Mark Spittle and Irony

Mark Spittle pats himself on the back for participating in an inherently coercive and unjust "jury duty", which itself is inscribed in an exploitative and monopolistic justice system, berates Aaron for being legitimately excluded from his "jury duty", tells us that we're not concerned enough about other people's rights. Irony is beautiful.

I would like to note in passing that the fact that Mark Spittle didn't get excluded from "jury duty" has to be one of the most persuasive arguments against juries.

Socialism = Tall People / Who Owns the Internet ?

Anti-State has pointed me to a page for a product called HeightMax in which Tom Hundley tells us how socialism makes people taller. I am not making this up.

Tim Swanson at Mises.org asks : Who Owns the Internet ? His thesis is that the neutrality of the Internet is endangered by communications monopolies granted by the state, and that the solution is not, as content providers want, more regulation. Once again, the state created the problem, and people want more state intervention as the solution. It's always the same fucking ringamarole.

The main issue is not a matter of bit discrimination, multiple tiers, or even denial-of-service; rather it is a fight over private property and who owns the cornucopia of wires, cables, fibers and network infrastructure spanning the continent. Unfortunately due in large part to State intervention throughout the past century, this is a somewhat vague and nebulous area with many seemingly gray regions.

The only reason AT&T (formerly SBC), BellSouth, Cox Communications, and other incumbents have the large user bases they currently do is because they were granted geographic monopolies for communications. They were legally insulated from outside competition for much of the past century. And, by and large, this protected status still continues unabated, shielded by the current FCC regulatory regime.

Religion vs politics: a comparison

The issues of ownership and exploitation are fundamental in political theory, but for very different reasons.

Ownership is a vital concept because we cannot escape it, and it is the main determinant of how a system works. In standard democratic statism, private individuals nominally own their property, but under the control of the state and its monopolistic laws and regulations. Marxist theory gives ownership of all property to the state. Market anarchy gives ownership of all property to private individuals. And so on and so forth.

Exploitation, on the other hand, is a more philosophically negative concept, as it tells us what we should seek to eliminate. In general, the statist notion of exploitation (and I do realize this is a big generalization) revolves around the concentration of power in any domain. Whoever has the most power, is the exploiter, regardless of what they do. For market anarchists, on the other hand, it is the act of force that creates exploitation. In this view, the state is inherently exploitative because its monopoly is maintained by force.

Does religion have anything to say about all this ? While monotheistic religions have very little to say about political theory per se, I think that their attitude towards man and freedom is a strong stance against human governance of any kind. Their attitude is : you're not worth shit, because you are a human being. A common attraction of these religion is that they make you believe that man is inherently degraded and immoral (through Original Sin or otherwise) and then provide their particular brand of insane solutions. It's like one of those ads for spray detergent where everyone is shouting, except all the actors are wearing black robes and are clinically retarded.

They believe that you don't own yourself, God does. And if they don't say it explicitly, that is still the net result of their beliefs. After all, if possession if nine-tenths of ownership, we can equally say that control is nine-tenths of possession (he who controls the good benefits the most, regardless of deeds or contracts). If I am not habilitated as an individual to have my own moral freedom, and if it is perfectly moral for God to kill as many human beings as it wants, then in no way am I in control of my own life. At best, I am like a citizen in a democracy, owning my own body but not free enough to control it like I desire. It is a hollow concept.

This is in direct opposition to all other modes of social organization, which are based on ownership by a small concentrated ruling class (monarchy), a large and all-pervasive ruling class (democracy), or by the individual (market anarchy). All of these presume that at least some human beings, by virtue of their class, race or guile, are worthy of owning themselves and owning others.

The question then arises : if religion is opposite to politics, how have they developed such a close symbiosis ? Well, on the one hand, extreme forms of religion or politics do try to wipe out their opposite (such as modern Islam, Nazism, Communism). But on the other hand, their collectivist nature makes them mutually supportive to a large extent. Religion subjugates the mind, while politics subjugates the body.

The traditional form of symbiosis has religion provide the legitimacy for the ruler (i.e. the King rules by the grace of God, or is even a demi-god), and that ruler in turn provides the tool for religious supremacy (i.e. support of churches, state religion, war against heretics, etc). With the invention of democracy, legitimacy is a lesser problem for the ruling class, and therefore religion loses much of its influence. This is why democracy tends to chase away religion, and religion tends to chase away democracy (now there's a lose-lose situation).

In general, this is resolved by putting God, the state, the churches, and the general population in a certain hierarchical order, usually in that order (with women being inferior to men, of course). The fact that "God's laws" and "the state's laws" contradict most of the time is blithely ignored. What's a few commandments between friends ?

The religious theory of exploitation is also wildly different. Basically, everyone who disagrees with you is an exploiter. Once again, the use of force is not considered relevant here. Islam protestors may kill innocent people, but to religious commentators (and also statist ones, not coincidentally) they are the victims of "hate speech" (i.e. a few lame cartoons). The cartoonists are the exploiters. To the American Christian, the atheist whose rights he is spitting on is an exploiter. He is the victim of the atheist's demand for his rights, and every single Ten Commandments monument (which ironically break the second commandment) is another victory against anti-Christian exploitation.

This is partly so because monotheistic religions are based on a victim complex. Without hardships, there is no reason to be religious. Happy and fulfilled people don't need religion. When no hardship exists, it must be manufactured. Every single act of rebellion, even if done by other Christians, is an attack against them. If they do not exist, then they must be manufactured (war against Christmas anyone ?).

Another part of this is the inter-subjectivity of religion. As it is founded and sustained by agreement (which brings legitimacy), any inter-subjective system naturally sees credible disagreement as its worst enemy. So naturally such a system would not point to its own power structure as exploitative, since that would defeat the whole agreement mechanism (although New Age and other "liberal" religions sidestep this issue altogether), but rather must point to sources of disagreement. To be a critical thinker, therefore, is to do violence to oneself, and to express doubt is to do violence to others, within that perspective.

Private Companies Outperform Government Agencies in Katrina Disaster

In yesterdays L.A. Times newspaper, there was an article entitled, "Report Details Katrina Communications Fiasco." Inside the article are details of how private companies responded much more effectively to the Katrina disaster than did U.S. Government agencies. Here are a few excerpts:

Private firms were often more adept at meeting the challenges.

The Starwood hotel company, "through effective panning and pre-positioning of phones," helped about 2,100 people -- guests, employees and their families -- in two of its hotels by deploying satellite phones and using batteries to maintain Internet connections.

"Local responders and journalists sometimes relied on Starwood's communications capabilities since the city's communications system was largely lost," the report says.

Mississippi Power Co. relied on an internal system, Southern-Linc Wireless, that had been designed with "considerable redundancy." Within three days of [hurricane Katrina's] landfall, it was functioning at nearly 100%. The utility also installed its own microwave capability to 12 remote staging areas.

Surprise, surprise! Private organizations are more capable at adapting to, and preparing for, emergencies or drastic changes. They should be good at it, since they are adapting all the time in the free market. What's especially sad about this is that these private companies aren't disaster-specialized companies. Starwood hotel company? Please! They are supposed to be experts at providing hotel rooms, not emergency services. Yet, they managed to outperform a Government agency that was specifically designed to handle emergencies: FEMA.

Some people would protest, and say "But FEMA was a clusterfuck of incompetence! Surely a better run Government agency could perform better." While this may be true, it still does not justify Government. If a hotel company can outperform the disaster-response agency known as FEMA, I contend that even a well prepared government disaster-response agency would not be able to perform as efficiently or effectively as a privately-run and competitive disaster-response company.

The government is not justifiable in arguments of principle, nor in utilitarian arguments.

The FDA - will it be toppled ?

After 70 years of anti-capitalist murder and oppression, there is a very tiny light at the end of the tunnel for sick people. The DC Circuit Court of Appeals ruled yesterday that dying patients have a due process right to access drugs once they have been through the FDA's first-stage trials.

Is this just a glitch in the history of a murderous organization which kills more than five thousand people a year (as a very low estimate) by withholding life-saving medications, or the beginning of the end ? I hope to Providence that we're going to see a deligitimization of this quack mafia.

A Market Anarchist on: what is exploitation ? part 2

In part 1, I discussed the social aspects of exploitation. Now I want to discuss the more personal aspects - what kinds of exploitation exist in our personal lives, and how we come to accept it, and why market anarchy requires such a frame shift.

Exploitation is a feature of relationships - be they personal, economic or social. So to understand exploitation we have to look at how it is expressed in relationships.

The first and most important exploitative relationship is that of the parent and the child. Raising a child necessarily involves exploitation at a certain level, because the child must be restricted from expressing his innate values - such as for example his curiosity in wanting to cross the street. So I'm not saying that every single instance of exploitation must necessarily be a social evil.

But beyond that, the parenting system is exploitative because the parent is not really accountable to anyone, especially given that the child cannot defend himself against abuse. Historically, parenting has been a festering cesspool of social repression : child sacrifice, sexual slavery, child mutilation, physical beatings, and the inculcation of fear (most of these methods still being used today).

Parenting is the basis of a person's psyche. So the repression of the parenting system has repercussions in our whole lives. For one, it makes it a lot easier to accept exploitation in our adult lives.

But even with this in place, the government needs a system of thought control in place to keep the beliefs alive. It needs to control the schools, the media, the academia and the arts. And it needs to constantly manipulate people's behaviour. So it seems that we have the advantage of being a natural position. People are naturally able to see coercion for what it is, and only an incredible amount of repression and indoctrination can change that.

Now, I admit that it is very effective, even on me. The first time I was exposed the idea that all war is morally wrong, I had to wrap my mind around it. When you've been blasted by propaganda for all your life, it takes a while to return to the state of being able to recognize government coercion for what it is. You have to first fully accept that you have to be honest about it. But when you make that commitment, breaking free of the propaganda is not so hard.

Does parenting prepare you for government belief ? I think so. Children believe that what takes place in their household is a universal. If people are raised to believe that meaningful human relationships must be exploitative, then they will accept the exploitation perpetrated in society.

Now, it is true that most relationships are relationships of power. This is something perfectly natural for hierarchical beings such as ourselves, and something which to a certain extent is perfectly healthy. This does not mean that relationships must be exploitative. To undo this idea, we have to first undo the intuitive notion of exploitation that relies on concentration of power. I will talk about this on a future entry.

Stop talking about immigration

Everyone stop talking about immigration. Most of you are fucking racists and have no idea what you're talking about. There is no such thing as an "illegal". The "country" is not legitimate, any more than state or provincial lines are legitimate. It makes no sense to prevent people from traveling from one country to another any more than it makes sense to prevent people from crossing a side of the street or from one city to another. It is racism. NOTHING MORE.

And stop saying that people are "stealing jobs". there is no such thing as "stealing a job". That is physically impossible, you moron. How the fuck can you steal a JOB ? A job is a conceptual entity, you fucking jackass. I can't believe how fucking retarded and meaningless that argument is.

And don't give me your "compassionate" racist argument that immigration is good because they work so hard and they take shitty jobs. You fucking racist, is that how you see people from other countries ? Did lazy Jews deserve to be killed in the Holocaust, and only killing the hard-working ones was bad ? Is willingness to take your shit how we should measure whether a dark-skinned or weird-speaking guy has basic rights or not ?

In short, shut the fuck up. SHUT UP ! SHUT THE FUCK UP ! YOU FUCKING RACIST MORON, SHUT THE FUCK UP !

A Market Anarchist on: what is exploitation ? part 1

Any serious political position must have a position on the existence and perpetuation of exploitation - in short, a model of exploitation. In Marxism, this model is centered around the notion of classes and discrimination between classes. Exploitation, according to this model, exists because the "higher classes" use their economic power to "oppress" the "lower classes".

A model based on reality must reject such notions, because they are based on collectivism. We must start from the premise that only individuals and their interactions exist. And the natural moral extension of this is : the only thing that can be exploited is the individual's value expression. Even if we're talking about money or power, all that we're talking about here is forms of value expression.

To exploit someone, therefore, must have something to do with stopping them from being able to express their values, or affect their ability to do so in the future. But the notion of exploitation also includes an involuntary nature. A person who desires to be restricted - for whatever reason - is not being exploited.

If I am in excruciating pain and I ask you to help me commit suicide, I am not being exploited. But if I was put in this excruciating pain because I was beat up by a policeman for speaking against the state, I was exploited. And the government in general receives the benefit of the police oppressing me because it raises its legitimacy. So in this case any politician in the government can be said to exploit me, even if they do not commit the force themselves, because they ordered and benefit from the oppression.

So exploitation, as a specific definition, is the process of restricting people's value expression without their consent, of one's own power or through the use of the power of another.

In this market anarchist perspective, I distinguish between three categories of exploiters : first-hand parasites, second-hand parasites, and free riders. Let me go through them in turn.


1. First-hand parasites are the individuals who use force directly, those that have the guns, and the individuals who give orders to them.

So obviously here we're talking about policemen and soldiers - public criminals - and we're also talking about private criminals and mafia foot soldiers. By extension, we're also talking about the politicians and bureaucrats who benefit from the law and wars, and the gangs that benefit from gang wars. In a sense, it is appropriate to list them together, since the government and mafias are basically the same kind of organization.

In past times, and still in some countries, we would also be talking about agents of religion as first-hand parasites. However religion serves a much more important role as a catalyst for state oppression, which I will discuss later.

2. Second-hand parasites are the individuals who indirectly exploit people by benefitting from government power, and depend on government force for the maintenance of their status.

Here we would be talking about people who manipulate the trappings of democracy, such as activists, interest groups, political organizations and parties. Unions are another major example of this category, as their monopoly on the workforce depends on government regulation. Corporate trusts, corporations receiving subsidies, and corporations benefitting from protectionism are also part of this category. Mafias are also part of this category, because they depend on government laws to maintain their markets.

3. Free riders are people who would still have a job in a market anarchy, but who use government power to further their aims, while suffering the perverse effects of said power.

A great number of people are in this category. They are not parasitic in nature, unlike the people in 1 and 2, but they are part of the greater area of control of government. This includes CEOs of multinationals, politico-scientists and politico-artists, activists, churches, lawyers, doctors, insurers, public school teachers, amateur and professional athletes, and so on. So there is a whole set of people doing their job with twisted incentives.

Organized religion is an interesting case. It used to be an exploiter on par with government. Nowadays, religion is a free rider on government power, keeping its grip on the people through religion-friendly laws and support from the state. In exchange, religion perpetuates the myth and narratives of the state. Unlike most domains, people who occupy the religious domain seem to suffer few perverse effects from their free rider status. Government and religion have a symbiotic relationship, where government busies itself with controlling bodies, and religion busies itself with controlling minds. Together they form a perfect system of social control, and catalyze each other.

Another additional category that could be added is that of prudent predation. However I don't really want to get into this, as this is more of a moral issue and less of a political issue.


As exploiters, all are morally culpable to some degree. A soldier who kills people for a living is obviously more morally culpable than the owner of an insurance company that benefits from evil laws. However both reap the benefit of exploitation in one form or another.

I want to make clear here that I don't think most people on this list are universal exploiters. They exploit a specific set of people. Public school teachers exploit children and the necessity of their presence, while the administration of the school exploits their parents. Politico-scientists exploit the masses through the credibility of the media and their pre-existing status. Union thugs exploit the people who are forced to be part of their union. Government is the only institution which has the power to exploit the whole of society.

As society is a network of economic and social relations, and government affects the whole of society, it is impossible to disentangle ourselves from the effects of government. All we can do is minimize our moral responsibility in its perpetuation. We still have to pay taxes and play by the rules of the game. But we must recognize that it is a game, a game that is being played for the interests of a small minority of exploiters against the people composing the vast majority.

So this gets us to the issue of perpetuation. If the vast majority of people suffer from exploitation, why does the system persist ? I think part of that lies in the symbiosis of state and religion that I described. Both are authoritarian, collectivist belief systems, based on a morality of repression and sacrifice, which feed off each other.

But the most important part of the answer lies in the consequences of social control. As government takes control of vital areas such as education, the media and
it is able to control the thoughts of its citizens, able to dictate what can or cannot be made aware. It is obvious that monarchies did not have the means to garner support that democracies have today, partly because of democracy itself and how it confers legitimacy in the eyes of the masses.

This power of global thought control is why I think the Internet will eventually attract the ire of states to a much greater extent than it is today. Right now dictatorships know what's good for them and try to censor the Internet as much as possible. I think that the strategy in the Western world to grab your free speech by the balls by threatening your ISP will continue to work very effectively, but that governments will eventually arm themselves with other means to attack free speech on the Internet.

In part 2, I look at the more personal aspects of exploitation.