DagSeoul: Positions, Populations, Punk, Poetics

you have to dig the positive externalities, and american libertarians just aren’t up to it. 

"Liberty is the only thing you cannot have unless you are willing to give it to others."

William Allen White

Liberty is a gift, apparently. So much for no coercion.

The Right Field: Mr Trained Economist Constructs a Straw Man

andrewfriedle:

dagseoul:

Popular statements:

1. “Corporations are people, my friend.”  

2. “We can’t blame corporations. Their sole purpose is to create profits for the share holders.”

The Paradoxes:

1. Corporations cannot both be people and not people at the same time.

2. Employees cannot both be people, free individuals composed as consumers, and not people, bound subjects tasked solely to create profits for owners.

Fortunately, for capitalists, the employing and employee classes seem to presently share one thing in common: the mindless implementation of paradox-denying common sense about nature and markets.

Inconsistent Logic:

1. Democratically elected government defines what constitutes a corporation.

1. Following the Constitution and legal precedent judges determine that corporations are people.
2. Precede to blame Capitalists for this.

You don’t address the content of my post. You’ve poorly composed a straw man. So, try harder, Mr Trained Economist.

I’ll just wait for your experience to illustrate itself.

(via andrewfriedle-deactivated201301)

"I believe that Chomsky’s blunder comes from the “Hierarchy bad” view of the egalitarian radical left, despite the fact that hierarchy is a natural thing (so is cancer) and isn’t necessarily negative. If one man is wiser than the rest of us and he understands the situation and has the best wishes for the enterprise at heart, then why not give him a greater deal of control over affairs?"

mises.org forum poster neodoxy (via logicallypositive)

“Hierarchy is a natural thing.” An absolute hoot.

(Source: rigatonideology)

"So apparently compulsory (i.e. involuntary) unionization is ‘free bargaining’."

The Cheeky Earnest Libertarian

thecheekylibertarian:

…intellectualism is inherently elitist.

And refusing to engage in debate with anyone who insists on disrespecting me simply means that I preference basic respect for human dignity (which you *seem* to care about) over intellectualism.

You made an explicit claim: that to collectively bargain is unfair and coercive. You’ve yet to engage the response that’s far from disrespectful. It might be direct, explicit, precise, concise, clear, but uncivil it’s not.

In what universe is right-to-work legislation voluntary and not coercive? Involuntary refers to doing something against one’s will or unconsciously; it doesn’t refer to doing something collectively.

The government insisting employees cannot collectively bargain (it’s never free) for better contracts is compulsory, not the other way around. Unionization has never been and is still not compulsory, especially in your fucked up state.

Organized labor is always done with the will. I know this is hard for the crass libertarian mind to grasp, but try for a moment to consider that, in the US, at-will employment implements a freedom of contract that only serves the will of the employer. Right-to-Work legislation cements and legalizes this one-aspect will as an authoritative and just will, delegitimizing employees’ singular and collective wills. Organized labor insists otherwise. Organized labor recognizes that labor needs an organized will.

In capitalism, Labor and work has nothing to do with volunteering. Why not consider how employment is the most coercive aspect of our daily lives in capitalist culture and that you aren’t actually being libertarian when you support employer will.

What you’ve chosen to focus on is that I insisted you wouldn’t know freedom if it were stuck between your toes. This is snark. And you praise snark on your blog’s header. 

We all know why you can’t respond to my clearly and precisely worded response to your specious claim about collective bargaining rights and the anti-labor legislation we call “right to work”. We know why you’ve cut those clearly and precisely worded claims from your reblogs. You can’t respond and you censor because you don’t know what you’re talking about. You like the words “free” and “liberty”. You like to pretend you’re a libertarian when you’re nothing more than a Ron Paul supporter, a supporter of free market capitalism, which is, in fact, to be authoritarian and anti-libertarian.

Get off your high horse and get busy doing the critical thinking necessary to address my claims, or get bent. It’s not my choice. It’s yours. It’s your choice to cry foul and ask for civility when you’re met with just opposition, but it’s not going to do anything about the opposition. 

If The Cheeky [sic] Libertarian believes organized labor is involuntary and coercive, then imagine what she thinks about voting in elections.

American Libertarianism is Crass Libertarianism

Imagine a libertarianism that supports employer will as primary, legal, authoritative, and ethical and that constructs employees’ wills as a singular will that volunteers to submit an employee’s will to work to an employer’s will to profit.

This is aristocratic libertarianism, a pseudo-libertarianism that is actually a kind of progressive and authoritarian capitalism.

Crass Libertarianism, Liberty, Ideology, Ron Paul fans

dagseoul:

I got sick a couple of weeks ago and forgot that one of my favorite trolls is wishing me mad death and napalmings and such. So, for my new followers, I thought I’d repost some highlights of what got me in trouble with the logical positivists, the Ron Paul fans, and their hysterical apologists. (Any bisexual snark is reserved for Leon.)

I began writing about libertarianism this summer. Somewhere in my archives, you can find me struggling to discuss capitalist libertarianism, trying to come to terms with what to call it. I settled on “crass libertarianism.” About that time, I began being trolled by Ron Paul fans, logical positivists, and anarcho-capitalists. Most of them have given up reblogging my posts because I insisted that if they wanted to talk about capitalism and libertarianism, even positivism, that they’d need to begin referring to the actual theories and theorists, rather than giving me some shit paraphrased from mises.org.

For my new followers, this thinking about crass libertarianism is not all I write about. I’m into critical race theory. I write a lot about whiteness and white supremacy. Also, about pedagogy. I also post about what I’m listening to and a few other things. I love conversation, so always feel free to leave an ask…

1. US Libertarianism is in hate with itself

Libertarianism, from anarcho-capitalism to objectivism, denies social being yet depends on its formation (namely, society,) for its denial, its rhetoric, its discourse. They are the only social political movement I know of that denies itself as part of its ideological representation of reality.

I wrote this earlier on The Weight of Emptiness:

2. Ron Paul, Ideologist

If freedom is “taking your own risks,” then freedom for Paul has nothing to do with the libertarian sacred cow, Liberty. Freedom is being free from others, and nothing more. Liberty becomes a rhetorical object embodying this being with(out) others.

Not only is Ron Paul a capitalist ideologist. He’s an aristocrat with a compulsion to cultivate the traditional white power structure.

I write “ideologist” in combination with the tag “libertarianism is stupid” for many reasons, but each reason rests with(in) the most stupid thing libertarians like Ron Paul discuss: regulation. (I believe this is why he is nothing more than a common Republican.)

If what I’ve illustrated in many posts about Paul, anarcho-capitalism, and American libertarianism is true, that Liberty for libertarians is the ability to be more or less free from others, then this social and political movement, from capitalist anarchists to fascist objectivists, is about nothing less than insuring regulations only exist to compose citizens as free individuals who must be free from others. We could make this ethical and bring in “ought to be”: the libertarian ethos is focused on regulating society to compose citizens as free individuals who should be free from others. And people are more or less free from others dependent upon their status. This is a must because libertarians believe individuals should be status-seeking.

In nature, an individual is never being free-from-others. (This is being as a noun; “free from others” modifies it.) In markets, a consumer is never consuming free from others. In society, a citizen is never living free from others. This free from others is an ideological construction. In other words, it is imaginary. As such, it is a highly regulated representation of reality that relies on ancient and aristocratic notions of the city and citizens. Libertarianism is not to be confused with a new movement that is looking forward in its progressivism, say that’s represented in the current, growing Occupy Movement. It’s the old order of wealthy and privileged elites who wish to define the best we can be via a highly idealized vision of past orders.

I do believe that libertarianism is stupid. Stupid enough to not understand that the core of its own complex ideological structure calls out for a very narrow construction of what is intended to be seen as a free and public discourse community regulated to reflect an ideal version of nature, market and society that has never existed. It’s not that they believe their own representations of reality as the only reality that’s problematic. That’s just common fundamentalism we cope with in free societies and marginalize as anti-intellectual. It’s that they wish to force everyone else to live according to their rules. So much for liberty and freedom.

Anyone who denies social and shared good(s) exist separate from economic good(s), as crass libertarians do, is a very dangerous kind of fundamentalist. Libertarians are tricky because they use the anti-intellectual knee-jerk response to the words “liberty” and “freedom” to offer cover for their elitism. We live in a capitalist market economy that’s ideally free. But what free means in the capitalist free market is free to exchange goods and services. Unfortunately, we also have a money economy. As we all know, the money economy rather unjustly limits freedom in all communities within society to those individuals who have more money than others. Even Adam Smith had to handle this ethical problem of unjust social standing he referred to as unearned ambition.

Libertarians have no ability to cope with the unjust money economy. It’s why they hold equality in contempt. In addition, they conflate the money economy with nature via a constructed term Hayek called the spontaneous social order, and I often call the liberal social order. This is where aristocracy enters via another construction from Greek, the catallaxy. Supposedly, you can’t make enemies into friends without exchanging money for goods and services—in other words, without trade across borders.

A libertarian can’t talk to you about these things. Go ahead and try.

3. Why I hate Ludwig Von Mises

It’s simple. To take Mises’s work on human action seriously, I’d have to first admit that capitalism is natural and that democracy depends on its unregulated function. Second, I’d have to admit that I’m much better described as a consumer than a citizen. Mises’s theory was constructed to justify a society’s use of death and the threat of death for billions who are not US citizens. It’s theory developed to make socialism appear to lead to communism as democracy leads to capitalism. It’s opposed to the concept of a general shared good. It’s constructed to reward unearned ambition and inheritance as a natural right. In other words, it’s constructed to eradicate discussions about equality in human society. In this manner, it’s highly aristocratic.

To contrast capitalism and communism the way Mises and his followers do—that the latter is natural and the former is artificial—is troubling. First and most important, it’s rhetoric. It really doesn’t mean anything to those who don’t believe it. In this manner, it’s a fiction. In my opinion, it illustrates a major flaw with much of the cold war era’s theory about liberty and capitalism. It’s a critical attitude towards humanity that illustrates human being (human action) as the natural recipient of something we created, namely capitalism. Mises struggles, as do other capitalist theorists like Hayek, to find the source of capitalism in human society and as a result of nature. That’s where catallaxy and catallactic come from: the idea that the unregulated exchanging of goods and services peacefully and justly organizes society as the result of a spontaneous social order that results from the unregulated exchange. That’s a fucking fiction. It’s white fiction about the earliest days of organized human society when we are taught we became civilized. (You know, son, that business is the cornerstone of civilization. Trade. Free trade. Without it, civilization would end. Get the fuck out of here with that nonsense.)

Capitalism is a highly regulated economic system. To insist it’s part of nature (the liberal social order) is interesting, but suspect. Moreover, it explicitly demonizes a significant aspect of human being, shared good and the impulse to seek it out—in other words, the impulse to address inequality, to organize our lives, our communities, our society. It’s hard to to take seriously a moral system for economic being that constructs a complex and artificial framework for human being that insists we pretend it’s natural while at the same time denigrating the one thing it accepts we naturally seek to do.

It’s hard not to see Mises as a cold warrior. In this manner, he’s a hero to some, I suppose. But to what end? His works hold no answers for growing poverty and corruption. For him, we are all consumers of products produced by entrepreneurs who listen to our wishes. That’s really it, that’s his theory of demand. We want what we buy because what we buy is produced to satisfy what we want by really smart rich guys. That’s fucking insane stuff.

We have the ideal theorist for an idealized capitalist society fueled by white power and white fiction about the wealthy white man and his just inheritance of everything he stole.

4. Crass Libertarian-isms: Liberty

Liberty, for crass libertarians, is a rhetorical tool.

An object.

Liberty reflects what the individual observing it sees as any thing, process, and/or state of being that makes one feel free of obligation, duty and responsibility—these three often being most responsible for citizens’ anxiety and dread in public.

Liberty is a rhetorical tool designed to make one think about freedom while being educated about how to behave in a capitalist market.

Liberty looks like it has roots in a historical tradition of republicanism and democracy and sounds in tune with capitalism. They appear to go hand in hand.

Liberty is, however, a shape-shifting placeholder for one’s desire to be free from others while laboring with them. It justifies one’s own slavery while excusing others’. Liberty, therefore can be seen as a Capitalist’s ideal form of Cooperation.

Liberty reminds people of an idea they think they share. But the idea was constructed to look old, treasured, lost and recoverable. Liberty has been designed by capitalist economists and libertarian theorists to appear just out of reach. If you have not the liberty you want, it’s because you haven’t worked hard enough, or because the government is keeping you down.

Liberty is part of the white power tradition in the United States.

———

When listening to a political leader, public official, and/or community organizer using Liberty to organize any effort, think twice before trusting him. (Him is appropriate here. Liberty is part of white masculinity. It’s almost always heterosexist.) They’re working in a tradition of white power, imperialism and capitalist economic theory—theory that justifies unearned poverty, war and slavery of others—that justifies the unearned ambition of the wealthiest members of society. Capitalist Libertarians are always anti-socialist, anti-anarchist. They are statists.

5. On Crass Libertarianism Wealth Redistribution:

When you talk to a capitalist about taxes and government spending, inevitably the capitalist will want to begin speaking about wealth. A common conversation is that we, as in our government acting on behalf of citizens, should be promoting (spending on and investing in) wealth creation not wealth redistribution. Never mind that the claim is unreasonable. Specifically, business owners, entrepreneurs and employers in general do not create wealth. Wealth is a capitalist word that is supposed to be a synonym with value. Wealthy people do not create value. We know how value works, but wealth, you know, is the root in wealthy. So, wealth and the wealthy go together. It’s just common sense. Right? Don’t get pulled into a discussion with such shitty use of common sense and language.

When you hear wealth, you should always insist the conversation returns to labor and value. That’s the most important thing. Capitalists do not want to talk about value. Capitalists want to argue that wealthy people create demand. We know that spending creates demand, but again, capitalists will not want to talk about spending. Capitalists will not want to talk about the fact that money in the hands of the poor is much more stimulative than money in the hands of the rich. Why? Well, for example, capitalist libertarians like to believe that 1$ wealthy people spend is worth more than 1$ poor people spend. It’s that simple. It’s an absurd debate to get into. Always insist the conversation turn to labor and value. Bring the conversation from spending, debt, and wealth back to the basic relationship between the employer and employee.

You’ll discover that the capitalists aren’t capable of discussing value and labor because they typically don’t know what they’re talking about. They haven’t done their homework. They’re simply repeating propaganda.

See also my post from last week. I wrote:

5%, in the US, consume 80% of the capital gains income. That income is taxed at 50% of what it would taxed at if it were normal income. 1% control 40% of that capital gains income. In other words, most US citizens don’t have any access to the wealth their labor produces and a few take advantage of all that labor for their own benefit without having earned it.

When you hear a conservative or libertarian talk about personal responsibility, you’re listening to somebody fighting for the cause of the wealthiest and whitest citizens and against the well-being of the majority of citizens who have no access to it now, nor historically ever have. Personal responsibility really means work that others should do so I can continue to benefit from it and it only applies to privileged individuals who can afford to profit from others’ labor.

If you don’t see the class warfare against the poor, you’re an asshole and an idiot.

"

SO: WHY TALK ABOUT RACE AT ALL?

If, then, the Race Question is really a problem for statists and not for paleos, why should we talk about the race matter at all? Why should it be a political concern for us; why not leave the issue entirely to the scientists?

Two reasons we have already mentioned; to celebrate the victory of freedom of inquiry and of truth for its own sake; and a bullet through the heart of the egalitarian-socialist project. But there is a third reason as well: as a powerful defense of the results of the free market. If and when we as populists and libertarians abolish the welfare state in all of its aspects, and property rights and the free market shall be triumphant once more, many individuals and groups will predictably not like the end result. In that case, those ethnic and other groups who might be concentrated in lower-income or less prestigious occupations, guided by their socialistic mentors, will predictably raise the cry that free-market capitalism is evil and “discriminatory” and that therefore collectivism is needed to redress the balance. In that case, the intelligence argument will become useful to defend the market economy and the free society from ignorant or self-serving attacks. In short; racialist science is properly not an act of aggression or a cover for oppression of one group over another, but, on the contrary, an operation in defense of private property against assaults by aggressors.

Murray Rothbard.

One of many reasons why Rothbard is a douche bag, white supremacist fuck: his belief in genetic or biological racial inequality. In other words, the free market, as a natural organizing principle, illustrates, in fact, that “the races” aren’t equal.

And then Ron Paul, to distance himself from Rothbard, made the claim that libertarians can’t be racist because racism is a collectivist idea. You know Ron Paul and his mysticism; simply being an individual exonerates him from being a member of a historically racist class from which he’s profited and made a living. 

(via dagseoul)

(via dagseoul)

"

SO: WHY TALK ABOUT RACE AT ALL?

If, then, the Race Question is really a problem for statists and not for paleos, why should we talk about the race matter at all? Why should it be a political concern for us; why not leave the issue entirely to the scientists?

Two reasons we have already mentioned; to celebrate the victory of freedom of inquiry and of truth for its own sake; and a bullet through the heart of the egalitarian-socialist project. But there is a third reason as well: as a powerful defense of the results of the free market. If and when we as populists and libertarians abolish the welfare state in all of its aspects, and property rights and the free market shall be triumphant once more, many individuals and groups will predictably not like the end result. In that case, those ethnic and other groups who might be concentrated in lower-income or less prestigious occupations, guided by their socialistic mentors, will predictably raise the cry that free-market capitalism is evil and “discriminatory” and that therefore collectivism is needed to redress the balance. In that case, the intelligence argument will become useful to defend the market economy and the free society from ignorant or self-serving attacks. In short; racialist science is properly not an act of aggression or a cover for oppression of one group over another, but, on the contrary, an operation in defense of private property against assaults by aggressors.

Murray Rothbard.

One of many reasons why Rothbard is a douche bag, white supremacist fuck: his belief in genetic or biological racial inequality. In other words, the free market, as a natural organizing principle, illustrates, in fact, that “the races” aren’t equal.

And then Ron Paul, to distance himself from Rothbard, made the claim that libertarians can’t be racist because racism is a collectivist idea. You know Ron Paul and his mysticism; simply being an individual exonerates him from being a member of a historically racist class from which he’s profited and made a living. 

(via dagseoul)

for michaelangerlo.

"For it must be cried out, at a time when some have the audacity to neo-evangelise in the name of the ideal of a liberal democracy that has finally realised itself as the ideal of human history: never have violence, inequality, exclusion, famine, and thus economic oppression affected as many human beings in the history of the earth and of humanity. Instead of singing the advent of the ideal of liberal democracy and of the capitalist market in the euphoria of the end of history, instead of celebrating the ‘end of ideologies’ and the end of the great emancipatory discourses, let us never neglect this obvious macroscopic fact, made up of innumerable singular sites of suffering: no degree of progress allows one to ignore that never before, in absolute figures, have so many men, women and children been subjugated, starved or exterminated on the earth."

Derrida, Specters of Marx (h/t DP ”checkmate liberals”)

can’t trust it

Whenever a libertarian starts talking coercion and freedom, you can be sure they mean to regulate something in your life to get what it is they’re ultimately after.

“Beware of the hand
When it’s comin’ from the left
I ain’t trippin’ just watch ya step
Can’t truss it”

"

SO: WHY TALK ABOUT RACE AT ALL?

If, then, the Race Question is really a problem for statists and not for paleos, why should we talk about the race matter at all? Why should it be a political concern for us; why not leave the issue entirely to the scientists?

Two reasons we have already mentioned; to celebrate the victory of freedom of inquiry and of truth for its own sake; and a bullet through the heart of the egalitarian-socialist project. But there is a third reason as well: as a powerful defense of the results of the free market. If and when we as populists and libertarians abolish the welfare state in all of its aspects, and property rights and the free market shall be triumphant once more, many individuals and groups will predictably not like the end result. In that case, those ethnic and other groups who might be concentrated in lower-income or less prestigious occupations, guided by their socialistic mentors, will predictably raise the cry that free-market capitalism is evil and “discriminatory” and that therefore collectivism is needed to redress the balance. In that case, the intelligence argument will become useful to defend the market economy and the free society from ignorant or self-serving attacks. In short; racialist science is properly not an act of aggression or a cover for oppression of one group over another, but, on the contrary, an operation in defense of private property against assaults by aggressors.

Murray Rothbard.

One of many reasons why Rothbard is a douche bag, white supremacist fuck: his belief in genetic or biological racial inequality. In other words, the free market, as a natural organizing principle, illustrates, in fact, that “the races” aren’t equal.

And then Ron Paul, to distance himself from Rothbard, made the claim that libertarians can’t be racist because racism is a collectivist idea. You know Ron Paul and his mysticism; simply being an individual exonerates him from being a member of a historically racist class from which he’s profited and made a living. 

It’s all about regulation for these “libertarians”. And for a specific reason: to cultivate an artificial landscape of private properties for exchange in a capitalist market. The Pauls’ manifesto gives that right wing notion that “freedom isn’t free” a new sense.

The Pauls apparently have no idea the internet is not a natural resource. They appear ignorant that it’s entirely created by the government and succeeded only as a result of the proper functioning of many highly regulated public resources. Certainly, corporations and Capitalists have found ways to exploit the public resource for profit, but the result of their exploits has not been a more general liberation, something free for all.

I suppose we can note that The Pauls are oblivious of history, which should come as no surprise. Their manifesto is merely stocked with stale arguments aimed at liberals (love the citing Reagan and Jefferson, two Internet users, right?) that illustrate how stale their claims about property have become and how illiterate and ignorant they and their followers are re: technology. Completely out of touch.