tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-100914522024-03-17T20:02:36.981-07:00Mutualist Blog: Free Market Anti-CapitalismTo dissolve, submerge, and cause to disappear the political or governmental system in the economic system by reducing, simplifying, decentralizing and suppressing, one after another, all the wheels of this great machine, which is called the Government or the State. --Proudhon, General Idea of the RevolutionKevin Carsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07525803609000364993noreply@blogger.comBlogger1308125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10091452.post-21078243181222902292023-12-29T15:48:00.000-08:002023-12-29T15:48:33.656-08:00Some Resources for Jailbreaking Copyright <p> Academic books and journals -- <a href="https://libgen.is">Library Genesis</a></p><p>Newspaper and magazine articles -- <a href="http://Archive.org">Archive.org</a></p><p> <a href="http://Archive.vn">Archive.vn</a> </p><p> <a href="http://Archive.ph">Archive.ph</a></p><p> <a href="https://12ft.io">12ft. Wall</a></p><p> <a href="http://RemovePaywall.com">RemovePaywall.com</a></p><p>Movies -- <a href="https://bflix.sx">BFlix</a></p><p> <a href="https://flixwave.to">Flixwave</a></p>Kevin Carsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07525803609000364993noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10091452.post-73164074705309227032023-05-27T14:23:00.002-07:002023-05-27T14:23:22.414-07:00Where to Find Me<p> This blog has been inactive for a long time -- I'm just leaving it up for the archives. </p><p>But you can find most of my writing catalogued either at my <a href="https://kevinacarson.org/">main website</a>, my <a href="https://independent.academia.edu/KevinCarson">Academia.edu page</a>, or my <a href="https://c4ss.org/content/author/kevin-carson">C4SS archives</a>. I'm also on <a href="https://twitter.com/CPostcapitalism">Twitter</a>, <a href="https://www.facebook.com/kevin.carson.52687506/">Facebook</a>, and <a href="https://kolektiva.social/@KevinCarson1">Mastodon</a>.</p><p>And of course, if you value my writing and care to do so, you can support me on <a href="https://www.patreon.com/KevinCarson">Patreon</a> or make a one-time contribution via <a href="https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/KevinCarson826">Paypal</a>.</p>Kevin Carsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07525803609000364993noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10091452.post-89710538007928856792016-04-01T18:12:00.001-07:002016-04-01T18:12:45.151-07:00Desktop Regulatory State -- Now in Print!The book I've been working on for almost five years, <i>The Desktop Regulatory State: The Countervailing Power of Individuals and Networks</i>, is now in print. Here's the page at <a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Desktop-Regulatory-State-Countervailing/dp/1523275596/">Amazon</a>. <br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />Kevin Carsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07525803609000364993noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10091452.post-77574793332256894032015-12-02T09:17:00.002-08:002016-10-27T15:35:20.433-07:00How the O Lordy Curve Got Its NameDriving through the Boston Mountains for Thanksgiving dinner, I decided to relate an old family story about that route while there's still someone alive to remember it.<br />
<br />
The seventeen miles from Winslow to Mountainburg is very crooked and steep, and my family calls the sharpest curve the O Lordy Curve.<br />
<br />
It got its name back in the '50s when my Aunt Alma and Uncle Ivan went down to Ft. Chaffee to bring my Uncle Dale up to Springdale on leave from the Army. The road was narrower and more dangerous back then, and Uncle Ivan drove pretty fast and recklessly. Alma was a large bosomy woman, and Ivan was a lanky man with bony elbows. Dale sat in the middle, and kept getting tossed back and forth against Alma and Ivan as the latter whipped around the curves.<br />
<br />
Every time Ivan sped around a bad curve, Alma would moan "O Lordy, Ivan, you're going to kill us all!" And when they went around the sharpest S-curve on the route, Alma started hollering "O Lordy O Lordy O Lordy O Lordy!"<br />
<br />
That's how the O Lordy Curve got its name.<br />
<br />
<b>Addendum. </b>The 17-mile Boston Mountain route is anchored on its south end by Mountainburg Hill, a steep, winding pathway about two miles long just outside Mountainburg. It can overhead an old car engine even today. In my grandfather's time, the old men used to sit in the cafe and compare their time getting up Mountainburg Hill with a wagon and team of mules.Kevin Carsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07525803609000364993noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10091452.post-76088599469300222612014-03-05T14:13:00.000-08:002017-07-26T14:59:14.022-07:00On C4SS and the "Cultural Left"On C4SS's "outreach mission": Today @<a class="tweet-url username" data-screen-name="C4SSdotorg" href="https://twitter.com/C4SSdotorg" rel="nofollow">C4SSdotorg</a>
came under fire for throwing away its anarchist outreach mission in
order to promote "bargain basement content" like social justice and
other trivial "PC" concerns. Our goal is to promote left-market
anarchism to a broad, mainstream audience.<br />
If our mission is "outreach," as he says, it obviously means reaching
out to people who don't already believe as we do. It means saying
unpopular things to people who are offended by them. He apparently
doesn't object to all the right-wingers like Walter Block who are pissed
off about our anti-capitalism and class struggle stuff. So basically he
must be saying the class war aspects of left-libertarianism and
anarchism are worth taking a stand on even at the expense of pissing
some people off, because getting the workerist and anti-corporate types
on our side is worth it, even if it means treating the concerns of PoC,
women and LGBT people as marginal trivia and throwing them under the
bus. But taking a stand on the concerns of the latter from a libertarian
standpoint is bad because those people aren't important -- but the
workerist dudebro types and their hurt feelings are.<br />
<br />
Shorter version: Anti-empire and class stuff is important, "real"
anarchism; people who are fucked over by social forms of domination
aren't. The people who get offended by calling them out on racism,
homophobia, etc. are vital to our outreach mission. The PoC, women,
gays, trans ppl, etc., who have felt excluded from a white middle-class
and culturally right-wing movement for years, and dismissed
libertarianism as irrelevant, are entirely expendable.Kevin Carsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07525803609000364993noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10091452.post-4182999759095261982013-12-13T21:39:00.000-08:002013-12-13T21:49:22.180-08:00<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<b>Jeff Graubart. </b><i><b>AFFEERCE:
A Business Plan to Save the United States and Then the World</b></i><b>
(Second draft -- 2013).</b><br />
<br />
[<i>Disclaimer. This is a paid
review. I was assured by Jeff Graubart that negative reviews were
fine – he expected only honesty. And I received 40% of the payment
up front, with the rest to come after writing the review.</i>]</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: 0.19in;">
Graubart's vision
of a future society, like the whole of Gaul, is divided into three
parts:<br />
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 0.49in; text-indent: 0.19in;">
We need free markets on steroids and we need universal entitlement on
steroids. If you can’t see past what appears to be an absurd
contradiction, then you haven’t put that together with the third
thing that is essential for the survival of the planet: reproductive
control: parents must pay for their child’s entitlements before
they are allowed to give birth or adopt. These are outlined in the
fundamental relations.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: 0.19in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: 0.19in;">
For Graubart,
these three basic features of his proposed society are a three-legged
stool. Without all three of them, it won't stand. Remove any one, he
warns, and the result will be barbarism.
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: 0.19in;">
The first feature,
the free market itself—the maximum possible degree of economic
freedom—is a goal for Graubart in it's own right. But without a
universal entitlement, a totally free and unregulated market will
lead to barbarism through the concentration of capital, technological
unemployment and mass impoverishment, and eventually class war and
revolution. And without reproductive control, the universal
entitlement will lead to an underclass breeding out of control for
the sake of the additional entitlement money their kids will bring
into the household, and eventually to mass impoverishment and social
bankruptcy from overpopulation.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: 0.19in;">
I don't see either
of these outcomes as necessary or inevitable absent his proposed
remedy, and therefore for me the chain of logic by which the three
parts of his agenda cohere into a whole is weak (as I will explain
later in this review).</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: 0.19in;">
Graubart explains
the basic principles in more detail with the acronym AFFEERCE, with
AF standing forAlternative Family, FE for Free Enterprise, E for
(Universal) Entitlement, RC for Reproductive Control and
E for Enlightenment.<br />
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 0.49in; text-indent: 0.19in;">
Alternative Family does not mean you have to run off and join a
commune or have a 5-way sexual relationship. You have every right to
structure your family on 1 man + 1 woman + children. Or you can
choose to live alone....</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 0.49in; text-indent: 0.19in;">
Free Enterprise means laissez-faire. It means government keeps its
hands off business. It means no minimum wage and no inflation. It
means no corporate income tax of any kind. It means the marketplace
will determine if monopolies should form and the effectiveness of
collusion. It also means no civil rights protection and no right to a
job....</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 0.49in; text-indent: 0.19in;">
Universal Entitlement – ...Entitlement is not based on need. A
billionaire receives the same entitlement for food and housing as a
pauper. Each person in a family of 50 receives the same dollar<br />
amount
for food and housing as a person who lives alone.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 0.49in; text-indent: 0.19in;">
Personal entitlements include nutritious food, safe shelter,
unlimited free education, and quality medical....</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 0.49in; text-indent: 0.19in;">
Reproductive Control – Families must pay the present value for a
lifetime of entitlements before they are allowed to adopt or raise a
child. This is approximately $600,000 but it is tax free. However,
this goal might not be met for a century or more. In the beginning,
families might pay only half the cost of entitlement or $300,000
before being allowed to adopt or raise a child. Even this amount
might be phased in over 100 or more years.... Regardless of cost, if
the parents cannot pay, the child will be placed with a family that
can afford the child....</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 0.49in; text-indent: 0.19in;">
Enlightenment – In a free society, all religions, spiritualties,
beliefs or lack thereof, are welcome. The AFFEERCE enlightenment is a
reliance of the truths in nature following the deconstruction of
postmodernism....</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 0.49in; text-indent: 0.19in;">
The postmodern age will lead to the synthesis between objectivism and
subjectivism; an age of the union of science with spirituality, of
mind and body, of freedom and entitlement, of Eros and Agape.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: 0.19in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: 0.19in;">
About the last
item, Enlightenment, I have little to say, because metaphysics and
epistemology are pretty far outside the subject matter I feel
competent to discuss. Before I finish up with a detailed critique of
the logical connections between the three major parts of Graubart's
agenda, though, I will take some time to comment on the other
individual components of AFFEERCE with my own positive and negative
observations.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: 0.19in;">
Graubart's
Alternative Families are quite similar to what I've written about
elsewhere as “primary social units.” Rather than “Alternative
Families,” I think “households” might be a more apt
description, since many of them bear a closer resemblance to what we
would think of as multi-family cohousing projects. They exist mainly
as economic expedients for pooling incomes and risks, and reducing
costs of living by minimizing the unused spare capacity of housing
and household capital goods that normally exists when separate
nuclear family households predominate. Of course large Alternative
Families can also function as polyamorous sexual units or group
child-rearing institutions, but they don't have to. And people can
still form families based on one couple with children, but the
economic incentives in Graubart's society would be strongly in favor
of larger household units.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: 0.19in;">
Graubart's picture
of how a Free Enterprise economy would work is, in my opinion, one of
the weaker parts of his book.
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: 0.19in;">
The main way his
Free Enterprise economy deviates from the real article is the VOS:</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: 0.19in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 0.49in; text-indent: 0.19in;">
In AFFEERCE, a government agency, The Bureau of Standards, through
volunteer standards groups, wil coordinate industry standards, and
require that industries either adopt the standards of the industry,
or display in a consistent way across all industries, those standards
that are violated, the VOS. Omission of violated standards from the
VOS and failure to properly display or get customer sign-off on the
VOS constitutes fraud. The VOS is a legal document that protects
against liability, so businesses will pay inspection agencies to
certify their VOS.</div>
<div align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 0.49in; text-indent: 0.19in;">
* * *</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 0.49in; text-indent: 0.19in;">
Once you have properly revealed how your entity deviates from
acceptable standards, you no longer are liable for that deviation.</div>
<div align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 0.49in; text-indent: 0.19in;">
* * *</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 0.49in; text-indent: 0.19in;">
Each category of enterprise has an associated set of standards
determined by volunteer consumer and business standard’s groups
(VSG’s) whose members are members of these enterprises or engage in
the marketplace with these enterprises. The Bureau of Standards
coordinates these VSG’s, and makes suggestions for consistency
across types of enterprises, but does not control the set of
standards.</div>
<div align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 0.49in; text-indent: 0.19in;">
* * *</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 0.49in; text-indent: 0.19in;">
Secondly, any business that does pollute would have to indicate the
extent of its pollution on its VOS. Should the pollution markedly
exceed the amount disclosed, that would likely constitute fraud. The
VOS is a public document that limits liability. There are no
officials to bribe or arcane EPA regulations to hide behind.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: 0.19in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: 0.19in;">
This strikes me as
a poor alternative to the use of a fully liberated tort law and a
wide variety of self-organized reputational systems for punishing
corporate malfeasors. But Graubart's attitude toward such approaches
is quite dismissive.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: 0.19in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 0.49in; text-indent: 0.19in;">
The point is that there are literally billions of cases where fraud
is ambiguous. Certainly an industry can collude on a set of
standards, and even display an “Underwriter’s laboratory” type
of seal, but there is nothing to prevent another business, or even
one of the companies from producing the product at less cost by
violating those standards and selling to customers who have neither
the time nor energy nor inclination to study labels.</div>
<div align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: 0.19in;">
* * *</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 0.49in; text-indent: 0.19in;">
The argument that bad practices will quickly destroy a business is
false. Companies change names. People are mobile and do not spend
their time researching companies. Even major news exposés can be
lost amongst the information overload....</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: 0.19in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: 0.19in;">
Graubart, in
critiquing the standard libertarian vision of a free market
regulatory state, frequently refers to the “objectivist” position
on this or that, seemingly taking the Randians as a stand-in for
libertarianism in general. I get the impression that he has little
exposure to the free market tradition or libertarian literature
outside the Objectivist milieu, and in particular I get no indication
that he's familiar with such writers on the mechanics of a free
market regulatory regime as David Friedman or Morris and Linda
Tannehill.
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: 0.19in;">
I think Graubart
underestimates the extent to which a liberated tort law, in its full
vigor and without liability caps and other forms of right-wing “tort
reform” promoted by business lobbyists, would strike fear into the
hearts of potential defrauders and malfeasants.
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: 0.19in;">
A genuinely
libertarian common law of torts would restore the notions of
liability that existed before state court judges changed the law to
make it more business-friendly in the early-to-mid-19th century (as
recounted by Morton Horwitz in <i>The Transformation of American
Law</i><span style="font-style: normal;">).</span> Before these
judge-made modifications to the classical law of torts, it wasn't
necessary to prove negligence. If you did something that resulted in
an unforeseen harm to your neighbor, you were liable for it,
regardless of intent. And “standard business practices” weren't a
defense—if a new business imposed negative externalities on
neighbors who were already there, it was liable for them.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: 0.19in;">
The 20th century
regulatory state further weakened what civil damages were available
to punish corporate wrongdoers. In many cases regulations like the
EPA's environmental standards were dumbed-down,
least-common-denominator standards that preempted common law
standards of liability and created safe harbors against civil
liability. So a company that destroys the watershed of an entire
region through mountaintop removal, or poisons the air and water of
surrounding communities and creates a cancer cluster by fracking, can
say “Hey, we meet the EPA regulatory standard” and use that as a
shield against liability in court.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: 0.19in;">
I also
think—something about which I'll have more to say below in my
evaluation of his argument for the necessity of the Universal
Entitlement—that Graubart underestimates how drastically a genuine
free market economy would differ from our present one in structural
terms. He seems to envision an economy still characterized by lots of
corporate firms and an atomized society with lots and lots of
anonymous transactions in the cash nexus.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: 0.19in;">
But I believe
that, absent state subsidies to long-distance transportation and
economic centralization, and to large-scale enterprise and hierarchy,
the pressure would be overwhelmingly toward decentralization and
relocalization, and more demographically stable localities. The great
bulk of manufactured items that are now imported from large factories
across the United States or sweatshops in China would be produced in
small garage factories with the surrounding neighborhood or community
as their primary market. A great deal more—especially in the way of
foodstuffs and clothing—would be produced in the informal economy
of the large household itself, or informal barter and gift networks
of multiple households. Rather than one-off transactions on the
anonymous cash nexus, most economic exchange would overlap with the
social ties of neighborhood and community, with people producing for
customers they know by face and name.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: 0.19in;">
In such a society,
where most enterprises depended on repeat business from their
neighbors, and selling dangerous or tainted goods that resulted in
harm would get you assessed damages by a jury of your angry
neighbors, both reputational and tort mechanisms would carry a lot
more weight.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: 0.19in;">
The Universal
Entitlement is Graubart's version of a proposal that's been around
for a long time (basic income, guaranteed minimum income, negative
income tax, citizen's dividend, social credit, etc.).
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: 0.19in;">
And I find it
attractive, at least as a transitional measure. As Graubart points
out himself, a guaranteed minimum income would do away with the
entire welfare state bureaucracy at federal, state and local levels,
with its enormous administrative costs. But I find it far more
attractive when packaged, as it is in proposals by the
Geolibertarians, with a funding system based on taxing economic rents
(primarily the site value of land) and negative externalities (i.e.
Pigovian taxes on pollution and resource extraction). A libertarian
society in which the welfare state was replaced by a universal basic
income funded by a tax on unearned wealth, the regulatory state was
replaced with prohibitive taxes on emissions of CO2 and toxic
chemicals, and the market was otherwise completely free, would at
least be a huge step in the right direction.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: 0.19in;">
So I'm somewhat
surprised that Graubart reinvents the wheel with a funding mechanism
based on a 70% flat tax on consumption, instead of these other, more
attractive funding proposals.
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: 0.19in;">
Of course
Graubart's flat tax isn't nearly as regressive in practice as it
sounds. First of all, it's a tax only on consumption spending over
and above the Universal Entitlement, which is slightly over $1000 a
month (and includes food, housing and healthcare among other
necessities). So for those in the bottom three quintiles of the
population, at least, a 70% tax on consumption over $1000 a month
would probably be less than the total federal and state income tax,
Social Security and Medicare payroll tax, and state and local sales
and property taxes, that they're paying now.
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: 0.19in;">
And the
consumption tax is only a temporary expedient for paying the
Universal Entitlement while Reproductive Control (enforced by a
requirement to pay the entire capitalized lifetime value of a future
child's Universal Entitlement, $600,000, up front before having a
child) is phased in. As Reproductive Control is implemented—Graubart
proposes to gradually work up to the full $600,000 per child over
many years—the consumption tax will be steadily lowered and
replaced by revenue from the payment for having children.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: 0.19in;">
The Universal
Entitlement is deposited into an account that can be accessed for
spending via a universal biometric identification system. An
individual, say, buying food or clothing, or paying rent from this
account simply swipes their hand, speaks or submits to a retinal scan
to make a cashless payment. The Entitlement cannot be transferred
from one person to another, with one big exception: between members
of an Alternative Family. The Alternative Family, with its formal
legal charter and bylaws, is the official building block of the
AFFEERCE society, and all its members' Entitlements are shared within
the family unit as a condition of membership.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: 0.19in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: 0.19in;">
<b>The Transition.
</b><span style="font-weight: normal;"> One thing I like about this
book is, it's one of those visions of the future that falls within
the category of (in the words of the Wobbly slogan) “building the
structure of the new society within the shell of the old. </span>
</div>
<div style="font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: 0.19in;">
Graubart's book, first and foremost, is an appeal for investors (see his website at <a href="http://www.affeerce.org/">http://www.affeerce.org/</a>). He
intends to build lots of miniature local AFFEERCE societies as
business corporations with joint land trusts as a platform for member
households and business enterprises. These nuclei he calls
“...AFFEERCE nations,” or “AFFEERCE enclaves that develop under
the current government of the United States.”</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: 0.19in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 0.49in; text-indent: 0.19in;">
Of course, the third and fundamental problem of all movements is how
do we bring such a society about? There is only one sure way: a
business plan. Relying on both the profit motive and the AFFEERCE
spirit, AFFEERCE will grow into a corporation so large and powerful,
it will swallow Washington whole. I promise you, when the time for
capitulation comes, the people of the United States will vote nearly
unanimously to turn power over to the AFFEERCE Nations. And until
that fateful day, the United States Government and the AFFEERCE
Nations shall coexist in complete harmony.</div>
<div align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 0.49in; text-indent: 0.19in;">
* * *</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 0.49in; text-indent: 0.19in;">
Keep in mind that AFFEERCE nations will form within the United States
of America and be subject to its laws: most importantly, the code of
the Internal Revenue Service. While our tax lawyers will utilize
every loophole, and our representatives will work to make the code as
favorable as possible for the AFFEERCE nations to flourish, AFFEERCE
is built on honesty. The VIP will issue 1099s for every AFFEERCE
citizen, and maintain automatic withholding into a dollar-denominated
tax account....</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 0.49in; text-indent: 0.19in;">
...In pre-capitulation AFFEERCE, the AFFEERCE nation is a privately
held corporation....</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 0.49in; text-indent: 0.19in;">
These AFFERCIANADO pioneers will form an AFFEERCE land corporation by
purchasing shares and electing a board. The land corporation can buy
contiguous foreign land, register it as AFFEERCE territory,
optionally develop the land, and sell AFFEERCE territory to citizens
(encumbered by an AFFEERCE lien).</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: 0.19in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: 0.19in;">
I find this very
attractive. The classic example of this approach was Ebenezer
Howard's Garden Cities, to be built on cheap colonized land in the
countryside, and developed with funds from a land value tax on the
appreciating real estate values. Dmytri Kleiner's “<a href="http://interactivist.autonomedia.org/node/4509">VentureCommunism</a>” takes a similar approach. So does the movement in Vinay
Gupta's short story “<a href="http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/004123.html">The Unplugged</a>,” based on “buying in at the
bottom” and building a comfortable subsistence lifestyle on the
superior efficiency of small-scale high technology. The idea of an
alternative economy movement forming as a voluntary association
within the existing capitalist society, relying for its inputs
primarily on the waste byproducts of inefficient corporate dinosaurs
and doing a far better job efficiently extracting value from them,
and growing within the belly of the beast until it ultimately takes
over from within, is something that I find—to repeat—very
attractive.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: 0.19in;">
My main difference
from Graubart on this score is I don't think it's necessary for such
an alternative economy to ever take over the state or other
institutional framework of the old society. No need for capitulation,
or for the United States to formally amend the Constitution to make
the new economic order the law of the land. The state and the large
corporation exist for purposes that will be obsolete in a free
society with cheap small-scale production technology, horizontal
network communications and peer-to-peer organizations.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: 0.19in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: 0.19in;">
<b>The Logical
Necessity for the Universal Entitlement. </b><span style="font-weight: normal;">The
Universal Entitlement is necessary in a free market economy, Graubart
says, because without it the natural trends of the free market will
impoverish the great majority of the population and create an army of
paupers ready to pull society down around their ears. “</span>Universal
entitlement allows for a free market economy, and it is the only
thing that does.” The reason is simple technology:</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: 0.19in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 0.49in;">
there is no
question that given enough innovation, a single skilled human being
can operate a machine that will do the work currently done by tens of
thousands of workers. Massive wealth will be created. Where should it
go? To build prisons for the unemployed underclass whose clergy
instructs them to reproduce?<br />
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: 0.19in;">
Graubart's
technological unemployment argument, I believe, is based on a
misunderstanding of technological history. Technological
unemployment, like the wage system itself, presupposes a specific
technological model: capital-intensive mass production, using
expensive, product-specific machines—conventional factories, in
other words, in just about every particular except the radically
reduced need for people to work in them. They seem to be
talking about something like a GM factory, with microcontrollers and
servomotors in place of workers, like the Ithaca works in Vonnegut’s
Player Piano. If such expensive, capital-intensive,
mass-production methods constituted the entire world of manufacturing
employment, as they were in 1960, then the Graubart's technological
unemployment scenario would indeed be terrifying.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: 0.19in;">
But in fact the
technological changes of recent years are destroying the material
rationale not only for the wage system and factory system, but for
technological unemployment. That rationale, originally, was a
technological shift from individually affordable, general-purpose
craft tools to extremely expensive, specialized machinery as the
dominant means of production. Such machinery could only be afforded
by rich people, who hired poor people to work it for them. The
revolution in desktop information technology and cheap garage-scale
digital machine tools is reversing this trend: We’re going back to
(a much higher-tech version of) cheap, general-purpose craft tools.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: 0.19in;">
When the
predominant means of production are individually affordable, the very
distinction between being “employed” and “unemployed” becomes
meaningless. A larger share of work becomes ad hoc and project-based
rather than employer-based, and indeed a great deal of work shifts
back to its original understanding as something you <i>do</i> to feed
yourself rather than something you're <i>given</i> by an employer.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: 0.19in;">
At the same time,
the terminal crises of the corporate economy and the technological
destruction of its material rationale are already to many of the
kinds of changes that Graubart associates with his Alternative
Families.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: 0.19in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 0.49in; text-indent: 0.19in;">
Large families allow some members to take on risk and provide a
greater division of labor for startups.... Each additional family
member allows a more efficient use for the total housing, food and
sundry entitlements, thereby creating wealth.</div>
<div align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 0.49in; text-indent: 0.19in;">
* * *</div>
<div align="LEFT" style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 0.49in; text-indent: 0.19in;">
Most importantly, that which will render all of Marx’s arguments on
alienation and commodity fetishism moot is the freedom of the
alternative family in an AFFEERCE society. Because of the
entitlements, the division of labor and the economies of scale, every
AFFEERCE family is free to form their own society. Each individual
has a right to work at their own speed. Labors of love can be turned
into small profits that large industrial giants would never even
consider. Communes receive huge food and housing entitlements every
month and they are free to combine pagan ritual with the harvest and
still make money. What is important to each of us takes center stage
in our lives. We are the means of production, and we shall not be
alienated from ourselves.<br />
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: 0.19in;">
According to <span style="font-style: normal;">the
neo-Marxist James O'Connor, in </span><i>Accumulation Crisis</i><span style="font-style: normal;">,
the historic tendency of capitalism, during cyclical crises, has been
for unemployed and underemployed workers to shift a portion of their
needs satisfaction to self-provisioning in the informal and household
sector. And given that we're now in a crisis that's not </span><i>cyclical</i><span style="font-style: normal;">
but </span><i>structual</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, there
is a long-term shift toward increased satisfaction of needs through
self-provisioning in the household and informal economy. As Ralph
Borsodi showed eighty years ago, even then it was more economical in
terms of total unit costs to grow and can one's own food than to buy
it at the supermarket, or to make one's own clothing with a sewing
machine. Since then the revolution in desktop information technology
and tools for the home workshop has increased the share of production
that can be undertaken at home, or in a neighborhood cooperative
workshop with shared tools.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: 0.19in;">
<span style="font-style: normal;">At
the same time, the large household of an extended family or multiple
families has a long history as a unit for pooling risks, costs and
income. And in the years since we hit Peak Employment in 2000, there
has been a drastic increase in multi-generational households.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: 0.19in;">
<span style="font-style: normal;">I
expect this only to rise in coming years, as both the state- and
employer-based social safety net become hollowed out and are forced
to retreat from social life. I expect a rise in primary social units
like extended family compounds, multi-family cohousing projects,
urban communes, neighborhood barter and sharing systems, intentional
communities, friendly societies and lodges, mutual insurance systems,
networked employment platforms like guilds and cooperative temp
agencies, and a wide variety of other expedients, to replace the
risk-, cost- and income-pooling functions currently provided by the
state, employers and capitalist insurance policies. </span>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: 0.19in;">
<span style="font-style: normal;">I
expect to see a society coalesce, over the coming decades, much like
a high-tech version of the medieval peasant commune (e.g. the English
open-field system or Russian </span><i>mir</i><span style="font-style: normal;">),
in which one is born into a primary social unit that supports its
children and gives adults who choose to stay an aliquot share in the
common productive land and access to the workshop, and either
undertakes production in such facilities for common consumption or
contributes income from an outside wage job in return for a
guaranteed right to food and subsistence. In such a primary social
unit (say a multi-family compound of twenty people) only a few might
work at outside wage employment to earn the “foreign exchange” to
buy goods available only on the cash nexus, others might work feeding
the family by working in intensive raised-bed gardens or caring for
chickens and guinea pigs, or working in the workshop. Surplus
specialty crops or craft goods the household specializes in might be
exchanged for other household surpluses in the neighborhood barter
network. </span>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: 0.19in;">
In other words,
the natural economic trends of shifting to an informal economy will
replicate the effects of the Universal Entitlement.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: 0.19in;">
As I argued above,
I think Graubart drastically underestimates just how radically a
genuine free market economy—one without state-enforced privileges,
artificial property rights or artificial scarcities of any kind—would
differ from our current one.
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: 0.19in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 0.49in; text-indent: 0.19in;">
And while it will never be the case, as it is today, where the lower
40% of the population has .2 percent of the wealth in a truly free
society, there is a level of inequality that has been shown to favor
optimal success in business, science and economics. It is based on
the work of Joseph Juran and named after Italian economist Vilfredo
Pareto. The Pareto Principle shows that a natural and optimal
inequality will tend to occur, where 20% of the population has 80% of
the wealth...</div>
<div align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 0.49in; text-indent: 0.19in;">
* * *</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 0.49in; text-indent: 0.19in;">
Currently, the top 20% of the population has 93% of the wealth, not
the Pareto 80%.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: 0.19in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: 0.19in;">
I don't think
Pareto was situated to make any such pronouncement, based on the
observation of actually existing capitalism—a system in which the
actual distribution of wealth reflects mainly rents on state-enforced
artificial property, and the predominant model of business enterprise
reflects massive state subsidies and entry barriers.
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: 0.19in;">
The elimination of
direct and indirect rents on “intellectual property” (including
the waste and planned obsolescence from the effect of patents on
criminalizing modular designs with open-source replacement parts and
ease of repair), the elimination of the portion of land rent that
results from absentee title to vacant and unimproved land, the
elimination of the portion of interest that results from entry
barriers to cooperative banks and alternative barter currencies, the
elimination of licensing, zoning and safety code barriers to running
home microenterprises (micro-bakeries, hair salons, restaurants,
daycare, unlicensed cab services, etc.) using the spare capacity of
ordinary household appliances, legal barriers to self-built
vernacular housing, etc., would both drastically lower the income of
the top tier of the economy and also drastically lower the threshold
for comfortable subsistence.
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: 0.19in;">
Far from
technological employment, I think technological changes will lead to
a society where employers have trouble hiring workers for enough
hours or at a low enough wage to make a profit, because they face the
nightmare scenario where they're competing with the possibility of
self-employment and self-provisioning. This is the scenario that led
to the Enclosures 250 years ago, when capitalist farmers in Britain
complained that cottagers with independent access to a living on the
common were unwilling to work as many hours, or for as low a wage, as
the farmer desired.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: 0.19in;">
There will still
be differences in wealth from energy and effort, skill, and sheer
entrepreneurial ability in anticipating and meeting needs. But there
will no longer be the massive wealth resulting from compound returns
on artificially scarce land and capital, or living off the rent of
one-hit wonders by using patent and copyright to criminalize
competition.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: 0.19in;">
Instead of our
present wealth differential of boulders and dust, the range will be
more like good-sized rocks and pebbles.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: 0.19in;">
Barbarism, in
short, is not the only alternative to the Universal Entitlement.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: 0.19in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: 0.19in;">
<b>The Logical
Necessity for Reproductive Control. </b><span style="font-weight: normal;">Graubart
concedes that the idea of children as a source of wealth was
originally one associated with pre-industrial societies with
labor-intensive forms of production, extreme poverty, and high
mortality rates. He concedes that this state of affairs ended when
childhood mortality fell, children ceased to be an economic asset in
the household, and income came mainly from adult employment outside
the home. But “[y]ou might be surprised to find out that in a truly
free society, many of the reasons to have children in pre-modern
times will come back in a thoroughly modern context.”</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: 0.19in;">
<span style="font-weight: normal;">Unfortunately,
Graubart's actual argument seems to consist almost entirely of a
priori reasoning from his assumptions about human nature—assumptions
that sound a lot like the anecdotes from a Ronald Reagan speech ca.
1970 about “welfare queens” driving Cadillacs and buying T-bones
with food stamps. To show that this is not hyperbole or
mischaracterization on my part, I produce an unusually long series of
examples below:</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: 0.19in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 0.49in; text-indent: 0.19in;">
<span style="font-weight: normal;">Universal Entitlement </span>creates
a society where children add to the wealth of a household. If the
household has little wealth to begin with, children would be treated
as income. Without reproductive control to both fund entitlement and
prevent unlimited births, resources would be depleted, taxpayers
would rebel, and reactionary forces would lead us to barbarism.</div>
<div align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 0.49in;">
* * *</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 0.49in; text-indent: 0.19in;">
Every additional child means at least $625 per month extra coming
into the household. Families without a source of income could use
bearing children as a path to wealth. This is not only an
evolutionary catastrophe, but one that must inevitably lead to a
collapse of society.</div>
<div align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 0.49in; text-indent: 0.19in;">
* * *</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 0.49in; text-indent: 0.19in;">
The result of the conflict between Children=Wealth vs.
Children=Poverty is that educated, middle class families are having
fewer children and the impoverished are having more, and that
imbalance can only grow more acute.</div>
<div align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 0.49in; text-indent: 0.19in;">
* * *</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 0.49in; text-indent: 0.19in;">
It is a simple fact of human nature: If having a child increases your
wealth, some people will have as many children as they can. It is
argued that women do not want to return to the era where they were
baby factories. Women today are far more interested in a career and
their own personal development. But this attitude is in an age where
Children = Poverty. In an AFFEERCE society, it is precisely the women
who do not have careers who will be enticed to increase their wealth
in the easiest way they can.</div>
<div align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 0.49in; text-indent: 0.19in;">
* * *</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 0.49in; text-indent: 0.19in;">
However, if we forego reproductive control, like the pigeons, the
population will grow exponentially. And even if the economy is able
to keep up, the limited resources of the earth will not.</div>
<div align="CENTER" style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 0.49in; text-indent: 0.19in;">
* * *</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 0.49in; text-indent: 0.19in;">
Now the taxpayer is assured the privilege of paying for nutritious
food for your child, and for the social worker who will make certain
you are feeding your child properly. But the social worker only comes
twice a month, and you can feed the kids well on those days. In the
meantime, you can get 75% on your link card for crack. Now the kids
are screaming because they’re hungry, but it doesn’t bother you.
You don’t have a care in the world, feeling oh so nice on the
taxpayer’s dime. You figure if you had enough kids, perhaps there
would be enough to get high every day of the month, and still fool
the social worker. What can citizens do to stop this theft?
Absolutely nothing! Families can churn out babies, one after another.
There is no recourse....</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: 0.19in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: 0.19in;">
Graubart himself
goes on—in quite head-scratching form—to apparently concede in
passing that all this loaded ideological language is a mere
“diatribe,” perhaps not to be taken as based on actual evidence
or logical necessity. But then he continues:</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: 0.19in;">
<br /></div>
<div align="LEFT" style="margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 0.49in; text-indent: 0.19in;">
But the diatribe is important because it is an archetype of the
truth. It is a fear hidden not far below the surface in many of us.
And in other countries, the truth is even more apparent. In India,
there are children who will blind or dismember themselves to increase
their chances of getting something to eat.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: 0.19in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: 0.19in;">
Um, so is it true,
or isn't it? Since his argument for the stark choice between
Reproductive Control and barbarism seems to hinge on it being
actually true and not just a useful myth, I will analyze it on the
assumption he actually means what he spent so much time saying.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: 0.19in;">
First of all, his
very model of a society in which households are polarized between
comfortable, educated people who exercise restraint and uneducated,
impoverished breeders desperate for the six hundred bucks each child
would bring, presumes—as I've already discussed at considerable
length—a society much like our own in many respects. But I think
it's much more likely a free society would be characterized by a more
nearly even distribution of wealth.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: 0.19in;">
Second, I'm
extremely skeptical that multi-generation families of welfare mothers
having children simply for the measly amount of income support they
bring from the state exist beyond the level of statistically
insignificant anecdotes. I think Graubart seriously underestimates
just how much personal effort and equity is entailed in carrying a
child to term for nine months and then spending years with a baby and
toddler in the house. And to the extent that there's a grain of truth
in it, it's only true because 1) the state has manufactured an
artificially large destitute underclass by forcibly shutting off
access to opportunities for production and comfortable subsistence;
and 2) there are people living with the almost unimaginable levels of
destitution that would make six hundred-odd bucks a month seem worth
the incredible personal investment of pregnancy and motherhood.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: 0.19in;">
To the extent that
this phenomenon really does exist, it results not from the incentives
of the welfare state (as described in neoconservative lore by Marvin
Olasky), but from the fact that northern cities were flooded by
former black sharecroppers who'd been tractored off their land after
WWII. They were essentially in the same predicament as the Okies
who'd fled to California half a generation earlier, only without even
the availability of migrant farm labor to make a living. In other
words, it wasn't the presence of the Great Society, but the absence
of forty acres and a mule, that created welfare families.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: 0.19in;">
Assuming a society
in which Graubart's Universal Entitlement is in place, and every
person already alive is guaranteed shelter, groceries, clothing and
healthcare far superior to what WISC or food stamps will afford
today, the incentive to have children for welfare money (to the
extent that it actually exists to a significant degree outside
fevered Tea Party imaginations) would be far less than at present.
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: 0.19in;">
In short, the
economic incentives that result in reduced birth rates in mature,
prosperous societies would remain largely intact or even be
strengthened. Reproductive Control is not the only alternative to
barbarism.<br />
<br />
<b>Conclusion. </b>For all my disagreements with this book, I do share one broad agreement with Graubart: the overall prosperity and happiness of a society in which subsistence no longer depends on one's willingness to accept work on whatever degrading and exploitative terms it is offered, in which people are free to exercise their full creative faculties taking advantage of productive opportunities afforded through association with their family, friends, neighbors and equals, where the labor threshold for comfortable subsistence is low and leisure is plentiful, where everyone sits under their own fig tree and vine and none makes them afraid.<br />
<br />
</div>
Kevin Carsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07525803609000364993noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10091452.post-48436066958230237242013-07-29T14:55:00.002-07:002013-07-29T15:30:27.462-07:00Radicalism in my roots?My sister and brother-in-law came up today to visit my mom in the hospital, and we got to talking afterward about our dad and his family.<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjJXG24dfT7XdwEQ-pvhZbs1y977ekBf9OreI5sfjb5_adj7rmLNc60mGJcIJaaPB8TpFvtgNWGc7eA_U3r6ftEHyXr_hENG90oqiUnkqriAoBbYVOCsh226lEx0vXGNBENxf71AA/s1600/27026782_121164640104.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjJXG24dfT7XdwEQ-pvhZbs1y977ekBf9OreI5sfjb5_adj7rmLNc60mGJcIJaaPB8TpFvtgNWGc7eA_U3r6ftEHyXr_hENG90oqiUnkqriAoBbYVOCsh226lEx0vXGNBENxf71AA/s1600/27026782_121164640104.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Amos Morgan Carson 1916-1979</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
She remembered, back when she was young and living at home, my dad telling her that Mother Jones had earned the respect and love of miners by devoting her life to fighting alongside them for their rights, and for the work she did to help strikers in need. She doesn't remember what spurred the conversation now, or why he would have had such a strong impression of her, but the question has intrigued me for a long time.<br />
<br />
He was born in Hartman, Colorado in 1916. My paternal grandfather moved to the Missouri Ozarks in 1921 with all his children (six or eight -- I've lost track). He died sometime the late '20s, I think, when my dad was twelve, and his mother's second husband pressured her to get the older kids out of the house. So my dad spent most of his time boarding and working as a hired hand at neighboring farms until his mother and step-father made him feel so unwelcome he migrated down into Arkansas and eventually married my mother.<br />
<br />
I really don't know anything about my paternal grandfather, or what his life had been like before he wound up having a son in Colorado. He was fairly well-read, and passed along a love of books to my dad. My dad's moldering set of Shakespeare, since lost to mice and mildew and multiple changes of residence, was originally his father's.<br />
<br />
And thinking about the whole Mother Jones thing, it seems pretty likely he would have been working in mining or some other extractive industry in the Colorado of 1916. 1916 wasn't long after the Copper Wars had ended in Colorado, with the governor declaring martial law and mine workers affiliated with the I.W.W. and other unions (Big Bill Haywood's Western Federation of Miners was the original core of the Wobblies) fighting pitched battles against state militia.<br />
<br />
And looking back on it, my dad's side of the family were classic textbook examples of the sort of people who made up the Wobblies in the first two decades of the 20th century. Aside from immigrant workers in New England mill towns, the I.W.W. was made up mostly of itinerant mine. lumber and migrant farm workers in the Plains and Rockies. The Wobblies spread like a religion out West in the mining and logging camps, and in harvesting gangs. The kinds of labor described in Woody Guthrie's song "<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kfq5b1bppJQ">Hard Travelin</a>'" will give you a good idea.<br />
<br />
As soon as they got old enough to leave home, all my dad's siblings wound up gravitating back West, spread out through the Rockies and Alaska.<br />
<br />
And there has always been an unusual strain of radicalism among them. His sister Isabel used to be a communist (during an extended visit in the 1950s, she and her husband raised eyebrows by having the Daily Worker or whatever it was called at the time delivered to my parents' address). His sister Ruth married a guy who'd been heavily involved in organizing the shipbuilder's union in the CIO on the West Coast in the '30s, and had been knocked unconscious fighting cops during an organizing strike.<br />
<br />
Unfortunately, everything now is entirely a matter for speculation. All my father's siblings are dead, and years ago when I asked the last surviving one, his younger brother John, he couldn't remember much about their father's life before he moved to the Ozarks. <br />
<br />Kevin Carsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07525803609000364993noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10091452.post-40425354186347884112012-11-01T14:21:00.001-07:002012-11-01T14:21:33.996-07:00My Trip to the County Courthouse, by Kevin A. CarsonI just finished negotiating the bureaucracy at the Washington County Arkansas courthouse in order to get my mom an absentee ballot.<br />
<br />
Both yesterday (when I picked up the application) and today (when I picked up the actual ballot), I had difficulty parking because of all the political campaign workers (including some of the politicians themselves) standing around with signs and obstructing the drive-thru area. I actually had to circle around and pass up empty spaces because the people holding signs didn't give me room enough to maneuver and pull into the spaces at the proper angle.<br />
<br />
On the plus side, one of the people holding a sign was mayor Lioneld Jordan. It's not every day you get to glare at a mayor and refuse to shake his hand. <br />
<br />
Inside, I had the joy of going through Security Theater with a metal detector staffed by County Sheriff's Department deputies, taking off my belt and handing over my phone, keys and wallet. First of all, nobody in Al Qaeda is going to bother blowing up some chickenshit county courthouse in Arkansas. And second, if they did they'd be smart enough to find a way around that perfunctory bullshit.<br />
<br />
Mayor Jordan and his campaign staff had apparently been taking in my (pro-gun, pro-drug,
anti-police, anti-publik skool, anti-Walmart, pro-anarchist and
pro-Wobbly) bumper stickers while I was in the building, because I was spared any attempted gladhanding on the way out.<br />
<br />
Aside from that, my only inconvenience was finding parking at the brew pub (thanks to some wonderful folks playing the game of "make the neighboring parking space unusable as possible while technically keeping within the lines"). And now I'm working on my first IPA, getting ready to write some columns, and trying to rinse the memory of my "public servants" out of my mind.<br />
<br />
<br />Kevin Carsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07525803609000364993noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10091452.post-64920141114863873442012-08-03T13:24:00.002-07:002012-08-03T13:24:39.918-07:00Mutualism QueenslandI've been remiss in updating my links for a long time, but you should check out Lillian Geddes' <a href="http://mutualismqueensland.wordpress.com/">Mutualism Queensland</a> blog. She's a mutualist writer in Australia.Kevin Carsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07525803609000364993noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10091452.post-16691229060799551882012-06-08T20:52:00.000-07:002012-06-08T20:52:25.401-07:00Small Business Survey: Licensing and Regulations Trump Local Tax RatesI recently got some interesting information about a small business survey from Sander Daniels:<br />
<br />
I'm Sander Daniels, co-founder of Thumbtack.com - we're a site where you
can easily hire local help (photographers, tutors, carpenters, etc.).
We've partnered with the Kauffman Foundation to conduct a survey of
6,000 of the small businesses on our site. We've ranked the friendliness
of states and cities towards small business, and we're releasing the
results this Tuesday, 5/8.<br />
<br />
You can see the beta preview of the results <a href="http://www.thumbtack.com/survey" target="_blank">here</a> and a methodology and analysis paper <a href="http://cdn-1.thumbtackstatic.com/media/_survey/ThumbtackSurveyMethodology.pdf" target="_blank">here</a>.<br />
<br />
Here are some of the survey's most interesting findings:
<br />
<ul>
<li>
Small businesses care almost twice as much about licensing regulations
as they do about tax rates when rating the business-friendliness of
their state or local government.</li>
<li>
An important predictor of small business friendliness was whether
small business owners are aware of their state or local government
offering training programs for small businesses.</li>
<li>
Small business owners ranked <a href="http://www.thumbtack.com/id" target="_blank">Idaho</a> and <a href="http://www.thumbtack.com/tx" target="_blank">Texas</a> as the most business-friendly states, with <a href="http://www.thumbtack.com/ok/oklahoma-city" target="_blank">Oklahoma City</a> and <a href="http://www.thumbtack.com/tx/dallas" target="_blank">Dallas-Ft. Worth</a> taking top honors among cities across the nation. <a href="http://www.thumbtack.com/vt" target="_blank">Vermont</a> and <a href="http://www.thumbtack.com/ri" target="_blank">Rhode Island</a> found themselves on the opposite end of the spectrum, joined in the bottom-five by <a href="http://www.thumbtack.com/ny" target="_blank">New York</a> and <a href="http://www.thumbtack.com/ca" target="_blank">California</a>.</li>
</ul>
Every city and state has its own page with a visualization of that
location's full results - you should check out some of the links above
to see what I mean.<br />
<br />
The rankings are based on a survey of real small business owners, like
wedding photographers, auto mechanics, and yoga instructors.Kevin Carsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07525803609000364993noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10091452.post-66179821954269600112012-01-13T12:09:00.000-08:002012-01-13T12:13:50.730-08:00New MIcropayment System at C4SS<a href="http://c4ss.org">Center for a Stateless Society</a> (c4SS) has switched to a new method of paying contributors. There's a Flattr button at the top of every column. So if you like what you're reading and you have a Flattr account, you can simply click the button and make a one-time payment of any size you like (even just a dollar) to support the writer.Kevin Carsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07525803609000364993noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10091452.post-51459197061362776002011-12-12T13:47:00.000-08:002011-12-12T13:49:49.789-08:00Call Emory Campus Police to Protest Arrest of Joe DiazPlease call and email to protest the arrest of Joe Diaz, a PhD student at Emory University, who was brutally assaulted in the University Library by campus police, arrested, and held under degrading and punitive conditions. In the library he saw his diminutive friend Alice, surrounded by hulking uniformed officers standing over her as she sat peacefully on the floor. As you can see in the video, he stepped in in a non-confrontational manner, identified himself, and asked if his friend was OK. It immediately escalated into a violent confrontation, initiated by the police, who might have following the script of soldiers storming a living room in a house-to-house search of occupied Baghdad. The cop's behavior was that of an Alpha Male dog confronting someone who didn't roll over and show their belly fast enough.<br /><br />As you can see in the video, Joe did not obstruct police business. That accusation was a lie, coming from someone so hyped on his own adrenaline and authority that he could see only a red haze before his eyes. Joe was not resisting. That was another obvious lie barked by the snarling animal in uniform. The cops also lied when they said it was illegal to videotape them, and when they accused those recording them of having a camera "in my face" -- but that lie's standard police operating procedure, repeated as a matter of course regardless of what "the law" is. Because, you see, "the law" only applies to people who aren't wearing uniforms and carrying guns.<br /><br />Here's Joe's <a href="http://dirtseyeview.wordpress.com/2011/12/08/libraryarrest/%20">written account</a> of the events. Here's the <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZ6KwGuqLVA">video</a>.<br /><br />What have things come to, when a campus police force dealing with peaceful students in a library behave like Nazi soldiers dealing with an occupied population? Thirty years of the Drug War and SWAT team militarization have bred up uniformed beasts of prey in our midst.<br /><br />I've aready written before, in the case of UC Davis thug John Pike, of the power of viral video for holding these cockroaches up to the light of day. Please help me give the Emory thugs the <a href="http://c4ss.org/content/9012">John Pike treatment</a>.<br /><br />Please call and/or email the Emory Campus Police to demand an end to such behavior, and please circulate this message as widely as possible.<br /><br />Emory Campus Police email: Police@emory.edu<br /><br />Emory Campus Police email: (404) 727-6115Kevin Carsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07525803609000364993noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10091452.post-45436588399038077152011-11-21T23:51:00.000-08:002011-11-22T00:03:15.453-08:00Know Your Enemy<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh_JE5Fj1sx0geh6R1a5Ev8X37R2NnlNCLj4F4fBqCNQb3oMIWCyoqgcmcWn4Qk55fjW5HO-jFDU7fIbLoc1JEyzRtwLSRFoIuXFxUXPgO8RyLV52rJB2ipumitEodoT4WNOCWHSA/s1600/Pike_W.jpg"><img style="float: right; margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; cursor: pointer; width: 216px; height: 295px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh_JE5Fj1sx0geh6R1a5Ev8X37R2NnlNCLj4F4fBqCNQb3oMIWCyoqgcmcWn4Qk55fjW5HO-jFDU7fIbLoc1JEyzRtwLSRFoIuXFxUXPgO8RyLV52rJB2ipumitEodoT4WNOCWHSA/s320/Pike_W.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5677726201773231410" border="0" /></a>"One of the officers began to remove us physically without the use of weapons. And Lieutenant John Pike ordered them to stop, raising his pepper can and saying ... '<a href="http://vimeo.com/32389739">Leave them. I want to spray these kids</a>.'"<br /><blockquote>Behold, thou hast driven me out this day from the face of the earth; and from thy face shall I be hid; and I shall be a fugitive and a vagabond in the earth...</blockquote>Lieutenant. John Pike<br />Records Unit Manager<br />Phone: 530-752-3989<br />Cell: 530-979-0184<br />Skype: japike3<br />email id: <a href="mailto:japikeiii@ucdavis.edu" class="ot-anchor">japikeiii@ucdavis.edu</a><br />Address: 4005 Cowell Boulevard, Apartment No 616. Davis,<br />CA 95618-6017.<br />LinkedIn Account: <a href="http://www.linkedin.com/pub/john-pike/18/a76/879" class="ot-anchor">http://www.linkedin.com/pub/john-pike/18/a76/879</a>Kevin Carsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07525803609000364993noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10091452.post-40989510193164466082011-11-15T00:11:00.000-08:002011-11-15T00:51:54.731-08:00NYPD Gestapo Shutting Down OWS. Shut Down NYPD!NYPD Whiteshirt Gestapo are <a href="http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-201_162-57324763/riot-police-surround-occupy-wall-street-camp/">raiding Zuccotti Park</a> on orders from Bloomberg, evicting protestors, conducting mass arrests.<br /><br />Let's shut down the NYC government. Swarm the phone lines, emails and faxes of the Mayor's office and NYPD.<br /><br />For starters:<br /><br />Bloomberg's email: <a href="http://www.linkedin.com/redirect?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww%2Enyc%2Egov%2Fhtml%2Fmail%2Fhtml%2Fmayor%2Ehtml&urlhash=WT9g&_t=tracking_anet" rel="nofollow" target="blank">http://www.nyc.gov/html/mail/html/mayor.html</a><br />Bloomberg's Fax: (212) 312-0700<br />NYPD 1st precinct: (212) 334-0611<br /><strong style="font-weight: normal;">NYPD Central Booking:</strong> (718) 875-6303<br /><strong style="font-weight: normal;">NYPD Internal Affairs:</strong> (212) 487-7350<br /><strong style="font-weight: normal;">City Hall: (212) 788-3058</strong><br /><br />Circulate this far and wide, jam the city government's phone lines, and demand Bloomberg's thugs STAND DOWN NOW!Kevin Carsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07525803609000364993noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10091452.post-26923602075569042332011-11-10T23:55:00.000-08:002011-11-10T23:57:13.633-08:00Happy Veterans Day<iframe src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/YKfwwlEcowk" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" width="420"></iframe><br /><br />It was just before dawn<br />One miserable morning in black 'forty four.<br />When the forward commander<br />Was told to sit tight<br />When he asked that his men be withdrawn.<br />And the Generals gave thanks<br />As the other ranks held back<br />The enemy tanks for a while.<br />And the Anzio bridgehead<br />Was held for the price<br />Of a few hundred ordinary lives.<br /><br />And kind old King George<br />Sent Mother a note<br />When he heard that father was gone.<br />It was, I recall,<br />In the form of a scroll,<br />With gold leaf and all.<br />And I found it one day<br />In a drawer of old photographs, hidden away.<br />And my eyes still grow damp to remember<br />His Majesty signed<br />With his own rubber stamp.<br /><br />It was dark all around.<br />There was frost in the ground<br />When the tigers broke free.<br />And no one survived<br />From the Royal Fusiliers Company C.<br />They were all left behind,<br />Most of them dead,<br />The rest of them dying.<br />And that's how the High Command<br />Took my daddy from me.Kevin Carsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07525803609000364993noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10091452.post-51105484996004586552011-11-03T00:16:00.000-07:002011-11-03T00:18:00.664-07:00When YouTube's Advertising Algorithm Goes AwryThe ad next to <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCkXEWBWOss">this video</a> was: "Earn a Bible Degree."Kevin Carsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07525803609000364993noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10091452.post-90282754146949651472011-10-28T19:47:00.001-07:002011-10-28T19:55:38.305-07:00Property is Theft! A Proudhon Anthology<a style="font-weight: bold;" href="http://www.akpress.org/2010/items/propertyistheftakpress"><span style="font-style: italic;">Property is Theft! A Pierre-Joseph Proudhon Anthology</span>. Edited by Iain McKay (AK Press, 2011). </a><br /><br />Every time I look through this book, I'm amazed at the sheer amount and quality of material in it, and the scholarly apparatus included with it. <br /><br />As I keep telling people, the last major Proudhon anthology out there -- if you can call it that -- was Stewart Edwards' <span style="font-style: italic;">Selected Writings of P. J. Proudhon</span>. Calling <span style="font-style: italic;">Selected Writings</span> an anthology is generous. Its format was actually more like that of Bartlett's <span style="font-style: italic;">Familiar Quotations</span>, with a long series of short excerpts from assorted works grouped together under topic headings. It totalled 262 pages, which meant that even if someone took the trouble to assemble all the scattered excerpts from any particular book in order in a single place, the result would hardly qualify as an abridgement. <br /><br />On the other hand, this effort by Iain McKay -- widely familiar as the principal author of <a href="http://infoshop.org/page/AnAnarchistFAQ"><span style="font-style: italic;">An Anarchist FAQ</span></a> -- is over 800 pages, with almost twice as many words per page. It includes modestly abridged versions of almost all of Proudhon's major works, along with dozens of shorter works in their entirety. The abridgements of longer works include <span style="font-style: italic;">What is Property?</span>, both volumes of <span style="font-style: italic;">System of Economic Contradictions</span>, <span style="font-style: italic;">Solution of the Social Problem</span>, <span style="font-style: italic;">Organisation of Credit and Circulation</span>, <span style="font-style: italic;">Bank of the People</span>, <span style="font-style: italic;">Confessions of a Revolutionary</span>, <span style="font-style: italic;">Interest and Principal</span>, <span style="font-style: italic;">General Idea of the Revolution</span>, <span style="font-style: italic;">The Federative Principle</span>, <span style="font-style: italic;">The Political Capacity of the Working Classes</span>, and <span style="font-style: italic;">The Theory of Property</span>. The excerpted material from <span style="font-style: italic;">General Idea of the Revolution</span>, for example, is over fifty pages, and over forty pages are excerpted from <span style="font-style: italic;">Political Capacity of the Working Classes</span>.<br /><br />A considerable portion of the material is in English translation for the first time, some of it translated by Proudhon scholar <a href="http://libertarian-labyrinth.blogspot.com/">Shawn Wilbur</a>.<br /><br />Iain McKay's fifty-page Introduction is not only a studied bibliographic essay on Proudhon, but also a closely argued thesis regarding the place of markets in the anarchist movement and anarchism in the socialist movement. As such, it is the latest contribution to the ongoing and often heated "Who is an anarchist?" debates, and will no doubt attract careful attention from my market anarchist comrades at <a href="http://c4ss.org">Center for a Stateless Society</a>.<br /><br />Edwards' venture at a Proudhon anthology, for better or worse, was pretty much it for thirty years or so. I expect this one will stand -- far more deservedly -- as the standard anthology for at least that long.Kevin Carsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07525803609000364993noreply@blogger.com13tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10091452.post-33025889007661274102011-10-16T23:15:00.000-07:002011-10-16T23:22:49.449-07:00Alleluia, Nunc Dimittis, and Glory Be!<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgBCnYUPDKtqSx0C4uddiValVNcWbygPuicyR4dL7M5uJ-XiD3VMluG-TQqxyRKWf6FxdBdRhqrjAt3w4vpy3xlO0UUrJuNikNEzGuP-uQ9Si_B15oqqu87B0s5GlrvxnwHTuCF6Q/s1600/alice-walton-mug-shot_360x477.jpg"><img style="float: right; margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; cursor: pointer; width: 242px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgBCnYUPDKtqSx0C4uddiValVNcWbygPuicyR4dL7M5uJ-XiD3VMluG-TQqxyRKWf6FxdBdRhqrjAt3w4vpy3xlO0UUrJuNikNEzGuP-uQ9Si_B15oqqu87B0s5GlrvxnwHTuCF6Q/s320/alice-walton-mug-shot_360x477.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5664342644268570514" border="0" /></a><br /><a href="http://www.parkercountytx.com/JudicialSearch/Scripts/UVlink.isa/parker/WEBSERV/JailSearch?action%253Dview%26track%253D256067862">Something to celebrate</a>, in the five-thousand-year war between the people who own the world and the people who live in it. <a href="http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/02/northwest-arkansas-blogging-on.html">Read here</a> if you want to know why I'm so happy.Kevin Carsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07525803609000364993noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10091452.post-41081167066589748052011-10-06T19:20:00.000-07:002011-10-06T19:31:49.956-07:00Fourth Quarter 2011 C4SS FundraiserThe <a href="http://c4ss.org">Center for a Stateless Society (C4SS)</a> just began its Fourth Quarter Fundraiser. It's a pretty big target, since it includes a rollover of all our shortfalls for the previous fundraisers. <br /><br />The rate of contributions has fallen way, way down over the last year or so, even as the readership continues, presumably either because former contributors no longer consider us worth supporting or because they're no longer able to do so. So we've been working mostly for free -- getting considerably less than half our pay -- for a long time. <br /><br />The thing is, C4SS will keep on going no matter what. We keep writing -- and doing our media relations, social media, and other work -- regardless of whether we get paid, because we believe in it. Our director, Brad Spangler, doesn't get any pay at all, aside from coverage of bare webhosting costs he pays. Our media director, Tom Knapp, usually gives back a considerable portion of his salary. And with my actual pay down to about a hundred or less a month on average, I'm still contributing $20 a month to the fundraiser. <br /><br />If you can't afford to contribute, or don't like most of what we do, you obviously have no obligation to support us. But if you're one of the people who used to contribute, just fell out of the habit, and can still afford to do so, please consider helping us out again on a regular basis. <br /><br />You can donate <a href="http://c4ss.org/support-the-center">here</a>.Kevin Carsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07525803609000364993noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10091452.post-88799694120759463562011-09-19T23:53:00.000-07:002011-09-20T01:52:20.220-07:00Why Hierarchy Creates ClusterfucksAt <a href="http://highclearing.com/index.php/archives/2011/09/16/13653">Unqualified Offerings</a>, thoreau devotes a post to "an important point about organizing a bureaucratic organization." Most of my post will consist of the money quote from thoreau's original, inspired piece, and a digest of the debate that ensued in the comment thread. My development of the issues, which follows, is a minority of the whole thing. But I strongly recommend you read the first part in full, because it's one of the most intellectually engaging debates I've read in a long time.<br /><br />Thoreau, in the body of his post:<br /><blockquote>If you make it costly to go through Official Channels, people will find ways to do things outside of Official Channels. Most of what they do will be harmless. However, some of it won’t be. By driving the activity underground you guarantee the following: <p>1) Harmful activities will not be spotted except through chance or when there’s An Incident. And we all know what bureaucracies do when there’s An Incident.</p> <p>2) There will be no chance to work with people on making their activities safe, because they won’t come to you in advance. The only chance you’ll have to talk to them is when they get caught by chance (at which point they’ll be more focused on doing a better job of keeping secrets) or when there’s An Incident (at which point their main concern will be deflection of blame).</p> <p>3) The institutional culture will develop an even greater disdain for Rules and even (in many cases) for Safety. Given the realities of how these things work out so frequently, disdain for Rules and even Safety (in most cases) is largely a healthy thing. However, to the extent that a bureaucrat actually values these things, that bureaucrat should try to make it so that doing things through Official Channels is cheaper than skipping Official Channels. That’s your only hope of getting people to actually respect these things. Well, there’s also fear, but fear isn’t respect. It’s mindless, panicked compliance, and it can fade over time, or motivate people to find even better evasive tactics.</p> <p>Another thought on when there’s An Incident: Besides all of the usual problems with incentives and information in large institutions, it occurs to me that size guarantees that the people responsible for Safety, Compliance, and related matters will be separated from the people on the ground doing whatever it is that the organization is allegedly there to do. Consequently, the person who enforces a ridiculous rule, or who makes you sit through a useless presentation full of statements that are at best insulting and at worst factually wrong, will not be having lunch with you. Often the local enforcers (especially people whose primary task is something other than Safety) are more reasonable than the distant enforcers because, frankly, they need to be. Yes, their access to local information leads to smarter decisions, and they have at least some sort of incentive to see that the job gets done (whereas the distant enforcers only care about Compliance). But they also can’t afford to piss everyone else off (too much) because they will be having lunch with everyone else. If they insult everyone else with a boring and factually wrong Powerpoint, they’ll be ostracized.</p></blockquote><p></p><p>This elicited an immediate response from <a href="http://rabett.blogspot.com/">Eli Rabett</a> -- the first in the comment thread:</p><p></p><blockquote><p>Obviously you never had to clean up after a big one, like one where a) people get seriously hurt and b) the potential for more to get hurt and buildings to go blooey is not zero.</p> <p>Let Eli tell you a story about a physicist who thought he knew what he was doing, and was sucking silane into a cryopump, until the pump blew up and took most of a student’s hearing and almost the student, and there was a second cryopump in the system that had not YET blown up.</p> <p>Clowns who think safety is a joke are auditioning for a Darwin test.</p></blockquote><p></p>As you might expect, a vigorous debate ensued. First, thoreau's rejoinder:<br /><blockquote>I don’t think that safety in the lab is a joke, Eli. <p>I think that most of the safety training sessions that I’ve sat through were worthless, that many of the procedures are more focused on covering bureaucratic ass than on helping people do things safely, and that anybody who relies on the safety officers to tell him how to be safe (as opposed to learning everything he can about the apparatus that he’s using, and learning from other people’s experiences with similar apparatuses) is the one auditioning for a Darwin Award.</p> <p>I think that clowns who say “Look! Somebody almost died in some other context!” as soon as somebody criticizes a safety rule (I’ve dealt with such people) are the ones who lack the critical thinking ability to think through a situation and make good choices.</p> <p>A student once left a harmless chemical in a refrigerator that had food. This refrigerator was NOT in a lab. Again, the refrigerator was NOT in a lab. Please re-read that sentence as many times as you deem necessary.</p> <p>I will be the first to say that the student should be severely chastised and learn a very harsh lesson. Not because there was anything remotely dangerous about the situation, but because the student needs to learn good habits if he is going to avoid truly dangerous situations. (In fact, I was hoping that Samuel L. Jackson might get involved, and say something about the path of the righteous man, just to really make the lesson as dramatic as possible.)</p> <p>Instead, the response was to take away the refrigerator. A refrigerator that was NOT in a laboratory room. A refrigerator that was in fact in an office. One joker even tried to ban food from the room before I pushed back. Again, the room was NOT a laboratory. It was a shared office area.</p> <p>And when I said that this was stupid, do you know what the response was? Some idiot pointed out that a student had died in a fire in a chemistry lab at another school. As if that had anything to do with this.</p> <p>What did the student learn? The student learned that if you get caught people will do stupid things. The teachable moment was tainted.</p> <p>At this point it is customary for somebody to point out that a person once died or nearly died in some other situation. As if that had anything to do with this....</p></blockquote><p></p><p>And of course, I had to jump in:</p><p> </p><blockquote><p>The point is not that safety considerations are a joke. It’s that if pointy-haired bosses several steps of bureaucratic hierarchy removed from the actual situation make safety rules that are effective, it will be by accident. </p><p>The best preventative measure against the kind of incident you described would have been collective policing within the department, by colleagues who actually understood the technical issues involved. If the physicist who thought he knew what he was doing really didn’t, what makes you think some fucking pointy-haired boss insulated from direct contact with the situation by several layers of bureaucracy <em>would</em> know?</p> <p>Ever play the telephone game? It results in fucked up communication filtering even without power relationships coming into consideration. As R. A. Wilson pointed out, hierarchies are a cybernetic nightmare with one-way information flow.<br /></p><p>Information is systematically filtered as it travels up a hierarchy, because power relationships distort communications. Everyone self-censors in talking to a superior, so that the person at the top of a hierarchy lives in a completely imaginary world. According to Wilson, rational behavior requires accurate feedback about the actual effects of one’s decisions — i.e., two-way communications between equals. A decision-maker who is cut off from accurate feedback by the unidirectional communication in a hierarchy becomes functionally insane.<br /></p> <p>In short: a boss or bureaucrat wouldn’t know an effective safety rule if it bit him on the ass.</p></blockquote><p></p>Let me pause here to insert <a href="http://www.deepleafproductions.com/wilsonlibrary/texts/raw-marquis.html">Wilson's remarks on Proudhon</a>, because they're so damned brilliant.<br /><blockquote>A civilization based on authority-and-submission is a civilization without the means of self-correction. Effective communication flows only one way: from master-group to servile-group. Any cyberneticist knows that such a one-way communication channel lacks feedback and cannot behave "intelligently."<br /><br />The epitome of authority-and-submission is the Army, and the control-and-communication network of the Army has every defect a cyberneticist's nightmare could conjure. Its typical patterns of behavior are immortalized in folklore as SNAFU (situation normal—all fucked-up), FUBAR (fucked-up beyond all redemption) and TARFU (Things are really fucked-up). In less extreme, but equally nosologic, form these are the typical conditions of any authoritarian group, be it a corporation, a nation, a family, or a whole civilization.</blockquote>Or as he put it in <span style="font-style: italic;">Illuminatus!</span>:<br /><blockquote>A man with a gun is told only that which people assume will not provoke him to pull the trigger [<span style="font-style: italic;">or fire them</span>--K.C.]. Since all authority and government are based on force, the master class, with its burden of omniscience, faces the servile class, with its burden of nescience, precisely as a highwayman faces his victim. Communication is possible only between equals. The master class never abstracts enough information from the servile class to know what is actually going on in the world where the actual productivity of society occurs.... The result can only be progressive deterioration among the rulers.</blockquote><br />The innominate one added some experiences of his/her own illustrating the idiocy of the bureaucratic safety process:<p></p><blockquote><p>Our yearly safety training meetings are heavy on chemical hazards, despite the fact that our university has a web-based centralized inventory records system for hazardous chemicals. So, in theory, the safety people could do what I suggested in writing year before last and check the chemical inventory of all labs in our department and then tailor the safety training meeting to something useful. Guess what didn’t happen. We heard the same spiel about hydrofluoric acid and P-listed wastes (no definition or explanation of what the hell a P-listed waste is). We’re a biology department, heavy on ecologists. I bet no one in our department uses that crap.</p> <p>This year, at least, they added a section on dealing with biohazardous wastes, which if memory serves was another suggestion I made two years ago (though this might be a memory of convenience). However, we are still instructed to dispose of materials which are not biohazardous in the biohazardous waste disposal, which is a waste (no pun intended) of money.</p> <p>I did learn from the biohazard disposal training that all rDNA organisms must be deactivated before disposal. No definition of what an rDNA organism is was provided. After the lesson I asked the obviously clueless trainer for a definition and he stated that he thought it was an organism with ribosomal DNA. I said, so, all organisms everywhere? But not viruses, which arguably aren’t organisms and definitely don’t have ribosomal DNA. Viruses must not need to be deactivated before disposal.</p></blockquote><p></p><p>Eli made it clear he wasn't having any of it:</p><p></p><blockquote><p>1. There was NO ONE in the department who understood the danger. When the EE and I on the investigation committee heard about what was being done we turned white and he is black. We also closed the lab down immediately because of the remaining pump.</p> <p>This later became an issue years later when the clown sued for persecution. As it happened I had retained the investigation report, so yes, record keeping is important.</p> <p>2. It is the responsibility of the DEPARTMENT to work with the ES&H office to tailor safety training to risks in the department.</p> <p>3. On the refrigerator thing, you can look at it another way. From the viewpoint of ES&H it had already been shown that there was a failure of safety training, and given that safety for undergrads should be much more failsafe, the fridge was a risk. You had to do much more than say we ain’t gonna do it again to get that fridge back.</p> <p>4. A lot of this is the same idiocy as the PFM thing. If you want safety training to be tailored, you are going to have to work with the safety trainers. That means hours of soul deadening meetings, written reports, taking responsibility if bad things happen (we said do it this way and we were wrong) and more.</p> <p>You guys appear to think that Osha is a village in Wisconsin....</p><p>5. Think of it as training your students for industrial and government lab jobs.</p></blockquote><p></p><p>The innominate one explained what "working with the safety trainers to tailor safety training" translated to, in practice:</p><p></p><blockquote><p>“It is the responsibility of the DEPARTMENT to work with the ES&H office to tailor safety training to risks in the department.”</p> <p>ES&H has to be willing to do so. Since ES&H has responsibility for conducting safety training, why don’t they take the initiative in getting the department to work with them to customize the training into something useful? I bet it’s because:</p> <p>1. most ES&H people aren’t hired with an eye toward having expertise in the various areas needed to be aware of safety concerns in such differing areas as chemistry, biology and physics (not even counting the range of variation within just one of those sciences)</p> <p>2. in my experience most ES&H people don’t know anything more than what the regulations are, no real lab experience. As an example, I refer you to my anecdote above about rDNA organism deactivation.</p> <p>3. it’s easier to just keep doing what you’re doing and give the same, general training instead of doing the work to develop customized training. just do the same thing that’s always been done, and your ass is covered until someone screws the pooch, then just add a few minutes to your training session the next time to explain the newly discovered problem.</p> <p>Hey, you want to see some truly useless training? Get MSHA safety certification.</p></blockquote><p></p><p>And thoreau added some comments on the same theme:</p><p></p><blockquote><p>Your attitude seems to be that we exist to serve the safety office, not that the safety office exists to serve us.... </p><p>A system where the Safety Office provides training that is unresponsive and useless (as in TIO’s case), and where they recommend unnecessary, expensive, and possibly even inadequate procedures (e.g. TIO’s example of treating chemical waste as biohazardous waste, despite the differences between the two types) is a system that will NOT lead to safe outcomes. It will NOT avoid An Incident. I care about safety enough to want intelligent rules that lead to safe practices. I care enough about safety to want teachable moments to be used productively. </p><p>In my example, I was not the one primarily interacting with the students who put the chemicals in the fridge–I only got involved because the fridge was in an office that my students shared with the students in question–and I was out of town when it happened (so I was putting out fires via email). Had I been in front of the students, I would have delivered a lesson on habits, and how they were lucky that it was a completely benign chemical in a sealed container. I would have pointed out what could have happened if they had gotten into the habit of putting chemicals next to food, what could have happened if they did not have well-honed habits and multiple layers of safeguards. And then I would have read them the riot act and pointed out the other things that could have gone wrong, i.e. the possible administrative consequences. In other words, I would have been factual rather than capricious.</p> <p>I could give other examples where I’ve seen IT, Conference Services, and other support departments act like we exist to serve them, and make cooperation expensive, and the consequence has been that people keep their activities (mostly harmless, but not always) hidden. You can take the moral stance that we just ought to do things the right way, and you aren’t even wrong. However, you are not designing a system with incentives that get good results from real people in the real world.</p></blockquote><p></p><p>Since we were all sharing stories about specific examples of Pointy-Haired Bossism in the safety field, I reentered the fray with some juicy ones of my own:</p><p></p><blockquote><p>I’ll give a couple examples of my own.</p> <p>At the hospital where I work the Infection Control policy is to wear gowns and gloves in the rooms of patients on contact isolation (as well as masks if it’s droplet isolation). But when we transport them through the halls, the patients are not to wear isolation gear of any kind. Why? It might alarm visitors and other patients.</p> <p>The written policy re masks for droplet isolation is to wear them at all times in the room. Then take them off outside the room and deposit them in the trash can outside the door. After all, it wouldn’t make much sense to wear the mask in the room till you finished your task, and then take it off and walk the eight feet from the patient’s trash can to the door unprotected — right? Only we don’t have trash cans outside the door, because there are extremely detailed bureaucratic rules on what can be in the halls — it’s a JCAHO fire safety thing. </p> <p>I would also add that the safety departments in most large organizations are a stovepiped bureaucracy whose policies aren’t coordinated with those of the other bureaucracies. Their main purpose is to have a safety policy on paper so their asses are covered, and they can point to it to impress the visiting JCAHO inspectors (who, despite supposedly accrediting hospitals for safety and quality, never <span style="font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;">never</span> ask how the patient care floors are staffed).</p> <p>Meanwhile, on the patient care floors, the orderlies have ten or upwards patients apiece, and nurses stay over two or three hours finishing paperwork they couldn’t get done on-shift because of patient load and acuity. Half our patients have bed alarms because they are confused and get up by themselves. Now, imagine that you’re one of two orderlies on a floor with 20 patients, your coworker is tearing her hair out trying to run to three call lights at once, and you’re tied up in with a patient on contact isolation. If several bed alarms start going off around the floor, and you’ve got to get out of the isolation room and get to them before the patients fall down and crack their skulls, what’s gonna give? If you guessed “handwashing and other contact precautions,” you win the kewpie doll!</p> <p>I’ll close with an example from the news. Several years back a PETA activist took a job undercover at Tyson and filmed chickens being manually decapitated when the machines got jammed up. The boys in the C-suite (of course) screamed “Foul!” and pointed to their written policies and training films on humane measures that prohibited manual decapitation. “But we have a written policy! We <em>told</em> him!”</p> <p>The PETA activist said, yeah, I saw those films. And then my supervisor told me, when the machine’s jammed, this is how we do it manually (wink, nudge). But all that mattered was that senior management’s asses were covered because they had a <span style="font-style: italic;">written policy</span>.</p> <p>Auschwitz probably had a “written policy” against killing Jews.</p></blockquote><p></p><p>Poor Eli, having suffered about all the abuse he was willing to take, took a Parthian shot:</p><p></p><blockquote><p>No, Eli’s attitude is that you, or your students can not exist if you don’t have a functioning safety culture. </p> <p>Let me tell you a story about a long time friend and megabigshot who told Eli what he did on his first day of retirement. He said: “I went to my new office which they gave me for being emeritus, I put up my feet on the desk and relaxed and gave thanks that none of my students or co-workers had ever been hurt when I was in charge.”</p> <p>Running a lab is an immense responsibility for the lives and safety of others and the kind of attitudes being displayed here are invitations to disaster. The tension is that you can’t have a failsafe environment, but have to build on and rely on good judgement for many things. The mismatch with ES&H is that they are built to ensure failsafe.</p></blockquote><p></p><p>And thoreau presented the closing argument for the prosecution:</p><p></p><blockquote><p>So, let’s talk about the attitudes that we’ve been displaying toward safety:</p> <p>1) In the refrigerator incident, I specifically said that instead of insulting the students’ intelligence and pretending that the chemical in question was dangerous, we should have made it clear that the HABITS (i.e. part of a functioning safety culture) that they were displaying were dangerous. The reason to never, ever leave any chemicals in the fridge, even benign ones, is that it develops a bad habit.</p> <p>So far, I’m all about safety culture.</p> <p>2) Several of us said that safety training sessions should focus on things that are actually relevant to the real hazards in the department. This way people see the safety training as something useful, rather than a wasted hour. Again, a functioning safety culture requires productive discussions of safety issues.</p> <p>3) TIO pointed out that EH&S couldn’t even be bothered to consult an existing chemicals inventory, to make sure that the actual chemical hazards in the department were addressed. Paying attention to documented hazards is another important part of a functioning safety culture.</p> <p>4) TIO also pointed out that EH&S urged a blanket policy of disposing of everything as biohazardous. In a functioning safety culture, you sort out materials according to hazard type and dispose of each accordingly, rather than mixing different categories.</p> <p>5) Kevin Carson pointed out a complete lack of attention to critical chokepoints in the safety procedures at his hospital, specifically inadequate staffing. In a lab, the number one rule is never work alone. In a larger operation, the generalization of that rule would be to never work when there are too few people to address a dangerous situation. Again, safety culture.</p> <p>6) I specifically said that a person using a piece of equipment has an obligation to research that piece of equipment, and learn about hazards that others have encountered with similar equipment, rather than relying on that 1 hour powerpoint presentation. Again, that’s part of a functioning safety culture.</p> <p>Your only point in this entire thread has been that we should have more respect for the bureaucracy, even though we have repeatedly given examples of how bureaucratic thinking was at best orthogonal to good safety culture and at worst counter-productive.</p> <p>Maybe your EH&S department is so superbly competent and useful that you cannot imagine any of the problems that we have described. Or maybe you are having an affair with the head of EH&S at your institution and consequently you cannot tolerate any criticism of the person supplying you with blowjobs. Either way, you need to stop and actually think about the experiences that we are describing.</p></blockquote><p></p><p>Now, this is going to be me typing from here on out.</p><p>I think Eli writes from an implicit Weberian/Taylorist perspective embedded in the original Progressivist ideology of the early 20th century, which was very heavy on apolitical, immaculate expertise as a way of transcending the irrationality of "mere" politics and class conflict. See, for example, <a href="http://c4ss.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/Thermidor-of-the-Progressives.pdf">here</a> and <a href="http://www.thefreemanonline.org/featured/taylorism-progressivism-and-rule-by-experts/">here</a>.<br /></p><p>To someone working from Eli's perspective, the functionaries in the office with a plate on the door reading "Safety" 1) really are motivated primarily by a desire to promote safety, and 2) are the best judges of how to accomplish this. In short, the pointy-haired bosses mean well, and they don't have their heads up their asses. It follows that if you make snide comments about any "duly constituted authority" with X in its title, you are opposed to X.</p><p><span style="font-weight: bold;">Analysis of Point 1.</span> <span style="font-style: italic;">Any</span> office, regardless of its ostensible official purpose, will be headed by functionaries whose primary skill is advancing up a hierarchy through bureaucratic infighting. The ostensible purpose of their office will always take (at best) second place to ladder-climbing. That was the argument of Robert Shea, in "<a href="http://www.carolmoore.net/articles/empirerisingscum.html">Empire of the Rising Scum</a>": </p><p><span style="font-family:Arial,Helvetica;"><span style=""></span></span></p><blockquote style="font-family:times new roman;"><p><span style="font-size:100%;">Every combination of two or more human beings has both a useful aspect and a political aspect. These tend to conflict with each other. As the political aspect becomes more and more influential, the organization ceases to be useful to its members and starts using them.</span> </p> <p><span style="font-size:100%;">Why does this happen? Because the better an organization is at fulfilling its purpose, the more it attracts people who see the organization as an opportunity to advance themselves.</span> </p> <p><span style="font-size:100%;">The ability to get ahead in an organization is simply another talent, like the ability to play chess, paint pictures, do coronary bypass operations or pick pockets. There are some people who are extraordinarily good at manipulating- organizations to serve their own ends. The Russians, who have suffered under such people for centuries, have a name for them-- apparatchiks. It was an observer of apparatchiks who coined the maxim, "The scum rises to the top."</span> </p> <p><span style="font-size:100%;">The apparatchik's aim in life is to out-ass-kiss, out-maneuver, out-threaten, out-lie and ultimately out-fight his or her way to the top of the pyramid-any pyramid. Appropriately, Russia produced a superb specimen of homo apparatchikus--Josef Stalin.... Niccolo Machiavelli wrote a handbook for apparatchiks that is unsurpassed to this day--The Prince. But the most successful of this breed need neither exemplars or hand-books; they seem to know instinctively what to do....</span></p><p><span style="font-size:100%;">Unfortunately, the existence of this talent means that every successful organization will sooner or later be taken over by apparatchiks. As such people achieve influence within the organization, whenever there is a conflict between their own interest and the interest of the organization, their interests will win out. Thus, over time, the influence of apparatchiks will deflect the organization further and further from its original intent....</span></p></blockquote><p><span style="font-family:Arial,Helvetica;"><span style=""></span></span></p><p>Any policy they adopt in the name of their ostensible purpose -- "safety" or whatever -- will have the primary purposes of: 1) covering their asses and deflecting blame in the event of (thanks, thoreau) An Incident by having an impressive-looking policy in place on paper -- regardless of whether or not it works; 2) minimizing the autonomy and discretion of their subordinates; and 3) maximizing the flow of money and perks upward.</p><p><span style="font-weight: bold;">Analysis of Point 2.</span> The cognitive and information-flow problems inherent in hierarchy mean that -- even if the bosses really <span style="font-style: italic;">did</span> genuinely want to maximize the ostensible goal of "safety" or whatever -- they still wouldn't know an effective policy if it bit them in the ass. It's almost guaranteed that whatever policy they adopt will be directly counterproductive to their stated purposes.<br /></p><p>People who advance in bureaucratic hierarchies tend to be those who started out learning to shut off their capacity for critically evaluating the statements of those in authority in terms of evidence or logic (see <a href="http://c4ss.org/content/3649">here</a> and <a href="http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2011/06/how-to-get-ahead-in-life.html">here</a>). As such, a person at any level in a hierarchy above the bottom rung is likely predisposed to evaluate all statements based on the authority of their source.<br /></p><p>In addition, the higher one advances in a hierarchy, the more likely they are to be surrounded by people who are afraid to tell them anything except what they want to hear. Any subordinate who points out possible unintended consequences of a policy proposal, or who points out unforeseen consequences of an actual policy in place, will be perceived as a "troublemaker" or "not a team player." This is what Irving Janis called "<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groupthink">groupthink</a>."</p><p>Consequently, the people who make "safety" or any other policy will almost certainly be operating on the ingrained assumption that "executive-type hair" is a badge of superior knowledge on any subject for which they are making policy. They will, therefore, see any questioning of the effectiveness of a policy as a sign of a "bad attitude," and will label as "noncompliant" any attempt by those in contact with the situation to mitigate the clusterfuck that would result from strictly adhering to management policy.</p><p>Take another look at my comments above on R.A. Wilson and Proudhon.<br /></p><p>We can state, as a general rule, that -- as a result of both the incentive-alignment and cognitive problems outlines above -- the intrusion of authority into any organizational relationship will produce suboptimal results. Any attempt by those in authority and removed from a situation to interfere with the judgment of those directly engaged and experienced in it will result in irrationality.</p><p>Organizations continue to function only because those directly engaged in the situation treat intrusions of management irrationality as an obstacle to be routed around -- just as the Web treats censorship as damage and routes around it. The fastest way for subordinates to destroy an organization is by always adhering to official policy in preference to their own judgement. This is the basis of the devilishly effective labor tactic known as working-to-rule.<br /></p>Kevin Carsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07525803609000364993noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10091452.post-41346735966877201992011-09-19T22:56:00.000-07:002011-09-19T22:58:16.186-07:00John Boehner, LeninistLenin, in a marginal note in his copy of <span style="font-style: italic;">On War</span>, enthusiastically endorsed Clausewitz's argument that wars were not started by aggressors who moved their armies across other countries' borders -- but by the governments of the invaded countries who decided to resist. See, the invading country would like nothing more than to occupy the other country without firing a shot. The <span style="font-style: italic;">war</span> doesn't start until the invaded country starts fighting back.<br /><br />In that sense, I guess the working class and the Left can be legitimately said to be waging class warfare. The corporate plutocracy has been waging a full-scale class invasion for the past thirty or forty years, with the ratio of CEO-to-line-worker pay rising from 50 to 500 and almost all real dollar increases in GDP going to rentiers and senior management. The percentage of wealth owned by the top 1% has risen from around 25% to around 40%. <br /><br />So when workers propose fighting back, maybe they're "starting the war" in Clauzewitz's and Lenin's sense. <br /><br />I never thought Lenin and John Boehner would be on the same page.Kevin Carsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07525803609000364993noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10091452.post-76089931763929267102011-09-19T12:53:00.001-07:002011-09-19T12:55:39.984-07:00Bleg for People Who ShareBenita Matofska is raising funds for People Who Share at <a href="https://www.buzzbnk.org/ProjectDetails.aspx?projectId=42">Buzzbnk</a>. Here's her description of the project:<br /><br /><span id="ContentPlaceHolder_ContentPlaceHolderMedia_lblProjDescription"></span><blockquote><span id="ContentPlaceHolder_ContentPlaceHolderMedia_lblProjDescription">The People Who Share is both a movement and a social enterprise. We are a marketplace for the new ‘sharing sector’ (car sharing, skills exchange, upcycling, freecycling, swap trading, redistribution…). We’ll make sharing easy, proving that it’s cheap, green, social and fun! As campaigners, we’ll engage more and more people as "Collaborative Consumers".<br /><br />Online, we are building a marketplace for people who want to share. Onland, we will provide services and experiences.<br /><br />If I can raise £2,800 in 30 days, then I'm in the running to get an investment of £50K from Village Capital. Together with your support, this will enable me to take my idea forward. Please share with me, and together we can make a better world.</span></blockquote>Kevin Carsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07525803609000364993noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10091452.post-26706426871915280602011-09-17T23:43:00.000-07:002011-09-17T23:46:00.171-07:00Announcements Moved to TwitterFrom now on, I'll link to most of my new publications online, etc., at my Twitter account: <a href="https://twitter.com/#%21/KevinCarson1">@KevinCarson1</a>Kevin Carsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07525803609000364993noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10091452.post-17211550432923494592011-09-16T15:24:00.000-07:002011-09-16T15:25:34.196-07:00At C4SS--Rick Perry's Government: "Inconsequential" as a Ball and ChainKevin Carsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07525803609000364993noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10091452.post-47337043411818097142011-09-11T13:35:00.000-07:002011-09-11T13:39:53.980-07:00Bleg for Factor e FarmMarcin Jakubowski of Factor e Farm had an anticipated $60k grant either delayed or fall through altogether (it's not clear which), and has an emergency fundraiser to raise $20k ASAP to keep plans for concurrently prototyping the entire Global Village Construction Set on track. $10k came from one generous contributor. Some $4500 of the remaining $10k has come in via ChipIn. If you can afford to help put them over the top and keep this project going, please consider doing so <a href="http://blog.opensourceecology.org/2011/09/recovery-plan/">here</a>.Kevin Carsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07525803609000364993noreply@blogger.com0