conservative persuasions, commonly refer to this as “our free market system,” or maybe “free enterprise.”

But we haven’t had anything even remotely resembling a free market for over 150 years. (For that matter we didn’t have one before, what with Enclosures, the Combination Law, mercantilism, slavery and colonialism.) Since the mid-19th century, what we’ve had is massive collusion between big government and big business. The corporate economy was created almost whole-cloth through a monstrous act of top-down government intervention, with the help of such things as the railroad land grants and other infrastructure subsidies, the exchange and pooling of patents, tariffs, regulatory cartels, and union-busting by uniformed thugs. The New Deal was just corporatist icing on the cake.

What we have is not a free enterprise system, but an interlocking directorate of giant, centralized government and corporate bureaucracies. The same personnel circulate, through a revolving door system, between senior corporate management and government political appointees. The same person who is now Assistant Vice President for Such-and-Such at So-and-So Corp LLC, is apt in five years to be Deputy Undersecretary for the Other Thing. And vice versa, of course. It makes about as much sense to treat a Fortune 500 corporation as a “private business” as it makes to treat a count in fourteenth-century France as a private landlord.

Within the large corporation, management bears more resemblance to the Soviet Nomenklatura than to free market entrepreneurs. They justify their power in the name of shareholder value, but in fact shareholders exercise almost no control over corporate management. Proxy fights almost never work, and corporations are typically controlled by inside directors. After a brief period of hostile takeovers in the ’80s, management quickly acted to restore insider control and nullify the threat of such attacks through measures like poison pills and greenmail; today, most takeovers are friendly and carried out by the management of both companies in collusion. If some seats on the board are occupied by institutional investors, it’s more accurate to describe it as a coalition between interlocking corporations. Bond issues are reserved mainly for financing mergers and acquisitions, and most new investment is financed by retained earnings, so the external control exerted by the capital markets is largely mythical.

American corporate management claims to represent shareholders as a legitimizing ideology, just as the Soviet bureaucracy claimed to represent the workers or the people — meanwhile having dachas, private cars, and shopping privileges in the luxury department stores reserved for Party members. In both cases, though, what you really had (and have) is a self-perpetuating oligarchy in control of a free-floating mass of unowned capital.

The typical Fortune 500 CEO invests money that she didn’t contribute from her own past savings, but that lacks any external owner capable of exercising any genuine control over it. Corporate management spends other people’s money, amounting to de facto owners of it. Shareholders are conventionally regarded as residual claimants, because in legal theory they have a claim on all revenue that’s left over after after all contractual claims are paid. But in the real world, it makes more sense to say that the shareholder is a contractual claimant with even fewer rights than a bondholder, and that management is the real residual claimant. A shareholder is entitled only to whatever dividend management sees fit to issue, if any. But senior management is entitled to whatever salaries and bonuses they can get, through mutual logrolling with the board of directors.

A lot of establishment libertarians, when they call for a “free market,” really seem to mean the present corporatist system without the welfare or the health and safety regulations — a world owned by Wal-Mart and Halliburton.

But when you hear a call for a freed market by someone at the Center for a Stateless Society, or anyone else on the free market left, please be aware that we mean something completely different by it. What we want is a society in which corporations are deprived of all the subsidies, privileges, protections, and artificial property rights they currently enjoy. What we want is a society in which all market activity consists of free exchange between equals, without anyone paying monopoly rents to the privileged and powerful. What we want is a society in which all functions of the state are replaced by voluntary association, whether by market transactions, mutual aid associations, or gift economies.

In short, the free markets we talk about have nothing to do with those of Dick Armey and FreedomWorks, the AEI, or the Heritage Foundation. We’re not talking about socialism for the rich and a Dickensian work house for everyone else.

When we say we believe in free enterprise, we mean it.

“Bad news coming” thought Winston…

Christopher Houseman

No, not the impending cuts of so many public payroll salaries (some of which have jobs associated with them), but rather a certain commonality in the Coalition about the motives for their present course of action.

Nick Clegg has assured the LibDems that he doesn’t want to cut the state for the sake of cutting it. No, he wants to cut it so he can rebuild the state differently. Likewise, Liam Fox has informed the Tories that he doesn’t want to cut defence and nor does David Cameron (cue Tory applause) – but at the moment, he has no choice.

Thus is the libertarian ideal of a smaller state smeared in the eyes of political activists and the wider public as a necessary evil, a stopping-off point to be endured on the road to the sunny uplands of a reshaped and re-expanded State tomorrow.

Unless libertarians can convincingly and appealingly present to the public the truly joyous reality of being able to work (or not) as we please, with whom we please, to offer goods and services we’re proud of to whomever we please, libertarians will remain marginalised and misunderstood. They’ll be seen as an articulate but callous bunch, perversely rejoicing over the wider dislocation and misery caused by the State’s champions ditching the minions they think they can most easily do without.

When faced with people determined to do exactly the wrong thing, Lenin’s “The worse the better” dictum may be an accurate response to their failures. But it’s no way to market anything to anyone.

PS. I note the Tories’ pledge to let headteachers discipline children for misbehaviour on the way to and from school. I leave the last word on this news to John Taylor Gatto:

As schooling encroaches further and further into family and personal life, monopolizing the development of mind and character, children become human resources at the disposal of whatever form of governance is dominant at the moment.

Will Hutton on How the Banks Won (and keep winning…)

Christopher Houseman

Will Hutton presented a Dispatches documentary recently on Channel 4 about the British banking cartel system.

The extent of Mr. Hutton’s connections with the previous Government were plain to see, as he treated us to an hour of breast-beating to the tune of “Why oh why do the noble politicians not rescue us from the greedy bankers?” This seems more than a little rich (in irony only, you understand). As I recall, the recent banking crisis would have lawfully removed large numbers of greedy bankers from the UK economy – but for Labour’s insistence on debasing the money supply still further to try to prop them up.

Perhaps the most informative snippet came towards the end when Mr. Hutton revealed that British banks currently lend out fifty times more money than they have on deposit, and five times more than the value of everything else the UK produces. No wonder our glorious leaders are worried about a repeat performance. Mr. Hutton’s solution? To try to force the banks to stop inflating residential property prices by switching the focus of their lending activities to (British-based?) businesses.

Sadly, Mr. Hutton didn’t tell the viewers how his proposals would avoid inflating the prices of business “assets” (commercial property, plant and machinery, R&D, properly skilled and experienced labour, etc.). Nor did Mr. Hutton explain how artificially stimulating productivity could be compatible with any conceivable form of environmental responsibility (so much for the alleged anti-environmentalism of decision-making in a free market). In fact, Mr. Hutton didn’t even tell us why businesses should apply for his proposed extra loans if they can’t be sure there are enough additional customers able and willing to pay for all the proposed new supplies of goods and services.