by Thomas L. Knapp

It’s a familiar story, re-told three or four times a year with few alterations apart from geography: A dictator, long ensconced in power, holds formal “elections,” claims victory versus a proponent of “real democracy” despite clear evidence of loss, attempts to remain in power, but is eventually overthrown by his country’s people (with a little help from the United Nations, or the United States, or some regional organization of states).

The current version of the tale comes to us via western Africa’s Cote d’Ivoire, or as we English-speakers put it, Ivory Coast, where sitting president Laurent Koudou Gbagbo continues to hold out against the alleged democratic victory of Alassane Ouattara to succeed him in office.

Plot familiarity alone constitutes reasonable cause for suspicion. States love old standards and tend to recycle successful propaganda, rinsing and repeating until the colors fade completely out before moving on to new narratives.

Up front, let me make it clear that I carry no portfolio for the Gbagbo regime, or any other. The history of Cote d’Ivoire, from ancient history through French colonialism and to the imposition of a single state over incompatible populations, is a textbook case for the undesirability of political government.

But is Ouattara a genuine improvement for the people of Cote d’Ivoire, or is his supposed election simply a cynical fraud in token of his prospective service as an overseer acting on behalf of other, more powerful states?

His personal history gives us good reason to suspect the latter. Most of Ouattara’s career has been spent in service to two institutions of state domination in general and the exploitation of former colonies by western states in particular: The International Monetary Fund and the Banque Centrale des Etats de l’Afrique de l’Ouest (Central Bank of West African States). For at least 30 of the last 42 years he’s openly worked for one, the other, or both of those organizations, even while serving at times as Prime Minister and acting president of Cote d’Ivoire.

Color me cynical concerning the roles of the IMF and BCEAO, but I see them something like this:

The IMF’s role in Cote d’Ivoire, as in all other places where its reach extends, is to continuously chivvy the country’s economy into line with the interests of the western neoliberal states. The IMF accomplishes this task by loaning “development” funds to regimes and then dictating the course of said “development.” In theory, the IMF acts as a conduit of “market information;” in fact, it’s an anti-market institution dedicated to the preservation of, and service to, existing commercial relations at all costs.

The BCEAO’s role, like that of any central bank, is to promote “stability” — i.e. the maintenance of the status quo. A single state’s central bank generally identifies that status quo with the existing state, but a multi-state central bank’s view is generally much more “big picture” or IMF-like. If a particular regime has to go in order that the over-arching status quo can thrive, no problem.

In 2009, the IMF forgave the Gbagbo regime for $3 billion in debt. The IMF’s 2010 report on the country characterized the Gbagbo regime as cooperative with its goals, but in “an economic environment that has deteriorated significantly.” Also in 2010, new oil discoveries off the coast (in maritime territory apparently disputed by the regimes of Cote d’Ivoire and Ghana) came into play.

It’s anyone’s guess whether Gbagbo’s regime did something specific to drive the IMF and BCEAO out of its corner and into Ouattara’s, or whether internal politics happened to cough up a chance for “improvement” (from their point of view) in the form of a Ouattara presidency.

But, upon careful examination of the narrative, the propaganda gives way to a picture that looks a lot more like international statist scheming than native popular conflict.

The only apparent evidence that Ouattara won the election is that his foreign employers, who have an obvious interest in him winning it, say he won it. There’s little or no evidence of any popular uprising on Ouattara’s behalf on the ground in Cote d’Ivoire. The major players seem to be Gbagbo’s regime supporters on one hand versus foreign UN “peacekeepers” protecting Ouattara’s hotel headquarters on the other.

Regardless of how the whole thing plays out (the smart money’s on Ouattara taking power while Gbagbo flees to well-funded exile), the people of Cote d’Ivoire appear to be footing the bill for a wrestling match between states at the expense of their own real interests.

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Thomas L. Knapp, Senior News Analyst and Media Coordinator at the Center for a Stateless Society, is a long-time libertarian activist and author of Writing the Libertarian Op-Ed. Knapp publishes Rational Review News Digest, a daily news and commentary roundup for the freedom movement.

by David D’Amato

Those of us dwelling on the free market left, the strange breed that understand corporate domination as a protuberance of state power, are seen as paradoxical outliers within the American political catalog. We don’t fit very comfortably within a dialogue that regularly and mistakenly sets the interests of the powerful within our corporate economy against the powerful within the state.

The peculiar challenge for free market anarchism, then, is to explain not just how authentic interchange in goods, services and ideas benefits real, working people, but also to revisit the accepted account of business/government relations, contributing a revision that more accurately express those relations. The continuing debate surrounding healthcare reform offers a classic example of the pervasive cronyism — the state-corporate affinity — that is confused for the free market in the United States.

And in the face of all of their vehement debates, the rival sides in the current wrangle, Republicans and Democrats, without reservation indulge that system of anticompetitive corporate privilege and preferential treatment. Soon after the new healthcare law was passed in March, the attorneys general of states around the country filed claims in federal court to challenge many of the new provisions, among them the requirement that Americans buy health insurance or face fines.

Ruling on one such challenge, a federal court in Virginia held Monday, as reported by Bloomberg, that “the mandate on individuals in President Barack Obama’s health-care legislation goes beyond Congress’s [constitutional] powers to regulate interstate commerce.” Explaining his decision, U.S. District Judge Henry Hudson wrote that the central consideration is “an individual’s right to choose to participate,” that the “dispute is not simply about regulating the business of insurance.”

The most noteworthy feature of the court’s decision, at least for market anarchists, is that it exposes and thereby undermines the absurd false choice we’re conditioned to see in every political issue — the choice between endorsing state action on behalf of the common man and championing the free enterprise embodied by massive corporations.

That alternative and its assumptions about power are a sham, a pretense to dissemble the “public/private partnerships” of corporate liberalism that have long endured in the United States. In his critical reappraisal of the relationship between the state and powerful industries, Gabriel Kolko observes that the “motives and actions [of both the state and business] were designed to maintain or preserve a particular distribution or locus of power.” Kolko’s basic thesis is substantiated in the healthcare law, a corporatist chicanery that finds crusaders for the poor in the uncomfortable position of supporting a guaranteed market for greedy corporate mainstays in insurance.

That’s the progressive corporate state at its best; it has succeeded in deceiving the American Left into the belief that a comprehensive corporate holdup is the best way to provide health services to the poor. On the other side, it has coaxed the American Right into its customary, knee-jerk reaction, rising to the defense of Big Insurance and Big Pharma as paragons of some supposed “free market.”

As Kevin Carson demonstrates in his study, The Healthcare Crisis: A Crisis of Artificial Scarcity, the underlying problem precipitating America’s healthcare quandary is its considerable price, and not one of the apparent solutions coming out of the state-corporate elite confronts that problem.

Big hospitals and insurance companies, institutions with solidified links to the state, will do whatever they can to perpetuate the problem, to keep prices high. Accomplishing that goal requires them to construct a labyrinthine index of laws and regulations — from professional licensure, to drug patents, to special tax rules — that stave off the kind of competition that would swell supply and undo the state’s monopolies.

“[P]olitical decisions …” writes Kolko, “with few exceptions, preserve[] the type of distribution of power and decision-making that also insure[s] the power of regulated industries.” Judge Hudson’s opinion on the healthcare law throws into relief, even if not intentionally, the grievances of free market anarchists against the real welfare recipient in this country: Corporate-establishment Big Business. Voluntary, cooperative organizations are the way out of the price-controlled slough of the state-corporate economy, rectifying the misallocation of resources (read: Fraud) that defines the current paradigm.

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C4SS News Analyst David D’Amato is a market anarchist lawyer currently completing an LL.M. in commercial law at Suffolk University Law School. His aversion to superstition and all permutations of political authority manifests itself at www.firsttruths.com.

by Kevin Carson

It’s a common observation, to the point of triteness, that we tend to hate those traits in others that we’re prone to ourselves. But maybe there’s something to it when it comes to one country’s perception of another.

Among the diplomatic cables recently released by Wikileaks is a document from last February by Johnnie Carson — Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs — in Lagos, Nigeria.  In it he bemoans the “aggressive and pernicious” nature of Chinese policy in Africa.

Aggressive, eh? Why, mercy me, whatever could they have done? Maintained a “defense” budget almost as large as those of the rest of the world put together? Deployed a navy with a dozen carrier groups capable of raining death from the skies on any country that defied their will? Formulated a national security doctrine which explicitly calls for China to remain the world’s sole superpower forever and ever, and to prevent any other power from ever arising to challenge its hegemony?

According to Carson (no relation), China is not only an “aggressive and pernicious economic competitor.” It also has “no morals.” Not only that, but “China is not in Africa for altruistic reasons.” Unlike the United States, which “will continue to push democracy and capitalism,” what the Chinese promote is “authoritarian capitalism.”

I vaguely recall reading some stuff about another non-altruistic economic competitor that did things like secretly write draft “intellectual property” law for the Spanish parliament. And a few years earlier, this aggressive and pernicious country got its puppet “Provisional Authority” in Iraq to rubber-stamp laws handing over state industry to Western corporations on sweetheart terms and instituting a draconian “intellectual property” regime. (The one thing the Iraqi puppet government most decidedly did not change was Saddam’s anti-union laws.) I guess it’s all in a day’s work when you’re pushing democracy and capitalism.

Still, Carson said, China has not yet emerged as a direct security threat. He enunciated several criteria for recognizing such an eventuality when it does occur:

“Have they signed military base agreements? Are they training armies? Have they developed intelligence operations? Once these areas start developing then the US will start worrying.”

Gawd, yes! Because we can’t have a country building military bases and deploying military advisers all over the place, can we? Not to mention conducting intelligence operations!

It’s a good thing we’ve got the United States putting its military bases and advisers all over the world, intervening in the affairs of other countries, telling everyone what to do, and blasting the living daylights out of anyone who disobeys. And it’s a good thing the United States is pushing democracy and capitalism by strong-arming other countries into passing laws conducive to the interests of American corporations.

Otherwise, some aggressive power with no morals might emerge and start doing non-altruistic things.

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C4SS Research Associate Kevin Carson is a contemporary mutualist author and individualist anarchist whose written work includes Studies in Mutualist Political Economy, Organization Theory: An Individualist Anarchist Perspective, and The Homebrew Industrial Revolution: A Low-Overhead Manifesto, all of which are freely available online. Carson has also written for such print publications as The Freeman: Ideas on Liberty and a variety of internet-based journals and blogs, including Just Things, The Art of the Possible, the P2P Foundation and his own Mutualist Blog.

by Kevin Carson

Britain is racked by student demonstrations — in many cases riots — because Parliament tripled university tuition to $15,000 (in U.S. dollars).  Americans would still probably consider 15k tuition for a first-class university a bargain.  But until now, higher education has been a heavily subsidized good.

So why should libertarians care? Aren’t these just a bunch of spoiled brats, throwing a tantrum when they’re cut off from the taxpayer teat?

Not exactly.

British students, like those in America, are hit from two directions under the state capitalist model: First, by government interventions that inflate the amount of the “education” commodity they’re forced to consume in order to make a decent living. And second, by government interventions that inflate the cost of procuring it.

So government has placed students in a double bind in which relying on government tuition subsidies is the only way out.

On the one hand, we’ve had decades of subsidized education — which makes college-educated administrative and technical labor artificially cheap and plentiful to employers — coupled with a relentless upward creep of legally mandated credentialing. As a result the credentialing primarily serves a signaling function for the employer, and is inflated far beyond the functional requirements of the actual job.

As commentator Joe Bageant points out (“The masses have become lazy, fat and stupid,” December 11 2006),  the liberal panacea of more and more “education” spending is a pipe dream, based on a fallacy of composition. The Empire needs about a quarter of its population in administrative-technical positions that require a college education. Educating a larger portion of the population only results in credential inflation for other jobs.  And the more people with managerial-technical educations are competing for jobs, the more corporate bureaucracies are characterized by opportunism, shameless climbing and back-stabbing.

On the other hand, universities are dominated by the same high-overhead, cost-plus culture that Paul Goodman described in “People or Personnel”: Bureaucratized administration, prestige salaries, ossified Weberian work rules and job descriptions, mission statements, and all the rest of it. When an institution is self-organized and run from the bottom up, on the other hand (Goodman uses Black Mountain College as a comparison), its members are free to economize on means, and to use their own judgment and initiative in directly solving problems in the most common-sense way without running afoul of standard operating procedures. Because the members are working for themselves in pursuit of their own interests, they don’t have to work under the distrustful eye of an administrative bureaucracy.

The answer, first, is to eliminate all state-mandated licensing and credentialing, all college and technical school accreditation, and to dismantle higher education as a conveyor belt for processing human raw material for delivery to the appropriate HR department.

Educational offerings should be driven, on a demand-pull basis, by the desires of students, while all the state-created artificial scarcities that cause the wage labor market to be a buyer’s market should be eliminated.

Second, we should eliminate the high-overhead, cost-plus culture that predominates in the university (as in all other large institutions of state capitalist society). Higher education should be governed by the ad hoc, bottom-up, self-organized institutional culture Paul Goodman described in “People or Personnel”:  Low overhead, no administrative bureaucracy, and making do on refurbished equipment. Whenever possible, the advantages of network culture should be taken advantage of for moving information around to the point of consumption, in preference to an industrial model of moving people to a central location for processing.

In the end, we need to move toward a society where work is organized — and the qualifications for it are set — mainly by the people doing it, and such judgments by working people are the main thing driving the way they organize education for themselves.

None of this should be taken to mean I’m anti-intellectual — far from it. We need a society where people are smart enough to question authority, to subject its claims to rigorous tests of logic, and check them against against their own independent knowledge. But such skills aren’t really a core competency of the “educational” apparatus, are they?

Colleges exist to cram people full of the skills employers demand, and to inculcate the cultural habit of taking orders from an authority figure behind a desk. Critical thinking, on the other hand, is a skill acquired through self-education, in cooperation with one’s equals, to pursue knowledge for one’s own self-determined purposes — the “Community of Scholars” Goodman described in a book of that name. Higher education is more often a hindrance than a help, in that regard.

I’m not usually a fan of General Wesley Clark, for obvious reasons.  But in the 2004 Democratic primaries, he no doubt angered a lot of professional “educators” by saying: “Yes, I’m educated. I read books.” Exactly.

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C4SS Research Associate Kevin Carson is a contemporary mutualist author and individualist anarchist whose written work includes Studies in Mutualist Political Economy, Organization Theory: An Individualist Anarchist Perspective, and The Homebrew Industrial Revolution: A Low-Overhead Manifesto, all of which are freely available online. Carson has also written for such print publications as The Freeman: Ideas on Liberty and a variety of internet-based journals and blogs, including Just Things, The Art of the Possible, the P2P Foundation and his own Mutualist Blog.

by Darian Worden

Everyone who values freedom should be concerned about the arrest of WikiLeaks personality Julian Assange. This is one of those cases that are not just about the accused, but are contests of values. Anyone who wants freedom and truth to triumph over tyranny and censorship should make two specific demands: A fair trial for sexual offenses and no prosecution for free speech.

The sexual offenses Assange has been accused of involve serious issues of consent. But a lot of suspicious circumstances surround the proceedings, which seem tailor-made for deflecting attention from the crimes revealed by WikiLeaks. Charges against Assange have changed multiple times and the allegations seem to keep getting worse. Assange’s lawyers claim that despite their overtures to the prosecution, the state has not been cooperative with them. The state would apparently prefer to make a big show by issuing a flashy Interpol directive to hunt down a fugitive. It’s a strange kind of fugitive they’re after — Assange cooperated with the police and turned himself in immediately after a proper arrest warrant was issued. It’s also noteworthy that the original Interpol notice was made within two days of the Cablegate releases.

Whether guilty of the sexual offenses or not, Julian Assange deserves a fair trial. This will be difficult to get in a government court where the judge is a politician and the prosecutor is out to win. Assange will need not only good legal representation, but also political pressure and money.  Both of which the US government and its corporate sycophants are trying to keep out of the contest.

But the mask of power really slips when extradition to the United States is brought up. If Assange is extradited to the US, that means either the sexual charges are bogus or the international community regards telling the truth a more serious offense than rape. Who has Assange hurt in the US? There is no crime in damaging the interests of a gang of criminals.

Democracy is the legitimizing story for modern government. But government actually suppresses democracy by ruling over people and using its control of information to mislead the public. The success of WikiLeaks in dispersing the power of knowledge among the broader population damages the ruling class’s ability to prevent people from making informed decisions.

Recent WikiLeaks cables reveal that the US government manipulated courts in Spain, pressured German authorities away from holding CIA agents accountable, lied about bombings in Yemen, pressured the Turkish government to hold closer to the US position on Iran, and offered governments favors in exchange for their help in disappearing Guantanamo prisoners — to name just a few things.

hey’ve also revealed US military contractors engaging in child prostitution, the Afghan vice president transporting $52 million in cash from unknown sources, and western corporations manipulating governments. Is Eric Holder promising to do “everything that we can” to get to the bottom of any of these crimes and hold people accountable? Nope. This is how they do things, and they’re only outraged that the peasants have found out.

The crimes revealed in published cables are of prime importance no matter how big the issue of Assange becomes. But the revelations also underscore the importance of defending Assange. If the government succeeds in making an example of him, then people might be dissuaded from spreading information. The same holds true for alleged leaker Bradley Manning. The more that politicians get away with, the more censorship they will attempt.

Political pressure can mean showing that people are watching, raising voices against the state, disrupting censorship prosecutions, and holding corporations accountable for siding with the state. This should be done concurrently with the continuous and innovative spread of information and the creation of more resilient funding networks. It must be made clear that the state stands to lose if it raises the stakes in the battle over free speech.

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C4SS News Analyst Darian Worden is an individualist anarchist writer with experience in libertarian activism. His fiction includes Bring a Gun To School Day and the forthcoming Trade War. His essays and other works can be viewed at DarianWorden.com. He also hosts an internet radio show, Thinking Liberty.

by Darian Worden

The Department of Homeland Security wants to expand invasive search procedures beyond airports to other transportation hubs. They’ve already launched pilot programs at bus depots in Tampa and elsewhere.

Like anybody else, I want to be as safe as I can reasonably expect. I certainly don’t want my loved ones to suffer a terrorist attack. But I don’t believe that sacrificing liberty makes anyone safer. Compare the TSA-style measures’ effectiveness in thwarting terrorist plots to the effectiveness of good intelligence, thorough investigation, and the initiative of intended victims.

Government priorities mean that security checkpoints are not mainly looking out for bombs or terrorists. Checkpoint personnel are looking for people with immigration violations, drugs the government doesn’t approve of, weapons carried without government approval, and whatever else will boost arrest stats and revenue. The traveler is confronted by militarized authoritarians who aren’t totally focused on passenger safety.

Security could function on an amicable relationship, since the peaceable traveler and security officer should both be concerned with the safety of the transportation system. But police state procedures foster an antagonistic relationship as the traveler worries about what he might have forgotten to take out of his bag and the officer expects total submission from the traveler he’s investigating. The harm done to communication and trust leaves us more vulnerable to attack. Security from unreasonable searches goes hand in hand with security from attackers.

If terrorists want to take away our freedom, the government is certainly helping them get what they want. But terrorism is primarily a (completely immoral) response to government policies. People don’t like the US government telling them what to do, supporting regimes that oppress them, or killing civilians while trying to stamp out resistance. The security state apparatus is a government solution to a problem that government helped create in the first place. Not surprisingly, the government answer is to deploy more force and insist on more control over the public. If you’re a hammer, everyone else looks like nails.

It should be clear that the loss of freedom doesn’t really make us safer. But we pay for the security state in other ways too. People are made late, travel time is increased and inconvenience leads to marginally less travel. As a result the economy becomes less dynamic. If people avoid public transportation there will be more highway traffic and more car accidents. Increased spending on fuel and road repair comes at the expense of things people would otherwise desire more.

But someone benefits. President Eisenhower warned that the influence of the military-industrial complex could be disastrous to liberty if not held in check by an aware and knowledgeable citizenry. Today Americans suffer under that influence, expanded into a broader security-industrial complex. There’s big money in scanners, prisons, and tools for low-level security personnel. Bureaucrats often view expansion of their department as a key for career advancement. Not surprisingly, a company that manufactures body image scanners invested heavily in lobbying efforts. It looks like their investments are paying off, and Americans are footing the bill. This does not stimulate the economy. It instead forcibly shifts spending away from the productive goods and services of the voluntary sector into the pockets of those favored by the state.

When someone asks how much liberty you’re willing to trade for security, you should ask why they assume there is a tradeoff. What we’re purchasing with our liberty, privacy and wealth is not security. It is a society of submission. True security is founded on liberty at home and abroad.

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C4SS News Analyst Darian Worden is an individualist anarchist writer with experience in libertarian activism. His fiction includes Bring a Gun To School Day and the forthcoming Trade War. His essays and other works can be viewed at DarianWorden.com. He also hosts an internet radio show, Thinking Liberty.

by Kevin Carson

The state, in legal theory, is the entity claiming the sole right to define what is lawful or criminal activity in a given territory.

Perhaps just coincidentally, the state tends to judge the actions of its official agents and favored clients by a less strict standard of criminality than the one it uses to judge the actions of its subjects.  And it tends to hold those it regards as enemies to a much higher standard of legality than those it regards as friends — again, perhaps just a coincidence.

The state can undertake actions that, for you or me, would mean life behind bars or even a ride on Old Sparky.  But when the state does them they’re not really criminal, see, because they were done for — ahem — reasons of state.

In the famous words of Richard Nixon, in the David Frost interviews, “If the President does it, that means it’s not illegal.”

Consider, for example, recent revelations in a document released by Wikileaks that Texas military contractor DynCorp facilitated parties at which Afghan police officials placed bids on the sexual services of very young dancing boys.

To the U.S. government, this was no big deal. In fact the State Department did its best to cover it up. But this is the kind of thing that, if it had been done by (say) a religious cult leader in Waco, would have been sufficient cause for burning a hundred people alive (“for the children”). Had it been done in Milosevic’s Serbia or Saddam’s Iraq, the news would have been trumpeted with indignation from White House and State Department briefing rooms every single day as a pretext for regime change.

And does anyone have any idea when the last time was that Interpol took an interest in charges of unprotected sex in Sweden, or the British authorities put such a high priority on apprehending someone for such charges? I’ll just listen to the crickets chirp while I wait.

But never mind legality. Human life has a much higher value when it’s taken by an enemy of the state, for some reason, than it does when it’s taken by the state or one of its friends. I haven’t been keeping very close track of just how many times in the past few weeks someone has called for the criminal prosecution (or worse) of Julian Assange, based on the amount of “soldiers’ blood on his hands.” I don’t know how many people have demanded Assange be punished for risking the innocent lives of foreigners who secretly cooperated with the United States.  But I suspect if I had a dollar for every iteration of that sentiment, I’d be a very rich man.

Oddly enough, though, nobody at TownHall.com wants to prosecute Bush, Cheney, Obama, who actually sent soldiers to be shot at, for the blood of thousands that’s dripping from their hands. I’ve never seen Sarah Palin demand that George Bush be hunted down like Osama Bin Laden for the tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians who were killed as a direct consequence of the war he lied us into.

Let’s get back to that double standard for enemies versus friends of the state. Imagine, if you will, that the U.S. government has been supplying arms and military advisers to Satan. If you don’t read Mother Jones or In These Times, you’re probably blissfully unaware of the fact. But imagine that for some reason Satan stops taking orders from Washington, or does something that causes him to be regarded as a liability. Why, the very next day the White House Press Secretary would be standing up in front of the Press Corps, announcing in the most shocked tones what they’d just discovered was going on in Hell! Why, Satan has been making war on his neighbors and Using Weapons of Mass Destruction Against His Own People! Oh, the humanity! Oh, we have to stop him — now!   And then a twenty-year-old photo would resurface of Don Rumsfeld shaking hands with the Devil.

As the old joke goes, the U.S. government knew Saddam had WMDs because it kept the receipts. It knew he’d been making war on his neighbors, because its military advisers were giving him all kinds of handy tips on how to do it.

Look, if something’s a crime, it’s a crime no matter who does it. It’s a crime to kill people who are doing you no harm, and to take or damage their stuff. It’s a crime to send someone else to rob and kill innocent people. It’s a crime whether you’re Joe Blow, or whether you  call yourself “Commander-in-Chief.”

A criminal’s a criminal, no matter how powerful.

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C4SS Research Associate Kevin Carson is a contemporary mutualist author and individualist anarchist whose written work includes Studies in Mutualist Political Economy, Organization Theory: An Individualist Anarchist Perspective, and The Homebrew Industrial Revolution: A Low-Overhead Manifesto, all of which are freely available online. Carson has also written for such print publications as The Freeman: Ideas on Liberty and a variety of internet-based journals and blogs, including Just Things, The Art of the Possible, the P2P Foundation and his own Mutualist Blog.

by David D’Amato

Last month, government officials in the United Kingdom responded to an independent review of the education system by lodging a plan to raise the cap for tuition fees by almost three times. The program, heeding a supposed “austerity” approach to the country’s budget, would set the ceiling at the equivalent of over 14,000 US dollars. The proposed plan was met with immediate protests, students objecting to the added burden of debt as an attempt to mend the government’s balance sheets on the backs of those least able to carry the millstone.

Today, following the House of Commons vote authorizing the fee hikes, the protests have intensified with the government unleashing its thugs against the affronted students. British lawmakers, already on the defensive, maintain that the impact of the cost increase will be absorbed easily by students, that it’s a fair, “sustainable” measure to counteract rising costs. Talk of economic sustainability — regardless of the British state’s attempts to mollify citizen apprehensions — hardly rings true considering the cartelized design of the United Kingdom’s state education system.

That system, though, is not unique or confined to the U.K. but is rather the standard assembled by all states, with some variations, around the world. In contemplation of education policy, many of us would raise few objections to the idea that those more able to pay ought to, through some arrangement, subsidize the education of the indigent population. That said, we need not defer to the assumption that such subsidies must necessarily ensue from the violence of the state.

Life insurance, for instance, is a kind of risk-anticipating subsidy, grounded on what we might consider a gamble, whereby some, the “losers” in that wager, ultimately subsidize others, the “winners” (forgive the irony in this particular example). Similarly, most people probably agree that, when all is said and done, the goals of whatever regimen society decides upon should be broad accessibility and a quality product in the education received.

Looking at the riots, it’s easy to see students’ cavils at the costs of their education as the callow attempts of the immature to avoid their responsibilities, to keep society at large on the hook for a service they benefit from. But to avoid that oversimplified characterization it’s necessary to inquire into what exactly these students are paying for and where their money is going. In Britain as elsewhere, contrary to the drivel of lawmakers, huge percentages of education expenditures are going not to balance governments’ budgets or improve quality, but to what economist Thomas DiLorenzo calls “a price-fixing conspiracy against the public.”

As “the victims of the [government] school cartel” — a scheme that includes state-protected corporate gorgers — British student protestors have every right to complain. The high costs of formal education, no less a crisis in the United States, are completely manufactured by the constraints of statism, the vast potential supply side strangled by controlling interests. If the state were actually motivated by its stated purposes, we could expect to see improvements corresponding with increased expenditures, be they from tax revenues, student fees, or otherwise.

That heap of societal wealth, instead of improving the service we’re superficially paying for, goes to feather the nests of everyone from big publishing companies, to university endowments, to contractors retained by government schools. Through the use of accreditation and a degree-focused corporate economy that actuates de facto attendance requirements for higher education (to approximate those imposed by law for early education), the state-corporate education cartels minimize the yield of education services.

In so doing, they exert an irresistible upward pressure on price and shove us into powerful academic institutions that sell extortionate letters to follow your name rather than substantive, practical education. “[T]he State,” reflected Joseph Stromberg, “functions to balance the interests of large economic power blocs while maintaining their common ascendancy in the face of potential threats from below.” His analysis correctly regards the state as a council defined by monopolization and manipulation of resources for its associates; whether they realize that or not, the frustrations of British students are a reaction to being hustled by that program, which feeds their money toward largely useless tasks.

Lower prices can only come if we abandon the state, allowing the supply to mushroom to meet demand. Though someday society may see the experiments in mutual “subsidization” that completely free interactions could issue in education, for now the only things being subsidized are bloated institutions that society could do without.

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C4SS News Analyst David D’Amato is a market anarchist lawyer currently completing an LL.M. in commercial law at Suffolk University Law School. His hatred for superstition and all permutations of political authority manifests itself at www.firsttruths.com.

by Kevin Carson

Barbara Tuchman, in “The March of Folly,” quoted Nelson Rockefeller on the resumed bombing of North Vietnam:  “We ought to all support the President. He is the man who has all the information and knowledge of what we are up against.”  Tuchman rejected this view, quoting Gunnar Myrdal: “‘Foreign policy decisions are in general much more influenced by irrational motives’ than are domestic ones.”

Paul Goodman summed up the official “epistemology of democracy” in “Like a Conquered Province”:

“We elect an administration and it, through the Intelligence service, secret diplomacy, briefings by the Department of Defense and other agencies, comes into inside information that enables it alone to understand the situation.  In principle we can repudiate its decisions at the next election, but usually they have led to commitments that are hard to repudiate.  Implicit is that there is a permanent group of selfless and wise public servants, experts, and impartial reporters who understand the technology, strategy and diplomacy that we cannot understand; therefore we must perforce do what they advise.”

Anyone who seriously believes the legitimizing ideology need only go back to all the amazing “secret intelligence” Colin Powell presented to the UN Security Council before the Iraq War, the pressure on the intelligence community to stovepipe intelligence telling the neocons what they wanted to hear, and the reprisals taken against Joe Wilson for telling them something they didn’t want to hear.

And never mind all the deliberate lies to whip populations into a frenzy of hate and obedience, like the British propaganda about bayoneted Belgian babies in 1914, or the propaganda in 1990 about Kuwaiti incubator babies.

The question isn’t whether the government knows all sorts of top secret stuff bearing on the “national interest.”  It’s whether the “national interest” has the remotest bearing on the real interests of a majority of the people who actually live in the U.S.

I would submit that the so-called “national interest” promoted by the national security establishment is the interest of the people who own the nation, not the people who live and work in it. The ideal “democracy” of the owning classes, in the words of Samuel Huntington almost forty years ago, is a country which is “governed by the president acting with the support and cooperation of key individuals and groups in the Executive office, the federal bureaucracy, Congress, and the more important businesses, banks, law firms, foundations, and media, which constitute the private establishment.”

The irony of it is that, even as the government justifies its unaccountable power based on the stuff it knows that we don’t, it’s simultaneously warning us not to acquire any knowledge it doesn’t want us to have.

On Friday, the OMB General Counsel instructed all federal agencies to warn their employees to safeguard classified information by not accessing Wikileaks — presumably at home as well as at work. Wikileaks’ disclosure, it said, did not alter the classified status of the documents. Consequently, they may not be viewed over an insecure channel.  The Social Security Administration is warning its employees that even looking at Wikileaks could be a criminal offense.

That’s right: All us good little citizens have a patriotic duty to stay ignorant about what the government’s doing, or it might hurt the National Security! We should “trust and obey” because “they know stuff we don’t” — but trying to find out the stuff they know so we can critically evaluate it from the standpoint of an equal is treason!

Meanwhile, the usual right-wing mouth-frothing idiots at places like TownHall.com — not to mention certified Moderate and Serious, Responsible Person Wolf Blitzer — are demanding explanations for why the government was so negligent as to allow the sovereign citizenry to find out stuff that we should remain ignorant of for our own good. It seems the one case in which it’s permissible for an authoritarian personality to be critical of authority is when the authority’s not being authoritarian enough. There’s a venerable history of authoritarians demanding that the government “get tough” on out-groups and dissidents, “teach them a lesson,” and “show them who’s boss.”

I submit that the real danger to “national security,” from the government’s standpoint, is the possibility that the “sovereign” people which it allegedly represents might acquire enough knowledge to critically evaluate its actions and stop swallowing what they’re fed.  The real enemy they want to keep in the dark is not al Qaeda, but us.

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C4SS Research Associate Kevin Carson is a contemporary mutualist author and individualist anarchist whose written work includes Studies in Mutualist Political Economy, Organization Theory: An Individualist Anarchist Perspective, and The Homebrew Industrial Revolution: A Low-Overhead Manifesto, all of which are freely available online. Carson has also written for such print publications as The Freeman: Ideas on Liberty and a variety of internet-based journals and blogs, including Just Things, The Art of the Possible, the P2P Foundation and his own Mutualist Blog.

by Thomas L. Knapp

After losing the Democratic Party’s primary in 2006, US Senator Joe Lieberman formed a new party and sought re-election on its ticket. In doing so, he bucked an American branding fad: While many candidates refer to their campaigns as “Smith for America” or “Jones for Arizona,” Lieberman called his “Connecticut for Lieberman.”

Freudian slip or refreshing honesty? Either way, it goes to the heart of Joe Lieberman’s character: Everything’s all about him. The highest purpose of the voters of Connecticut is, in his opinion, to provide him with a Senate sinecure. And that sinecure’s purpose is to extend the reach of his power beyond Connecticut to the whole of the United States and beyond.

All of which is par for the course with politicians, but the events of the last year or so reveal the true extent of Lieberman’s ambitions and the lengths to which he’s willing to go to realize them. The “Internet Kill Switch” proposal, the SHIELD Act, his abuse of office to bring pressure on companies like Amazon.com, all of these boil down to one simple and unavoidable truth:

If the price of keeping Joe Lieberman in power is you staring over a plow at the ass end of a mule all day and lighting your home with candles or kerosene at night before collapsing on a bed of filthy straw, that’s a price Joe Lieberman is more than willing to have you pay.

He’s not comfortable with America’s 21st century unless the key features of its political system resemble those of western Europe’s in the 12th (right down to the Crusades, even), with Lieberman as lord and you as serf. The Internet stands astride his road to that ideal, and therefore the Internet must be reined in or, as a last resort, dispensed with altogether.

Nor does Lieberman stand alone. He’s merely the most visible and forthright advocate of the new medievalism. If push comes to shove, I’ll be surprised if more than a handful of sitting or aspiring US Senators or Representatives recoil in horror from the prospect. Descent to brute force when confronted with limits to power is a feature of, not a bug in, the idea of political government.

As I write this, we’ve seen the opening shots in the first all-out “cyber war” — The State vs. Everyone Else, Round One.

It’s not terribly surprising to see the state’s privileged pets and hangers-on — the corporations — lining up on its side. Amazon, Paypal, Mastercard, Visa, and so forth are stumbling over themselves to appease their masters. Not only do they know which side their bread is buttered on, they know how easy it would be for Joe Lieberman and Co. to have them figuratively (for now) dragged to the basement of the Lubyanka for a bullet to the back of the skull.

Things don’t look good at the moment. They’ll get worse before they get better. Wikileaks figurehead Julian Assange is in the enemy’s clutches. The US Department of Homeland Security conducted a test seizure of Internet domain names last week to see if they could get away with it or if some shred of the rule of law might be successfully invoked to hold them back (to all appearances, the last tattered remnant of that fiction has now gone with the wind). The state, directly and through its proxies, has its hands on freedom’s throat.

My gut feeling is that we’re only feeling the first weak squeezes and haven’t seen anything like “bad” yet. Recent invocations of the Espionage Act of 1917 by Lieberman, Dianne Feinstein, John Ensign and other Senators and apparatchiks provide the clearest clue as to their intentions. The next year is probably going to look like the love child of Comstockery and the Palmer Raids, in high tech format and on steroids.

But, believe it or not, we’re winning, the bad guys are losing, and there’s no chance whatsoever of it coming out any other way. The Wikileaks archives, instant target of Lieberman’s ire, remain widely available to anyone who want them. Nothing short of a “scorched Internet” policy can change that … and most of the people I know aren’t willing to turn the clock back to the Dark Ages just to make Joe Lieberman happy. We’ll see him scuttling for the airport in a bid to flee the country first.

There are only two ways Cyber World War One can end. One is with Joe Lieberman’s surrender (almost certainly highly conditional and pushing most of the real issues off into the future, more’s the pity). The other is with not one stone atop another inside the DC “Beltway.” Your call, Joe.

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Thomas L. Knapp, Senior News Analyst and Media Coordinator at the Center for a Stateless Society, is a long-time libertarian activist and author of Writing the Libertarian Op-Ed. Knapp publishes Rational Review News Digest, a daily news and commentary roundup for the freedom movement.