Spooner's Constitution of no authority

So I just read Lysander Spooner's essay/article, No Treason. No. VI, the Constitution of No Authority. It can be found online here... http://www.lysanderspooner.org/bib_new.htm Scroll down to where it says No Treason and click The Constitution of No Authority. This man's life was very interesting to me. Information on it can be found on the website.

The article argues very effectively that we are not bound by the American Constitution and people residing in the territorial area known as the United States never were bound by it, simply because they never truly consented to it in any form that would stand in a court. He has an especially entertaining paragraph or two comparing government to highwayman. I think Ayn Rand uses some his paragraph in Atlas Shrugged. He claims that the highwayman is more honorable and noble than the government because the highwayman leaves us alone after we are robbed.

There is also an interesting attack on the secret ballot. I am not sure if he actually argues for non-secret ballots or just uses the argument to attack the government. Either way, it's worth a read. Check it out if you haven’t read it already.

Economies in MMOs

Massively multiplayer online games have been quite popular in the past few years and some of them have interesting economic aspects to them. Titles under this genre include Ultima Online, Everquest, Asheron's Call, Star Wars: Galaxies, Dark Ages of Camelot, The Sims Online, Shadowbane, and World of Warcraft.

Virtually every character you run into in games of this nature are controlled by another player. Player interaction is usually encouraged to defeat hard monsters or puzzles and players can trade virtually every item in most of the games. This exchange creates some interesting possibilities and problems. Most games have a common currency, usually gold. One of the larger problems in these games is that the gold massively inflates over time. The gold enters the economy usually by players taking it off monsters they've killed or as rewards for quests or puzzles. Gold exits the economy by buying things from non-player-characters. Some games make players use the gold to pay to power-up, other games require certain amounts of gold to cast spells or travel to other locations. We can see how this is not all that similar to a real economic system.

This system is called a "faucet-drain economy." There have been a few essays written on it. Some of them may be published. For me, the interesting part is what happens in-between the faucet and the drain. Nike has used some smaller MMOs to model or forecast preferences for clothing and shoes. Other companies have done this too. Some of the games may have some real potential for economic analysis - at least to see some of less-noticeable theories in action.

I think it'd be interesting to see some company make a game that didn't start off with a default currency like "gold" that can be looted off monsters. It'd be interesting to watch at first as players try to find something that can be used effectively as a medium of exchange. DarkFall Online, several years ago, had some posts about this on their development board, but I'm not sure if that game is still being tested or not.

Very Basic Utilitarian Libertarianism

So this is mostly a continuation of the previous discussion on Natural Rights libertarianism... Many people have asked me (usually with some anger?) how a system could possibly work without taxes. The natural rights argument doesn't really address this question, but it shouldn't have to because the question isn't related to the argument at all.

In this post I will attempt to use utilitarianism to explain how a political system could work without taxes, aggressive war, or conscription.

The word utilitarianism is a structure of beliefs or ideas built around the idea of maximizing utility. Utility generally means happiness. Most economics teachers would agree to this definition. Maximizing utility could also mean something like... the maximum amount of uneasiness removed. The two meanings are similar, but happiness seems slightly less definitive to me.

A libertarian utilitarian generally believes that the maximization of utility for a society would be accomplished by the removal of government.

Basically, the argument is based on the success of the free market. If enough people want something or if a single person wants something badly enough, then they or he will get it through the market. If enough people want green shoes, then someone will start a shoe company to make green shoes or a currently existing shoe company will start to manufacture green shoes. The same goes for the various operations of government according to this line of argument.

If a large number of individuals demand something like security (a police force for example) on the market, then various methods of security will arise through various entrepreneurs attempting to profit from other peoples desires.

David Friedman and Murray Rothbard in their books, The Machinery of Freedom: A guide to radical capitalism and For a new liberty: the libertarian manifesto, respectively, lay out basically the same ideas for the road to utilitarian libertarianism or anarchy. I don't have The Machinery of Freedom available to me right now, but Friedman says there are things that we can do today and things that we can do in the future to take the state apart. It must be done in a certain order for the system to work most efficiently, he argues.

If I remember correctly, he first says that we should sell off the public roads and schools. I think I should pause here before proceeding with what order to do things or explaining exactly how the system would run to put up an argument for a private road and school system...

These two areas are some of the hardest to defend for a utilitarian libertarian. There was a highway built in LA a while ago, a private one that cut a more direct path for travelers to wherever it was going and saved them time (highway 73). I think when it came out the toll was like $8 per trip. The price is high, but the road boasted a toll system that you could drive through at 70 miles per hour without stopping. No other system like this exists in the country, to my knowledge anyway, and there are a lot of toll systems back east. The owners of the road set up cameras along the whole length of the road and if there was an accident or some kind of breakdown, they knew about it immediately and sent crews out to clean it up to keep traffic moving and the money coming in. No road system that I know of can respond this fast. They gave away a free gallon of gas to people that ran out because it was inefficient for them to leave the car on the side of the road with the possibility of impeding traffic. The enormous amount of traffic and the social costs associated with it would be minimized by having a private road system.

Concerning education: Most people, liberals anyway, seem to think that the public school system in America is in horrible condition. Would a private system of schools fix the problems or just leave some people uneducated and be generally worse for society? Imagine what would happen if there were no public school system. First, people wouldn't be forced to pay for public schooling through taxes. Various private schools would arise serving whatever desires that the market demanded. Some parents would demand high quality education and be more willing to pay for it for their children than they were previously. Some poorer families that couldn't afford to send their children to a very high quality expensive school would have the option available to them to send their child to some sort of shorter-term trade school if they wanted. Schools would compete with each other for students. In every case where free competition exists in a free market, prices drop. New methods of education would be attempted and new ideas would surface, allowing for more efficient education of everyone. Public schools have virtually no one to compete with and therefore have very little incentive to innovate. Basically, if schools were privatized, then a larger variety of education would come into existence and overall prices of education would fall because of competition.

Friedman and Rothbard both go on to explain how a market based police force, court system, and perhaps even military could not only exist but also be more efficient on the free market than the way it currently is. Where the argument is now though, without public education or public roads, is where many minimal-state libertarians draw the line. Most also believe that there should be a much smaller military as well...

I'll make another post on how a police force, court system, and maybe a military could be provided on the market.

This argument isn't as solid as the natural rights one, so feel free to nail me somewhere and I'll argue about it.

Natural rights libertarianism

Libertarianism is a relatively modern name for an older bunch of ideas manifesting themselves in the American Revolution, based, to at least some extent, on the ideas of John Locke, along with some other major thinkers of his time and before.

I will explain, at least in this post, natural rights libertarianism, which is based off of some of the ideas of John Locke and for the most part was realized in early eighteenth century America.

The basic assumption that I must begin this explanation with is:
Human being have the right to live.

Humans survive, not through instinctual behavior, but through the use of reason to gain food or shelter. Humans must use reason to survive. Because we have the right to live, as human beings, we therefore have the right to reason.

Because we have the right to live - that is, to produce things necessary for survival, the man that creates, makes, or thinks of something has the sole right to keep, use, destroy, or do whatever he wishes with that which he has produced with his own mind or body. The implications of this are interesting.

The goods that we come to 'own' through the use of our own reason, minds, and body, are ours to keep. Any attempt to take the property of another individual is a violation of the human right to live, since they exercised their ability to reason - man's sole means of survival - to gain possession of the property. Any individual with a property right over some good has the right to trade it or sell it, but not to violate the right of any other person's right to their own property. Keep in mind that exchange between two individuals is ALWAYS voluntary and therefore completely in accordance with man's right to live. Obviously, included in a man's property, is his own body, since it is his own body, guided by reason, which performs the actions that allow him to survive.

From this line of reasoning, we conclude that only voluntary exchanges between individuals do not violate the rights of human beings. If someone steals something from another person, it is theft. If someone forces another person to give up a piece of their property through force, then it is theft. Taxation then, is theft. The government, through the use of coercion, takes what you earned honestly through the use of your mind and your body. This is theft and a violation of the basic human right to live.

Since human beings have a right to their own bodies and to do what they wish with their own time, conscription is slavery and it violates the basic human right to life, to reason, and to property.

In accordance with humans right's to life, aggressive war is murder. Any death on any side of a conflict is the responsibility of the aggressor. If a country goes to war with another country for any reason except self defense, then the heads of state that started the aggressive war are murderers and should be held accountable for their actions just as any other criminal. If the war was put to a democratic vote and over half the people in a country voted to start an aggressive war with another nation, then anyone that perished in the conflict on either side is a victim of murder. Anyone that voted 'yes' for the war should be held accountable for the crime of murder.

Since we have the right to our own body and property, anyone aggressing upon our body or property has violated our right and self defense is completely justified.

Natural-rights libertarianism is the only truly just system in accordance with man's basic right to life.

Acknowledgements: Many of these ideas are based on Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, by Ayn Rand and Atlas Shrugged, by the same author. Murray Rothbard’s For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto outlines them in more detail. I was probably influenced by David Friedman’s The Machinery of Freedom: A Guide to Radical Capitalism as well.

Cav Daily article about Social Security

Well, I wrote this back in March, but I want my blog to look full and active from the very beginning, so I'm going to post it. The first part is a newspaper article in the Cavalier Daily, the student newspaper at the University of Virginia. My response starts about half way down after the spot with his email.


Securing the dignity of the elderly

Zack Fields, Cavalier Daily Columnist

WHEN MY grandmother's great grandfather died, he was living on the poor farm in Lawrence County, Ala. Before there was Social Security, those old folks who didn't have any family or whose family couldn't afford to take care of them went to the poor farm or the poor house. In Lawrence County the seniors who could still get out of bed in the morning went on down to the fields and hoed cotton or squash, working until the day they died. Many old folks who didn't end up on the poor farm lived with their relatives. My grandmother told me that often a husband and a wife would be split up for their final years because one family could not afford to take care of both of them. Perhaps a son's family would take care of the mother and the daughter's family the father.

None of my relatives live on the poor farm today. No elderly person has to suffer the indignity of being separated from her or his spouse because of economic necessity because in 1938, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the Democratic Congress created Social Security, which Lyndon Johnson expanded to cover all seniors under the auspices of the Great Society. According to Associate History Prof. Grace Hale, these federal programs had virtually eliminated poverty among the elederly by the 1980s. While rising drug prices have compromised the living standards of seniors in the past decade, Social Security nevertheless ensures that my grandmother can retire in her home rather than till the soil on the poor farm.

Why, then, is President Bush attempting to dismantle Social Security? Why privatize, and thereby destroy, our country's most successful social program? Why would the Republican Party return us to an era when old age was characterized by poverty? It is not only callousness to the well-being of my grandmother and all working-class senior citizens. To be sure, Bush will sacrifice the interests of the seniors in order to enrich the stock brokers and mutual fund managers who, as Hale pointed out, are the only sure winners of Social Security privatization. Yet Bush is not attempting to destroy Social Security merely to transfer the retirement savings of all citizens to some stock brokers on Wall Street. Bush must destroy Social Security because its existence is a daily refutation of Republican ideology and "free" market rhetoric.

Social Security has vastly lower management overhead costs than privatized pension systems in oher countries (such as in Britain), according to Princeton economist Paul Krugman, and Social Security is so successful that we effectively eliminated poverty among seniors. The Social Security Administration estimates that "nearly half of all older Americans" would live below the poverty line without Social Security, based on data from 1999. Fifteen million seniors would live in poverty today without that guaranteed benefit. Over the last forty years, the time since Johnson expanded Social Security to include all seniors, the poverty rate for the elderly has fallen 72 percent, according to the SSA.

But because the Republican Party thrives on criticizing "big government," the existence of a big government program that eliminated poverty for old folks threatens their party's and their ideology's long term solvency in America. If we can eliminate poverty for seniors, there is no reason we cannot eliminate poverty among children, who currently suffer the highest rates of poverty. If we can eliminate poverty for seniors, perhaps we can provide employment for workers who have seen their jobs sent to Mexico and China by their former corporate employers. Social Security's unambiguous success is a stirring testament to the power of government to affect positive change in the average person's life.

My father and mother deserve to retire after a lifetime of labor. My cousins in northern Alabama should not have to work at Wal-Mart until the day they die. We have a moral responsibility to protect Social Security from Bush's assault, and expand the welfare state where otherwise possible, precisely because the wellbeing of my family, of most American families, depends upon it. We cannot return to an age when, as Prof. Hale said, Americans "worked until physically unable, then lived with family or in the country home, the poor house."We have an obligation to protect the "profoundly important" achievement of our grandparent's generation, lest we condemn our children's to the poor farm in their old age.

Zack Fields' column appears Wednesdays in The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at zfields@cavalierdaily.com.


Now my response...

Here's my response to the article... a letter to the newspaper. They didn't publish it.

This letter is in response to Zack Fields’ article concerning Social Security that appeared in the Cavalier Daily on Wednesday, March 2, which argued that Bush’s plan to ‘privatize’ Social Security would lead to the destitution of millions of American seniors’ ability to retire. Mr. Fields praises Social Security as an “unambiguous success” and a “testament to the power of government to affect positive change in the average person's life.” In addition to this, he also accuses President Bush of being a free-marketer which is simply not true. This letter is intended to amend some of the thoughts expressed in Mr. Fields’ article through a look at economic growth since 1930 and the Republican Party’s approach to ‘big government’ and free trade.

Mr. Fields misunderstands the underlying causes of the decline in poverty rates of senior citizens in the twentieth century. He writes that Social Security “eliminated poverty for old folks.” Yes, to an extent, Social Security may help seniors to retire – especially those that would not normally save the money in the absence of Social Security. What really though, has stopped poverty in the United States? Mr. Fields starts his article off talking about his grandmother’s great grandfather. If I am not mistaken, that is five generations. That could be between one hundred and maybe one hundred and fifty years ago. In 1850, the United States was only beginning to experience the effects of a world wide Industrial Revolution that would eventually lead to greater prosperity for virtually every nation and almost every individual in the United States. It was the enormous economic growth of the last one-hundred years that has ‘saved’ us from more poverty than we are currently experiencing, not government programs attempting to define what we can and cannot do with our own money. It does not logically follow then, that if Social Security were to be dismantled, we would return to a period of poor elderly members of society toiling their last years away on the poor farm.

Personal income in the United States since 1930 has risen drastically. It is this increase, this huge economic growth, which has saved fifteen million seniors, as Mr. Fields says, from poverty. From the article on Wednesday – “According to Associate History Prof. Grace Hale, these federal programs (Social Security and Johnson’s Great Society) had virtually eliminated poverty among the elderly by the 1980s.” Well, of course poverty had been “virtually eliminated” by 1980. Per capita income has increased between the years of 1929 to 1980 by fourteen times what it was according to Bureau of Economy Analysis. The massive economic growth of this century does much more to fight poverty than the government forcing people to save a small percentage of their income.

I may surprise some of you now. I am not a conservative. Mr. Fields’ article not only talked about how wonderful Social Security and the ‘Nanny-State’ are, but also implied that the Republican Party does not approve of ‘big government’ programs. He also wrote that President Bush is a free-marketer. In the last four years, the President and a majority Republican Congress have succeeded in spending trillions of dollars, pushing the National debt higher and higher. The war in Iraq and Bush’s social programs have cost the American tax payer much. Accusing the president of being hard on ‘big government,’ according to the evidence from his first term and his most recent State of the Union Address, is absurd. The President is expanding government spending and policy quite rapidly and doesn’t seem to think there is anything wrong with ‘big government.’

Mr. Bush also supported a tariff on steel in his first term that would prevent the free importation of that commodity into the United States. That is an attack on free trade. I tend to think that the President is more of a mercantilist or moderate socialist than a conservative. Mr. Fields writes too, about how the government could fight for American jobs to stay at home instead of being sent to China or Mexico. In the article, the blame falls on the corporations for sending the jobs away. The President, in his campaigning speeches anyway, promised to bring the jobs back home. Of course the blame would fall on the corporations though. The leaders of all business firms attempt to make a profit. If labor costs are very high in the US, then it’s cheaper to build factories in Mexico or even China. This is not unusual. Firms attempt to maximize profits. Why is it though, that wage rates are higher in the United States than in other countries? One quick answer is that it is the unions and their involvement with the government drives up labor prices and prevents the flexibility of wages. That is, wages can only rise in our current system. This encourages credit expansion by the Federal Reserve to help alleviate the problem of only upward moving wages through inflating the dollar.

If jobs leave the United States, the prices of all goods fall for all consumers in the US. If totally free trade is permitted by our government, then the prices of all goods in the US would fall at the expense of some American jobs. If wages were also allowed to fall, then the drop in prices would nearly equate to a drop in wages that would allow the employment of a large percentage of American workers, even ones that have lost their jobs to cheap foreign competition. If you have any trouble with this letter, please direct at least some of the questions to your economics professor.

First Post

Greetings and Welcome to my blog. I want to use this website to express some opinions of mine or review things that I have read or saw that I thought were interesting. I will often be posting about things that pissed me off over the course of the day...

Anyway, hopefully you'll enjoy reading some of the stuff and post some responses. Anyone is welcome to respond.