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How to Use Democracy To Deny Human Rights | Mises Institute

Posted by M. C. on August 31, 2021

In the end, the fact that the notion of a people not needing a government to have their freedom of religion and speech seems absurd represents the devastating extent to which the statist mentality has been cemented in the minds of the men, women, and children of this country.

https://mises.org/wire/how-use-democracy-deny-human-rights

Ayush Poolovadoo

“You gather the idea that Mauritius was made first, and then heaven; and that heaven was copied after Mauritius.”
– Mark Twain

Since its rebirth as an independent state in 1968, this paradisaic island has been touted as a paragon of democratic political institutions promoting rapid economic growth and motivating its citizens to overcome divisions of religion, language, ethnicity, and region of origin. It is looked up to as an example of thriving democracy and constitutionalism in the aftermath, most recently, of Dutch, French, and British colonization.

One benefits greatly from venturing beyond a cursory look at this small island republic’s admirable history and digging into the respect for institutions borrowed from its Western overseers. In doing so, it becomes painfully transparent that proselytizing about the virtuous and egalitarian character of a representative democracy has been little more than another shrewd but effective tactic of the state to maintain its essentially illiberal nature with the end goal of enthralling the ancestors of present-day Mauritians and ensuring that their descendants are born under its yoke.

The Lack of Preexisting Cultural and Societal Institutions

Unlike a select few of its fellow African entities, such as Botswana or Madagascar, Mauritius has not had the advantage of precolonial institutions or cultural frameworks to promote resistance against the state’s encroachment on property rights or to provide guidance for development following the departure of the colonizers. With regard to Madagascar, several Malagasy tribes, specifically the Merina, had such institutions. This society, descended from Southeast Asian settlers, adhered to a legal code instituted by its Hindu aristocracy, which l’Estrac describes in Mauritians: Children of a Thousand Races, his 2004 work, as outlining a basic social order, the organization of justice, the status of the family, property rights, moral values, and territory. However, this lack of precolonial institutions or frameworks did not prevent the spark for an anarchic society from coming forth.

Beginning in the late seventeenth century, the incumbent Dutch colonial administrators witnessed not only the ruthlessness and violence they could inspire in rebels and runaway slaves, but also how this diverse group, comprising Malagasy and Indian slaves, could achieve peaceful coexistence. Taking refuge in the uncharted Mauritian wilderness upon their escape, this seemingly disparate group of former slaves, miles away from their respective motherlands, established a society in which each individual’s land was demarcated and neighbors’ property and individual rights, as well as their freedom to practice whichever faith they belonged to, were respected. The commonalities that transcended their differences were their love of freedom and willingness to take any measures necessary to defend their liberty. No measure was so drastic or immortalized as their arsonist massacres of the Dutch establishment in 1677 and their escape to Bourbon Island (present-day Réunion).

Thus, if we are to lament the loss of a truly voluntarist spirit among the island’s modern-day citizens, as well as its diaspora, we can pinpoint the departure of its anarchic ancestors, in the pursuit of their own freedom, as the downward turning point in the fight against the state. The fight for freedom by any means necessary did not end here; uprisings and revolts became increasingly frequent over the following years, manifested by Malagasy and Indian slaves who saw slow, excruciating deaths as free men and women as preferable to lifetimes spent chained and shackled. 

The State Wises Up

Under no colonial administration were the state’s attempts to keep disenfranchised groups pitted against one another more beautifully executed than under the French (1715–1810). The legal codes and governmental practices that their bureaucracy left behind were fundamental to keeping the freedoms and aspirations of the island’s inhabitants in check.

However, to understand how these manifestations of statism in their colonial incarnations function, it is crucial to gain an accurate picture of who stood where in the social hierarchy of the day. At the dawn of French rule, the elite consisted of French-born inhabitants who had arrived in service to the East India Company. Whites born on the island were directly beneath them. Then the Creoles, foreigners (Englishmen and Dutchmen), and, finally, the slaves, the latter of which were separately categorized as black, Indian, or Malagasy. At the turn of the century, this hierarchy had remained more or less unchanged, perhaps with greater diversity in the middle class (the “people of color”), which at this point consisted of free Indians and Creoles.

With specific regard to the Indians, a singularly ingenious strategy by the French colonial government to gain better control over them was the creation of the “chief of the Malabars” (chefs de Malabars) office1 in 1784. The position was created in response to frequent intracommunal feuds.

The position was filled by Denis Pitchen, a wealthy Tamilian Catholic born to free Indian parents. At a superficial level, Pitchen’s elevation to a position of authority as a nonwhite resident would be lauded as a milestone for the representation of nonwhites, particularly by apologists of colonialism or advocates of reform through bureaucratic channels. However, l’Estrac provides us with two wrinkles that undermine this milestone’s glorious sheen:

  • Pitchen was a slave owner, and among his possessions were other fellow Indian Christians. This drew the ire of the Catholic Church, which expressed its indignation at the enslavement of Christians.
  • Rather than serving any meaningful diplomatic position, the office of the chief simply served as a conduit for the Franco-Mauritian plantocracy to infiltrate the Indian camp and ensure that their internal troubles would not affect the administration’s hold over them.

Pitchen’s performative elevation was a crippling blow to the self-determination of the inhabitants. This tactic was a common one for rulers: elect an elite or a committee of them from the disenfranchised classes and grant them a few privileges to convince them of the benefits of retaining the present system of governance. The efficacy of this strategy is evident in the resignation of the future generations to the legislative and executive tools of the French and, later, the British as the best pathways to improve their condition and environment.

In their 2015 article in the journal International Labor and Working-Class, Yoshina Hurgobin and Subho Basu not only confirm the predicament of indentured laborers, as previously mentioned, but also reveal the despicable bastardization and repression under oligarchies and all forms of big-government camps throughout history (a feat that Murray N. Rothbard defines as the theft of capitalism from laissez-faire liberals by right-wing traditionalists). Knowing that an open and free labor market would allow laborers to pursue better-paying jobs or positions in which they could diversify their skills, the plantocracy saw to it that the state’s anticapitalistic and illiberal character trumped any entrepreneurial spirit that was slowly brewing within Mauritian society.

The state’s decisive blow to freedom and liberty came in 1886, when the revered reformist Sir William Newton began the electoral tradition of the Council of Government. Newton was very careful to restrict the franchise to those who met the criteria of earning a certain income and owning a certain amount of wealth in the form of assets or land. Despite this discriminatory restriction of the franchise, the masses’ adoration of democracy would soon grow into a general culture of leaving the responsibility of governance in the hands of “elected” officials. This contract, however, is merely symbolic, as their own constitution only recognizes three groups (Hindus, Muslims, and Chinese), with the remaining communities being lumped together under “general population.”

Conclusion

As the politicians and lawmakers of the Mauritian political structure have become more diverse (only with regard to ethnicity and religion, as opposed to diversity of thought and philosophy), the Mauritian population has convinced themselves that their fight for liberty and self-respect as a nation is behind them, remaining ignorant of the pyrrhic nature of their “victory.” In the end, the fact that the notion of a people not needing a government to have their freedom of religion and speech seems absurd represents the devastating extent to which the statist mentality has been cemented in the minds of the men, women, and children of this country.

  • 1. In the colonial context, “malabar” was a generic term used to describe Indians brought to the island, some as slaves and some as indentured laborers. The term refers to the Malabar Coast of the Tamilnadu state in south India.

Author:

Ayush Poolovadoo

Ayush Poolovadoo is a native of Mauritius and studies Politics and International Relations at Newcastle University.

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TGIF: Who’s the Aggressor? Who’s the Victim? | The Libertarian Institute

Posted by M. C. on July 17, 2021

If the point of rights theory is to enable human beings to flourish as they live side by side peacefully and cooperatively in society, then any theory that regards land and other scarce resources as jointly owned by all of humanity is in for problems. The moral is the practical.

The principle of nonaggression is universal: you may not interfere with me, and I may not interfere with you. Liberty for all means no one is aggressed against. Society should be based on consent and cooperation.

https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/tgif-whos-the-aggressor-whos-the-victim/

by Sheldon Richman

rothbard

When a libertarian says that the most basic individual right is the right not to be aggressed against, a clever interlocutor may accuse the libertarian of begging the question, of stuffing the rabbit into the hat. The trick, the critic will say, is in the word aggress: libertarians allegedly rig the game by restricting the category of aggression to only the actions they disapprove of, thereby institutionalizing many corrupt activities.

For example, If Jones tells Smith to get off land to which Jones has legal title, is it really clear that Smith is in the wrong and Jones is in the right? The critic will offer a counter-narrative: it’s considered Jones’s land because the political system arbitrarily defines property rights in a certain way. It might have defined rights differently so that Smith could walk on the land as wishes. So why not see Jones as the aggressor against Smith?

If the libertarian responded that Jones transformed the hitherto unowned parcel by mixing his labor with it, perhaps by clearing and fencing it, the critic might respond that Jones’s act constituted aggression because, unlike yesterday and the day before, no one now may step on the land without Jones’s permission. Jones, in other words, restricts everyone else’s freedom. Who’s right and who’s wrong would depend on one’s point of view.

This case against libertarian property rights implies that land has never been unowned because it has always been owned by humanity in common. Such a position was taken most famously by Henry George. While George did not oppose individuals’ use of parcels of land, he said that users ought to have to pay land rent to the community, the true owners. This was George’s “single tax.” Murray Rothbard rebutted George’s case in both its moral and economic dimensions. (See also Rothbard’s Power and Market.)

If the point of rights theory is to enable human beings to flourish as they live side by side peacefully and cooperatively in society, then any theory that regards land and other scarce resources as jointly owned by all of humanity is in for problems. The moral is the practical. So imagine the impracticality of determining how a piece of land is to be used if everyone is to have a say in the matter. Yet if human beings are to prosper, decisions about how to use scarce resources are crucial. No one is infallible or has a monopoly of wisdom about the “best” use of resources, but we have the next best thing: the market and its price system. The market provides indispensable signals about ever-changing supplies and consumer preferences. Ludwig von Mises and F. A. Hayek made their marks as great economists by, among other things, showing that market prices are the only things we have to relieve, insofar as possible, our ignorance about how scarce resources can be used best to serve everyone’s welfare. Private property and free markets expand rather than contract the public’s access to resources.

The critic of libertarianism may listen and nod but continue to insist that we have no objective way to tell who is the aggressor: Smith or Jones. But maybe we do.

Life is not an abstraction. Individual people are beings who live day to day through the pursuit of projects, which usually involve the cooperation of others. Since we are physical beings, that pursuit requires control over things, including land, and therefore noninterference by other people. How could we live and plan long term if our activities could be interfered with and the fruits of our efforts could be appropriated by others? I take for granted that each person is a self-owner because denial of this principle collapses in absurdity. Lincoln wrote that “if slavery isn’t wrong, nothing is wrong.” Abolitionists called slave owners “man-stealers.” If self-ownership isn’t right, then nothing is right.

The principle of nonaggression is universal: you may not interfere with me, and I may not interfere with you. Liberty for all means no one is aggressed against. Society should be based on consent and cooperation.

In the story above, if we assume Jones acquired the land justly through homesteading, purchase, or gift, then the land is part of his project, and Smith’s trespass constitutes interference with Jones’s life. (Of course, trespass can be trivial, and methods of prevention or redress would have to be proportional to the offense. Put bluntly, Jones can’t shoot Smith merely for setting foot on his land.)

Yes, in a physical sense, Jones’s ownership “interferes” with Smith’s freedom, although not his ability to live as a human being (except perhaps in an emergency). But human action is never merely physical. Justice is relevant. The same physical act can be just or unjust depending on the circumstances.

I think this demonstrates that the libertarian case does not pack its conclusions into its definition of aggression. Hard cases of course can arise, but generally we can determine who is the rightful owner and who is wrongfully interfering.

Finally, I have not tried to sort out the case of ownership clouded by historical injustice, namely, theft. What to do about this is a complicated matter, in part because of the variety of cases, on which I claim no particular wisdom. Those who wish to delve into the problem can begin by looking at what Rothbard had to say in The Ethics of Liberty.

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The GOP Is Not Your Savior | The Libertarian Institute

Posted by M. C. on June 17, 2021

Unfortunately, the answer is that the Republicans would not have saved us, and for two reasons, one historical and the other philosophical: (1) Republicans have never saved us from the bad policies and programs of Democrats, regardless of whether they had partial or total control of the government and could have done something, and (2) Republicans are philosophically not much different from Democrats, regardless of how often and how loud they recite their conservative mantra about the Constitution, the free market, limited government, federalism, traditional values, free enterprise, a balanced budget, individual freedom, free trade, and property rights.

https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/the-gop-is-not-your-savior/

by Laurence Vance

If Sen. Johnny Isakson (R-Ga.) had not gotten sick and resigned his Senate seat, then the title of this article would have been “Will the Republicans Save Us?”

After serving in the Georgia state house and senate, Isakson served three terms in the U.S. House of Representatives before being elected to the U.S. Senate in 2004. He was re-elected in 2010 and 2016. Although his Senate term did not expire until January 2023, in August 2019 he announced that because of his Parkinson’s disease and other health challenges, he was resigning his Senate seat effective at the end of 2019. Under Georgia law, the governor—Brian Kemp, a Republican—was allowed to make an appointment to fill the unexpired term until the next regularly scheduled statewide election (November 3, 2020). He selected Republican Kelly Loeffler, the co-owner of the Atlanta Dream of the Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA), who had never held political office. She assumed office in January 2020.

Under Georgia election law, all candidates for a special election, regardless of their political party, compete in a “jungle primary” where every name is on the November general election ballot. If no candidate in what is usually a crowded field receives more than 50 percent of the vote, then a runoff election is conducted in January. All told, there were twenty-one candidates—including a write-in candidate who received seven votes—most of whom received less than 1 percent of the vote. Loeffler finished second in the special election with 25.9 percent of the vote. That is why she was in the January 5 runoff election for the Senate seat she held at the time. But although Loeffler claimed to be the most conservative Republican in the Senate, and was considered to be the richest member of the Senate, she lost in the runoff election to the Democrat Raphael Warnock by the slim margin of 50.8 to 49.2 percent.

It is because of this special election that Georgia was the only state to hold two Senate elections in 2020. In the Senate, the 100 senators are divided into three classes with staggered terms. Thus, only one-third of the Senate seats are contested at any election, and never more than one Senate seat in a state. In the regular Senate race in Georgia, the incumbent Republican David Perdue—the cousin of former Georgia governor and Trump administration Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue—was seeking a second term. But as he received only 49.7 percent of the vote (47.9 percent went for Democrat Jon Ossoff and 2.3 percent went for Libertarian Shane Hazel), Georgia law required a runoff election between the top two candidates. But in the January 5 runoff election, Ossoff defeated Perdue by a margin of 50.4 to 49.6 percent.

Winning these two Georgia Senate seats is how the Democrats wrested control of the Senate from the Republicans, who had controlled the Senate since January 2015. Prior to the Georgia runoff election, there were 50 Republicans in the Senate and 48 Democrats (including the two independent members of the Senate, Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Angus King of Maine, who caucus with the Democrats). So now that the Senate is tied 50-50, the Democratic vice president, the former senator Kamala Harris, gets to cast the tie-breaking vote, effectively giving Democrats control of the Senate.

The Democrats

One-party control of the government is dangerous. Gridlock in the Congress helps prevent one party — whether Democrats or Republicans — from exercising unbridled power. Thus, even if one Georgia Senate seat had been won by a Republican, it could have stopped bad legislation proposed by Democrats from passing (assuming that all of the Senate Republicans voted together). But the reality is that life under Democratic rule will be especially dangerous to privacy, liberty, and property.

Now, we know that the Democratic Party for many years has been the party of liberalism, progressivism, collectivism, socialism, paternalism, statism, environmentalism, “social justice,” economic egalitarianism, organized labor, taxpayer-funded abortion, public education, climate change, affirmative action, welfare, higher taxes on the “rich,” universal single-payer health care, increased government regulation of the economy and society, increased government spending, larger and more-intrusive government, and assorted income-transfer programs and wealth-redistribution schemes. The Democratic solution to every problem, injustice, or crisis — real, imaginary, or contrived—is invariably more government, more government intervention, or more government money.

The Democratic Party is not just going to pick up where it left off at the end of the Obama administration. Democrats in Congress will stop at nothing to achieve their agenda. The Democratic Party of today is even more radical than it was twelve years ago during the first two years of Obama’s first term, which was the last time that Democrats had total control of the federal government (House, Senate, presidency).

What’s On the Table

In an episode of “The Libertarian Angle” recorded just two days after the Electoral College vote was certified, Future of Freedom Foundation president Jacob Hornberger and Citadel professor Richard Ebeling examined the question of life under Democratic control and it was not a pretty picture they painted. According to Hornberger and Ebeling, we are going to see massive increases in federal spending, and the debt ceiling rendered totally irrelevant; massive foreign intervention, since Biden is essentially owned by the national-security state; increased focus on official enemies, expansion of the role of the military in American life, expansion of the welfare state, the revitalization of Obamacare, the attempt to implement a full-fledged government health-care system, and the expansion of the war on drugs (a war that Biden supported when he was vice president and Harris supported as a prosecutor); increased federal regulations, massive welfare-state socialism, a more centrally planned economy, massive debauchery of the currency, tax increases, increased anti-trust enforcement, a national increase in the minimum wage, elements of the “green new deal,” and emphasis on equality of outcomes and proportional representation of minorities in all groups; and more money creation by the Fed, increased inflation, wage and price controls to combat inflation, and a more interventionist foreign policy. They concluded that under a Biden administration, everything is on the table that could be a danger to our liberty, privacy, income, wealth, property, and freedom in the marketplace.

To this we can certainly add increased deficit spending, further increases in the national debt, unrestricted funding for Planned Parenthood, loosened restrictions on taxpayer-funded abortions, increased enforcement of anti-discrimination laws, expanded gun-control laws, a federal family-leave policy, government-funded child care, increased resources devoted to fighting climate change, increased violation of privacy and civil liberties in response to the coronavirus, fewer welfare-work requirements, and increased promotion of the transgender movement.

On the basis of statements in the 2020 Democratic Party platform, the recommendations in the “Biden-Sanders Unity Task Force Recommendations,” and statements from Biden himself, we can also look forward to extended unemployment benefits, a $15 per hour minimum wage, and more-generous refundable tax credits that give even more Americans tax refunds of money that they never paid in; increased funding for food stamps, WIC, and school-meal programs; greater “investment” in mass transit and transportation public-works projects, “fair” trade policies and deals, expanded farm and housing subsidies, a national goal of achieving net-zero greenhouse gas emissions for all new buildings and vehicles, and “environmental justice”; increases in corporate tax rates, aggressive attempts to increase the supply of “affordable” housing, increased government efforts to close the racial wealth gap, increased spending on K-12 education, tuition-free college, increased federal education grants, extended student-loan payment suspension, and student-debt relief; and making Washington, D.C., the 51st state, an increased push for a reduction in the use of fossil fuels, the ending of cash bail, the passing of an Equal Rights Amendment, increased condemnation of “hate speech,” the reauthorization and expansion of the Violence Against Women Act, the securing of equal pay for women, and increased funding for arts and culture.

The Republicans

Read the rest here

This article was originally featured at the Future of Freedom Foundation

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Of Two Minds – What’s Yours Is Now Mine: America’s Era of Accelerating Expropriation

Posted by M. C. on April 27, 2021

The takeaway here is obvious: earn as little money as possible and invest your surplus labor in assets that can’t be expropriated. Develop low-overhead gigs and enterprises that are 100% yours so you can legitimately write off expenses and control how much work you decide to take on. Keep accurate records and pay whatever taxes are due, but by minimizing net income then taxes will be modest. Invest your best self, time and energy in assets that can’t be assessed, taxed or expropriated: your skills, networks, value you create and invest in your own self-sufficiency, sharing and good living of the kind that can’t be bought or sold or expropriated.

https://www.oftwominds.com/blogapr21/expropriation4-21.html

Charles Hugh Smith

The takeaway here is obvious: earn as little money as possible and invest your surplus labor in assets that can’t be expropriated.

Expropriation: dispossessing the populace of property and property rights, via the legal and financial over-reach of monetary and political authorities.

All expropriations are pernicious, but the most destructive is the expropriation of labor’s value while the excessive gains of unproductive speculation accrue to the elite that owns most of the nation’s wealth.

In a nation in which the leadership has finely honed the art and artifice of legalized looting and financial legerdemain, it’s not surprising that the expropriation of labor’s value takes many forms. For the self-employed and small business proprietor, the list is practically endless:

1. Proliferating junk fees for permits, licence renewals, applications, late fees, penalties, fines for violating obscure regulations, etc. (Never mind if you’re losing money; by definition, as a business owner you’re “rich” and deserve petty expropriations. If you’re Amazon, however, we’ll shower you with subsidies and tax breaks.)

2. Sky-high liability insurance, disability insurance and workers compensation insurance, because all the fraud and friction in these systems adds expense and you’re the one who will pay for it all.

3. Sky-high rent. Now that the Federal Reserve jacked up the “market value” of a $1 million commercial building to $10 million via asset inflation, rents have soared even though no improvements have been made to the tenants’ spaces. Thanks to the Fed, rents are many multiples of what they would be if the Fed hadn’t jacked up real estate to absurd overvaluations.

4. Taxes on wages. Consider the Self-Employed in a High-Tax State: let’s start with the 15.3% federal self-employment tax on wages up to $142,000, then add federal tax rates that quickly reach 32% and up and state taxes that hit 10% and higher in high-tax states, and then don’t forget the extra 3.9% Medicare tax above $125,000, and when we add all this up, the total tax rate exceeds 61%. (You want to quibble? OK, make it 55%. How much difference does this make? None.)

Now this may be acceptable in Scandinavian nations where you receive virtually free healthcare and higher education, but here in the Accelerating Expropriation USA, the Self-Employed in a High-Tax State has to pay insanely costly healthcare insurance out of the 39% that’s been oh-so-generously left to live on, as well as the insanely high student loans that were taken out to attend university.

Factor those in and the Self-Employed in a High-Tax State gets a third or less of her labor’s value. This only rises slightly in so-called lower-tax states, which tend to compensate for lower income taxes with high sales taxes and property taxes (“they get you coming and going.”)

Inflation is stealth expropriation, and like all expropriation, we’re told it’s for our own good, just like any other beating delivered by authorities. So as the Fed pushes asset inflation to Mars and whines that real-inflation isn’t high enough yet, the Self-Employed in a High-Tax State are experiencing a monthly expropriation of the purchasing power of what little labor value has been left to them.

I received an insightful email on this topic from A.C.:

“Expropriation.

Once you’ve had it done to you personally (as I did through my business) you view the world in a whole new light.

Without assets in which you can store the excess value of your labor minus the worry of debasement or theft, the incentive to create that excess goes away. That’s why the BLS ‘take this job and shove it’ JOLT measure is staying so stubbornly high.

Unfortunately, it’s that excess labor that funds what we call civilization.

People without the margins which excess labor can create tend to revert, for their own security, to community groupings based on familial bonds. They’re a store of value that’s stable and can’t be inflated away.

Those without such bonds are SOL. Hunger goes a long way in mitigating the personality disorders which impair the creation of such bonds.”

Here’s the takeaway: Any “wealth” denominated in financial instruments will be expropriated by one means or another, so “wealth” has to be denominated in some other “currency”, social, cultural, skills / intellectual, that is beyond the grasp of monetary and political authorities. This is the primary reason why crazy risky speculation is being pursued with such intensity: there is no way to escape the grinding impoverishment of expropriation for most wage-earners except to make more “wealth” via crazy-risky gambles than is being expropriated.
The Only Way to Get Ahead Now Is Crazy-Risky Speculation.

There’s another dynamic few grasp: When the Empire runs out of colonies to exploit, it brings its expropriation machinery home to stripmine the domestic populace. I explained this dynamic back in 2012:

Neofeudalism and the Neocolonial-Financialization Model (4/24/12)

Welcome to Neocolonialism, Exploited Peasants! (10/21/16) October 21, 2016

Why are we not surprised that as expropriation accelerates on all fronts, the Middle Class Now Holds Less Wealth than Top 1 Percent? (brookings.edu) Thanks to the magic of pay-to-play “democracy,” the super-wealthy and corporate elites escape all the expropriation machinery stripmining wage earners. The corporate taxes collected are a tiny slice of the hundreds of billions corporations spend on stock buybacks, the only purpose of which is to enrich insiders and the super-wealthy who own most of the nation’s financial assets.

The takeaway here is obvious: earn as little money as possible and invest your surplus labor in assets that can’t be expropriated. Develop low-overhead gigs and enterprises that are 100% yours so you can legitimately write off expenses and control how much work you decide to take on. Keep accurate records and pay whatever taxes are due, but by minimizing net income then taxes will be modest. Invest your best self, time and energy in assets that can’t be assessed, taxed or expropriated: your skills, networks, value you create and invest in your own self-sufficiency, sharing and good living of the kind that can’t be bought or sold or expropriated.

I cover these topics in greater depth in my books:

Get a Job, Build a Real Career, Defy a Bewildering Economy

An Unconventional Guide to Investing in Troubled Times

Money and Work Unchained

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The Equality Act’s Attack on Religion Is Really about Private Property Rights | Mises Wire

Posted by M. C. on April 9, 2021

It has become clear that these laws are a fruitful and convenient vehicle—from the policymaker’s perspective—to advancing federal control over all of private life. As time goes on, expect lawmakers to turn again and again to these laws as a means of expanding government control of private organizations of every size, shape, purpose, mission, and religion. 

https://mises.org/wire/equality-acts-attack-religion-really-about-private-property-rights

Ryan McMaken

With the introduction of the Equality Act of 2021—and its passage in the House—the Democratic Party and its allies continue the now well-established tradition of using “antidiscrimination” and “public accommodation” laws to continue the attack on the private sector and private institutions once somewhat insulated from regime control. 

Historically these laws, acts, and court rulings—found initially in the Civil Rights Act of 1964—focused largely on regulating hiring and the provision of services at private institutions. These legislative and judicial acts regulate how private owners of restaurants and hotels—and a wide variety of other private establishments—enter into verbal or written contracts with potential employees, clients, and customers.

Initially, these mandates focused on regulating how business provide services to religious minorities and what the Canadians call “visible minorities”—i.e., non-whites. The laws began with just regulating private for-profit “public carriers” and organizations known to provide “public accommodation” of basic necessities.  The Equality Act, however, greatly expands these federal powers. First, the Act continues to expand the groups that are considered “protected” groups, most notably LGBT groups. Second, while older provisions tended to target run-of-the-mill businesses, the Act now expands federal power in order to regulate religious institutions, as well. The Act moves to ensure that fewer and fewer Americans will be able to exercise the free exercise of religion as a means of avoiding federal mandates. The Act also expands federal control over medical institutions and employees. 

It has become clear that these laws are a fruitful and convenient vehicle—from the policymaker’s perspective—to advancing federal control over all of private life. As time goes on, expect lawmakers to turn again and again to these laws as a means of expanding government control of private organizations of every size, shape, purpose, mission, and religion. 

What Is the Equality Act?

How exactly does the Equality Act expand regime control over the private sector? It redefines which organizations are subject to “public accommodation” laws, and it adds new interest groups that private sector institutions will be forced to service in a manner to the regime’s liking.  For instance, the act would make it discriminatory to deny certain medical procedures to transgender persons:

[t]he Equality Act would force hospitals and insurers to provide and pay for [sexual transition] therapies against any moral or medical objections [raised by medical personnel]. It would politicize medicine by forcing professionals to act against their best medical judgment and provide transition-affirming therapies.

The Act goes well beyond only medical institutions: 

The text of the bill explicitly includes … “any establishment that provides a good, service, or program, including a store, shopping center, online retailer or service provider, salon, bank, gas station, food bank, service or care center, shelter, travel agency, or funeral parlor, or establishment that provides health care, accounting, or legal services.”

Notable among these is the expansion to “shelters” which include domestic violence shelters. Under the Equality Act, these organizations would be required to house males self-identifying as women in shelters alongside abused women.

The inclusion of salons is also notable, since—as was exhibited by the notorious Jessica Yaniv case in Canada—public accommodation mandates would likely erase the ability of salons to limit waxing services to women only. Naturally, as in the Yaniv case, the employees at these institutions could potentially be forced into waxing men’s genitals provided those men identify as women.

The Act also could easily be interpreted as a blanket ban on refusals to perform abortions:

The Equality Act bans discrimination on the basis of “pregnancy, childbirth, or a related medical condition,” and courts and the federal government have interpreted “related medical condition” to mean “abortion.” It is, therefore, quite conceivable that courts could soon interpret the Equality Act as requiring private insurance and government health-care programs to fund abortion.

The Abolition of Religious Exemptions

But perhaps most central to the Act are its provisions to reduce exemptions for religious persons and institutions. Historically, federal law and federal court decisions have in many cases noted that religious institutions—if the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights is to mean anything—must be able to behave in ways that are compatible with religious belief. Thus, in some cases, a church or other religious organization can refuse to hire persons who espouse ideology or behavior that stands contrary to a religious group’s beliefs. Similarly, in some cases, a religious doctor or nurse could have found some protections under these provisions for refusing to perform religiously objectionable medical procedures such as sex reassignment surgery or abortions.

This has always been rather weak tea in terms of limiting federal powers, since it restricts private discretion to only those acts that are religiously motivated. Moreover, government agents themselves—i.e., government judges—have also often arrogated to themselves the power to determine if a discriminatory decision fits under any known religious category. In other words, the government will tell you if your legal defense can be defined as a religious defense. Moreover, as the Masterpiece Cake Shop case and similar cases have shown, even religious objections fail to provide much in the way of protection from these legal mandates.

Nevertheless, even these few and weak loopholes are too much for backers of the Equality Act which is designed to further restrict religious freedom:

University of Virginia law professor Douglas Laycock has warned that the Equality Act would “crush” religious dissenters. “It goes very far to stamp out religious exemptions…. It regulates religious non-profits. And then it says that [the Religious Freedom Restoration Act] does not apply to any claim under the Equality Act. This would be the first time Congress has limited the reach of RFRA. This is not a good-faith attempt to reconcile competing interests. It is an attempt by one side to grab all the disputed territory and to crush the other side.”

If the Act passes, we should expect an avalanche of lawsuits against religious schools and similar institutions that attempt to hire only employees who reflect the organizations’ missions. 

A Doorway to Widespread Regulation of Private Life

This was to be expected. The public accommodation provisions have long served as a doorway for federal regulators to enter and manage the daily minutiae of private life and the private sector. The expansion of these powers under the Equality Act is only the next logical step. After all, this body of law has always constituted a direct assault on the private sector and the institution of private property, bringing more and more of private life under the watchful eye of government bureaucrats. It has provided an excuse for government regulators to investigate, fine, sue, and otherwise harass and destroy business owners in a wide variety of ways. For those business owners who cannot afford a legal defense, there is no recourse.

Naturally, this is all to the benefit of the regime itself. As Ludwig von Mises has noted, private property is an institution that is absolutely central and essential in limiting government power and in providing some small realm of freedom beyond the reach of the regime’s coercion. Like market institutions and the family, religious institutions are themselves within the private sector and a key part of what the early laissez-faire liberals called “society.” Society represents those noncoercive institutions that are to be contrasted with the state and its mandates, imposed under threat of fines and imprisonment. All else being equal, it’s a good thing that religious organizations have been able to exercise discretion in “discrimination” even if these same freedoms were denied to others. Some freedom—what some might call loopholes—is preferable to no freedom. 

But that was never enough for the advocates of the Equality Act, and they’re now moving faster in the wrong direction. The small bit of freedom carved out for religious institutions is being reduced further and religious institutions are likely to soon be considered more or less indistinguishable from long-beleaguered commercial organizations. 

The Answer Lies in Private Property

But what we can we do about the problem of private sector discrimination that’s truly designed to disadvantage some specific minority group? Ironically, the answer lies in protecting private property.

For those of us who are concerned about increasing access to goods and services for minority groups—ethnic and otherwise—it is most effective to combat the regime’s restrictions on private sector activities and lower barriers to entry in the marketplace. The legal public accommodation edifice is largely built on the idea that firms headed by bigots will be able to establish partial or total monopolies that can dictate to consumers who can buy what. In a reasonably free economy, however, this is extremely unlikely. As I have shown in the past, we can find many examples of much-discriminated-against Japanese Americans and Latinos—and in other groups that have built up ethnic economic enclaves—rushing to provide a responsive economic foundation of goods and services built around the needs of their group. If our goal is to broaden and expand services—and those who can count on them—the last thing we need is an ever more repressive legal regime built on the constant threat of lawsuits and fines for organizations that run afoul of the regime’s ideological preferences. 

On the other hand, it is unlikely that the backers of the Equality Act are actually motivated by securing economic prosperity for constituents. Rather, this is about settling political scores—carving out privileges for certain interest groups at the expense of other interest groups. In other words, it’s a culture war. And that means maximizing the regime’s ability to dole out favors and punishments.  Author:

Contact Ryan McMaken

Ryan McMaken (@ryanmcmaken) is a senior editor at the Mises Institute. Send him your article submissions for the Mises Wire and Power&Market, but read article guidelines first. Ryan has degrees in economics and political science from the University of Colorado and was a housing economist for the State of Colorado. He is the author of Commie Cowboys: The Bourgeoisie and the Nation-State in the Western Genre.

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Property Rights and the Pollution Problem | Mises Institute

Posted by M. C. on February 27, 2021

One way around the difficulty is not to count trivial harms as violations of your rights. Mulkeen offers two objections to this solution. First, if doing something of value outweighs minor boundary crossings of your rights, doesn’t this lead to making rights less important than adding to social utility, just what those in favor of rights don’t want? They think rights are more important than social utility. She mentions the philosopher David Sobel, who has made a proposal of this kind:

https://mises.org/library/property-rights-and-pollution-problem

David Gordon

Murray Rothbard and other libertarians support self-ownership. Part of being a self-owner is that no one may physically harm your body without your consent, unless you first violate someone else’s rights. David Friedman raised a famous objection to this principle, and the problem has also been discussed by Walter Block. In his book The Machinery of Freedom, Friedman states the problem in this way: “The final question to be dealt with is how property rights should be defined—the question implicit in my discussion of trespass by single photons and single molecules of carbon dioxide.” If you say that transmitting photons onto someone’s property violates rights, doesn’t this make a wide variety of common actions, such as turning on the lights in your own house, violations of rights? Friedman’s account of the problem is about violations of property rights in land, but the problem obviously applies to trespass against people’s bodies as well.

The political philosopher Nicola Mulkeen doesn’t mention Friedman or Block, but she discusses the same issue in an excellent recent article, “Rescuing Self-Ownership: Tackling the Pollution Problem” (in Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, vol. 22 [2019]) and I’d like to discuss a few points she raises.

One way around the difficulty is not to count trivial harms as violations of your rights. Mulkeen offers two objections to this solution. First, if doing something of value outweighs minor boundary crossings of your rights, doesn’t this lead to making rights less important than adding to social utility, just what those in favor of rights don’t want? They think rights are more important than social utility. She mentions the philosopher David Sobel, who has made a proposal of this kind:

His own view is that proponents of self-ownership must abandon the uniform stringency against infringements and permit encroachments of self-ownership for social gain. More specifically, he proposes that we sell different-sized infringements for different amounts of social welfare so that the lower the risk of an infringement an act causes, and the less harm it threatens, the cheaper it should be in terms of social good to make permissible…. He says “perhaps the fact that an infringement causes N amount of the relevant sort of infringement harm requires that the act produce at least 20N of social gain to be permissible.”

She objects that this would allow severe harms to a few people, so long as social gain was twenty times higher. Her objection is a good one, but it fails to meet a modification of Sobel’s proposal. To claim that you can commit a trivial infringement of rights if the gain is sufficient doesn’t entail that you can gravely injure someone’s rights so long as this condition is met. A modification of Sobel’s proposal that confines it to cases of trivial infringement is still in the running. (I don’t favor this proposal, but I’m not now giving my own view of the problem.)

This leads to her second objection. She imagines a case in which the government requires vitamins to be put in orders of coffee in a coffee bar. Suppose (I add this) the vitamins make no difference to the coffee’s taste. The government claims that this will have great health benefits. Doesn’t someone who hates the vitamins have a right to refuse them? To claim otherwise is to support paternalism, and this libertarians surely don’t want.

Self-ownership is appealing precisely because it expresses equal respect for all. It does not allow others to treat us paternalistically, nor does it allow our rights to be violated for the benefit of others or allow others to make fundamental decisions about our person.

This deals very well with the vitamin case, but it is irrelevant to cases where trivial rights violations aren’t undertaken for someone else’s benefit. The person who turns on the lights in his own house isn’t doing so to benefit the neighbors; he just wants his lights on. The modification I suggested to Sobel’s suggestion, i.e., that it should apply only to trivial boundary crossings, hasn’t been refuted.

An objection has probably already occurred to many readers, and this is one that Mulkeen deals with in her own proposal. I’ve been talking about “trivial” boundary crossings, but what if the person affected doesn’t consider the matter a trivial one? Suppose, e.g., that he dreads other people’s photons impinging on his body and demands an enormous amount of money as compensation if light rays from someone else’s lamp reach him. Or suppose he refuses compensation, and prohibits others from turning on lamps when he is around? What is the best response to situations like this?

Mulkeen’s answer depends on the fact that people need to engage in certain activities in order to survive. Beyond that, people need to have wide freedom of movement in order to lead a normal life. If restrictions imposed on your activities by the self-ownership rights other people have over their bodies become so great that people can’t survive or lead normal lives, then you shouldn’t be required to respect such limits. You have no reasonable alternative to survival or leading a normal life, and, according to her, you are morally responsible for doing something only if you have a reasonable alternative to doing it. The self-ownership rights of others can’t prevent you from breathing, even if air that you exhale will spread in their direction. As she puts it,

If we examine the living conditions in which we are born, we can note that our survival requires that we breathe, eat, drink and keep our body at a constant temperature. And the only way of doing these things involves using the world’s resources. We know that all of these actions produce pollutants. But, for us to abstain from these activities in their entirety would be fundamentally life-threatening. It is, for example, a fact that we cannot avoid breathing out carbon dioxide, nor can we avoid spreading germs: germs live in our food and water, and food that is not cooked or stored at a suitable temperature contains very harmful bacteria. We spread these germs when we breathe and talk, which might cause various degrees of harms to persons whom we expose. In these instances, we foreseeably cause incursions or pose a threat to others. But we are innocent of wrongdoing because we have no reasonable alternative available: it is beyond the bounds of possibility for us to live in a way that produces zero contamination.

If you have no reasonable alternative to doing what you did, you don’t have to compensate those whose boundaries you cross, or at least the compensation you owe is much reduced.

Mulkeen’s proposal is valuable, which isn’t to say that she is right. A great deal in her idea depends on what is regarded as a “normal” activity, and it would seem that answering this depends to a large extent on social convention, from which many libertarians recoil. But is there a reasonable alternative to it?

Note: The views expressed on Mises.org are not necessarily those of the Mises Institute.

Author:

Contact David Gordon

David Gordon is Senior Fellow at the Mises Institute and editor of the Mises Review.

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Why “Stakeholder Capitalism” Is a Disaster for Entrepreneurs | Mises Wire

Posted by M. C. on February 25, 2021

We cannot take for granted that the heart of a peaceful and prosperous economic system is respect for private ownership of property by individuals. Private property rights need to be strictly delineated in an objective and absolute way. When ownership of property is shared with “society,” as in stakeholder capitalism, there will be inexorable conflict. Because stakeholder capitalism is built on a collectivist version of property rights, free market advocates should fully denounce it.

https://mises.org/wire/why-stakeholder-capitalism-disaster-entrepreneurs

Thomas Spain

During the 1990s there was a legal and philosophical idea, championed by Milton Friedman among others, that a corporation exists to serve the interests of the shareholders, being that they are the rightful owners of the corporation. Progressive thought leaders responded with the countertheory of stakeholder capitalism. Under stakeholder theory the shareholders have a stake in the success of the firm, but the firm also has a competing obligation to other entities deemed “stakeholders.” Stakeholders are employees, customers, suppliers, and the community. While this theory is presented as a commonsense truism, it has one specific foundational flaw: it dilutes and undermines the principle of private property.

To own a thing in principle is to have control over its use. An owner of a company, in a market system, has ultimate discretion over and responsibility for how the assets of the company are used. In a joint-stock company, the decision-making is shared by the various owners of shares. But in stakeholder capitalism, all of the stakeholders have influence in company decisions. Therefore, stakeholders are de facto joint owners of the corporation, and advocates of stakeholder capitalism would seek to make this ownership a legal reality.

When stakeholder capitalism is expounded by its advocates, it’s easy to believe that it is not as much a social theory as simply good advice. Businesses seek to develop mutually beneficial relationships that will last into the long term. As a means to that end, it is good business practice to maximize the contentedness of your employees, deal honestly with your suppliers, survey the needs of your customers, and keep a good image in the community. However, stakeholder capitalism goes beyond good practice by putting government power on the side of the stakeholders.

We can see what the joint ownership of stakeholders looks like in practice. For employee stakeholders, control would mean union representation on the corporate board. For supplier stakeholders, industry oversight associations would oversee contracts, making them impossibly difficult to terminate while outlawing any market choice. Customers would be represented by consumer protection bureaus. And community stakeholders would mean democratic approval of business actions by government committees.

While in the free market stakeholders vote directly with their dollars, in stakeholder capitalism the nominal stakeholders never exercise their ownership stake directly. Rather they are represented indirectly or bureaucrats are imbued with the authority to interpret their desires. The driving force behind the stakeholder capitalism philosophy is precisely that it creates opportunities for political actors to assert disproportionate control over the economy’s resources. Rather than create real wealth for society, politicians and bureaucrats use their social ownership of companies to extort economic resources for their purposes.

In such an environment, entrepreneurial decisions are reduced to a political process. The entrepreneur is made impotent to improve the status quo, because any intrepid decision will be vetoed by political stakeholders who fear to lose. Prices can never rise. Wage rates must always rise. Risk must be averted. Nothing must be allowed that would inconvenience the community or make anyone uncomfortable.

Recently, the most dangerous aspect of stakeholder capitalism has been its amalgamation with the climate change agenda. Any minute decision a business makes will infinitesimally affect the climate for people all over the globe. Therefore, the concept of a community stakeholder is expanded to the entire world, eliminating individual and local sovereignty. Under a climate change regime, decisions as small as remodeling an office building will be as politically charged as the ongoing Keystone Pipeline fiasco.

Clearly, many of the principles of stakeholder capitalism have been implemented in different ways for a long time, including politicized unions, regulatory schemes, and extortion of campaign contributions. But the threat to private property has also worsened in the US in recent years. In particular, politicians openly extort corporations with the threat of targeted regulation, like the Big Tech companies are facing over fake news and censorship. Socialist bureaucracies have unaccountable authority to investigate and persecute businesses, like suing petroleum companies for vague climate change damages. Large investment firms use their customers’ accounts as leverage to push politically driven reforms that are not in the financial interest of the account holders, like divesting from fossil fuels. Not to mention corporate leaders are swarming to affirm every social justice fad.

We cannot take for granted that the heart of a peaceful and prosperous economic system is respect for private ownership of property by individuals. Private property rights need to be strictly delineated in an objective and absolute way. When ownership of property is shared with “society,” as in stakeholder capitalism, there will be inexorable conflict. Because stakeholder capitalism is built on a collectivist version of property rights, free market advocates should fully denounce it.

Author:

Thomas Spain

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WHY TAXATION IS SLAVERY

Posted by M. C. on September 2, 2020

Now I put it to you that the above description is exactly the reality that you face in relation to government as we know it today. The “I” in the example above is the IRS. It takes away your money by means of coercion, intimidation, and force and gives it to others who claim to legitimize the theft on the basis of majority rule, public benefit, wealth distribution, homeland security, etc., etc., etc. To the extent that the above description is correct, the government is a thieving parasite and you are its host. To the extent that you don’t get to keep the fruit of your labor the government owns it, not you; and to that extent you are a slave.

https://www.titanians.org/why-taxation-is-slavery/
By Robert E. Podolsky

Government is a Criminal Enterprise

I have maintained for some time that taxation is government’s most criminal enterprise and that it is, in fact, a form of slavery. Yet it continues to baffle me that so many people cannot or will not see the obvious truth in these statements and insist on arguing that taxation is necessary to humanity’s well being and that it is not slavery at all. “The greatest good for the greatest number” goes the usual utilitarian refrain…which I maintain is one of the greater falsehoods…for the usual reasons. But since these reasons are so elusive to the greatest number I have decided to explain my reasoning in language that (hopefully) anyone can understand, thus settling this dispute once and for all in the eyes of any reasonable person.

While a whole book might easily be devoted to this subject, it is my intention to present here only a brief treatise on the subject in order to make the information as accessible as possible. I present herein three separate, but not entirely independent, arguments to make my case. I call them respectively:

1. The Property Rights Argument,

2. The Robin Hood Argument, and

3. The Smart Business Argument.
The Property Rights Argument

Property Rights is the one usually presented by libertarians in the manner of the late Murray Rothbard. Unfortunately, Rothbard presupposed that most people would accept intuitively that people own their own bodies. From this assumption he then reasoned that this implied the existence of property rights and hence absolute ownership of whatever the individual might create or produce. While the reasoning behind this argument is correct, few people accept it because it is counter-intuitive. It is counter-intuitive because as children it is obvious to us that our parents own our bodies, rather than we ourselves. When we go to school our teachers appear to own us. And when we grow up and become employees it often seems that our employers own us. We also observe as adults that if we refuse to pay taxes we can involuntarily lose possession of all our assets, thus demonstrating that government has a higher claim than we do to whatever we would like to believe we own. In the midst of such a society it is hardly surprising that most of us are unconvinced that we have any property rights not mitigated by government decree.

So it follows that if indeed we have any property rights worth discussing we will need some other way to discover this fact than simply agreeing with the Rothbard assertion that we own our own bodies. Fortunately there is another avenue of reasoning that we can call upon for this purpose. It begins with the definition of an ethical act:

An act is ethical if it increases the creativity of anyone, including the person acting, without limiting or diminishing the creativity of anyone.

As I have shown elsewhere, this definition is logically equivalent to similar definitions in which the word “creativity” is replaced by “love”, “awareness”, “personal evolution”, or any of a potentially large set of resources that are logical equivalents of creativity. I have also conclusively shown elsewhere that the utilitarian definition defining an ethical act as one that does more good than harm is invalid, and that because of this that it follows by simple logic that ethical ends cannot ever be attained by unethical means no matter who (or how many) benefits from such an act[1].

Now let’s ask the question, “Might it be ethical to steal someone’s possessions, either by force or by deceit?” And the answer is a resounding, “NO!” The scientist depends on her computer. The poet depends on his word processor. The artist needs her brushes and paints. Steal these things from someone and they are rendered less creative. By definition such an act is unethical…bad…evil. It follows logically from this that if we have the “right” to be treated ethically then we must have the “right” to own whatever we are able to acquire without stealing from someone else…and that therefore no one has the right, for any reason, to deprive us of the fruit of our bodies’ labor. By similar reasoning it follows that we do indeed own our own bodies and that any act which abrogates that right of ownership is an act of slavery because it diminishes our self-ownership. If our physical and financial possessions indeed contribute to our creativity, then it follows that the systematic removal of any such resources from our possession is evil and is a form of enslavement. Taxation is just such an act.
The Robin Hood Argument

The Robin Hood Argument is even easier to understand. We begin the discussion with my asking you the question, “Would it be all right with you if I stole your assets?”

And of course your answer is, “No.”

Next I ask, “Would it matter to you whether the theft was by force or by fraud?”

Again you answer, “No.” Then I ask, “Would you care what I did with the money?”

Again, “No.” Then I ask, “What if I gave the money away…would that make it okay?”

Again, “No.” “Suppose I gave half the money to a lot of poor people and they liked it and wanted more. Would that make the theft okay with you?”

Still, “No.” “Suppose all those poor folks elected a bunch of congressmen and I gave the other half of your money to them to spend as they wished. Would that make the theft okay with you?”

Still, “No.” “Finally, suppose those congressmen got together and wrote a piece of paper saying it was all right for me to steal from you and give away the proceeds; and they called that piece of paper a ‘tax law’. Would that make the theft okay with you?”

At this point I hope you have the good sense to continue saying, “No. NO. NO!”

Now I put it to you that the above description is exactly the reality that you face in relation to government as we know it today. The “I” in the example above is the IRS. It takes away your money by means of coercion, intimidation, and force and gives it to others who claim to legitimize the theft on the basis of majority rule, public benefit, wealth distribution, homeland security, etc., etc., etc. To the extent that the above description is correct, the government is a thieving parasite and you are its host. To the extent that you don’t get to keep the fruit of your labor the government owns it, not you; and to that extent you are a slave.

I should say a few words here about how the government steals from you. It does so in three ways. First it taxes you directly by means of income taxes, property taxes, sales taxes, parking and traffic tickets, court imposed fines, school and utility district assessments, licensing and registration fees, gasoline, alcohol, and tobacco taxes, etc. Then there are taxes passed on to you indirectly. Most of these are taxes paid by the businesses which make or import the things you buy. Every time the government requires a tariff for the importation of foreign goods or raw materials it requires you to pay more and get less. If your Toyota dealer pays a tariff, then you are paying more for a car than the free market would charge. If you save yourself the added expense by buying a Ford, then in effect your government insists you settle for an inferior product so that Ford can make a bigger profit. This amounts to an indirect tax. Either way value is taken away from you and given to someone else who didn’t earn it.
Hidden Taxes

And finally there are hidden taxes. The most blatant example of a hidden tax is inflation…the illusion of rising prices. Every time the Federal Reserve prints money for the government to spend, the government gets the full value of each Federal Reserve “dollar” printed. But shortly after the money is spent by the government it is absorbed by the economy and the value of every dollar in your bank account is diminished. In effect the government thereby steals the buying power of all of your money without your even knowing that you are being taxed[2].

All in all, if one includes direct, indirect, and hidden taxes, the average American gives up about 50% of their gross income to local, state, and federal authorities by way of taxes. That means that fully half the fruit of your labor is forfeit whether you like it or not. Is it any less odious to be a half time slave than it would be to live as a full time slave? I think not? Slavery is slavery.
Smart Business Argument

The Smart Business Argument starts with a fantasy. Imagine I am a slave owner and you are one of my hard-working slaves whom I use as labor in my agricultural business. They (and you) plant my fields and harvest my crops, which I sell at a substantial profit. My business depends on them. While you may think that slave labor is free to me, the fact is that it is not. Besides the initial purchase of my slaves, I have to maintain them. I feed, clothe, and house them…albeit cheaply, but it’s not free. I pay for whatever medical expenses I decide to invest in their health and I pay for their management, which includes the services of bounty hunters who round them up for me when they escape. I also have to pay for the tools and implements that my slaves use and the seeds that they plant. All in all it’s an expensive operation. What is more, I am limited in the geographical scope over which I can deploy my slaves, so my business is pretty much limited to the acreage contiguous to my home. This limits my profits still further.

Not wishing to remain so limited I consult a savvy business adviser and soon create a labor cartel together with a number of my colleagues. The cartel in turn goes into partnership with the government. Soon thereafter I round up all my slaves to attend a meeting at which I make the following announcements: “As of today your life will be different. Subject to certain rules and conditions, you and all other slaves will hereby be set free. The purpose of the rules is to reimburse me and my colleagues for the investment that we have made in you. When that debt has been paid, you will be completely free for all time. These are the rules:

1. You can live anywhere in the world you wish. As of today you can live in any housing you can afford. You pay for your own.

2. You can do any kind of work you want to do. You will work whatever hours you and your employer agree upon.

3. You will attend school through at least the age of 18 in preparation for your work. You will pay for your schools through taxes.

4. You may own a business if you so desire and are able to acquire the capital needed to start it.

5. You will carry an identification token all your life and through it your income will be tracked. I will know where you are working and for whom. I will know how much you earn and where you bank.

6. Directly and indirectly you will pay me and my colleagues 50¢ out of every dollar that you earn. This will apply toward payment of your debt to me.

7. If you need to borrow additional money and can convince a bank that you are a good ‘credit risk’, money will be created for you with the stroke of a computer key. This money costs the bank nothing to create and represents no risk to the bank, but if you fail to repay it with interest the bank will take away your house, your car, or any other assets you have that the bank required as collateral for the loan.

8. When the government needs to spend more money than it has collected in taxes, it will ‘borrow’ it from the Federal Reserve System which is a cartel of the world’s biggest banks. It will not need your permission to do this, but you and your descendants will be responsible for repayment of the loan. It will simply be added to whatever you already owe [3]. Naturally the value (buying power) of all the money (Federal Reserve Notes) in your possession will steadily diminish as the Fed continues this practice, so of course your debt to me and my colleagues will never be repaid in full.

9. In order to maintain your sense of freedom you will participate in general elections at regular intervals. The majority vote will determine who occupy the positions of elected officialdom. But the rules above will never be changed to your advantage…only to the advantage of the banking and labor cartels that are actually the owners of the whole system (including you). Accordingly, discussion of these rules will never be part of the general debate at election time.

10. The local, state, and federal governments of the United States will be responsible for enforcement of the rules above in keeping with its partnership in the banking and labor cartels. The courts will adjudicate any conflicts that arise; but discussion of these rules will be forbidden in court and any reference to them will be deemed ‘frivolous’ by the courts. In this way the rules become in themselves a form of law more potent and inviolable than the state and federal constitutions and local charters that might otherwise interfere with the working of the rules.”

The rules above are just “smart business” from the viewpoint of the modern slave owner. Costs are held to a minimum. Productivity is maximized. The slaves manage themselves. There are no rebellions to be concerned with. And yet the slaves are easy to manipulate and control using modern methods of scholastic indoctrination and media communication. What a blessing that most of the slaves have no inkling whatever that they are in fact slaves. This fact alone makes the whole system worth whatever sacrifices the slave owners have made to create it, because there are no organized modes of resistance to the system. Even the organized religions don’t protest the half-time slavery imposed on the public. What a deal for the owners of the system!

In Conclusion, I ask you not to feel too badly if you didn’t get it before now…if you didn’t realize that you are a slave. Most of us don’t get it and billions of dollars are spent each year to keep us in the dark about it. By maintaining the illusion that we are not slaves the system’s owners remain free to continue their perpetuation of the system, with the eventual (though not too distant) goal of taking over the whole world. If we don’t act promptly and with vigor that goal will be attained…very probably within your lifetime. As the goal is neared the deceit will become less and less subtle and the limitations on our freedom more and more pronounced. With the exceptions of 1865 and 1920 (emancipation and suffrage) we have had less freedom every year than the year before. This series of books [4] points the way to the only viable solution that I can see to the, otherwise inevitable, outcome of global slavery and the concomitant degradation of the social and physical environments of the world…to the detriment of all…including those who will be world’s rulers. It is a universal characteristic of parasites that, in the end, they destroy their host and with it themselves. Now let’s look at another atrocity – the attacks of 9/11/2011.

[1] See Appendix B of “BORG WARS” by Robert E. Podolsky

[2] See The Creature from Jekyll Island, a Second Look at the Federal Reserve System by G. Edward Griffin,

[3] Fully one half of your direct federal taxes today go to pay the interest on such loans.

[4] Titania™, the Bloodless Revolution by Robert E. Podolsky

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Why Should Recent Immigrants and Their Heirs Pay for Slavery Reparations? | Mises Wire

Posted by M. C. on August 18, 2020

It may be both necessary and desirable to seek reparations not just from living persons but from their descendants as well.

But in order to do this with an eye toward justice, one must identify specific victims and specific perpetrators. Reparations cannot justly be paid in the abstract.

Even if specific parties could be identified today, there’s no reason to assume these people have particularly deep pockets. The US government, on the other hand, has access to trillions of dollars. It makes sense to go to where the money is, even if that means sticking a hundred million immigrant families with the bill.

https://mises.org/wire/why-should-recent-immigrants-and-their-heirs-pay-slavery-reparations?utm_source=Mises+Institute+Subscriptions&utm_campaign=f10f4c148e-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_9_21_2018_9_59_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_8b52b2e1c0-f10f4c148e-228343965

Imagine being a Latin American immigrant to the United States who arrived fifty years ago, worked six days a week—every week—to establish a small business, and has now achieved some modicum of financial security. But now you’re being told every every time you turn on the news that you are on the hook for a $12 trillion “reparations” payment (or $35,000 for every American) to be paid out, because you have to make amends for slavery. (The $12 trillion dollar figure—being promoted by economist William Darity — is the latest figure being offered as the minimum sum necessary for mitigating the lingering effects of slavery in America.)

Never mind, of course, that slavery was outlawed decades before you ever arrived in the United States. And never mind that you came to this country with almost nothing. What wealth you have managed to acquire in the decades since is now apparently fair game to a Congress which plans to “set things right” through just another massive transfer payments program.

This sum—obviously—is not to paid merely by those who owned slaves at some point, or by those who are their heirs. No, the modern idea of reparations most often promoted is one in which the American taxpayers overall —regardless of their background or origins—must be forced to pay. That is, in this view, countless millions of Americans descended from people who only arrived in the US after slavery was outlawed are to be taxed to pay for crimes for which they could not possibly have been responsible.

A Proper Definition of “Reparations”

This isn’t to say there is no proper role for reparations for past injustices. Any decent legal system would provide for a victim of kidnapping and forced labor to obtain repayment for the time and labor stolen from him by the kidnapper.

As Walter Block writes:

Justified reparations are nothing more and nothing less than the forced return of stolen property—even after a significant amount of time has passed. For example, if my grandfather stole a ring from your grandfather, and then bequeathed it to me through the intermediation of my father, then I am, presently, the illegitimate owner of that piece of jewelry. To take the position that reparations are always and forever unjustified is to give an imprimatur to theft, provided a sufficient time period has elapsed. In the just society, your father would have inherited the ring from his own parent, and then given it to you. It is thus not a violation of property rights, but a logical implication of them, to force me to give over this ill-gotten gain to you.

It may be both necessary and desirable to seek reparations not just from living persons but from their descendants as well.

But in order to do this with an eye toward justice, one must identify specific victims and specific perpetrators. Reparations cannot justly be paid in the abstract. As Chris Calton has noted, property rights, properly understood, are

based on concretely identifiable property rights. When a violation of a person’s property rights takes place, restitution is the logical means of compensating the victim….

But in the real world [on matters of slavery] such a claim is incredibly difficult to prove. And failure to prove a legitimate property claim means that the currently recognized property title holds. Anything else would be committing a new injustice to give the illusion of correcting an old one.

These notions are certainly nothing new. In the seventeenth century, the English philosopher John Locke had already considered the matter, as well summarized by philosopher Grant Havers:

In his Second Treatise on Government, Locke wrote that the act of “reparation…belongs only to the injured party.” Moreover, this “damnified Person has this Power of appropriating to himself, the Goods or Service of the Offender, by Right of Self-Preservation.” In short, if one person steals the property of another, then the “injured party” has every right to take it back. Yet Locke stipulated that this act of “reparation” applies only to the “injured party” who clearly participates in an exchange of goods or services….Locke’s idea of reparation, then, applies only to those who are either a first or second party to an exchange of property, not a third party.

The Moral Absurdity of Reparations from Third Parties: The Case of Immigrants

In the case of slavery in America, there are the slaves, who are the ones who were wrongfully imprisoned and who had the fruits of their labor stolen. And then there are the slave owners: those who committed the theft and the false imprisonment. Yet modern-day restitution claims are primarily based on forcing third parties to pay for wrongs to which few of today’s taxpayers have any connection.

Among these third parties are the nearly one-fifth of the US population composed of Americans who arrived from somewhere else over the past fifty years or are their descendants. According to Pew Research:

Between 1965 and 2015, new immigrants, their children and their grandchildren accounted for 55% of U.S. population growth. They added 72 million people to the nation’s population as it grew from 193 million in 1965 to 324 million in 2015.

But of course these relatively recent arrivals are not the only ones who entered the US after the thirteenth amendment was ratified. Naturally, if we extend the time horizon further back in time, the number of “new” Americans only get larger.

Between 1870 and 1900, nearly 12 million immigrants arrived, more foreign-born people than had come to the country in the preceding seventy years. If that doesn’t seem like a large number, remember that the entire population of the United States was only 38.5 million in 1870. After 1900, and until 1915, another 15 million arrived.

Meanwhile, out west the Mexican Revolution convinced hundreds of thousands of Mexicans to move to the United States. From 1910 to 1930, “the number of Mexican immigrants counted by the U.S. census tripled from 200,000 to 600,000. The actual number was probably far greater.” By the 1920s, the US was experiencing a sixteenfold increase in Mexican immigration compared to the first decade of the twentieth century.1

Yet advocates for a national reparations program would have us believe that these people and their descendants are somehow morally responsible for slavery. But how to make the case that a middle-class Mexican American, descended from refugees fleeing the Mexican Revolution, ought to be paying thousands on reparations? In many cases, this problem is simply ignored by those pushing for reparations. But in other cases they’ve invented a wide variety of new theories.

Chief among these is the idea that the US economy was built by slaves. This claim, however, is demonstrably false. The slave economy during the nineteenth century was backward, inefficient, and hardly provided a foundation for the Northern economy, which was rapidly industrializing thanks primarily to technological innovation and the superiority of free labor. When slavery was finally abolished, the Northern economy just kept growing.2

[RELATED: “Why They Keep Trying to Blame Capitalists for Slavery” by Ryan McMaken]

Proreparations advocates are unlikely to relent on this, however, because if the proreparations side can win this argument, they can then claim that all those immigrants who prospered in American over the past 150 years somehow owe their prosperity to the foundation laid by slaves decades earlier. The proreparations party is basically saying to immigrants and their descendants “That wealth you acquired since coming to America? You didn’t build that.”

There are other “arguments” as well. The “white privilege” claim can be used to assert that many immigrants—now matter how impoverished or illiterate they were when they arrived here—somehow prospered at the expense of slaves and former slaves. Superficially, this claim is relatively easy to make in the case of Irish Americans and eastern Europeans who arrived a century ago. The proreparations camp insists these immigrants were nonetheless “white presenting” and thus able to integrate easily. Their whiteness gave them access to the benefits of American capitalism—capitalism built on slavery—and thus we’re back again to concluding that even immigrants owe their prosperity to the slavery of ages past.

But not all immigrants are “white presenting.” Hispanics and Asian Americans combined make up nearly one-quarter of the US population today. Many clearly do not have a stereotypical white appearance and presumably are unable to take advantage of the free pass to riches that is “white privilege.” Moreover members of the ethnic groups within the Latin American and Asian immigrant groups have been historically faced with a wide variety of legal and cultural barriers designed to stymie their access to capital and social benefits. Yet the millions of Americans within these demographic groups are expected to foot the reparations bill as well.

The Problem with Specifics

While the case of immigrants presents an especially compelling case against forcing third parties to pay reparations for slavery, the reality is that the situation for other populations is not much more clear cut.

There is no doubt that some Americans who lived in the antebellum United States benefited from slavery, but the degree to which these populations benefited was quite diverse. Poor families in Appalachia, for example, were hardly getting rich off the toil of slaves. In fact, slavery drove down the wages of workers who had to compete with slave labor. The number of whites—both north and south—who found themselves in this position was substantial.2

Moreover, slavery was primarily a regional phenomenon and hardly something that could be described as inherently “American.” After all, by the time of the Civil War, the overwhelming majority of the US population lived in states where slavery was illegal. By midcentury, some Northern states had even refused to comply with the fugitive slave laws.

Nor were the slave patrols—an institution central to preventing and punishing slave rebellions—something that received national support. Slave patrols were staffed at the state level, often by conscripts forced into service by the state legislatures.

Given this, there is scant reason to conclude that a farmer in western Pennsylvania in 1860, where the state government had nullified the fugitive slave acts, and where slavery was illegal, is somehow legally, morally, or financially responsible for slavery.

The reason for this insistence on blaming all Americans—both past and present—has a long history. To assuage their consciences, the slave owners of old concocted all sorts of half-baked theories designed to place the blame for slavery on people other than themselves. But nowadays, this impulse is tied to the need to find as many people as possible who can pay in to a reparations program. Even if Congress were to pave the way legally for lawsuits against the heirs of slave owners of old, the obstacles to obtaining any sizable cash settlement are large. Even if specific parties could be identified today, there’s no reason to assume these people have particularly deep pockets. The US government, on the other hand, has access to trillions of dollars. It makes sense to go to where the money is, even if that means sticking a hundred million immigrant families with the bill.

  • 1. David R. Roediger, Working toward Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants Became White: The Strange Journey from Ellis Island to the Suburbs (New York, Basic Books, 2005), p. 150.
  • 2. a. b. It should also be noted that the population of the slave states—including slaves—was considerably smaller than the population in free states. The population of the US in 1860 was 31 million. Of those, only 12 million lived in slave states, including 4 million slaves. In the decades following emancipation, most of the immense number of new immigrants moved to what had been non-slave states before the war.
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Contact Ryan McMaken

Ryan McMaken (@ryanmcmaken) is a senior editor at the Mises Institute. Send him your article submissions for the Mises Wire and The Austrian, but read article guidelines first. Ryan has degrees in economics and political science from the University of Colorado and was a housing economist for the State of Colorado. He is the author of Commie Cowboys: The Bourgeoisie and the Nation-State in the Western Genre.

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Authorities Are Still Looking for Any Clear Motives for the Attack – LewRockwell

Posted by M. C. on July 18, 2020

Each year adults all over the “developed” world spend the first half of the year working without pay, in a form of slavery creatively called the income tax.

It’s slavery.

Clear motives for the attack? Is that really a serious question?

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2020/07/allan-stevo/authorities-are-still-looking-for-any-clear-motives-for-the-attack/

By

What do you call a system in which a person is forced to work for someone else without pay?

Slavery.

Each year adults all over the “developed” world spend the first half of the year working without pay, in a form of slavery creatively called the income tax.

It’s slavery.

Doesn’t matter what foolish name they give it.

Each year, tens of thousands of people around the globe learn who really owns their home when they neglect to pay taxes on it and are forced out.

Property tax they call it. No matter whose name is on the deed, skip your property tax payments and be reminded that you’re just a tenant with no actual property rights.

It’s tenancy.

Doesn’t matter what foolish name they give it.

I make something. You like it. You offer to buy it from me. I say yes. We agree to a price, and you pull out the money. Some guy sticks his hand through the window and takes 13% of the money just as it’s passing between your hands and mine.

That’s stealing.

Doesn’t matter what foolish name they give it.

It doesn’t matter if it’s 1%, 13%, or 21%. It’s still stealing. There’s no nominal amount of stealing that’s appropriate. There’s no justifiable quantity. There’s no moral amount that can be stolen. It’s all bad.

I don’t care if the guy calls it sales tax, VAT, or protection money, the money is still stolen.

In Kozani, Greece on Thursday, July 16, 2020, a 45-year-old man walked into the government tax office on Aristotle Street with an ax and started swinging away at people working there.

The dramatic retelling of the story ends with the reporter saying “Authorities are still looking for any clear motives for the attack…”

Really?

Clear motives to want to do harm to thieves?

Clear motives to want to do harm to thieves who not only enslave you, threaten your home and steal from you, but also now use their ill gotten gains to lock you into your home, pump the airwaves with fear, refuse to let you visit the sick, divide families, close playgrounds, close beaches, make beloved childhood activities illegal, foment societal division, put the elderly in group homes to die neglected and alone, close stadiums, bring the recovered alcoholic back to the bottle, cancel lifesaving surgeries for those on the brink of death, push the depressive over the edge, stop therapy for those with cancer creeping through their body, make life so unnecessarily challenging for the marginalized who were just starting to get things together, deny families a funeral, close down the churches, and destroy the economizing human cooperation that we call our civilization?

And then if you don’t go along with their destructionism they say you are so dishonorable that you hate people and are anti-science.

Clear motives for the attack? Is that really a serious question?

The Greek man with the ax might be more sane than anyone I know. He’s one in a billion. The real question isn’t “What’s wrong with him?” The real question is “What’s wrong with the rest of us?”

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