For American families, the list of insurance types they subscribe to includes most of the following at various times, with some variances:

• Homeowner’s or renter’s insurance
• Mortgage insurance
• Title insurance
• Life insurance
• Health insurance (multiple policies)
• Auto insurance (multiple policies)
• Social “insurance”, in the form of Social Security
• Credit insurance, via credit card fees
• Unemployment insurance
• Disability insurance
• Bank deposit insurance (FDIC, and does FSLIC even exist any more?)

All that adds up to a whole bunch of money over a lifetime. With the exception of Social Security — more accurately described as a fraudulent investment scheme based upon extortion — insurance premiums are almost always paid to (generally large) corporations with insurance and/or banking licenses.

Lots of folks will tell you that insurance is one of the best businesses to get into. Why? Because operating as a privileged corporation with an insurance license makes you a member of an elite cartel uniquely positioned to extract massive rents from the market. If an entrepeneur wants to start an insurance business, the barriers to entry are very high: university educations, certifications, licenses, capital reserve requirements, specific corporate and capital structures, legal fees, accounting and audit compliance, government reporting and so on.

There is no free market for insurance today. The economic distortions introduced by artificial barriers to entry, extensive government regulation and all the privileges which attach to holding an insurance license make it impossible to say that anything like free competition in insurance exists. Indeed, because of this, we can’t look at today’s insurance markets for a whole lot of guidance as to what free market insurance might look like.

It’s quite possible that today’s policyholders are being ripped off relative to a free market, in that premiums would be lower absent the distortions. It’s also possible that premiums for some types of coverage would tend to be higher, since many of the distortions can be interpreted as subsidies which allow insurance companies to offer lower rates than possible otherwise. Additionally, providers of mandated forms of insurance might enjoy fewer policyholders.

Much of the insurance market in the United States today is decidedly un-free, though you can spot signs of freer times in some insurers’ names, where they include words like “mutual”. Time was when a lot of the insurance functions being provided today by the state and by large, privileged and even global corporations were handled by local mutual aid societies, industrial sickness funds, benefit societies, rural co-ops, fraternal associations, churches and just plain old good neighborliness within local communities.

The modern insurance system seems to me a great game, a trick increasingly used to enslave people. And with America now heading full-steam toward some sort of either mandated or state-provided health insurance scheme, well… the profits for politicians and their buddies in the insurance and banking industries will be enormous, while the average American is shackled with ever more mandatory premiums and compulsory coverage while service quality falls.

For the agorist, this is a business opportunity.

I received a wonderful gift. A t-shirt bearing this famous photograph, taken on 21 August 1968 at Šafárikovo námestie, Bratislava, Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, during the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia:

by Ladislav Bielik, 21 August 1968, Bratislava, Czechoslovakia

On the back of the shirt: приглашение

Pictured in the background, the headquarters of Comenius University in Bratislava.

Change we can believe in (Pure silver, silver, me hearties! Yaaaar!)

Original image by Ian-S @ flickr.com, who writes:

Found in the Norfolk (UK) village of Snettisham in 1985, the contents of a narrow-necked roman pot were found to consist of stock, raw materials and coins hidden by a Roman jeweller. The collection has become known as ‘The Snettisham Jeweller’s Hoard’, and dates from the late second century AD. These are some of the 83 silver coins from the hoard, and they all seem to show the Emperor Domitian (reigned AD 81-96). Some later coins dated at 154-5 AD were present too, and these dated the find.

Why?

Dunno. It occurred to me. I used to have this “friend”, see, who in between loading the three-foot “weed eater” for the next bong hit would occasionally belt this one out. An odd thing, perhaps, for a Jew to sing.

And no, we really didn’t have any good friends who just happened to be black… or communists… or Christians.

Let’s hope he got it from someplace… someplace pure. Someplace like The Doctor Demento Show, for instance.

Anyone know who wrote this piece of Ameri-horror-cana?

Speaking of random thoughts which crawl out of the depths of one’s mind late at night… anyone remember the scene from Airplane! where the well-dressed, polite boy comes to sit next to the well-dressed, aristocratic little girl on the plane, bearing a tray of beverages?

“Coffee?”

“Yes, please.”

“Milk?”

“No, thank you. I take it black. Like my men.”

Yeah, I thought you did.

Stand up and be counted, show the world that you’re a man
Stand up and be counted, go with the Ku Klux Klan

We are a sacred brotherhood, who love our country true
We always can be counted on, when there’s a job to do
We serve our homeland day and night, to keep it always free
And proudly wear our robes of white, protecting liberty.

Stand up and be counted, show the world that you’re a man
Stand up and be counted, go with the Ku Klux Klan

[trumpet solo]

The Bible, cross, Old Glory, too, our symbols of a man
A sword and water, robe and hood portray our noble Klan
In search of peace and liberty, we pledge our hearts and hands
We must defeat the communists to save our Christian land

Stand up and be counted, show the world that you’re a man
Stand up and be counted, go with the Ku Klux Klan

Stand up and be counted, show the world that you’re a man
Stand up and be counted, go with the Ku Klux Klan

On 18 December 1865, the US Congress passed the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, by which it is claimed that “[n]either slavery nor involuntary servitude” shall never again exist in the country.

At that time, this appeared to many as a very radical step. It even led to debates on whether slaveowners would be harmed. Today it is something officially unimaginable, though a trade in “white meat” does exist. Slavery would never have been abolished had its opponents not set such a goal and had they not cried out for it decades previously. Its abolition came at practically a single blow, not gradually or compensationally.

But with the extinction of the direct form of servitude there came and grew its other form. There appeared that plundering band called known as the state, which, just as the slaveowners did, usurped without consent and under threat of violence not only a portion of the labor and life of their thralls, but their property as well.

Lower taxes, broader privatization of “public” services, a less-extravagant state budget, less state intervention? No. No taxes, complete privatization, and neither the state nor “its expenditures and investments”. That is the path to freedom.

Almost 20 years ago, at the muddled dawn of my political awakening, I took a road trip from Orlando, Florida to Washington, DC with a few friends intent on joining one protest or another against the first Gulf War. My car was literally festooned with anti-war, pro-peace graffiti, bumper stickers and slogans — a rolling billboard for anti-war protest.

Late at night during the journey we stopped off for food and a break from the road at a Waffle House or Shoney’s in a tiny little town in South Caroline called Paxville. The perfect stopping place, one might think, given that the Latin word “pax” means “peace”, and wasn’t that just what we were after?

So we ate our meals and drank our coffees. About mid-way through, a small group of young men came in to dine as well, looking at us suspiciously and having conversations with a waitress in hushed tones. Cold stares all around. One of my friends noticed an insignia or patch on something one of the guys was wearing that suggested he was a member of the Civil Air Patrol. Potential conflict ahead, and under the surreptitious appraisal and venomous looks we finished our meals quickly, full of tension that this group might decide to provoke some sort of conflict.

We got back in the car and made ready to continue the long drive to DC. As I pulled out of the restaurant parking lot, one of my friends said that the CAP guys were hustling out of the restaurant and piling into a Camaro. I got us out onto the deserted, dark county road, heading back for the highway, but about 500 yards from the restaurant I and my friends spotted the Camaro’s headlights behind us. The CAP guys were accelerating quickly to close the gap between us. I made a snap decision to evade them; if they wanted to start trouble out here at 4 o’clock in the morning without another soul in sight, we would likely have our faces pulped and the car damaged. Spotting an unfenced field filled with tall grass and weeds ahead, I switched off my headlights and plunged into it, with the Camaro now maybe 200 yards behind. A short, reckless, bumpy ride into the field in darkness, and I used engine braking and the hand brake (to avoid brake lights betraying our position) to bring us to a stop a goodly distance off the road. I shut off the car, and we watched the Camaro pass slowly, take a U-turn a ways up the road past our location and circle back looking for us before making a final U-turn and continuing on their way.

After catching our breath a while and agreeing upon what had just happened, we all shared a laugh about the name “Paxville” and got ourselves back on the highway to continue on.

This close encounter with violence was part of a tapestry of counter-protest that we experienced nearly everywhere. “Support the troops, oppose the war” on our side and “America, love it or leave it!” on the other, backed by the barely-controlled fury of some in the opposite camp eager to bait us into violent confrontation.

I was just reminded of this old tale of Paxville on discovering and reading another follow-on fisking to my “Fuck the Troops!” article. It’s by one W.B.B. Johnson and entitled “OUR TROOPS…MY HERO’S! DON’T LIKE IT…THEN GO TO HELL!“. A long screed with a surfeit of apostrophes and all-caps invective ends on this note:

No one (especially our troops) likes war. Atrocities (which no one wants to have happen) do happen in war… IT’S WAR!! To call our troops murderer’s… is TOTALLY… UNACCEPTABLE and beyond reason! The cracker-ass-joker that wrote this article: http://www.nostate.com/77/fuck-the-troops/, would have been hung for treason against AMERICA… had General George Washington been here today!

What Mr. Johnson doesn’t seem to get is that if I were transplanted into the history he romanticizes here, I might indeed be hung for treason — by the British.

It is one measure of the relative success of the American state’s indoctrination program that so few would be able to make that qualification correctly.

So this morning I’m reading Roderick Long talking about whether or not Étienne de la Boétie actually wrote the Discourse of Voluntary Servitude. A mention of Isabel Paterson takes me over to Wikipedia on biographical curiosity. A reference citation to her place of burial takes me over to the Find a Grave website. Putting in my own surname, what do I find?

I find that one Stefan Gogulski was killed in 1940 at the Katyń massacre.

Who was Stefan? I have no idea. My father’s grandparents left Poland around 1905. “Gogulski” is not a common surname. According to some information I found a few years ago but have since mislaid, a census in the late 1990s showed about 650 “Gogulskis” living in Poland, most of them concentrated around the Poznań area.

Stefan was almost certainly a relative of mine, though the blood connection likely would need to be traced back to the mid-1800s to find the common ancestory.

So Stalin killed one of my relatives, then. Lovely.

And, oh look here… plugging in my paternal grandmother’s name at Find a Grave, I see that one Edward Korecki also was killed at Katyń.

So, two more rather personal reasons for me to hate the state, I guess. I’ll add these two to one I discovered a few years back…

Suitcase of Anna Kraus at Auschwitz

My mother’s birth name is Kraus. A few years ago when I visited Auschwitz, I took this photo above. There is a room there which displays gigantic piles of luggage which belonged to those killed there in the gas chambers and before the firing squads. And right there, front and center by the window, a connection to one of my family names. Mind you, “Kraus” is far more common than “Gogulski” or “Korecki”, but this was the top chiller on a brutally chilling meander through the detritus of the final solution.

I’ve gotta give my ancestors credit for getting the hell out of Germany and Poland when they did, even before World War I. Thanks, y’all.

Hat tip to RD.