Imperial Troubles

My latest op-ed, "Imperial Troubles," distributed by The Future of Freedom Foundation, appeared today in the Southwest News Herald in Chicago.

Silver Lining?

Whatever one thinks of Dubai Ports World acquiring leases to manage terminals at U.S. ports, there is one bright spot: People don't believe George II. He's basically asked for trust in his judgment on the deal, but today's New York Times shows he's not getting it: "Seventy percent, including 58 percent of Republicans, said Dubai Ports World, a company controlled by the emir of Dubai, should not be permitted to operate at United States ports, while 21 percent supported the arrangement." Bush's job-approval rating has fallen to 34 percent, and the percentage saying Iraq is going badly has increased from 54 to 62.

Given a world of government-owned ports and government-owned companies, I don't see a problem with DP World's acquiring the leases. But it's nice to see the people expressing their distrust for a president who has systematically misled them.

Cross-posted at Liberty & Power.

More on the Early Factory Workers

As a follow-up to my post below on factory workers, I quote this from Kevin Carson:

[T]he ruling class literature of the period is chock full of complaints about just how hard it was to get workers into the factories: not only were the lower classes not flocking into the factories of their own free will, but the owning classes used a great deal of energy thinking up ways to force them to do so.

Although the kind of thing I'm saying is denounced as "Marxist class warfare" these days, the land-owning and employing classes of early industrial Britain said the same thing in very nearly the same words, in a pretty frank "we're all men here" style. The cottager with independent access to a piece of land, it was complained, would only work a few days a week to supplement his income, and perhaps even then only work seasonally when he needed an extra stake of money to pay taxes or buy some luxury item. The periodical press resounds with demands for enclosure, the reduction of land available for household gardens, and forcible restriction of independent access to the means of subsistence so that the working population would have no choice but to work in the factories or as agricultural wage-laborers for whatever hours a master saw fit to demand of them.

Chapter 4 of Carson's book, Studies in Mutualist Political Economy, has supporting quotations and citations. (It's also online here.)

Carson adds in a Monday post: "When laborers had independent access to the means of subsistence, they worked at wage labor only seasonally, for supplemental income; they could afford to rely on subsistence farming for long periods, and go back to working for a boss only when they felt like it."

This is an important issue that I expect I will be returning to now and then as I learn more.

Detention Centers and Military-Run Civilian-Inmate Labor Programs?

Have you seen this summary of ominious news from Consortiumnews? According to reporting in the mainstream media, Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root got a $385 million contract to build holding facilities for "an emergency influx of immigrants into the U.S., or to support the rapid development of new programs [!!]" (New York Times [$$]), and the Army posted a report on "civilian inmate labor programs" ("This regulation provides guidance for establishing and managing civilian inmate labor programs on Army installations. It provides guidance on establishing prison camps on Army installations." Read it here).

Is it time to get nervous yet?

(By the way, Consortiumnews' section on Sen. Lindsey Graham's remarks about pursuit of fifth columnists was taken out of context. See this Washington Post article.)

Agora Site Started

Brad Spangler has announced the start of a new website of interest to left-libertarians and anarchists (or any curious person, really): Agorism.info. Some really good reading is posted there, including the late Samuel Edward Konkin III's "The New Libertarian Manifesto" and Wally Conger's "Agorist Class Theory." Kudos to Brad!

Port Sense

Xon Hostetter has an entirely sensible article about the Dubai ports issue. I recommend it. Here's a tidbit:

[W]e have a very good idea as to why Dubai Ports company wants to run these six ports – it thinks it can make money doing so! As said before, companies have every interest in protecting their investments, and they do this most obviously by turning a profit. . . . This company [Dubai Ports World] has every reason to take all necessary measures to keep its operations safe from terrorism, and to convince the American public that it is doing so. There are no guarantees in life, of course, but at least this company's motivations (and resources) are aimed against letting some terrorist atrocity occur on its watch.

Did the Early Factory Workers Welcome Their Fate?

Kevin Carson has an interesting post in his occasional "Vulgar Libertarianism Watch" series. This time he critiques Thomas Woods's comments on distributism, the Catholic-related idea, associated with Belloc and Chesterton, that the means of production should be widely dispersed, rather than concentrated in the hands of a few bureaucrats or capitalists. A distributist economy would presumably be filled with single proprietorships and worker co-ops. Carson quotes from Woods's article "What's Wrong with 'Distributism,'" in which he states that for family reasons, "it is by no means obvious that it is always preferable for a man to operate his own business rather than to work for another." To which Carson responds,

This makes the unwarranted assumption that working for someone else is the only way of reducing risk, as opposed to cooperative ownership, federation, etc. It assumes, as a basic premise, the very thing that distributism objects to: that capital is concentrated in the hands of a few owners who hire wage labor, instead of widely distributed among the general population who pool it through cooperative mechanisms.

He then adds,

The proper contrast is between a laborer making a subsistence living off a small family plot with access to a common, and supplementing his income when necessary with wage labor, versus that . . . [nineteenth-century] factory worker. To compare the hours and quality of work of a genuine subsistence farmer with the mind-numbing 12- or 14-hour days in a dark satanic mill is a joke.

To Woods's claim that the people who flocked to the factories after 1750 had no tools with which to start their own businesses and would have starved had they tried to stay in agriculture, Carson responds that land expropriations put those workers in that dire position, which was one of the points of expropriation in the first place.

Carson concludes:

To the extent that the anti-corporate Left sees state intervention as necessary to break the present power of big business, it's owing to the fact (as Nock said), that vulgar libertarians and state socialists have a common interest in obscuring the nature of the present system. Vulgar libertarian apologists for big business like to pretend that the current winners got that way through superior efficiency in the market. And state socialists like to pretend, likewise, that a bureaucratic apparatus controlled by themselves is the only way to counter the natural outgrowth of big business from the free market.

The post attracted several comments (including a couple by me) regarding the actual condition of pre-industrial peasants and factory workers, and the conditions under which the factories procured their employees. This debate has been going on a long time. Frankly, I find it difficult to sort it all out. Writers on the industrial "revolution" often have ideological agendas that color their descriptions, so it is hard to know whom to credit and whom to doubt. What I look for are statements that go against an author's own grain. When the Marxist historian Gabriel Kolko (The Triumph of Conservatism) writes that market competition intensified in the late nineteenth century and that it took government intervention to create cartels, that is impressive because Marxists usually think markets naturally become concentrated. Likewise, when the left historian Fernand Braudel (Civilization and Capitalism, 15th-18 Century: The Structures of Everyday Life) portrays pre-industrial life as poor, nasty, brutish, and short, again, that is informative, since many anti-industrialists have romanticized pre-industrial life.

It can work the other way too. For example, in Human Action, Ludwig von Mises writes:

But the fact remains that for the surplus population which the enclosure movement had reduced to dire wretchedness and for which there was literally no room left in the frame of the prevailing system of production, work in the factories was salvation. (Emphasis added.)

Writers like Carson would disagree with only the second half of the sentence: they would point out that the factory owners were to some extent accomplices in creating the situation in which the wretched had no choice but to submit to wage labor in the factories.

Similar statements can be found in How the West Grew Rich by Nathan Rosenberg and L.E. Birdzell Jr., two enthusiasts of the industrial "revolution." E.g.:

In England, the downward pressure on agricultural wages was accentuated by the enclosure movement -- that is, the fencing of agricultural land formerly available for the pasturage of animals owned by agricultural workers. The enclosure movement reflected the twin facts that the market price of land was rising as the population increased, while the market price of agricultural labor was declining: landowners [how did they come to "own" the land? --S.R.] had other uses for land more remunerative than its use as a fringe benefit for cottagers. The combination of a rise in agricultural population with a reduction in agricultural employment was a compelling incentive for the urbanization of Western society, but it also compelled many agricultural workers in England and other Western countries to endure long periods of economic and social adjustment. It was a combination that accounted for much social misery in England and other Western countries until well into the nineteenth century. . . .

In theory, the [parliamentary enclosure] acts compensated the cottagers for the loss of their common rights by giving them some of the enclosed land. But the cottagers were not effectively represented in Parliament, and there is much reason to believe that the compensation was in practice inadequate. [This implies that the cottagers had no choice in the matter; who would freely accept inadequate compensation? --S.R.] In any event, animal husbandry was often essential to the villagers' margin of prosperity over the barest subsistence, and the commons were essential to animal husbandry. Thus, quite apart from any question of the inadequacy of compensation, the long-term effect of enclosure was an impoverishment of agricultural labor. . . .

The shift from open-field agriculture, in which each villein cultivated a number of small strips, to small holdings agriculture was . . . not necessarily of benefit to those who ended as tenants of large landowners, and it was a disaster for the agricultural workers it left wholly landless.

There was, in point of fact, widespread poverty of the most abject kind in England and other countries in eighteenth-century Europe, and it was from the pool of the forgotten poor that the early factories drew many of their workers. [Emphasis added.]

Nonetheless, Rosenberg and Birdzell reject the "conventional belief" that "the economic gains of the period from 1750 to 1880 were achieved at the cost of enormous sacrifices. . . . In point of fact, there is good reason to think that the alternatives supposedly sacrificed by early factory workers were much less attractive than factory work -- which is not to say that factory work was attractive otherwise than by comparison to the alternatives. . . . But if early factory work was oppressive, the alternatives open to those who voted with their feet for factory work were worse. The early factories were able to attract workers with low wages because the wages were still well above the poverty level . . . ."

This seems out of kilter. If the cottagers had to leave the land because of acts of Parliament, how can we say simply that they chose "oppressive" factory work because it was the superior alternative? Other alternatives were foreclosed by government intervention, no?

As for the relative sacrifices, is the historian or social scientist really competent to do the weighing? Isn't this a matter of subjective value for the people concerned? If government intervention forced people off their land and into factories, can we really point to a rising living standard as "just compensation"? Not according to the methodology I subscribe to.

Addendum: I find this quotation in D. McCloskey's "The Enclosure of Open Fields: Preface to a Study of Its Impact on the Efficiency of English Agriculture in the Eighteenth Century," Journal of Economic History 32, no. 1 (1972): 15-35:

As much as enclosure may have hurt the poor, however, it is doubtful that the hurt was large enough, relative to the net gain to be achieved by the larger owners of the land, that it influenced their decision to enclose. This is because the poor were very poor: the value of their land and other rights was small. In consequence, an equitable procedure, which compensated them fully for their ancient rights, would have changed the net benefits accruing to those who had the power to set an enclosure in motion very little. At first approximation, then, the issue of equity may be left to one side.

This makes two objectionable assumptions: First, that hurt can be weighed against gain. Suddenly an indivdiualist becomes a collectivist. There is no social hurt and social gain. There is subjective hurt to specific individuals that is produced by the subjective gain seized by other specific individuals. There can be no hurt-gain calculation. You can't tote things up to determine "net gain." Really. I thought we were all methodological individualists now.

Second, maybe a cottager would be unwilling to give up his "ancient rights" at any cost, like Mrs. Kelo in New London, Connecticut. One suspects that some libertarians think that you can legitimately deprive someone of his rights as long as you compenstate him. But this can't be. It is a violation of rights. As I've written in the eminent-domain context (and isn't this the same thing?), logically there can be no just compensation in a forced sale. What signals that a level of compensation is just is that it is freely accepted by the property owner. If rejection of an offer is not an option, then we cannot conclude that an ostensible act of compensation is in fact just. What makes a transaction just is not compensation per se but consent. So, no, we cannot leave equity to one side.

Phoniness All Around

We live in such a phony age. I heard that sales of artificial tears are at an all-time high.

More on the Dubai Deal

The more I hear the hysteria against the Dubai port deal the more I think the opponents are exploiting the issue for political gain. They can't even get the facts straight: they keep talking about the outsourcing of security, which isn't what this is about at all. I never thought I'd be sympathetic to George II on anything, but when one listens to Schumer, Clinton, Graham, Frist, Hastert, not to mention media blowhards like Jack Cafferty on CNN, what choice does one have? In this case, the relative bad guys are the fear-mongers. Let them explain why a large company, Dubai Ports World, would jeopardize a lucrative worldwide business to help terrorists, who didn't need any such help on 9/11. This has the stench of populist demagoguery about it. I don't think governments should own ports or companies that operate ports. But we're stuck with such things today. The opponents of the Dubai deal are not calling for privatization. They apparently have no problem with other government-owned port operators, which are ubiquitous. So this is just a case of whipping up fear to score political points. Arabs are easy targets these days.

Cory Maye

Radley Balko summarizes the Cory Maye case on the Cato website today. Maye is on death row in Mississippi for fatally shooting a policeman during a raid on his home late one night. Although looking for a "large stash" of marijuana, police found only a gram's worth of ashes. As Balko points out, paramilitary raids by police are not uncommon and often involve errors and tragedies. "There are dozens of examples of late night 'no-knock' drug raids executed on the wrong home, or on people guilty of, at worst, misdemeanor offenses. Any gun owner willing to defend his family from intruders could well be in the same position Cory Maye was in four years ago," Balko writes.

Balko also points out that the firing of the public defender who represented Maye indicates that the authorities have something to hide. Kudos to Balko for keeping on top of the case.

"All I Gotta Do Is Die"

The great comedian Myron Cohen used to tell a story in which a man, unhappy at being told he had to do something, replies (in trademark Yiddish accent), "I gotta what? I don't gotta do a goddam thing. All I gotta do is die."

I was reminded of that by the latest column by one of my favorite commentators, David Henderson. A sample:

Last December, I attended a round-table academic conference in which we spent a fair amount of time discussing war and foreign policy. One participant mentioned that after the Japanese government (he actually said "the Japanese") bombed Pearl Harbor, it was obvious that the U.S. government (he said "we") had to go to war with Japan. I replied that that wasn't obvious to me at all. First of all, as my co-author, Charles Hooper, and I point out in our book, Making Great Decisions in Business and Life, and as philosopher David Kelley has so eloquently put it, there's almost nothing we have to do. And you don't think clearly by starting from falsehoods. So, although one might argue that the U.S. government should have made war on Japan, the U.S. government didn't have to: it had a choice.

Read the whole thing. It's a gem.

Dubai or Not Dubai

Ivan Eland brings a lot of sense to the port controversy at Antiwar.com:

In fact, since two of the 9/11 hijackers were from the UAE, Dubai Ports World might even have a stronger interest in operating safe and secure ports than companies from other nations. Dubai has a worldwide presence, an extensive history of operating ports, and a reputation to uphold. If a terrorist incident occurred in one of its ports, the company would probably lose more business worldwide than a non-Arabic company would under the same circumstances.

The company should be evaluated on its qualifications to operate the ports, not on McCarthy-like litmus tests for Arabs or the UAE.

What To Do About the Ports

The corporate state/mixed economy presents many conundrums. The latest is is posed by the purchase of a British port-terminal management company by firm owned by the governmment of Dubai, part of the United Arab Emirates. The British company operates terminals at six major U.S. ports, and its purchase by the Dubai firm, although approved by the Bush administration, has many politicians expressing concern about security at those ports. (All such expressions should be discounted to some extent by political interest.) They point out that two of the 9/11 hijackers were from the UAE and that money to finance the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon passed through the Arab state. The UAE reportedly still recognizes the Taliban as the government of Afghanistan. The Bush administration has approved the deal, saying that the UAE has been cooperative in the "war on terror." The Washington Times notes that "At least 90 terminals at major U.S. ports are operated by foreign governments and businesses...."

The six ports, of course, are not private property or private enterprise. They are "owned" by governments or government-created "authorities." In at least some cases, governors or mayors say they have the legal power to cancel the contracts with the management firm, and they may do so if the Bush administration doesn't reverse its position.

So what now? There may be no satisfactory answer under present circumstances. (This is often the case.) The ports are political, not free-market, facilities. And port security is a federal-government matter, just as it is at the airports, which are also government-owned.

The only good solution is to privatize the ports. This would not mean transferring them to well-connected corporate cronies, but rather, as Brad Spangler suggests, ceding control to the people who work and use the ports and who are not tainted by the corporate state. I'd prefer real profit-oriented ports with owners who risk their own capital to bureaucratic ports with politicized managers.

The other thing to do is to liquidate the empire in order to drastically reduce the odds that someone will want to do our society grave harm.

In the meantime, I suppose the the government authorities that now control the ports should act like the managers they claim to be. (A clash between the federal government on one side and the state and local governments on the other would be delightful.) As I said, no short-run measure will be satisfactory.

For some useful insights see Brad's post "Dubai Ports deal: What’s wrong and how to fight it."

Update: Kn@ppster has a persuasive argument here.

The Magic Needs Time

The U.S. government has again laid down the law to the Iraqis: Put the right kind of people in charge or else. The "or else" is a cut-off of money. Of course, the money should be cut off; American taxpayers shouldn't be compelled to finance Iraq. Nevertheless, it is enlightening to see the Bush administration using the money threat to dictate terms to the Iraqis. I thought George II went to war to bring democracy, sovereignty, and self-determination to that country. Apparently, he gave little thought to that society's sectarianism, which grows out of Iraq's history as a country pasted together by the British after World War I. The Bush utopians believe they can make it all right because they are wise and well-meaning. A government death squad is killing Sunni men? Don't worry, with time the neocons will work their magic.

Here We Go Again

From the Washington Post:

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice asked Congress yesterday to provide $75 million in emergency funding to step up pressure on the Iranian government, including expanding radio and television broadcasts into Iran and promoting internal opposition to the rule of religious leaders.

Not that I'm a constitutionalist, but where does the Constitution permit that?

Happy Birthday, Frank

Frank Chodorov, editor of The Freeman the first year it was owned by Leonard E. Read of the Foundation for Economic Education, was born on this date in 1887. Influenced by Henry George and Albert Jay Nock, Chodorov was a passionate and intelligent champion of individualism and free markets. He was equally passionate and intelligent on the subject of war and peace, understanding that war brings a permanent expansion of state power and a diminution of freedom. His criticisms of U.S. conduct in the Cold War and its penchant for empire are still worth reading.

If we will, we can still save ourselves the cost of empire. We have only to square off against this propaganda, and to supplement rationality with a determination that, come what may, we will not lend ourselves, as individuals, to this new outrage against human dignity. We will not cooperate. We will urge noncooperation upon our neighbors. We will resist, by counterpropaganda, every attempt to lead us to madness. Above all, when the time comes, we will refuse to fight, choosing the self-respect of the prison camp to the ignominy of the battlefield. It is far nobler to clean a latrine than to kill a man for profit.

In a letter to National Review in 1954 he said, "As for me, I will punch anyone who calls me a conservative in the nose. I am a radical." Some years ago Charles H. Hamilton edited an excellent collection of Chodorov's work, Fugitive Essays, copies of which can still be found.

Thought for the Day

"The liberal case for diminishing the power of unions by removing their
preferential legal treatment would be much enhanced if the power of business
were simultaneously diminished by removing their preferential legal
treatment in the form of free incorporation. If the power of big business were
curtailed, there would be no need for countervailing powers in the form of
either big labor or big government."

--Piet-Hein van Eeghen, "The Corporation at Issue, Part I:
The Clash with Classical Liberal Values and the Negative Consequences for Capitalist Practice" (pdf), Journal of Libertarian Studies, Summer 2005 (note 21)

Dog Bites Man

U.S. Royalty Plan to Give Windfall to Oil Companies --New York Times

The federal government is on the verge of one of the biggest giveaways of oil and gas in American history, worth an estimated $7 billion over five years.

New projections, buried in the Interior Department's just-published budget plan, anticipate that the government will let companies pump about $65 billion worth of oil and natural gas from federal territory over the next five years without paying any royalties to the government.

Socialize the costs, privatize the profits. Nice work if you can get it.

Yeah, That'll Work

From the New York Times:

"The United States and Israel are discussing ways to destabilize the Palestinian government so that newly elected Hamas officials will fail and elections will be called again, according to Israeli officials and Western diplomats."

I smell blowback.

Update: The Israeli and U.S. governments said the report is untrue. (Hey, I didn't say I believe them.)

Cheney Shooting: What's the Mystery?

I can't understand why people haven't figured out why 22 hours elapsed before we learned that Vice President Dick Cheney had accidentally shot a companion during a quail hunt in Texas. The reason is obvious: the victim, Harry Whittington, required 22 hours of surgery to remove the birdshot, and only Cheney could perform the operation. Whittington is doing fine.