In April, Wikileaks.org released a suppressed video of US soldiers killing civilians in Baghdad, and the world was shocked at what it saw. The boldness of Wikileaks to expose this evil was commendable, and their mission to tell the truth about the war continues. Early last week, Wikileaks revealed 91,371 classified military records about American aggression in Afghanistan, including many detailed reports of civilian deaths. This is the biggest military intelligence leak in history. It brings the war lost in time back to the forefront of the world public.

Now, before someone objects to the revelation of this “classified” information, you need to know that none of this stuff puts soldiers immediately at risk in their current operations. Wikileaks made sure of this. All of it is history, records of the past actions of the military. That is to say, in this case everything kept “classified” is simply stuff they don’t want you to know, and why might they not want you to know? Because the government knows you won’t like it. Because it reveals the side of the war they don’t want you to see. Because it might cause you to change your mind and stop romanticizing a senseless, barbaric, immoral war. Hence, the Pentagon and the White House immediately condemned this revelation as criminal and threatening to the security of the US and its allies.” Well yeah, it does threaten them. If your already unpopular gets even more unpopular, then your power is threatened. Good. Following suit, the mainstream media seems more interested in debating whether or not the information should have been leaked rather than the content of the leak itself. Typical.

Wikileaks has published all of this in what they are calling the Afghan War Diary. Even before going public, they released all the documents to three prominent newspapers: Der Spiegel, The Guardian, and the New York Times, on the condition that all three waited until July 25th, 2010 to write about them.

These war logs provide the most revealing inside look at the war that we mere citizens have been able to see, showing the true nature of this war. They tell of hundreds of civilian deaths, shadowy special forces operations, and even information about how Pakistan’s spy service, which receives over $1 billion from Washington to help combat militants, was assisting the Afghan insurgents. Talk about blowback…

From the BBC:

After being asked repeatedly by reporters whether he believed some of the incidents described in the documents constituted war crimes, Mr Assange said: "It is up to a court to decide, clearly, whether something is, in the end, a crime."

"That said, prima facie, there does appear to be evidence of war crimes in this material," he added.

He cited as an example an attack in June 2007 by a secret US special forces unit, Task Force 373, which used a Himars (High Mobility Artillery Rocket System) to begin a raid on a compound where a senior al-Qaeda leader, Abu-Laith al-Libi, was thought to be hiding. Seven children died.

Wikileaks front man Julian Assange is now a target for the US Federal Government. He has been advised by his friends not to enter the US after another prominent Wikileaker, Jacob Applebaum, was detained by US customs and had his computer and phones seized. It’s possible that Wikileaks is concerned for Julian’s life, considering they have now published an encrypted file on the War Diary page labeled simply “Insurance.”

Glenn Greenwald of Salon.com said it well:

Whatever else is true, WikiLeaks has yet again proven itself to be one of the most valuable and important organizations in the world.  Just as was true for the video of the Apache helicopter attack in Baghdad, there is no valid justification for having kept most of these documents a secret.  But that’s what our National Security State does reflexively:  it hides itself behind an essentially absolute wall of secrecy to ensure that the citizenry remains largely ignorant of what it is really doing.  WikiLeaks is one of the few entities successfully blowing holes in at least parts of that wall, enabling modest glimpses into what The Washington Post spent last week describing as Top Secret America.  The war on WikiLeaks — which was already in full swing, including, strangely, from some who claim a commitment to transparency — will only intensify now.  Anyone who believes that the Government abuses its secrecy powers in order to keep the citizenry in the dark and manipulate public opinion — and who, at this point, doesn’t believe that? — should be squarely on the side of the greater transparency which Wikileaks and its sources, sometimes single-handedly, are providing.

And as Julian aptly noted in his recent interview with Scott Horton of Antiwar Radio, the real heroes here aren’t even the people at Wikileaks but rather the brave sources who, by leaking this information, put their livelihood and perhaps even their lives at risk. God bless you, wherever you are.

I entitled this post “everything you need to know…” but in truth my own words could never be enough to capture the awfulness of the war nor the importance of the Wikileaks contribution to peace. However, perhaps with all the links I have provided you can become ever more educated about these important world events.

But here’s what you really need to know: This revelation is an incredible moment in the history of journalism and of the wars of the last decade, and hopefully will persuade many that interventions in the Middle East must be stopped. We continue to need Wikileaks more than ever.

Crossposted at LibertarianChristians.com.

This classic essay was originally written by Oscar Cooley and Paul Poirot, and is excerpted from a pamphlet originally published by FEE in 1951.

Can we hope to explain the blessings of freedom to foreign people while we deny them the freedom to cross our boundaries?

Freedom of movement underlies the concept of private property rights. A person has the right to exclusive possession and use of that which he has assembled and improved without trespass against others—the right to the product of his own labor. Any move of a man might be deemed proper and beneficial when he acts to assemble, transport, or otherwise convert the free gifts of Nature so that they may satisfy human needs more readily. This involves no infringement on the equal right of others. It would seem to be the kind of movement that should not be discouraged by man or by government.

On the other hand, freedom of movement may lead to trespass. A person may move or act in such a way as to threaten the life, or to seize or damage the property, of someone else. His apparent personal gain would be at the direct expense of another person. Surely, government should lend no encouragement to such harmful actions or threats of harm by individuals.

The problem of society, then, is to permit and encourage individuals to move and act in a productive and beneficial manner, and to avoid harmful intervention or trespass. The founding fathers wisely depended upon voluntary exchange—freedom of trade in the competitive market place—as the automatic, non-governmental guide to productivity and progress among men. They delegated to government the power to restrict only those actions of individuals designed to circumvent the free market through fraud, deceit, or coercion. The penalty for violation was restitution for damages, or imprisonment, or some other restraint upon that person’s freedom to act or move.

The freedom of the individual to move toward greener pastures, wherever they may seem to be, has been a vital part of the freedom of commerce—the freedom of choice that has constituted the truly distinctive characteristic of “the American way.”

In view of our long experience of near-perfect freedom to move about as each might choose, some of us may not realize the limitations that confront people in many other parts of the world who might like to move toward something better. Many who might choose to enter the United States, peacefully observing our laws and paying their own way, are denied entry. Our community slogans now seem to read: “Welcome to all peaceful and productive newcomers—except foreigners.” And a foreigner here is an individual who has crossed a special political line, supposedly which bounds “the land of the free”!

If it is sound to erect a barrier along our national boundary lines, against those who see greater opportunities here than in their native lands, why should we not erect similar barriers between states and localities within our nation? Why should a low-paid worker—“obviously ignorant, and probably a Socialist”—be allowed to migrate from a failing buggy shop in Massachusetts to the expanding automobile shops of Detroit? According to the common attitude toward immigrants, he would compete with native Detroiters for food and clothing and housing. He might be willing to work for less than the prevailing wage rate in Detroit, “upsetting the labor market” there. His wife and children might “contaminate” the local sewing circles and playgrounds with foreign ways and ideas. Anyhow, he was a native of Massachusetts, and therefore that state should bear the full “responsibility for his welfare.”

Those are matters we might ponder, but our honest answer to all of them is reflected in our actions—we’d rather ride in automobiles than in buggies. It would be foolish to try to buy an automobile or anything else in the free market, and at the same time deny any individual an opportunity to help produce those things we want.

Our domestic relationships would be harmed seriously by restraints upon man’s freedom to migrate. But why shouldn’t the same reasoning hold for our foreign relationships?

Fear No. 1: The “melting pot” might fail to assimilate newcomers. This notion has as little merit as the idea that a third-generation Yankee’s digestive tract isn’t capable of assimilating a bunch of carrots grown by a foreign-born Japanese or Italian vegetable gardener. The assimilation of a foreign-born person is accomplished when the immigrant willingly comes to America, paying his own way not only to get here but also after he arrives, and peacefully submitting to the laws and customs of his newly adopted country. Freedom to exchange goods and services voluntarily in the market place is the economic catalyst of the American “melting pot.” Christian-like morality is the social catalyst—and if it has come to be in short supply among native Americans, the blame for that shortage should not be laid upon our immigrants.

Fear No. 2: The “wrong kind” of people might come to America. The danger that “a poorer class” might come from Asia or Africa or Southern and Eastern Europe and contaminate our society, undoubtedly seems real to any person who thinks of himself as a member of a superior class or race. Such a person, like any good disciple of Marx, is assuming the existence of classes and is convinced that he is qualified to judge others and to sort them into these classes.

Perhaps what is feared is the importation of a new idea of the relationship between the individual and his government. If that has been our fear, it very well might have been justified. For America has been rapidly substituting a socialistic State control for the traditional system of private enterprise. But let us not mistake persons for ideas; the ideas are the root of the problem. Migration of persons is not a reliable measure of the flow of ideas.

Fear No. 3: Immigrants might deprive our own workers of jobs and depress the wage scale. The fear that immigrants might take the jobs of American workers is based on the fantasy that the number of jobs to be filled within our economy is strictly limited. Individuals still do—and undoubtedly always will—entertain unsatisfied desires for more and more goods and services, which industrious and ingenious individuals constantly are producing in response to opportunities. If there is freedom to think, to trade, and to move, then opportunities for new, creative jobs are not limited to the wilderness or a spot of idle land.

The fear that heavy immigration of workers would depress the wages of native workers is an outgrowth of socialist doctrine. Socialism is so concerned with consumption and “equitable distribution” that it neglects the source of production. It fails to recognize that there can be more and more to consume only if capital and tools are first produced to give leverage to the productive power of man.

Can we hope to explain the blessings of freedom to foreign people while we deny them the freedom to cross our boundaries? To advertise America as the “land of the free,” and to pose as the world champion of freedom in the contest with communism, is hypocritical, if at the same time we deny the freedom of immigration as well as the freedom of trade. And we may be sure that our neighbors overseas are not blind to this hypocrisy.

A community operating on the competitive basis of the free market will welcome any willing newcomer for his potential productivity, whether he brings capital goods or merely a willingness to work. Capital and labor then attract each other, in a kind of growth that spells healthy progress and prosperity in that community. That principle seems to be well recognized and accepted by those who support the activities of a local chamber of commerce. Why do we not dare risk the same attitude as applied to national immigration policy?

Our collective abandonment of the economic system of the free market leaves for us the controlled communal life, where everyone wants to be a consumer without producing anything.

The Basic Problem

Our immigration policy merely reflects the existence of this serious internal problem in America. Our present policy toward immigrants is consistent with the rest of the controls

over persons which inevitably go with national socialism. But the controlled human relationships within the “welfare state” are not consistent with freedom. Great Britain once thought she could deny freedom to American colonists. And now, her own people have traded their freedom for nationalized austerity. Even a “prosperous” modern America can ill afford traveling that same course. If we do, our community, too, will lose its capacity to attract newcomers. Then we wouldn’t need an immigration policy. But who among us would want to remain in a community where opportunities no longer exist?

Intellectual property, especially copyright and patents, is purely fictitious, a construction of the State. Stephan Kinsella has definitively proved such in his paper Against Intellectual Property.

Nevertheless, the US government continues to prop up this inefficient and unethical practice. Under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, many lives have been ruined by the bad side of corps, full of lawyers hunting for cash. We all know of the old ladies and teenagers who receive verdicts requiring them to pay obscene amounts of money for such non-crimes.

Well, some new rules coming straight from the Library of Congress are sure to help alleviate a few of these problems. Essentially, the Librarian of Congress must evaluate exemptions to the DMCA every 3 years, i.e. you cannot be prosecuted, period, if you do these things. Previously, there had only been one exemption recognized. Now, there are SIX of these, and the first three are quite significant.

The basics of each exemption:
1) You can rip your own DVDs. You can remix scenes for noncommercial use. So all those Hitler-plus-caption remixes from the movie Downfall no longer can be taken down. Teachers who want to use a movie in a class can rip it. No one from the DMCA can touch you.
2) You can jailbreak your phone, nobody can prosecute you. Big swipe at Apple/AT&T.
3) You can use software to unlock your phone for use on a different network.
4) You can use software to crack game SecuROMs or other game DRM for the purpose of "investigation" or research. The language is very broad, since even curiosity can prompt “investigation.”
5) You can use cracks to bypass a hardware dongle. This is significant for people like me who use lab equipment or any variety of peripherals with stupid dongles.
6) You can crack DRM encrypted ebooks to use text-to-speech capabilities. Convenient.

Gizmodo has a more thorough analysis here.

These new rules surely do not go far enough, but thankfully things are not becoming more restrictive in this arena. But we need to continue pushing back, so keep spreading the word!

Great news, folks. The good people at the Ludwig von Mises Institute have released version 2.0 of their media and book “torrents,” which is simply the easiest way to obtain the entire Mises online library. (Click here for a brief intro to torrents.)

What is particularly awesome about LVMI in this regard is that they understand that material like this doesn’t have to be protected by the strong arm of the state through aggressive copyright law. Instead, they just completely circumvent it. All of it is provided at the grand old price of $0.00. How awesome is that? To have an entire library of knowledge at your fingertips for the cost of a few gigabytes of bandwidth.

And besides being an absolutely heroic gesture, it even benefits LVMI monetarily as well. Ever since LVMI started giving away everything in electronic PDF form for free, their book sales have skyrocketed – because it turns out many people (like me) continue to want hard copies in addition to the electronic editions.

Huzzah to the great Ludwig von Mises Institute!

Here’s the text of their blog post with the appropriate links:

———————

Mises Torrents 2.0 Available

June 15, 2010 by David Veksler

It’s been about a year early since the first public release of torrents containing all the document and media content on Mises.org. The Mises Institute staff adds new content frequently, so it is time for version 2.0.  Here are the 2010 torrents: Mises Media (132 GB), Books (8.6GB), Journals (4.1 GB), PDFs (324 MB), and ReasonPapers (1.4 GB).

For more files and details see the original announcement.  If you are new to BitTorrent, install the uTorrent client, open the links above, and you’ll be on your way.

If you downloaded an earlier version of this content, please do not re-download everything.  In both uTorrent and Vuze, you can get just the missing files.  In uTorrent,  start the download and let it create the placeholder directory, then stop it.  Overwrite the placeholder directory with your existing files, then “Force Re-Check.”  You can do the same in Vuze –  just enable the option to “Truncate existing files that are too large” under Options->Files.  Then resume.

By my best calculations, we seeded last year’s torrents to thousands of computers worldwide and served over 4 terabytes from our servers alone.  Please help us spread the word and make this release even bigger.

This article is #20 of a weekly series highlighting the former memes of Bureaucrash, an organization once headed by my friends Pete Eyre and Jason Talley of the Motorhome Diaries. The memes were originally authored by Pete Eyre and Anja Hartleb-Parson, and were intended as means of communicating ideas about liberty in catchy and succinct ways.

Far from being environments conducive to learning, schools across the world coerce students to conform to the whims of politicians and bureaucrats. Billed as bastions of free expression, intellectual honesty and rigor, administrators have turned schools into prisons for the mind, where one-size-fits-all policies are forced upon youth and where independent thoughts are discarded. It’s a world in which the government will tell a student what they can and can’t think, wear, say, or do. It’s a world that crushes the individual for the benefit of those in power — a practice we’ve dubbed “Teensploitation.”

Teensploitation is intellectual slavery. Government schools, while alleging to perpetuate diversity, are centers of statist thought. Today, in virtually every class, students are taught to turn to the government when confronted with a problem, rather than to think for themselves, take their own initiative and bear the accompanying responsibility. Students are told that it is their duty to pay their taxes, to vote, and to accept regulations as good things, and that government is needed to protect the less-fortunate from the onslaught of capitalism. Students are rewarded not for documenting how entrepreneurs and voluntary transactions create wealth and thus lift people from poverty, but for proposing ever-more-invasive government programs under vague notions of “social justice.” Teachers parrot socialist ideas: that market failure rather than government policies caused and exacerbated the Great Depression; that redistribution is “just”; that students should listen to them and others in government because they “know what is good for them.” And like socialism, this one-size-fits-all education means that all students are treated the same — at the lowest common denominator so that none are left behind. Ever wonder why the brightest students are often bored? As H.L. Mencken stated, “The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all, it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality.”

Government schools elevate the good of the collective at the expense of the individual. Teachers tell students that the good of society, or a whole race or ethnicity ranks above that of an individual. That minority rights must be protected at the expense of individual rights. But isn’t the smallest minority the individual? Further, forcing diversity on students through programs such as affirmative action only reinforces prejudices that categorize people based on a factor outside of their control (i.e. their race/ethnicity). Using race to sort people is racist by definition. To escape the epidemic of racial conflict students need only grasp that civil society and free markets are the great equalizers, not the state, as is preached in government schools. For example, a business owner does not need the government to tell her who to hire. If she wants to stay competitive she’ll hire the most qualified person, regardless of their skin color or gender. If she doesn’t, her competitor will, placing her at a disadvantage. The same is true of whom they choose to sell to. If a business owner is racist and he refuses to sell to a certain group of people, he’ll lose business while his competitor, who sees the money to be gained, readily sells to them. But, are students taught this in school? That the market is the great equalizer? That the market, not any government program or mandate, creates the most opportunities? No? And why is that? So bureaucrats can keep their jobs?

Mandatory community service is slavery. Through programs such as Zero Tolerance and mandatory community service, government schools teach individuals to be subservient to the State, to surrender their rights without protest. Government schools are merely a bureaucratic tool—controlling what students learn, blocking diversity of thought, transforming youth into unquestioning supporters of an invasive government that controls their personal and economic decisions. As Benjamin Disraeli stated in 1874, “Whenever is found what is called a paternal government, there is found state education. It has been discovered that the best way to ensure implicit obedience is to commence tyranny in the nursery.”

Mandatory attendance violates individual rights. Though it varies by jurisdiction, governments decree by law that youth must attend school when they reach a specific age for a certain number of years, akin to a prison sentence. Failure to do so can result in fines (for their parents, whose money is already being stolen to pay for government schools) and if continued, jail. As the great hero of human rights Joseph Stalin once wrote, “Education is a weapon, whose effect depends on who holds it in his hands and at whom it is aimed.” Any wonder why it’s mandatory?

Cross-posted at LibertarianChristians.com.

This article is #19 of a weekly series highlighting the former memes of Bureaucrash, an organization once headed by my friends Pete Eyre and Jason Talley of the Motorhome Diaries. The memes were originally authored by Pete Eyre and Anja Hartleb-Parson, and were intended as means of communicating ideas about liberty in catchy and succinct ways.

According to the Tax Foundation, Americans will spend about 30 percent of their income on taxes in 2008. For comparison, in 1900, it was around 6 percent. Put differently, for almost four months out of the year you work just to pay for government. In the current system most types of income are taxed, sometimes twice, and often progressively. These are just some of the taxes levied by government: federal and local income tax, sales tax, property tax, gasoline tax, cigarette tax, liquor tax, vehicle sales tax, utility tax, marriage license tax, inheritance tax, and capital gains tax, etc. On top of that, you pay to compensate for taxes levied on others. For instance, you, as a consumer, pay higher prices for goods and services because of the corporate income tax levied on businesses. The government, if it is to exist, should protect people from force and fraud. Therefore, at most, government should tax only to maintain a national defense, a police force and law courts. But instead, legislators seek to fulfill the so-called “needs” of the constituencies and special interest groups that put and keep them in office. So, the government has tasked itself with providing cheaper prescription drugs for seniors, improving education for children, supporting for farmers by keeping food prices high and paying them for any product they fail to sell, covering the living expenses of the poor, paying for medical research, and so on. The result is not a system that protects our individual rights but a system that provides benefits to some at the expense of others. Typically there will be concentrated benefits and dispersed costs, which makes organizing resistance difficult and leads to even larger government interference.

Taxes violate individual rights. Specifically, it violates your property rights. By using taxation to benefit some people, the government says that you have no right to keep what you have earned or how you spend it, as long as there is someone else who needs or wants it, and that it, the government, has the right to seize your property in order to provide it to the person or group they see fit. That’s damn close to making you a slave. As John A. Pugsley stated, “How does the IRS agent who collects our taxes differ from the gunman? He does not. You are forced to pay under threat of imprisonment (the gun). Your money is taken without your voluntary consent. It is used by other people who claim that their need is a just demand of your property. The process is justified because a group of people (voters) decide as a group that you should be robbed and that the money should be used for whatever purposes they deem proper.”

The current tax system creates winners and losers. The government does not create wealth, but only usurps and redistributes it. The winners in this redistribution are legislators and the special interest groups that pander to them. Also, foreign producers win because the taxes levied on businesses increase prices on domestic goods. Tax accountants win because they garner more business due to the complicated the tax codes. And, people who are the least productive win because their income tax is lowest; some do not have to pay income tax at all. The losers are clearly productive individuals, those who have created wealth by providing goods and services to others, who have chosen to voluntarily patron their business. But more than that, everyone who pays income tax loses because they have to spend time and money to complete complicated income tax returns. As Mark Skousen penned: “Oliver Wendell Holmes once said, ‘Taxation is the price we pay for civilization.’ But isn’t the opposite really the case? Taxation is the price we pay for failing to build a civilized society. The higher the tax level, the greater the failure. A centrally planned and totalitarian state represents a complete defeat for the civilized world, while a totally voluntary society represents its ultimate success.” Taxes trample the idea of virtue. Forcing individuals via taxation to pay for the "needs" of others (often determined by a bureaucrat) does make them benevolent or charitable. What makes people charitable and benevolent is realizing that there are persons in true need and causes well worth while contributing to. Many people do realize this, which is why they give voluntarily. Moreover, excessive taxation discourages charitable giving because people have less money to give, or figure that their taxes already pay for helping the needy.

Taxation is frequently “progressive.” That means that individuals who earn more are forced to pay more. But why? They do not derive any greater benefit from the government by doing so. The underlying assumption of progressive taxation is that wealth is a like a fixed pie from which some people get to take a larger piece, thereby decreasing the share of others. Accordingly, income inequality is the expression of unfair wealth distribution and should be decreased by reallocation from the top to the bottom. Hence, those who make more should pay more because they have to give back in some way what they have taken from others. This depiction of the economy is inaccurate. More production generates more economic progress which leads to an increase in wealth for everyone (at least in a free market system), so that the pie does not remain a fixed size.

Cross-posted at LibertarianChristians.com.

This article is #18 of a weekly series highlighting the former memes of Bureaucrash, an organization once headed by my friends Pete Eyre and Jason Talley of the Motorhome Diaries. The memes were originally authored by Pete Eyre and Anja Hartleb-Parson, and were intended as means of communicating ideas about liberty in catchy and succinct ways.

Statists are anti-progress. Statists claim their policies are for the common good. For some this claim is just a front to get more power, but for others it is a genuine goal. Nevertheless, even the most well-intentioned statists, who believe that granting government the power to control individual actions will result in a better outcome, violate rights and cause harm. One need only consider historical fact to disprove this statist belief. For most of history, people were not free to decide how to live their lives because they lived in servitude to a noble or king. The vast majority of people were wretchedly poor, worked from dusk until dawn six or seven days a week, were prone to encounter devastating diseases, and died in their twenties or thirties. Even the privileged few — the kings, nobles and clergy — had nowhere near the standard of living that the ordinary worker in western countries enjoys today. It was classical liberalism — the ideas of British Enlightenment philosophers, Adam Smith, John Locke, John Stuart Mill, and the American “founding fathers” — that unlocked the true human potential. Classical liberalism set man free from servitude to another and gave him the right and the responsibility to care for his own life. As a result of the emergence and subsequent dominance of liberal democracy and capitalism in the last two hundred years, the world has seen progress unparalleled in human history: according to renowned economist Angus Maddison, “[w]orld per capita real income has risen twenty times as fast since 1820, than it did in the eight centuries from 1000 to 1820.”

Statism is anti-growth. Statists often justify their policies claiming that they want to reduce inequality and poverty. In reality though, statists achieve neither and often exacerbate both because their policies discourage economic growth, which is particularly detrimental to low income and poor people. For one, politicians and bureaucrats are limited in their knowledge, as is any individual. No matter how smart an elected official, bureaucrat, or committee is, there’s no way they could adequately plan and control the actions of millions of individuals to achieve maximal economic growth. Moreover, statism encourages rentseeking and protectionism, the activity of groups seeking government enforced advantages and insulation from the outcomes of free trade. This harms the consumer, who is forced to pay higher prices due to lack of competition and fund the rent through higher taxes. This statist action disincentivizes increases in production and job creation, thus depriving low income and poor people of better opportunities to make a living.

Statism causes conflict. Though statists claim to work for the common good, their actions benefit one group at the expense of another. Nazis favored the “Aryan” at the expense of all other nationalities and ethnicities; affirmative action proponents favor blacks, Hispanics and women at the expense of whites and males; socialists and unions favor workers at the expense of business owners; protectionists favor their native industry at the expense of that in other countries; rent-seekers favor their business, organization, or cause at the expense of other businesses, organizations, and causes at the expense of consumers; many religious people, but especially fundamentalists, favor their followers at the expense of those of another religion and at the expense of atheists; and earth liberation environmentalists favor nature at the expense of humans.

Hence, statists create friction and conflict among individuals, groups, and nations. The long stretch of peace during the mid-19th century was at least in part the result of limited government and laissez-faire economics in places like Britain and the United States. The free movement of people was widespread; Russia, the only country that required a passport, was considered backwards. The bloody wars and atrocities committed by governments during the 20th century were the consequence of a move toward state intervention to control people’s lives, ultimately leading to the emergence of ultra-statist regimes such as Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, Communist Russia and Maoist China, and many other totalitarian experiments including a United States that interned over 110,000 individuals of Japanese descent, drafted many more individuals, and implemented wage and price controls.

Cross-posted at LibertarianChristians.com.

Hey folks, are you attending the LP National Convention in St. Louis, Missouri this week? If so, make sure to find me and say hello. I’d love to meet any fellow students at the convention. I’ll be in the Texas delegation, and my wife will be there as well. Comment below to alert me and others to your presence!

This is the first time I will have been a delegate at an LP convention. I’m looking forward to bringing out the radicalism, and having fun with some great people.

This article is #17 of a weekly series highlighting the former memes of Bureaucrash, an organization once headed by my friends Pete Eyre and Jason Talley of the Motorhome Diaries. The memes were originally authored by Pete Eyre and Anja Hartleb-Parson, and were intended as means of communicating ideas about liberty in catchy and succinct ways.

Rent-seeking refers to the behavior of individuals or groups expending resources to achieve public policy decisions that transfer wealth to them at the expense of others. Some examples:

• A nonprofit organization might seek for the government to spend taxpayer money on their pet cause, such as protecting the environment or researching a disease.
• A workers’ union might want the government to force employers to provide higher wages, more benefits and greater job security.
• A corporation might seek subsidization to support an unsustainable business model instead of working to become more profitable.

While the rent-seekers should be faulted for the behavior, it is the government granting rent-seekers what they want that is the real problem. As it shells out more benefits and privileges, government has to collect more taxes to administer and pay for them, thus vastly increasing its size and scope.

Rent-seeking is theft. A rent-seeker wants to achieve a wealth transfer in his favor without having to provide value in return. In a mixed economy, companies and organizations find it more effective to petition the government for protection (i.e. subsidies, tariffs, entry barriers, regulations, etc.) than to compete by providing goods and services that consumers want to pay for. Since in a free market the choices of other individuals might not go in his favor, the rent-seeker would rather have the government initiate force against those individuals. The free market, on the other hand, is predicated upon and respects individuals’ free choices. Rent-seekers hinder the dynamism of the free market. When you and I trade in the free market, we each give the other something the other wants more than we want it, relative to what we receive in exchange. By contrast, when the government initiates force in favor of a rent-seeker, it makes everybody but the rent-seeker worse off. It leaves the rent-seeker’s competitors worse off, because the rent-seeker now has a government-enforced advantage, whether in the form of a government-approved monopoly, or stifling regulations faced by would-be entrepreneurs. Because market forces and signals are hindered and distorted, this leaves consumers worse off. They are forced to pay higher prices for poorer quality goods and services.

Rent-seeking harms economic growth. Instead of companies investing their money in new technology, new jobs, offering consumers better products and better prices, or increasing their employees’ pay, the money ends up in the pockets of lobbyists and the politicians able to grant favors. Consumers are forced to pay more for goods and services and taxpayers have to foot the bill for the rent-seekers’ government-enforced advantage. So, over time, as government arbitrarily favors one group over another and expands in size in order to pay for rents, rent-seeking erodes the mechanisms that make economic growth and wealth creation possible: the impartial rule of law, limited government and individual rights.

Statists, whether out of distrust of individuals or faith in the ability of the government, prefer that the state controls people instead of people controlling themselves; they opt for government intervention rather than individual liberty. Statist policies can include regulation of the economy, provision of social goods, and control over personal behaviors. Many political ideologies can be subsumed under the label “statist” — communism, fascism, authoritarianism, totalitarianism. Even a democracy can become statist if it does not create or does not follow constitutional safeguards against the majority imposing its will without regard for the individual rights of the minority.

Statism is anti-liberty. Individuals have property in themselves, also called self-ownership, which entails they should be free to control their bodies, their minds and their lives. The only way to interfere with that freedom is by means of physical force. The job of governments is to defend individual rights by protecting individuals against the initiation of physical force. However, when governments institute statist policies, they initiate force against individuals who are not infringing on the liberty of others and thus violate individual rights. For instance, regulations, tariffs and subsidies for businesses violate the rights of entrepreneurs and consumers, who both are prevented from voluntarily determining the terms of their interactions with others. If I choose to not give my money to a certain business, government has no authority to overrule that decision. It violates my freedom of choice and deprives others of the property they would have gained in the absence of government interference. Immigration restrictions violate the rights of individuals, since they are prevented from peacefully living and working where they choose to. Bans on smoking and the use of other drugs, speed limits and seat belt requirements, and laws preventing the sale of organs violate your rights since you are prevented from making decisions about your own body.

Cross-posted at LibertarianChristians.com.

This article is #16 of a weekly series highlighting the former memes of Bureaucrash, an organization once headed by my friends Pete Eyre and Jason Talley of the Motorhome Diaries. The memes were originally authored by Pete Eyre and Anja Hartleb-Parson, and were intended as means of communicating ideas about liberty in catchy and succinct ways.

The current Social Security (aka “socialist insecurity”) system is designed as a pay-as-you-go system, in which current workers’ tax dollars pay for the benefits of retirees. And the system is in serious trouble. With increased life expectancy and a declining birth rate, there are fewer workers to support a greater number of retirees. In 1950, there were 16 workers paying for the benefits of one retiree. Today, there are about three workers per retiree, and by 2025 there will only be two. According to the Social Security Administration itself, if unreformed, Social Security will begin running a deficit by 2017, and by 2060 Social Security and Medicare combined will make up 71 percent of the federal budget.

Social Security violates individual rights. It is predicated upon two ideas. One, that the strong should support the weak: in this case, the young should support the old financially when the old cannot do so themselves any longer. Two, that life entails certain basic risks that people either encounter at no fault of their own, such as economic downturns, or simply fail to prepare for. Now, while these ideas might be true, they miss an essential point. Your life belongs to you. Since it is you living your life, and you have the most interest in it, most likely you know your financial situation much better than any politician or bureaucrat. Therefore, as long as you are not violating someone else’s rights, you should be free to control your life and to make the choices that affect your future, even if you end up making mistakes. You are not violating anyone’s rights by planning for your retirement. So, you should be free decide whether you want to save for retirement and how much risk you are willing to take in investing, reaping the rewards or incurring the losses. As for helping the less fortunate, since Social Security is a bad investment with a poor rate of return (see below), it actually disproportionately hurts poor people because they cannot afford to invest additional funds for retirement privately.

Social Security negates choice. By forcing individuals to contribute to Social Security, the government takes away important choices they should be able to make about their own retirement. If you work, you are forced to pay into it but have no choice about how the money is invested. In fact, your Social Security taxes are not even invested at all; they are paid out to current retirees and to loan the federal government money for other government programs. You have no choice over how many years you work or when to retire in order to collect any benefits. You have no choice about what happens to the accumulated money after you die; you cannot pass it on to your family or your favorite cause.

Social Security is a bad investment. According to the Congressional Budget Office, if you are in your late twenties today, the most optimistic projection for your Social Security return is 0.7 percent! By contrast, historically returns on private investments have been much higher: stock market returns 6.8%; corporate bonds 3.8%; treasury bonds 3.3%; a balanced portfolio (50% stock/30% corporate bond/20% treasury bond) 4.9%. If you were able to invest your money privately, you could choose which type of investment you prefer. Stock markets might be riskier but involve higher returns than money market or plain old savings accounts. And, if you invest your money privately, you have a legal right to any returns on that money.

You have no legal right to Social Security benefits. In 1960 the Supreme Court ruled in Flemming v. Nestor that, “a person covered by the [Social Security Act] has not such a right in benefit payments as would make every defeasance of ‘accrued’ interests violative of the due process clause of the fifth amendment.” Hence, Congress can change or rescind those benefits at any time. For instance, before 1983 Social security benefits were not taxed. Since the 1983 Amendments to the Social Security Act, up to one-half of the benefits received are taxed if the recipient’s yearly income exceeded a certain threshold (generally individuals making more than $25,000 and married couples making $32,000). So, not only does the government forcibly take part of the money you earned out of your control, you also are not guaranteed to derive full benefits. That is legalized robbery.

Cross-posted at LibertarianChristians.com.