David Gross of The Picket Line submits an exploration of ethical reductionism in the context of political theory: Does political philosophy reduce to ethical philosophy?

[This] is what makes the liberal political theories and their justifications difficult for me to swallow. They seem to have this backwards. According to them, some behavior at the ethical level switches from unethical to ethical based on the description it is given at the political level, rather than its description at the political level being based on an analysis of it at the ethical level. Whereas it seems to me that whether a particular action is ethical or not should not depend on what political system you’re operating under or what role the people involved play in that system; rather, whether the system is reasonable and coherent should depend on whether the individuals enacting their roles in that system behave ethically in so doing.

With his submission, he says: “Some anarchists and libertarians seem to believe that political philosophy reduces to ethical philosophy, the same way some scientists believe that chemistry ultimately reduces to physics. Is this part of the appeal of anarchism, and does it make sense?” I for one do believe that the political ought to reduce to the ethical, that this does make sense and that it is part of anarchism’s appeal. My own posting on the clown suit defense makes this point, though a bit obliquely.

Mike Billy of Reflections from a Rotting Nation writes of another incident in what seems to be a new trend driven by both advances in technology and some rather insane law in Teen Girl Charged With Sex Offense For Sending Nude Pictures of Herself.

The girl may receive a punishment of several years in a juvenile detention center and forced registration as a sex offender. This new status could prevent her from living within a specified radius of any school, church, or park for the rest of her life. It may also force her to inform all of her neighbors that she is a sex offender when she moves.

So now, not only does she have nude pictures of herself floating around, but she also has the stigma of being labeled a sex offender hanging over her head. But hey, that is the law and ignorance is no excuse.

The ABC News story linked to in the post has comments attached which present both many defenses of the girl’s action as well as a catalogue of what passes for sexual “morality” in America, especially as connected to children: “Satan on the loose”, “She doesn’t need jail, she needs therapy”, “What the hell are kids thinking these days!”

The blog post I never wrote reacting to this incident and to some of the ABC News commenters was going to bear the title, “Shocking news! Teen girls enjoy fucking”.

Mike also brings us The Financial Crisis is Not a Market Failure:

No, the financial crisis is not a failure of the free market, it is a failure of fascism. Allowing one unchecked overarching organization known as the Federal Reserve to control the money supply and thus the interest rates has caused the failure.

And how do they propose to fix it? By having that same organization create even more money to bail out these banks.

Like a fly repeatedly striking a glass window, more of the same will not solve our problems. It is time to end the Fed.

The economics lemurs at nostate.com agree wholeheartedly.

Commenting on a resurgence of the Taliban and the displacement of the anemic, imperialist-funded state in Afghanistan, Darian Worden, author of Bring a Gun to School Day (worth reading, and promoting!), says, “Revolutionaries, Take Note“:

When desired goods and services are provided in a revolutionary context, the consumers then join entrepreneurs in building revolution. A revolution based on libertarian principles ought to build liberty outside of the system. It is not enough simply to tell people that the free market can do things better. They must be shown that we will make it do things better. Agorism and other left libertarian philosophies provide ideas for such action.

Pity the Taliban aren’t agorists, or anarchists of any stripe.

Francois Tremblay of the Check Your Premises blog submits a controversial article entitled “Why hierarchies are immoral“. He writes:

Anarchy, as a position on social organization, forces us to rethink the purpose of society itself. What is the goal of social action? While mainstream political ideologies disagree on various issues, there is one thing they all agree on: they universally elevate economic and technological progress as an ultimate, unimpeachable goal, and that the only disagreement is how to effect it and how fast. But this goal is driven by hierarchies that concentrate power and seek to expand that power by all means necessary. Anarchists are the only people who pipe up and say “hey, maybe this whole idea of limitless progress at all costs isn’t so great- maybe the costs are greater than we’re ready to accept.”

This post provoked a great deal of response, in my view, some of which can be found here, here, here, here and here, as well as in the comments to all those posts. One needn’t agree with Tremblay’s definition of hierarchy or with what he derives from it in order to find valuable explorations of social theory here.

Francois continues to push boundaries in his second submission, “I know what’s best for people”:

The Anarchist view is that our institutions and rules must be grounded in the individual’s values: that social morality, like everything else in society, must be a bottom-up system. In contrast, the ruling class imposes the concept of “law” in order to justify its coercive control over society.

An extremely important point, and one which ought to be shouted constantly at those who would seize control of whatever illegitimate coercive apparatus is at hand in order to try to impose their own vision of a “shining city on a hill” upon the rest of us. Looking at this from an agorist perspective, we might say that there is a tendency where if the values forced upon people do not comport with those of the individuals subjected to them, then the power of black and gray markets will increase. Or, as Princess Leia told the Governor: “The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers.”

Hosting the carnival gives me a little bit of power, which of course begs to be abused. In that spirit, I present also two things that I wrote this past month: Agorism and ancap panarchy – a response to an Obama voter, and The Golden Rule is insufficient.

Enjoy, and thanks for visiting!

Hey there,

You know, it’s funny, after reading your recent interview, I feel as though essentially you and I believe in the same (or a very similar) ideal world. I never realized that might even remotely be the case. I guess that could be because we rarely if ever engaged in political debate with one another, assuming the other felt very differently.

One day not too long ago, I was describing my ideal ‘political’ system and basically it hearkens back to my teenage fascination with communes and dropping out of society at large in order to live with like minded people who create their own guidelines to live by – growing their own food, caring for one another’s children – communally. Ideally, small groups/communities would ‘govern’ themselves: everyone could sit in a room together and have a vote and the group would be small enough that each voice would be heard. I think that’s what government was meant to be (or at least should have been), but it got all fucked up when it grew – it wasn’t scalable.

Although, you’d likely leave out all the warm fuzzy hippy-sounding bits of what I’ve said, I think we seem to essentially have very compatible ideal visions of the future.

And I respond:

Okay, I’m stunned by the synchronicity here, because literally at the same time you were likely writing this I was playing a video game and thinking to myself that it’s a pity that we find ourselves so divided on political questions, and that if you understood more of the background – or if I were better at explaining it to you – that we would find we have much more common ground than we thought.

Agorism is a revolutionary strategy for achieving a voluntary society. Intellectually, it grew out of the anarcho-capitalism of Murray Rothbard. The principles of that philosophy are not entirely compatible with more “socialist” forms of anarchism, in that anarcho-capitalism rejects almost everything which flows from economics based on the Labor Theory of Value in favor of Austrian subjective value theory (marginal utility), rejects the notion that hard titles to land are immoral or indefensible, and rejects the propositions found in many schools of thought which say that profit, rent and interest are either immoral or would disappear in a stateless society.

What is interesting is that the ancap model, I believe, is capable of subsuming all of the other models within itself, and serving as an overall framework under which any given philosophy of property and economics could be freely tried out within areas inhabited by people who wanted to adopt their own, so long as agencies for resolutions of disputes between communities with different philosophies could be agreed upon.

Within the anarcho-capitalist panarchy communities could choose to organize themselves along whatever lines they wanted to. Communes? Fine, have at it. Rugged individualists? Great, just don’t come stuffing it at the rest of us. Worker self-management and a society of independent contractors? That’s permissible. Syndicalist communes where the workers control the means of production? Fine, so long as they acquire their property legitimately. Corporations? Absolutely, but good luck maintaining anything even remotely like the predatory corporate forms of today or the past without State-backed limited liability, corporate personhood and the massive subsidies and externalizations of costs granted to big businesses by States today. Any or all of these could exist side by side – and of course, there’s a lot more to it than just a general permissiveness.

Overall, and perhaps of great interest for you, who I believe approaches questions of what ought to be in society more from a “harmonious human systems” approach than from an egoist individual rights approach, is that a society of this nature would naturally entail the disappearance of the corrupt, predatory, coercive and downright evil practices used by today’s ruling classes and wealthy elites via today’s States against poor and repressed people all over the world and throughout the horrible history of humanity. Revolutionaries everywhere want to overthrow their ruling class, but usually seek to replace it with their own familiar personal despotism, and let there be blood. The Agorist seeks to subject the bloated, loathsome carcasses of State and ruling class to the merciless creative destruction of the marketplace.

Agorism implies a great many things which challenge the ruling classes and what is called today by many “the Capitalist system” (though it ought better be called something like “the neo-Mercantilist system”) at fundamental levels. People who make money smuggling human beings from one country to another ought to be celebrated as heroes provided they are not selling people into slavery and they take necessary safety precautions. The real crime is that since the activity of smuggling people across artificial State borders is illegal, there’s no effective way to drive evil or careless operators out of the business. If the evil ones could be identified and excluded, the remainder are the Agorist’s allies if they are susceptible to an Agorist ideological conversion.

Likewise the drug dealers of today. Not the top layers of the extremely violent organized crime rings and their State accomplices, but the far more numerous minor dealers who form perhaps the one or two levels of connection to the ultimate drug user and who are rarely involved in violence or fraud. The same with the pimps and the whores and the bookies and the loan sharks and all the tradesmen willing to do a household repair job “under the table” and all those unlicensed day care centers operating in suburban homes and all other people engaged in nonviolent activities which are prohibited by States or done in ways States do not permit. All of these people are allies against the State if they accept the basic contract: Don’t tread on me, honor your agreements, and, if we fall into dispute, pledge to find a non-State solution. The Agorist is anyone who, at least part of the time, trades in markets the State prohibits, or does so in manners which aren’t permitted by States – such as without complying with ridiculous regulations that serve to create barriers to market entry for the benefit of existing participants and/or wealthier entrants, or without reporting the activity for taxation.

I’m attaching two fairly brief and highly influential works [ed: attached were Konkin's New Libertarian Manifesto and Agorist Class Theory]. Keep in mind that Agorism is a theory of revolution. Though it grew out of anarcho-capitalism and is grounded in that theory, it is quite distinct. You will not find a description of Utopia here (though I can tell you where to find plenty). In my mind, the Agorist praxis can be employed by a social revolution toward pretty much any Utopian vision, so long as the State and all of the privilege connected to it is eliminated along the way.

Enjoy

From Wikipedia:

Some girl (probably not a samurai) pretends to prepare to do something with a samurai sword during filming of some movie

Tsujigiri (辻斬 tsuji-giri, literally ‘crossroads killing’) is a Japanese term for a practice when someone, after receiving a new katana or developing a new fighting style or weapon, tests its effectiveness by attacking a human opponent. Originally, this practice took the form of traditional duels between bushi, but as the classical ideals of Bushidō were largely forgotten during the Edo Period, the mannerisms of Tsujigiri became increasingly dishonorable. By the 18th Century, it was not uncommon to hear of ronin ambushing unarmed peasants in the dark for simple amusement. A warrior who practiced this often would often be referred to as a Tsujigiri.

Essentially, the question posed by the assignment was this: Imagine that in your society the errant samurai was not sanctioned for ambushing and killing a hapless passerby simply to test his new blade. Does that make it right?

Having recently liberated myself from a fettering moral absolutism, I predictably and foolishly adopted the utterly unfettered relativist position and proclaimed in my essay that even though such a practice might seem barbaric today, it was morally acceptable because it formed an accepted part of the culture which existed in that place and time. It’s been a long while since then, and the essay is lost; perhaps I discussed what little I knew of the samurai code and its origins, imperial Japanese culture and other such matters.

What I certainly did not address in the paper were the passersby themselves. Ooops. I’d thrown away what I considered the stifling values of my upbringing in the name of discovering truth by its own lights. Unfortunately, I’d thrown out a great deal of the good along with the bad, leaving me in a place where, from my diminished principles, it was entirely possible to simply ignore the fact that the passersby were human beings. Definitely not part of the analysis was an examination of the moral standing of each of the actual participants in the tsujigiri exchange — the heavily armed, imperially-costumed samurai and the hapless peasant traveler — or any questioning of how the situation would be different if, instead, both or none were wearing the same costumes, or if the sword was moved from one set of hands to the other. I never asked myself about the samurai’s political status relative to that of the peasant or about what privilege was implied by the samurai’s costume. Certainly I knew nothing of the clown suit argument. I examined the beliefs of the collective in terms of my own belief that there could be no objective morality, and came to the preposterous conclusion that this jolly slaughter at roadside was just fine. The samurai was the samurai, and that was the system.

I’ve started writing a new version of my essay response to this tsujigiri question. I have just completed a first draft:

Tsujigiri

by Michael Gogulski

Down with the samurai! Death to the Emperor!

How do you think it sounds so far? I know I need a lot more words to reach 1,500 and I do need to mention something about moral relativism, but this is kinda what I’d like to say. Any tips?

To the most recent, Francois Tremblay offered both praise and a question of consistency:

I also applaud you, however do you also do the same for corporations? It seems to me that if you refused ALL statist jobs you would be on the street, unless small businesses and coops are much more numerous over there.

Though I have been refusing all manner of government work — both directly employed by governments or by companies that exist only to serve governments — for a very long, I have not really bothered thus far to firmly delineate that which I find acceptable versus unacceptable. I will attempt to do so here.

There are some basic ideas in play here which derive from my own philosophical axioms:

• Government is evil
• One should endeavor to avoid actions which support or strengthen government, thus avoiding evil
• Taxation is theft, and therefore evil, and doubly so since it supports the evil that is government
• Taking money stolen via taxation for oneself at the very least carries the taint of evil, and in very many cases makes one complicit in the original theft and therefore guilty of doing harm

If I may be forgiven for misrepresenting any of Francois’s views, there is an additional critique of the relationship between state and corporation which must be added here, and it consists of things like:

• The corporation is a creature of the state, a privilege granted by evil, and therefore morally questionable at best, condemnable at worst
• Corporations have successfully manipulated state mechanisms everywhere in order to secure greater privileges for themselves and their owners than accrue to ordinary people, and continue to do so
• The legal concept of limited liability is an abomination against natural law, and serves to encourage corporations to act more immorally than fully-accountable individuals might absent it
• The legal tradition of treating a corporation as having status equal to that of a person is also abominable, and leads to additional tendencies toward abuse by those exercising the state-granted corporate privilege

There is much to be added to both of these lists, of course, and others have done a far better job than I ever will of cataloging the immorality of both state and corporation. I believe that I share common ground with Francois in the critique of the corporation as statist creature at the fundamental level, though one as clever as he and one as obstinate as I will no doubt find any number of points to argue over bitterly. I believe I also share the view with him that one should work to minimize the evil they do and the evil they support in every way possible.

As recently as the beginning of this year, I sometimes took on a very narrow subset of government contracts. I was once asked to translate a tender for supply of small-arms ammunition to the Slovak military, and rejected it out of hand. At the same time, when a request came in to translate some text to be used by an agency working to promote tourism in Slovakia, I accepted it. I believe very strongly in the value of casting things into moral absolute categories, but must recognize also that there is a continuum. And, presented with the opportunity to reclaim some of the money stolen from me in tax by the state, I thought that doing the state’s work in one of its least harmful manifestations would be acceptable. Tourism okay, supporting the troops, fuck no. The limit to this would be that one should not accept in compensation for work from the state any more than the value stolen from you previously in tax.

That view of mine has already changed, and led to a new formulation of principle for me: Stealing back what the state has stolen from you is morally acceptable. But working to support the state in exchange for what has been stolen is not acceptable because you are still supporting the state by doing so.

I’ve had more than one client come back to me, after learning my position on working for the state, and offer something along the lines of “Well, you’re not really working for the government; I have this contract already, someone’s going to do it, might as well be you, you’re working for me.” This doesn’t hold up for me one bit. Adding layers of misdirection to hide the original theft of taxation would not change the fact that I commit evil by taking stolen money in support of the state through my work.

I have long rejected working for companies which do a large portion of their business with government. Before I became independent of “bosses” two years ago, I did not apply this principle consistently. But I can recount many telephone discussions with recruiters about job opportunities with companies which are basically state organs in private form (think “defense” contractors in particular, and others), and telling them there was no way morally I could work for such a firm. At the same time, and I will give particulars here, there is much to hate about General Electric. Even so, several years ago I accepted a one-year contract with GE Medical Systems to develop software, network infrastructure and procedures which allow doctors and medical technicians to receive training on the operation of MRI, x-ray, CAT scan and other medical devices via network delivery as opposed to having a trainer physically sent to the hospital/clinic work site. GE happens to be a company which makes death weapons as well as life-saving devices. Gray area? Maybe. I really needed the job in any case. Would I work for GE Medical Systems again today if the opportunity was there and the incentives interesting? I’m not sure (the corporate “culture” there is something which if placed in a Petri dish on a bit of substrate would rapidly spill out into a sickening, purulent mass which would fill all available space and consume everything in the production of its own tumorous growth), but I still wouldn’t object on moral grounds.

There are some questions I ask myself when considering a job which carries the potential taint of the state:

• Who pays? If the answer is taxpayers, I refuse.
• Who owns the company? If it is a state-controlled company, or a branch of the state, I refuse.
• Would this job exist were it not for the state? If no, refuse. This is a tricky point, in that I do accept jobs which violate this from time to time, such as the time I translated a response from an auto manufacturer to the Slovak anti-monopoly office defending itself against a charge of “unfair competition”. I also accept work from recently-privatized utility companies; the ownership of them remains dubious and the notion that a territorial monopoly on the scale even of a country as small as Slovakia is dubious as well, but it would be akin to suicide to refuse cooperation with those who bring clean water, electricity and other services into my home. I do refuse “public” transport companies and the “private” companies which develop the roads, but do so because they fail one or both of the first two criteria above.
• Will my work result in harm to anyone? If yes, refuse. It’s difficult if not impossible to know all of the potential implications of one’s action, of course, but when the answer to this is clear then so is my response.

I would like to live in a world in which the privileges that corporations in all their forms enjoy were abolished. I would like to also educate those who take state privilege as to why there is immorality in their firms’ conception. I would also not like to starve. The vast majority of my clients are incorporated as limited liability corporations or stock corporations, and this is especially true of all the translation agencies that send me work. I would like to stand on principle, but as Francois alludes to, truly standing on such principle in this world will lead one to ruin.

At the same time, even though they enjoy the privileges conferred by the state, not all corporations are necessarily evil simply by virtue of being corporations. There is an easy scale to point to which suggests that their evil (or capacity for evil) increases in proportion to their size, but then we also have counterexamples such as GE developing and selling life-saving medical devices which break the easy formulation. The fact that the statist corporate form exists and offers so many benefits is a problem which in my mind should be attacked in terms of the state itself and the institution of the corporation. I find it very difficult, though, to find fault with the businessman who, having grown his one-man operation to the point where he would like to expand, incorporated in order to gain flexibility and protection. This is rational behavior on his part.

It is also true that given the corporate-statist milieu we have before us, many businesses simply could not operate were it not for the corporate form. I should not wish that every airline disappear, however, nor refuse to patronize them simply because they are creatures of the present system. And I am not going to win any arguments with my clients by suggesting that they forsake limited liability and the other benefits the corporate form provides. They, also, must eat.

(Matters of inconsequential fact have been changed to protect identities and my business relationships.)

Client: Hey Mike, I have a small job that needs to be translated within 2 hours. It’s in your email, can you do it?

Me: Sure, I’ll be home in a few minutes and take a look.

So I go home and check my email, and look at this document he’s sent me. It’s something to do with a civic organization applying for a grant from one of the EU’s panoply of wealth-redistribution organs.

I email him back:

Actually, I’m sorry but I won’t take this job.

I’m an anarchist. As such, I won’t do any work that supports government in any way.

Sorry for the surprise, but you’ll have to find someone else for this.

Best,
Mike

An instant messaging conversation ensues:

Client: i’m shocked. you surprised me.
Me: hehe
Client: do you know someone else who can help?
Client: i need it in 2 hours
Me: you can try [this other guy, contact info provided] (question to myself: shouldn’t I have just said “no”, helping to further monkeywrench the job?)
Client: i’m also sending you a second file if you can do that
Client: thanks. do you know him?
Me: yes. he’s a pro.
Client: great. thanks.
Me: good luck. what’s this other file?
Client: euro funds….but for my friend also
Me: sorry but no chance, for the same reason. i won’t do any work involving getting money from governments, or helping governments operate. The only things I will do are documents that people and businesses are forced to complete by governments…
Client: hm…ok…
Client: but….
Client: i still can’t understand this…
Me: all government money comes from taxation
Me: taxation is stealing
Client: i know…
Me: i wouldn’t like to be part of the crime
Client: but what should we do?
Client: everybody is involved…
Me: resist, ignore, evade, refuse to cooperate, sabotage
Client: i’m a taxpayer too (they steal my money), so maybe this is a small legal opportunity to get some of it back
Me: stealing it back is one thing
Me: but if I do work for the state and get paid, I get some money back, BUT I still lose the value of my work, and I help the state operate
Me: the math doesn’t work out. i and others still lose.
Client: come on… get over it :-p
Me: not on this, sorry
Client: ok
Client: what should i do?
Me: find someone else or refuse the job
Client: can’t refuse…
Client: it’s for my good friend…and I don’t wanna dissapoint him
Client: if i pay you more, is there any possibility?
Me: for me no, it’s a matter of principle
Client: ok…it’s your business…
Client: anyway thanks for the contact
Me: sure.
Client: have a nice day… i’m off to work.
Client: bye
Me: cheers

I am somewhat conflicted as to whether to split this off as a separate item completely divorced from the original conversation and my reaction to Mr. Warner, or to let it flow. Since the hour is late and the path of least resistance is often attractive, I will leave it as a personal response.

Dear Lee,

You wrote:

[A]s a matter of pragmatism, none of the other definitions [of murder] or standards can deprive me of property, liberty, and life. Their value is purely symbolic, as they are not based upon force or coercion.

Of course definitions have no power on their own. They gain power only as they are accepted and applied by people in their relations.

If I read you correctly, you don’t necessarily accept the definition of murder as defined by legislature, religion, or “analysis of the rightful place of self-defense,” but you aren’t making clear exactly what your philosophical standard, legal principle, and definition is. If it’s not too legalistic of me, could I ask you to explain what YOUR higher law is, and how it would apply to me, or any other non-participant in your belief system?

In the Muslim world, the law is what the Sheik, Caliph, or Imam says it is. It tends to vary, notwithstanding the Koran or Sharia Law. I wouldn’t want that for me, and I hope that isn’t what you are talking about.

I wouldn’t want Sharia or literal Biblical law for anyone, and even I can agree that, as an example, the organic law based in the English Common Law is a morally superior system. That doesn’t make it a good system, however.

The question is not too legalistic, this is a fundamental and critical issue, and one which I and hopefully most of the world use to examine and judge the question. My philosophy is something of “self-defense plus”. I believe mine to be an extension of the philosophy described by the “Philosophy of Liberty” video I posted previously.

To the narrow question of what is a criminal murder and what is a justified killing — be it in self-defense, in the service of delegation of the right to self-defense or as retaliation for tortious damage or infringement — I am not a philosopher, and I won’t be able to put together a comprehensive intellectual argument which will unassailably support my beliefs. What I can offer, though, is a set of principles (though some may be loose and slippery) which speak to the issue, and examples that support and illustrate their application. I will gleefully and recklessly make assertions here without proof, use terms without definition and attempt to exploit proof by intimidation. I don’t have time for much else.

First, we own ourselves. Our bodies are our rightful and natural property. When someone attempts to damage us or kill us, we are justified in using whatever force necessary to prevent or interrupt that. That force may even be disproportionate. If a kidnapper has me tied up and is preparing to saw off my leg, if I manage to get a free hand and deliver an ice pick to his brain, that also is justified. We may be justified in certain circumstances in conducting proportionate revenge upon those who injure us as well.

Next, we own our property (define it as you will, and this is a broad and deep and vague philosophical area in which I have mixed opinions and in which there are many views), and that property is an extension of ourselves. We are justified also in using force to protect and defend our property, and may be justified in extracting proportionate retributive compensation or a proportionate forced cure for damage to or infringement upon our property. Our bodies are our property as well, as are our lives.

Next, we own our liberty. Liberty is the space in which one may move and act and be without infringing upon the equally inviolate liberty of others. Our liberty is also our property.

We have the duty to respect the equal rights of others with respect to their own persons, property and liberty. No action that we or they take can abridge or abolish this duty. This duty arises as a practical consequence of our own desire and need for our persons, property and liberty to be respected.

We have the ability, and the moral justification, to delegate the defense of our persons, property and liberty to other persons, organizations or institutions, exclusively or non-exclusively. When we make such an intentional (and explicit) delegation, we are not creating any right, entitlement or duty that did not exist before, we are merely expanding it and inviting others to enforce our own rights. Such a delegation is almost always carried out for reasons of reciprocity: familial love, kinship, fraternal association, commercial transaction, etc. If we, say, delegate our defense to a neighborhood association which sets up an armed patrol to safeguard our homes and defend our lives, property and liberty, we are not empowering those who carry the weapons and go on patrol in our names with any new entitlement, we merely concentrate it in them and agree to support and defend their actions insofar as those actions are in accordance with those of our own rights which we have delegated.

Additionally, other people to whom we have not specifically delegated our powers of self-defense also are justified in acting to defend us or to exact retribution from those who aggress against us. The onlooker to an escalating argument who breaks my debating partner’s nose when he sees that my debating partner is about to stick a knife in my belly is entirely justified, whether I know him or not.

What I think I have given here is a rough outline of libertarian/anarchist theory at a fundamental level. Looks a bit like Mosaic law, doesn’t it? It’s also the basis for the justified functioning of a volunteer military (the scaled-up version of the neighborhood patrol) whose services are contracted for and supported by a group of people who wish it. I’ve also given the barest toe-hold to the “preemptive strike doctrine” under which the war in Iraq today is being waged, though I disagree entirely with its extension to cover that war and almost every other instance where it is used in the world today.

Thus: an unjustified killing, a murder, is one which violates these principles. This is how I see the issue.

You came along, though, telling us that you’d killed people, and that though it haunts your conscience, you believe those killings to be just. I will submit, respectfully, that it should be impossible for a sane man to simultaneously hold close the principles I have outlined above and the belief that those killings were just.

In the US, habeas generally means that a suspect arrested and jailed must be brought before a judge within 48 hours of the arrest to be arraigned, which is to have the charges against him formally read, and to enter a plea. If that doesn’t happen, a request can be made to a judge that the authorities holding the suspect free him immediately.

Habeas is a check on arbitrary State power. Detention is used primarily as a punitive measure, and is widely and rightly seen as a denial of liberty. The balance being struck under the doctrine is that it may require a bit of time for police or prosecutors to secure witnesses or evidence, and that during that time the suspect may evade capture, go on to commit other offenses, destroy evidence or compel or eliminate witnesses, and that in such cases the burden imposed on the suspect by detaining him is reasonable, either in the interests of the State or society. Habeas is a princple of law in all common-law countries, and similar legal doctrines apply in many other places.

Seven hundred years later, under threat by “modern” terrorism — that is, acts of mass violence committed by people not wearing clown suits — habeas is breaking down. The US Military Commissions Act of 2006 effectively suspends the writ of habeas corpus for anyone the President designates an “unlawful enemy combatant”, which is to say anyone he damned well pleases. It essentially grants the President to point at anyone, mumble something about “terrorists” and imprison that person — without charge or trial — forever.

In the UK, time limits for charges to be laid against terrorism suspects have been getting longer since 2000: seven days under the 2000 Terrorism Act, 14 days since 2003, 28 days since 2006. This week, the House of Commons passed a bill to extend the limit to 42 days, as the BBC reports:

Brown wins crunch vote on 42 days

Prime Minister Gordon Brown has narrowly won a House of Commons vote on extending the maximum time police can hold terror suspects to 42 days.

Thirty-six Labour MPs joined forces with Conservatives and Lib Dems to vote against the proposals.

But that was not enough to defeat them – although the government still faces a battle in the House of Lords.

Before the vote, Anthony Barnett wrote in “42 Days: An ‘abundance of caution’“:

In presenting their case to the nation for the extension of detention without charge to 42 days, the Home Secretary Jacqui Smith and the Prime Minister emphasise how much time may be needed to gather all the evidence required to lay the necessary charges because of the immense complexity of such evidence in the age of information technology and international conspiracies. Much detail is offered about thousands of files and hundreds of computers. Their supporters say that we must not allow a terrorist to walk free just because there has not been ‘enough time’ to accumulate the necessary evidence to make good his arrest. The presumption is clear. It is important to highlight this. We are supposed to accept that the argument is over how long guilty people have to be held before they are charged.

This presumption is false. Over half those arrested under the Terrorism Act are “innocent members of the public”. This is officially regarded as acceptable due to the need for the police to exercise “an abundance of caution”. And of the small number held for nearly a month without charge, half of them are innocent too.

To jail someone who is innocent is a crime, one done in our name.

Don’t worry, Britain, it’s okay. They’re terrorists after all. If they weren’t guilty, they wouldn’t be suspects, right? And 42 days under State interrogation while locked in a cage isn’t really all that bad. I mean, sure, you might lose your job, have your mortgage foreclosed on for non-payment, your utilities shut off and all your personal property carted away for sale at auction, but that’s not really punishment, it’s just what a cautious society must do to protect itself from terrorism.

This is not even to mention the hardship imposed on a person and his family and social relations by being kidnapped and imprisoned, locked away in the UK’s overflowing dungeons and subject to rape, beating and the random stab wound by actual criminals. But that’s not punishment, it’s caution.

But hey, you know, it’s the modern age. Things are so complicated now, what with computers and emails and the lack of perfect surveillance. This will only be applied to terrorism suspects, of course. The same rationale for denying habeas for longer and longer periods will never be applied, say, to cases of suspected money laundering, drug trafficking, distribution of “obscene” materials or P2P file sharing. Of course the government will restrain itself, recognizing proper limits to its own power. Of course the cops and the courts are there to protect you.

And, of course, the age of worrying about “terrorism” will come to a rapid close as State policies to combat it by progressively destroying civil liberties and claiming greater and greater governmental powers culminates in the perfection of the panopticon, what Alex Jones refers to as a “prison planet”.

Me, I’m off to go jack up the rates I charge to translation agencies now, so they can’t jail me later.

From The Slovak Spectator:

Put up prices: go to prison

Businesspeople may face jail for euro price hikes under planned law

9 Jun 2008

UNJUSTIFIED price hikes prior to the adoption of the euro as Slovakia’s currency might result in businesspeople being sent to jail if a government plan to protect citizens from pre-euro price inflation becomes law.

[...]

Children branded by their new currency masters

The revision, which would impose a prison sentence on anyone who violates price discipline rules, would become valid in September.

Prime Minister Robert Fico described the law as a tool to penalise those who plan to make a fortune at the expense of others during the euro-switch.

“If someone is such a crook that they elevate prices only to become rich at the expense of someone else, the penal code will be applied,” Fico told a press conference on June 4.

[...]

Judging by details available so far, it seems that any citizen who feels they have suffered from an unjustified price increase will be able to report the business concerned to the police.

[...]

The revision indicates a lack of understanding of the basic principles of the market economy, where the optimal price is generated based on demand and supply, said the executive director of the Slovak Business Alliance, Robert Kičina.

“The freedom to set prices is a basic right of businesses operating in a competitive environment, and price changes are not a reason for criminal proceedings,” Kičina told The Slovak Spectator.

Richard Ďurana, director of the economic think-tank INESS, agrees that such legislation has no place in market economy. “It certainly won’t help businesses if the prime minister flatly throws them into the same group as criminals,” Ďurana told The Slovak Spectator.

[...]

“Instead of explaining the advantages of the euro, the government is evoking an unjustified suspicion among people that businesses want to use the switch to the euro to elevate prices,” Kičina said. “The revision criminalises the business environment.”

The best price regulator is competition and a watchful customer, say business professionals.
Lifting prices above the optimal level is disadvantageous for businesses because sales drop, Kičina said, adding that if prices fall beneath the optimal level consumers also lose out because production falls.

An important pre-condition for a functioning market is free access, so that if a business elevates prices in an unjustified way alert competitors can immediately enter the market and compete with lower prices, Ďurana said.

“The solution is to erase regulations, not to create more,” Ďurana said.

Neither Ďurana nor Kičina expect businesses to use the euro-switch to push up their prices to any great extent.

“If there was currently room to inflate prices, businesses would increase their prices today and would not wait for the euro,” Kičina said.

No country entering the eurozone before now has implemented criminal penalties for raising prices. However, in Slovenia businesses and the government signed an agreement about not elevating prices before the euro’s adoption, in order for the country to be able to meet the inflation criterion, said Kičina.

“The moment the term of the agreement expired, prices jumped and Slovenia is now struggling with the highest inflation within the eurozone,” Kičina concluded.

According to Ďurana, Malta installed a tough regime of price controls and a system of reporting price increases, with the added pressure of financial penalties.

“Such artificial intervention in prices meant that once regulation ended, inflation increased rapidly from 0.9 to about 4.5 percent,” said Ďurana.

Related: Police to pursue pricing

Slovak daily SME reports today that left-wing Prime Minister Robert Fico is proposing to make “speculative” pricing around euro adoption a crime (my translation from Slovak):

Police to Pursue Pricing

BRATISLAVA. Speculation with the prices of goods and services upon converting to the euro should be a crime. According to Justice Minister Štefan Harabin, the Ministry of Justice has responded to statements from Prime Minister Robert Fico and begun working on an amendment to the Criminal Code.

The amendment should set so-called “machinations” around the euro transition outside the law. It would concern unjustified speculation around transition to the euro currency which harms consumers. According to the Ministry, prison or fines should befall all who would wish to “enrich themselves or harm others in determining pricing for goods or services in euros.”

The Ministry did not make clear, however, what precisely is meant by machinations around the euro transition.

[...]

Socialist economics

“This is in conflict with a market economy; it is a principle of socialist economics,” said [lawyer] Gazareková at length. In her view, it is interference in the functioning of the market.

Juraj Karpiš, an analyst with the institute INESS, cautions that such regulatory activity from the government could lead to early price increases even before euro adoption. Businesses will be particularly afraid that after the euro transition they won’t be legally able to change prices so as to provide for a new situation in the market. Thus, they’ll prefer to do so in advance.

“Pricing is purely a matter for businesses, and it’s up to them alone how much they will sell their property for,” Karpiš said.

But let’s not allow reality intrude to now, Messrs. Fico and Harabin. And let’s not call out the hypocrisy of using the law as a tool to benefit the “little guy” consumers here as opposed to the “big bad” businesses when the Slovak central bank has been sticking it to importers (meaning anyone buying anything from outside the country: food, clothing, medicine, etc.) to the benefit of (a comparatively few) exporters through its own “machinations” under the ERM II exchange rate criteria in the face of a continuously strengthening local currency for years. No no, that wouldn’t do at all.

Related, and in English: Fico: Government Ready to Regulate Prices against Chisellers

War With Iran Might Be Closer Than You Think

There is considerable speculation and buzz in Washington today suggesting that the National Security Council has agreed in principle to proceed with plans to attack an Iranian al-Qods-run camp that is believed to be training Iraqi militants.  The camp that will be targeted is one of several located near Tehran.  Secretary of Defense Robert Gates was the only senior official urging delay in taking any offensive action.  The decision to go ahead with plans to attack Iran is the direct result of concerns being expressed over the deteriorating situation in Lebanon, where Iranian ally Hezbollah appears to have gained the upper hand against government forces and might be able to dominate the fractious political situation.  The White House contacted the Iranian government directly yesterday through a channel provided by the leadership of the Kurdish region in Iraq, which has traditionally had close ties to Tehran.  The US demanded that Iran admit that it has been interfering in Iraq and also commit itself to taking steps to end the support of various militant groups.  There was also a warning about interfering in Lebanon.  The Iranian government reportedly responded quickly, restating its position that it would not discuss the matter until the US ceases its own meddling employing Iranian dissident groups.  The perceived Iranian intransigence coupled with the Lebanese situation convinced the White House that some sort of unambiguous signal has to be sent to the Iranian leadership, presumably in the form of cruise missiles.  It is to be presumed that the attack will be as “pinpoint” and limited as possible, intended to target only al-Qods and avoid civilian casualties.  The decision to proceed with plans for an attack is not final.  The President will still have to give the order to launch after all preparations are made.