MRE's for sale!

In the aftermath of this year's devastating hurricane season there is, yet another, valuable lesson to be learned.

The lesson: Markets will and do develop in spite of government rationing.

Just as markets developed in the former Soviet Union amongst individuals who traded the goods they were rationed for the goods they preferred, so also, markets have been formed for buying and selling the goods that have been rationed, by the state, to this year's hurricane victims. Big surprise.

Markets can’t be stopped. Furthermore, as is beautifully demonstrated in the case of the eBay MRE’s, modern technology makes it that much easier to circumvent the state and for markets to thrive.

Yet another answer to "What about the poor?" -- already in existence but hidden from plain view: even the most wretchedly poor Asians and Africans send their kids to for-pay private schools rather than subject them to "free" state schools. All the while, governments and statists wiggle and writhe and spit and hiss at the phenomenon which is driving them out of the education business.

Via Kevin Carson, and also see his more in-depth analysis and his other sources. It's truly satisfying.

For starters, I'm repeating my earlier definition of anarcho-capitalism so that the readers of this blog will know where I stand. I'm not your typical anarchist; in fact, some of you might prefer to call me a minarchist. Let's get this semantic issue out of the way. Do you agree with the following description of of anarcho-capitalism, or do you see it as minarchism? Even if you agree that the system I describe is indeed anarcho-capitalism, is there something in it that you disagree with on moral grounds, or on the basis of some economic arguments?

My vision of anarcho-capitalism is that people will typically belong to private legal systems that are attached to local communities based on private property arrangements such as condo associations or gated communities or what-have-you; some people, particularly owners of relatively large pieces of real estate, will refuse to join such covenant-based communities, but small homeowners will usually find it profitable to minimise their transaction costs by buying their water, sewage treatment, road maintainance, gardening services etc. in bulk through condo fees or similar payments to the local community. Police services will typically be provided by guards hired by the condo associations, covenant-based gated communities etc.

People do not have to join these local communities; if membership in them were compulsory, it wouldn't be a private property covenant anymore, it would be a state. You only pay condo fees or similar payments if you have voluntarily joined the community. If the payments were obligatory, they would be taxes.

The rules of these covenant-based communities are PRIVATE LAWS that you have to respect if you believe in private property rights. You can't come into the community, break the laws and say, "Screw you, I never signed your covenant!" My point is that by voluntarily entering the area governed by a private property covenant, you accept the laws that apply there. This is why there are WRITTEN LAWS in anarcho-capitalism. Any community that wishes to maintain its rules must make them explicit by writing them down in a document that is available to all those who are subject to those rules.

If disagreement about applying those rules arises, there will be COURTS OF LAW that will JUDGE the case on the basis of LAWBOOKS. If a defendant is found guilty, normally the most efficient verdict is making him pay compensation to repair the damage done, plus fines and costs of the trial. If the defendant is unable to pay compensation and fines etc., PRISON becomes necessary.

This is why a capitalist society necessarily has laws, courts of law, and prisons, QED.

Somalia's newest would-be government is at it again, proving that the state is the greatest source of violence on earth.

Francois Lonseny Fall, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan's special representative, flew to Jowhar to meet President Abdullahi Yusuf, the second time the diplomat has visited the town 90 km (55 miles) north of Mogadishu in three months...

Fall said his main task was to learn "how to solve some differences among some members of the (government)"...

The tension between the Yusuf-led faction, based in Jowhar, and dissident warlords in his cabinet who are allied with a group based in Mogadishu, has led to an increased flow of weapons into the Horn of Africa country of 10 million people.

Despite an arms embargo, weapons shipments into the country in the past eight months have grown nearly 400 percent over the previous year, according to a report delivered to the U.N. Security Council earlier this month.

Both factions are gearing up for a military showdown, and 10 ministers in the government and Yusuf were involved in the latest transactions, the report said. Ethiopia, Yemen and Eritrea were the main suppliers, it said...

Security sources in Jowhar said that about 150 trainers from the Ethiopian military were working in and around Jowhar, teaching militiamen recruited by Yusuf in the past few months.

Ethiopia has consistently denied providing military support to Yusuf, a long-time ally of Addis Ababa.

Dissident warlords from the Mogadishu group have said the recruitment sends a message that military options will replace dialogue, and have responded in kind by boosting their own militias' strength.

These wannabe power whores haven't even seized power and they are already crippled by infighting and gearing up to perform the state's top duty: making war. Meanwhile, Somalia's stately neighbors are doing everything they can to ensure and increase the violence. Gee, and I thought that anarchy was the problem.

But come on, who really ever believed that these men would bring order, civility and peace to Somalia?

Every time some poor Somali so much as stubs their toe, every statist on earth jumps at the chance to place the blame on anarchy. The standard operating procedure for journalists reporting on Somalia is to imply that any amount of disorder, any act of violence, any unfortunate event is a direct consequence of the absence of a state.

The double standard couldn't be more glaring. Sudan, Uganda, Rwanda, Kenya, Ivory Coast, Liberia, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Congo, Zimbabwe, Guinea-Bissau (to name just a few and I know I've left some out) all have experienced and are experiencing major crises either directly caused or unprevented by their respective governments. War, crime, famine, genocide and starvation all regularly occur in the aforementioned countries while the worst of the violence and chaos in Somalia is caused by would-be governments with the help of the nosy states next door.

Seriously, when it comes to violence and chaos in the world, it's not anarchy that's to blame; it's the state, stupid.

The ACLU is reporting that the deaths of at least 21 American held detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan were homicides.

The documents show that detainees were hooded, gagged, strangled, beaten with blunt objects, subjected to sleep deprivation and to hot and cold environmental conditions...

While newspapers have recently reported deaths of detainees in CIA custody, today's documents show that the problem is pervasive, involving Navy Seals and Military Intelligence too.

News like this should lay to rest the myth of American moral superiority. However, the faithful masses, convinced of the goodness of their state-god and his anointed servants, will undoubtedly weave endless arguments about the evil of moral equivalency and how, despite these crimes, the US war machine is the most moral and benevolent in the history of man. They will comfort their guilty consciences by convincing themselves that no other nation has ever held so much power and used it to do so much good, that the US cannot be justly compared to the truly wicked regimes that dot the globe and that 2 + 2 = 5.

Aw, the First Lady of Nigeria died after complications from spending gobs of tax money paid by dirt-eating Nigerians just barely surviving to get the gobs of fat sucked out of her disgusting gluttonous belly. You filthy state largess-sucking dirtbag pig, I hope you rot in Hell, and I hope your equally-fatass husband's heart is so broken that his welfare whore African Queen croaked on the lypo table that he also drops dead.

Four news stories have recently caught my attention.

-Wherein Google is planning to blanket the globe in free wireless Internet access
-Wherein MIT built a $100 laptop
-Wherein the Pentagon sponsored a race between unmanned robotic vehicles
-And now, something to replace the lightbulb a hundred times over

Now what do these stories all have in common? Answer: mass shortsightedness, particularly on the part of the state.

Right now, people pay money, somewhere in the double digits, for the privilege of access to the proto-Matrix we currently refer to as the Internet -- that herald of the post-post-modern era destined to replace the television, gouge Hollywood, and put the Playboy Mansion on the auction block. In its decade-long reign over information exchange, it has arguably boosted global affluence, challenged more economic assumptions, enabled more agoraphobia, and supplemented more intimacy than the automobile, China, Domino's Pizza, and the detachable showerhead combined. And through it all, you and I, when we weren't warchalking back in 2003, have been paying for it.

Now imagine it's free. Starting with San Francisco, Google wants everyone in the world to have Internet access. This, of course, will make every personal digital assistant a free-unlimited-calling cellphone; every Starbuck's a hotspot; every house a hub. And it might happen earlier than the other service providers would prefer (which I guess means "before all the shareholders' grandchildren are dead").

That will be the real information revolution. Of course, it would be much more so if the poor could get in on the action early on. Oh, hello, what's this:

MIT has build a $100 wireless-capable laptop. They won't be for sale, at least not in the first three seconds of their distribution: MIT plans to hand them out to underprivileged youth all over the world. If you're anything like me, you believe that the next Einstein, Edison, or Gutenberg is hiding somewhere in the third world (the sheer numbers suggest it) without the resources to transform the world with a better mousetrap. Add $100 laptops and free wireless access to the equation: pornography and innovation carried by the four winds to all corners of the planet!

I've said all that can be said about self-driving cars on the above-linked forum thread. They represent a savings of countless hours of driving, parking, searching for one's lost car, drunk driving costs and injuries, traffic inefficiencies, and I'm sure porn figures into this one too, somewhere.

In the newest world-changing and me-exciting development, grad student Michael Bowers has discovered that the luminating capabilities of LEDs actually trump traditional lightbulbs in every regard, including brightness, longevity, application and cost. They make it seem as though any object can be made into a light source, and I for one am completely mentally prepared to ignore all evidence to the contrary. I'm serious, I am pumped.

Now for the comedy:

For Google's free Wi-fi bid, the government is back to its tired old routine of preemptively regulating an "inevitable" natural monopoly. Not that I'm not tickled by their enthusiasm, but I pine for the days when they expressed their latent Luddism in a more healthy way; though I suppose they don't remember the outcome of the ephemeral "email tax" plot with quite my nostalgia.

For the $100 laptops, the state of Massachusetts wants to buy them in bulk to use in classrooms. This alone isn't so bad, but MIT is likely to extend this strategy into Malnourishtan, selling to state heads rather than the free market, where they'll either be cynically retraded for arms with some other country or effectively ransomed to the middle class.

For the robot car race, the sponsorship says it all: the Department of Defense is interested in purchasing the technology to trick out its Bradley Armored Transports and other such warzone strategery.

Why do I call this comedy? Because what the government wants for technology means less and less every day. Free wifi will happen with or without the government's anti-trust precautions. Those laptops will be on Ebay before sundown. And for every dollar saved in funeral costs by the family of a slaughtered soldier because Robo-car delivered his smoldering remains a day earlier, you and I will save $100 -- quintuple that if you believe time is money.

There may have been a time the pharaohs could control the ramifications of technology; those days probably didn't exist but either way are far behind us. The state is losing influence; it merely doubles in size for every exponential growth spurt brought on by scientific breakthrough. It'll be interesting to see howmuch longer they can keep this up.

And as for the LED story, it' s still quite new, but if anyone comes upon an article about the government's response to the story, I'd love a link. If the Pentagon thinks they can make a bomb out of it, you all owe me a Coke.

With its print magazine struggling, US News is staking its future to the Internet.

"[T]he perennial third among the newsmagazines, is trying to become the first to exploit the Internet. It’s also trying to be among the first of the mainstream media outlets to hitch its fortunes to the shaky engine of Web economics.

A reading of the magazine’s internal memos, examination of its recent layoffs, and interviews with editors make it clear the weekly is betting on profits from its Internet ventures to prop up the magazine’s failing fortunes...

U.S. News has two clear rivals in the newsmagazine market; it faces hundreds of competitors on the Internet."

This increased competition is important for at least two reasons.

First, as the news media elite loses its grip on the flow of information, so does the state's propaganda machine for which big news is either a co-conspirator or a useful idiot.

Second, as the competition stiffens in the information market, media outlets are beginning to seek new areas to mark. Why is that important? Well, because this trend may put the state in competition with free market information providers as they move into areas that many wrongly believe can only be serviced by a benevolent caretaker government.

"The formula for the Web is based on the hope that the U.S. News brand, which has been successful in rating colleges, will have similar success rating hospitals and healthcare plans.

Next week the magazine will roll out its new Web health site. In addition to listing hospitals, it will give readers information on diseases and cures based on the magazine’s partnerships with healthcare institutions at Stanford, Johns Hopkins, Harvard, the Mayo Clinic, and the Cleveland Clinic."

Look out FDA and CDC, here comes US News!

Once upon a time, Ray Daugherty implied (and I!)that violence in Somalia would eventually be snuffed out as the security market atomized. I find it interesting in this Year 14 AB (after Barre) that when a warlord's militia tried take over a Mogadushu neighborhood to collect a levy "which is unpopular with locals," his forces were attacked by what Reuters claims/assumes is another militia. But reading on, we're presented with this quote:

"They failed to take the area because everybody here has a gun," resident Hussein Ali told Reuters in Nairobi by telephone.

No mention of a rival militia, only of many armed, pissed off regular people. Hmm.

Over the last few years, I have grown tired of arguing with friends and family who support the war. It is not the endless debating that bothers me nor is it hearing the same poor excuses and false justifications. What bothers me most is a realization that by speaking out against the war I am, in actuality, acting in the best interest of the United States.

I first made this realization when I suddenly noticed what strange bedfellows I have been keeping. I found myself reading, and loving, articles by such men as Pat Buchanan, Paul Craig Roberts and William Lind. I now have a subscription to American Conservative Magazine and I frequently read articles from The John Birch Society’s publication, The New American. How could this be? Did I make a wrong turn somewhere or did they?

My friends and family have often attributed my anti-war stance to my “anti-Americanism” or to me being a “leftist.” However, it dawned on me that the aforementioned writers and publications are neither anti-American nor leftist and, in fact, they could not be any more pro-American or pro-right. And that is when I realized that these men are the real patriots and they oppose the war because it is destroying that which they love most, the United States of America.

After this epiphany, I became increasingly frustrated when arguing with America loving warmongers. I could not make them see that opposing the war was actually in their best interest. I began to question my own opposition and to voice my disappointment. This past August, I wrote this in a letter to a friend:

“As you know, ultimately I want the US to fail completely and for this, I am actually torn on the war. If I desire to see the demise of the US come as quickly as possible then I should become the greatest war cheerleader you have ever seen. I should call for the US to stay in Iraq for years and to begin drawing up and executing plans to invade other lands throughout the world.

I should want the US to lose and waste massive amounts of military resources that would be stretched way too thin and for them to spend trillions of dollars, bringing the state closer to bankruptcy. I should want the government to breed more and more enemies, at home and abroad who will oppose its tyranny and imperialism thereby helping to delegitimize the State.”

Unfortunately, my words, once again fell on deaf ears and I refuse to argue any longer for that which is best for the USA when those who claim to be patriots continue to schizophrenically argue for a policy of self-destruction.

A prolonged policy of war will weaken and bankrupt the state and serve to destroy its legitimacy. Through continued war the machinery of the US military will be used up and stretched thin while the lives of the most violent, primitive, and dangerously stupid element of society will be extinguished. Because of this I now support the Iraq war and any other military misadventure that the rocket scientists running the US government want to start. Why should I waste anymore time trying to save something that I want to see destroyed?