At C4SS--Census: They Can't Move Forward Until We Send it Back

Three Works on Abundance and Technological Unemployment

A four-part review essay at P2P Foundation Blog.

Part One: William Dugger and James Peach
Part Two: Adam Arvidsson
Part Three: Martin Ford
Part Four: Martin Ford's Agenda and Mine

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At C4SS--Defining "Extremism" Down

First Quarterly C4SS Paper--The Healthcare Crisis: A Crisis of Artificial Scarcity

At C4Ss--Conspiracy and the Paranoid Center, Part 2

Conspiracy and the Paranoid Center

At C4SS--When You "Work Hard and Play by the Rules," the House Wins

At C4SS--The Hospital as Soviet Gosplan

At C4SS--How Not to Argue for IP

At C4SS--Thomas Sowell: Them Pore Ole Bosses Need All the Help They Can Get

At C4SS--Capitalism: A Good Word for a Bad Thing

At P2P Foundation Blog: "Intellect" as a Component of Price

At P2P Foundation Blog: From the Regulatory State to Voluntary Certification Networks

At C4SS--Obama and Liz Cheney: Separated at Birth?

At C4SS--The Copyright Nazis: Destroying “Intellectual Property” Rights in Order to Save Them

At C4SS--Ford's in His Flivver, All's Well With the World

Olbermann routinely mocks exhortations to charity and self-help, reflexively reaching for shitkicking hayseed imagery from Walnut Grove for want of any other comparison that will sufficiently get across just how backward and ridiculous that kind of thing really is.

Helping your neighbor out directly, or participating in voluntary self-organized efforts to spread risk and cushion against sickness and unemployment, is all right in its own way, if nothing else is available. But it carries the inescapable taint of the provincial and picayune, almost as if such efforts were administered by men in rimless spectacles and sleeve garters—very much, incidentally, like the stigma attached to homemade bread and home-grown veggies in the corporate advertising offensives of the early twentieth century.

People who help each other out, or organize voluntarily to pool risks and costs, are to be praised—grudgingly and with a hint of condescension—for doing the best they can in an era of relentlessly downscaled social services. But that people are forced to resort to such expedients, rather than meeting all their social safety net needs through one-stop shopping at the Ministry of Central Services office in a giant monumental building with an imposing statue of winged victory in the lobby, a la “Brazil,” is a damning indictment of any civilized society. The progressive society is a society of comfortable and well-adjusted citizens, competently managed by properly credentialed authorities, happily milling about like ants in the shadows of miles-high buildings that look like they were designed by Albert Speer. And that kind of H.G. Wells utopia simply has no room for the barn-raiser or the sick benefit society.