Thursday, September 29, 2011

No Taxation Without…

[Andrew Carnegie] was a very great millionaire who proved that it pays to work hard and save your pennies. He was wrong, but that doesn’t make any difference. He’s dead now and he left us a chain of libraries which makes the working people more intelligent, more cultured, more informed, in short, more miserable and unhappy than they ever were, bless his heart.

-Henry Miller from The Colossus of Maroussi


With the ‘Buffet’ tax on the wealthy and the American Jobs Act in the news the idea of taxation and how it affects us is prevalent on many minds. A little over 230 years ago the United States began when the American colonies rose up and demanded “No Taxation Without Representation.” The idea that began our country was formed because of taxation, but the colonists didn’t hate the idea of taxation, only the fact that by English law they shouldn’t have been taxed without a representative in parliament, but were anyway.

Facing the reality of this nation’s current situation the proposed laws don’t seem like such a bad idea. When one man is raking in 100 million dollars a year and another is barely scratching by with 12 grand (the wonders of a free market system), it hardly seems like a travesty to force the first man to pay more. Our current necessities aside, the moral idea of taxation of any kind is a different story.

Taxation is theft. Legally sanctioned theft. We are not asked to pay for social works, not asked for financial support to fund government spending, we are forced by the threat of penalty. Democracies and Socialists justify taxation as a way to pay for public provisions like education, health care and other social welfare programs, which are the cornerstone of our ideas of modern civilization. Very good, even though we fund these programs today through these means it is amazing how ineffective they are, the state of the education system, health care, social security, etc. are somehow all in shambles and generally sub-par. This system obviously isn’t working. Taxation is a law violating our basic liberties. Without our consent part of our income is taken by the government for their own uses-which we have little, if any, say in. An entity forcing another to hand over money, whether they are willing or not, with the threat of force behind it is essentially the basic definition of theft.

I don’t believe this system can change overnight, as of today, and for the foreseeable future, it is a necessary evil. But that doesn’t change the fact that it is wrong and we should gradually move away from it. Moving into the future, one step at a time, the middle ground between our current federal government and free market economy and true anarchism (anarcho-communism) would be the mix of anarcho-capitalism.

Anarcho-capitalists believe in the balance of the natural laws of the market. Free markets take care of themselves and any government interference can only be negative. In other words, government is superfluous to the system we are currently in. The social works we depend on can be funded through a variety of different means, including voluntary contribution. This may sound farfetched to say people will voluntarily give up some of their income to fund these programs, but odds are, if you have the choice to give up a small percentage of your pay check to ensure you’ll have proper hospital care and your children will go to a good school, you’ll do so willingly. No laws demanding a certain amount, or threat of force, necessary.

Over 200 years ago our ancestors fought against taxation under certain terms. The world may be readying itself for the next leap to abolishing taxation. Instead of “No Taxation Without Representation,” our new slogan would be much simpler: “No Taxation…” It may still be somewhere in the unforeseeable future, but it is possible. People have been naturally organizing themselves for the entirety of known history. Governments have made us believe it is impossible to do so without them; in reality governments are a hedonistic excess that drains wealth instead of creating it.

Wednesday, September 21, 2011

The Problems of Prisons and Government Authority

I have never voted in my life…I have always known and understood that the idiots are in a majority so it’s certain they will win.
-Louis-Ferdinand CĂ©line


Imagine it is sometime in the future; the United States no longer exists and in its stead no nation exists at all, but a thriving society, organized and peaceful without any central authority, laws or capitalistic markets.
This may be construed as a Utopian fantasy, and perhaps it is, there is no way to know for sure because no society to that extent has existed, at least not since before recorded history, but even then it is fairly safe to imagine mankind as a conglomerate of petty chieftains, warlords and the like. Is the idea of a society without laws, police, prisons and military feasible in any sense? The concept frightens most people, and for good reason. Logically when we think of the term ‘lawless’ it brings to mind chaos, thugery, unchecked murders and crime, so a lawless society must be a bad thing.
The truth is that so far anarchistic philosophers and theoreticians have not brought about any satisfactory answer to the question of dealing with what we’ll term as ‘anti-social’ behavior. Peter Kropotkin’s answer was that the system’s we are using now: prisons, capitalism, etc., breeds this behavior and crime is a result of it. People are inherently good and decent and if treated so will act so, the rare few that still behave to the contrary and commit offenses that harm others should simply be jointly excluded from society, not through literal banishment, but basically ignoring them to the extreme.
A charming concept, but its foundation lays completely on an assumption of what normal human behavior is and how it will adapt to this idea of society. I like the idea that inherently we are all good, and decent for the most part, but thousands of years of human history has shown us what humans are capable of, how far we can stretch greed and pettiness. The people that actually act this way are relatively few compared with the majority, but their effects can be far reaching and devastating.
Realistically the idea of a society without government, an anarcho-communistic society, still lacks complete practicality. What to do with those that still act as criminals, or anti-socially, has not been satisfactorally answered. While it is true that capitalism by its very nature creates crime, and an anarchistic society would greatly reduce the urge to commit crime by eliminating the "route of all evil," crime will always exist in some form. It is an issue that must be addressed.

Monday, September 12, 2011

Anarchy in the U.S.A.

The decisive moment in human evolution is perpetual.
-Franz Kafka

Anarchy is a name synonymous with chaos and disorder; either that or it’s a red ‘A’ spray-painted on the bottom of a skateboard or the angry phase-like pseudo-belief of a rebellious teenager listening to punk rock.

True anarchism is more akin, definition wise, to atheism. Atheism, which is often incorrectly categorized with religion, is in fact the lack of religion. Likewise anarchism is often associated with a political belief, but it can more accurately be described as the lack of a political belief. Anarchism, put as succinctly as possible, is society without government.

Those unfamiliar with anarchist theory and principles may find this idea as oxymoronic. Society, without government, cannot exist because there are no sets of enforceable laws, no central organizing authority, territorial boundaries, etc. What is a society without these seemingly fundamental elements? Again, it would seem to be deterioration into chaos and disorder - after all hasn’t the entirety of the known history of civilization been that of the progressive development of different forms of government: despotism, republic, feudalism, principality, monarchy?

Peter Kropotkin, a 19th century Russian scientist and philosopher, developed a basic system of anarchistic beliefs he labeled as anarcho-communism. The name can be a little misleading today with the stigma still resonantly surrounding communism, which is almost exclusively thought of in the Marxian ideology or with the Bolshevik revolution. Anarcho-communism is the avocation of a stateless society where the means of production are in the mutual hands of everyone, not some central organizing party that distributes goods like the common view of communism, but directly.

The aim of this blog is to look at, in depth, the theories of anarchism, their relevance in the modern world and how technological developments, such as the internet, provide us with the practical necessities to lead society into direct democracy wherein government is not only obsolete and unnecessary but detrimental to the further development of society. It also aims to observe, as objectively as possible, how government institutions affect the lives of those that live among them.

Jon Bekken summed up these ideas: “the purpose of anarchist economics, indeed of any viable economic theory, was to satisfy human needs as efficiently as possible - to promote ‘the economical and social value of the human being.’”

The heart of the United States, its primordial ideal, what it was founded to believe in, was freedom. Anarchistic principles are the logical next step towards a truly free society.