Stay in School! I Command it!

Steph goes on another brilliant rampage against public education. It's time to get out of this ownership mentality. A service imposed on a customer is assualt, not buisness. Maybe its about time we thought the same way about education.

Here's the link,

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ho5Z-wYBa6I&feature=channel_video_title

Stage of Life: Person to Watch in 2012

I submited a post to Stage of Life.com on the person to watch in 2012.

Here is the link to the essay: http://www.stageoflife.com/Default.aspx?tabid=72&g=posts&m=12220&#12220

David Graeber and Western Expansion or Picked Last in Gym Class

Anthropologist David Graeber had this to say about the expansion of the "West" in his pamphlet "Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology",



There has long been a related debate over what

particular advantage “the West,” as Western

Europe and its settler colonies have liked to call

themselves, had over the rest of the world that

allowed them to conquer so much of it in the four

hundred years between 1500 and 1900. Was it a

more efficient economic system? A superior military

tradition? Did it have to do with Christianity,

or Protestantism, or a spirit of rationalistic inquiry?

Was it simply a matter of technology? Or did it

have to do with more individualistic family

arrangements? Some combination of all these

factors? To a large extent, Western historical sociology

has been dedicated to solving this problem. It

is a sign of how deeply embedded the assumptions

are that it is only quite recently that scholars have

come to even suggest that perhaps, Western

Europe didn’t really have any fundamental advantage

at all. That European technology, economic

and social arrangements, state organization, and the

rest in 1450 were in no way more “advanced” than

what prevailed in Egypt, or Bengal, or Fujian, or

most any other urbanized part of the Old World at

the time. Europe might have been ahead in some

areas (e.g., techniques of naval warfare, certain

forms of banking), but lagged significantly behind

in others (astronomy, jurisprudence, agricultural

technology, techniques of land warfare). Perhaps

there was no mysterious advantage. Perhaps what

happened was just a coincidence. Western Europe

happened to be located in that part of the Old

World where it was easiest to sail to the New; those

who first did so had the incredible luck to discover

lands full of enormous wealth, populated by

defenseless stone-age peoples who conveniently

began dying almost the moment they arrived; the

resultant windfall, and the demographic advantage

from having lands to siphon off excess population

was more than enough to account for the European

powers’ later successes. It was then possible to shut

down the (far more efficient) Indian cloth industry

and create the space for an industrial revolution,

and generally ravage and dominate Asia to such an

extent that in technological terms—particularly

industrial and military technology—it fell increasingly

behind.

A number of authors (Blaut, Goody,

Pommeranz, Gunder Frank) have been making

some variation of this argument in recent years. It

is at root a moral argument, an attack on Western

arrogance. As such it is extremely important. The

only problem with it, in moral terms, is that it

tends to confuse means and inclination. That is, it

rests on the assumption that Western historians

were right to assume that whatever it was that

made it possible for Europeans to dispossess,

abduct, enslave, and exterminate millions of other

human beings, it was a mark of superiority and that

therefore, whatever it was, it would be insulting to

non-Europeans to suggest they didn’t have it too. It

seems to me that it is far more insulting to suggest

anyone would ever have behaved like Europeans of

the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries—e.g.,

depopulating large portions of the Andes or central

Mexico by working millions to death in the mines,

or kidnapping a significant chunk of the population

of Africa to work to death on sugar plantations—

unless one has some actual evidence to suggest they

were so genocidally inclined. In fact there appear to

have been plenty of examples of people in a position

to wreak similar havoc on a world scale—say,

the Ming dynasty in the fifteenth century—but

who didn’t, not so much because they scrupled to,

so much as because it would never have occurred to

them to act this way to begin with.

In the end it all turns, oddly enough, on how

one chooses to define capitalism. Almost all the

authors cited above tend to see capitalism as yet

another accomplishment which Westerners arrogantly

assume they invented themselves, and therefore

define it (as capitalists do) as largely a matter

of commerce and financial instruments. But that

willingness to put considerations of profit above

any human concern which drove Europeans to

depopulate whole regions of the world in order to

place the maximum amount of silver or sugar on

the market was certainly something else. It seems

to me it deserves a name of its own. For this reason

it seems better to me to continue to define capitalism

as its opponents prefer, as founded on the

connection between a wage system and a principle

of the never-ending pursuit of profit for its own

sake. This in turn makes it possible to argue this

was a strange perversion of normal commercial

logic which happened to take hold in one, previously

rather barbarous, corner of the world and

encouraged the inhabitants to engage in what

might otherwise have been considered unspeakable

forms of behavior. Again, all this does not necessarily

mean that one has to agree with the premise

that once capitalism came into existence, it

instantly became a totalizing system and that from

that moment, everything else that happened can

only be understood in relation to it. But it suggests

one of the axes on which one can begin to think

about what really is different nowadays.

Graeber blames the expansion of the West not on its military might or technological prowess but simply on its bloodlust which he claims was fuelled by capitalism, which to Graeber is no different than pure, unadulterated greed.

First, though I agree with Graeber on many things, I have to take issue with the definition of capitalism he chooses to use. One cannot define capitalism as simply a social structure that values the acquisition of material wealth more than you can define socialism simply as a social structure that values fried chicken. In any economic system, people value different things and certainly there are people in capitalist societies that value wealth above all else but I don't think I would be wrong to say that those people are in the minority. Graeber rightly identifies that capitalism is not determined as a matter of law or technology but is wrong in asserting it is the social acceptance of greed. Rather, I maintain, that it is defined by the social acceptance of capital and free-trade (I use the term loosely) and the ability of individuals to use their own subjective judgement in determining what is of value to them. Early forms of Western capitalism were, of course, more structural and take on a structural, rather than cultural, definition. When speaking of history, it makes the most sense simply to define capitalism as private property and trade which don't of themselves imply freedom.

Second, I think he is wrong to place the rise of the West as a world power solely on our adaptation of "capitalism", variations of which have existed as long as trade has throughout the world. The rise of the "West" (if you can call the horrific effects it had on the rest of the world a "rise") was caused by more than a multitude of factors, cultural and structural. To take the emotionally anti-west view that we were simply less moral than other powers at the time ignores the fact that China, India and the Islamic world were, at the time, looking inward, so to speak. China, which was isolationist to the point of xenophobia for most of its existence, had just ended its brief experiment in expansion with the close of the exploratory voyages under the Admiral Zheng-He and India, which had never really been expansionist in the first place, was still splintered from the fall of the Gupta Empire. The Islamic world was experiencing the opposite of an Enlightenment as people turned to Sufi mystics and Islamic piety rather than the natural sciences. In essence the West simply caught the rest of the world asleep at a time when truly devastating expansion was the most possible.

I think of the West as something of the kid who gets picked last on the soccer field when it comes to the realm of world trade. Western powers had taken a very long time to recover from the fall of the Roman Empire at the end of the Classical period which left Europeans pretty much the least powerful and least wealthy continent out of Europe, Africa, and Asia throughout the Post-Classical period. Europeans had wanted to engage in the luxury goods trade but had little to offer the rest of the world except depleting supplies of gold. With the beginning of exploration and the dawn of the truly global marketplace--America and Oceania were in contact with the rest of the world for the first time-- Europeans began to see the riches around the world for the taking but with little economic power, political power would have to do. After colonisation, economic power followed political power and the West emerged as the world's hegemony. I think of this as the kid on the soccer field who has little to offer the rest of the players feeling so left out and wanting to play on the field so bad that one day, while all the other players are relaxing in the shade, he brings a gun to the fields and shoots them all, claiming the field as his own. A grotesque metaphor perhaps, but one that I think strikes closer to the heart of the matter (and the heart of darkness) than  simply blaming the White man's greed.

Home Soil

Home soil, where we live, where we toil,

And after battle we will stand,

Our banners held up in our hands.

Our notes have a romantic ring,

As voices raised to heaven sing

Victory for the Sacred Land!


Dark armies stand at our gate.

Drums of their Death March, we await,

Alert, afraid, but not alone.

We send a shout into the air,

And have a rider fly out there,

To tell them it is far too late,

The war is ours, forget your homes.


Fear is masked by the elation,

Of the servant of the nation.

Our voices all call up as one,

An unstoppable cloud of human spirit,

Even the meanest will come to fear it.

We rule all lands beneath the sun!


One man alone would not suffice,

Nor would the tools of avarice.

Collectively we are stronger.

So let the loner join or die.

There is no place for him to hide.

He will bother us, no longer.


There's room for only one people.

Room for one church, with one steeple.

All others are infiltrators.

So rise, neighbours, together stand,

For the glory of the Homeland.

They are no more than invaders.


We've pushed back armies of evil,

And with great social upheaval,

Have made our people joined as one.

An unstoppable cloud of human spirit,

Even the meanest will come to fear it.

We rule all lands beneath the sun!


Other loyalties laid to rest.

Forsake family name and crest.

The State is ours and it is all,

And so we go to guard each door.

We are different than before.

Take post around the fortress wall.

The Stealth of Nations; Robert Neuwirth.

(Robert Neuwirth, journalist and author, has written two books--Shadow Cities and The Stealth of Nations-- about the informal economy that so many members of the human race work, shop, and survive in.)

The world traveling journalist, Robert Neuwirth, has opened up the pages of a largely ignored narrative in world economics. In his book "The Stealth of Nations" released this past year; Neuwirth takes the reader on a journey through various shades of grey in all sectors of the world's informal economy. With the dramatic effect that the informal but not illicit. (Neuwirth distinguishes the two with the former being the subject of this book. Informal being all of the actions which would be legal if the merchants simply were licensed by a government to do their work and to pay taxes.) This informal economy he calls "System D" (a term which was first coined by anthropologist Keith Hart) he explains as,

a slang phrase pirated from French-speaking Africa and the Caribbean. The French have a word that they often use to describe particularly effective and motivated people. They call them débrouillards. To say a man (or woman) is a débrouillard(e) is to tell people how resourceful and ingenious he or she is. The former French colonies have sculpted this word to their own social and economic reality. They say that inventive, self-starting, entrepreneurial merchants who are doing business on their own, without registering or being regulated by the bureaucracy and, for the most part, without paying taxes, are part of 'l'economie de la débrouillardise.' Or, sweetened for street use, 'Systeme D.' This essentially translates as the ingenuity economy, the economy of improvisation and self-reliance, the do-it-yourself or DIY economy.

            Seeking in part to bust the myth that those who work outside of the formal sphere are untrustworthy, he tells the story of many entrepreneurs who provide services to their people when the government cannot or will not and has spent years traveling across the globe seeking out the people who run businesses and markets outside of the overarching arm of governments and bureaucracies. He spends much of his time in the third world; referring often to time he spent in South America and Africa, particularly the smuggling of Chinese goods into Nigeria, but he is no stranger to System D entrepreneurs in America. Neuwirth sees and notes that States' are strangling their people's ability to prosper and do business and is aware that today's notion of neo-liberal capitalism is geared to favor massive international conglomerates. He even quotes Murray Rothbard several times, but while this may seem like the Agora from "Alongside Night" Neuwirth is clear to distance himself from any anarchist sentiment and seems to be more focused on what policies governments can implement to uses System D to build a better world though he does acknowledge the large role that System D will play in the world's future and is optimistic that it will be good for the people.

            He ends on a positive note by saying that despite the inequality and unfairness generated by the current system that the answer to what he considers the two biggest economic problems facing the modern world--unemployment and inequality-- will come not from the privileged halls of academia but from the storefronts and underground traders of System D and I agree with him. What he doesn't note is that the very existence of such an extensive System D is a syndrome of a form of capitalism that artificially favors the elite. When the competitive but regulated marketplace is skewed in favor of the biggest and most connected, the smaller or the new will leave the competitive but regulated market and form their own alliances, and establish their own de facto rules of trade. The book is able to go into this well and provides plenty of wholesome food for thought. I would highly recommend it to anyone interested in the future of Liberty and of mankind itself. The future lies with System D.

Newt Gingrich bares his teeth and ambitions.

THE NEWT'S TEETH AND AMBITIONS ARE BARED. BE PREPARED.

The flamboyant and grandiose Newt Gingrich rose to a tremendous victory in the South Carolina primary with fangs flashing at everyone from the mainstream media to his fellow GOP contenders. He reminds me of another grandiose figure who bared his teeth and ambitions to a populace tired of the old leader. No, I'm not trying to compare Newt to Hitler but you've got to question a man with a view of himself like Gingrich's.

One Man Alone or Follow the Flock

Many an astute thinker has noticed that fourteen men in a room will come up with fourteen different solutions to any given problem and none will agree with another. Forgetting for a moment that fourteen men in a room will more likely come up with three solutions, four or five "big-men" and a couple of factions, lets assume for a minute they are right.

 Lets think that as K says in Men in Black that a person is smart but people are stupid and that one man is usually a better descision maker than a community. There is anthropological support for this idea, as even in  early egalitarian societies a "big-man" often was the final arbiter of all actions.

We also know that one man cannot possibly comprehend all that happens in a society or an economy, particularly in our modern age. The intricacies of human interaction defy the social sciences and laugh in the face of central planning, leaving mankind to wallow in his hubris and folly. One person cannot plan it all, and still less can a bureaucracy (The bureaucrat is always for sale, and never knows the full extent of his actions.)

Eliminateing the democracy, the autocratracy, and the bureauacracy for their ineffectiveness, we are left with the Smithian conclusion that every individual is most fit to run his or her own affairs, and perhaps have a say in the affairs of those closest to him (by voluntary choice such as friends and the family unit.)

If each individual is to run his or her own affairs in an economy that we do not wish to be stagnant, it would seem to me that stored capital, private property, and the profit motive are all necessisties.

Denying property would lead to stagnation and would deny Man's nature as a manipulative being that survives by hand and mind. Denying the accumulation of capital would impead progress and cause consumption to dominate production, which benefits industrial economies in the short term, but the whole of Mankind cannot survive as consumers only. To deny the profit motive would be to tell the individual that he has no buisness caring for himself and that someone else is better suited to it.

We must allow the individual to progress, in turn allowing society to progress. As a strictly utilitarian arguement, I cannot see any one man is fit to run society nor any society fit to run one man.

Free Trade? (Even with Dictators?)

Do I believe in free trade? In short, yes. A libertarian society must allow for trade with all people, all across the Earth, free of corrupt political considerations. However, when we step outside the window of National interest and into the window of individuals we have to ask the question "With whom is it moral/immoral to do buisness?"

I believe it is immoral to sell a gun to someone you know is a murderer. If you sell a gun to someone who is dangerous, or someone you should have know was dangerous, you should be held partially accountable for all immoral actions carried out by that dangerous person. Likewise, I believe it would be immoral to do be immoral to do buisness with a tyrant as you would be funding their tyranny.

(Many in the United States seek sanctions against Iran to portest the governments dispicable treatment of its Citizens.)

How does a libertarian society deal with this? Does the seller of the gun owe restitution to the victims or their families?

I would say yes, and, as far as gun control goes, this should help keep guns out of the hands of violent criminals. Gun salesmen would be extra careful with private backround checks and waiting periods if they knew they would be responsible for crimes commited by their customers.

But someone doing buisness with a tyrannt cannot pay restitution to the victims, it simply isn't feasible as they have no way of prosecuting the salesman.

 Perhaps private activists groups would seek arbitration on their behalf. For sake of arguement we could assume that in a libertarian-anarchist society there are international peace and charity groups that seek to fight injustice (Hopefully, a good and righteous people would flock to these organisations when free from the tax-burden).

These groups could seek out foriegn nations which abuse their people and set up a sort of private embargo on them, or a boycott. They could prosecute those who do buisness with the tyrannt-nation on behalf of its victims.

Some might argue that this idea puts too much faith in charity and the thrid sector and perhaps it does, but the long-term effects of governmental restrictions on trade or the idea of open trade with anyone, even a genocidier, are infinately worse.