Libertarian Red Pill...

I know I've previously cracked on Thomas DiLorenzo in the past, but I have to agree with him here. Libertarian policy think tanks a la Cato may as well pack it up and go home. Move along, there is nothing more to see in Washington. What we've witnessed the past few weeks is a flat out coup in the best traditions of right wing South American strong men. The entire US banking and credit system has been nationalized. The State is now moving in to commercial paper and soon will be spreading it's tentacles into banking and financial equities. In all seriousness, if you would have pulled a Rip Van Winkle the past 8 years and just woke up and wandered into the National Security zone that Washington DC has become while learning that money and credit have now been completely nationalized, you would justifiably--in all incredulity--think that some right wing strong man had managed to execute some sort of coup d’état.

With all due respect to Lane, now is the time for libertarians to actually be picking up their manifestos, not putting them down. Low-tax liberalism now is about as much a pipe dream in the US as it would be in one party states such as China or historically, in Mussolini's fascist, corporatist Italy. I'm sorry, libertarianism is not about providing the swing vote for which party gets to select the puppet masters from the same pool of ruling class overlords. At this point the idea of the libertarian democrat or the libertarian republican leading an eventual charge of an "American Perestroika" to reform or unwind the mess we are now in seems delusional. Whatever "success" or "reform" achieved down the road is only going to bleed into the next moral hazard that triggers the actual mother of all tsunamis, the collapse of the US Medicare and Social Security systems. The so-called tsunami we are seeing today is but mere manufactured bubbles from a New York city sky rise hot tub. The actual real thing is yet to come, and the US nationalization of money and credit now virtually guarantees that that tsunami will be a Nation-State Level extinction Event.

Libertarianism, in order to remain a viable and relevant movement--and not just reduced to mere irrelevant peanut gallery squawking--is going to have to morph into a resistance movement. I'm not a fanatic, and I'm not talking about violence against the State. I'm referring to a movement devoted to the creation of alternative voluntary systems outside the purview of the State. You want to convert people to libertarianism in the stark reality of the fascist, corporatist State, then give them an alternative to non-violently opt out of the State while minimizing the risk of Statist reprisal. Libertarianism needs to become the red pill and not just a lighter shader coating of the blue pill. Sorry to say, recent events have obviated any possibility of sugar coating the blue pill from a libertarian perspective.

You've written an interesting and provocative post. I disagree, but want to raise just one point here. The market's reaction after the Lehman refusal showed that the markets and investors were expecting a bailout. In other words, there was an implicit government guarantee to intervene in a crisis such as this. In this instance, to try and go against the expectations of the market would be very hard and complicated. On the other hand, going forward, it will be clear that this implicit guarantee, which will now be explicit, was partly responsible for this crisis. I believe that this will come to be widely understood. Contrary to what you are saying, the moral hazards of this arrangement are more widely understood and accepted, and will finally have to be addressed.

arguing that market expectations demanded a bailout is not very convincing...

I'm generally pessimistic about people's willingness to thoughtfully embrace radical reforms--when conditions get bad enough, they'll start to consider radical solutions, but the very fact that most people will wait until after the crisis has hit home makes it difficult for them to approach the issue thoughtfully. However, we are dealing with the most educated, informed, and connected population in history.

I've generally considered electoral activism and radical advocacy to be complementary -- electoral activism serves as a means of communicating with the political mainstream of our society.

Finally, if radicalism does have an opportunity, it is during a crisis. Both the electoral and economic situation show signs of a crisis, and these two crises will probably feed off of each other. We're well aware of the economic crisis, but the emerging story of the past week is that a number of Republicans are fundamentally opposed to an Obama presidency (especially combined with Democratic control of Congress and the economic crisis). Whether its because they think he's a socialist, a terrorist, or just "black", these nationalists/traditionalists/racists seem to be getting quite agitated. I'm a bit worried about what they will do, especially if the economic crisis gets worse. Under normal conditions, I might find some catharsis in a futile rebellion of some dead-end racists triggered by the inauguration of a black president...but under the current circumstances, I worry that it may generate substantial sympathy.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/11/world/asia/11china.html?hp

Who Says Capitalism Is Dying?
Some good news:

"BEIJING — Chinese leaders are expected to allow peasants to buy or sell land-use rights for the first time, a step that could draw hundreds of millions of farmers more firmly into the city-centered market economy.
The new policy, which is being discussed this weekend by Communist Party leaders and could be announced within days, would be the biggest economic reform in many years and would mark another significant departure from the system of collective ownership and state control that China built after the 1949 revolution."

Read on.

Who says capitalism is dying?

From the Economist:

In the 1980s rural China was in the ascendancy. Peasants, far from being tied to the land, as has been assumed, were free to set up manufacturing, distribution and service businesses and these were allowed to retain profits, pay dividends, issue share capital and even a form of stock option. State banks rushed to provide the finance. Nian Guangjiu, a farmer from impoverished Anhui province, built up a business selling sunflower seeds (a popular snack), employed over 100 people and made a million yuan (nearly $300,000) in profit in 1986—just a decade after Mao’s death. Because most of this activity was set up under the misleading label of “Township and Village Enterprises”, Western academics largely failed to spot that these ostensibly collective businesses were, in fact, private.
But then, in 1989, came the Tiananmen Square protests. A generation of policymakers who had grown up in the countryside, led by Zhao Ziyang, were swept away by city boys, notably the president, Jiang Zemin, and Zhu Rongji, his premier. Both men hailed from Shanghai and it was the “Shanghai model” that dominated the 1990s: rapid urban development that favoured massive state-owned enterprises and big foreign multinational companies. The countryside suffered. Indigenous entrepreneurs were starved of funds and strangled with red tape. Like many small, private businessmen, Mr Nian was arrested and his firm shut down.

Unfortunately, it seems that the strongest "resistance" movement in the US is ACORN (soon to be a hot topic in the Presidential race, if Palin's "abuse of power" charges and the financial meltdown don't overwhelm it). They have a socialist agenda. While there may be some room for emphasis on the libertarian aspects of socialism, or cooperation on particular issues, libertarians will basically have to start from scratch in developing an alternative resistance movement.

One impulse may be to try to copy ACORN, but that's probably not the right road for libertarians. I think their organizational structure and activities are based on a socialist mentality, and libertarians would not be comfortable using them.

We also have differences in the socio-economic status of the "ACORN movement" and the libertarian movement: ACORN focuses on the people at the bottom whereas libertarianism typically appeals to middle class people with "petty bourgeoisie" mentality. While we'd like our movement to appeal to everyone, at the moment we need to consider the concerns and resources of this group and how that would shape any movement.

As I see it, this population does have the resources to build a new economy, but is also likely to be comfortable in the current economy.

I've never heard of ACORN until this week when they suddenly became the focal point of another republican diversionary scare tactic.

I'm referring more or less to a variant of agorism, although I tend to discount Konklin's version that places heavy emphasis on the emergence of market protection agencies to take on/supplant the State. i would advocate more of a co-existence model that defines resistance in terms of successful evasion/avoidance of state reprisal. If I had to coin an term for it, it would be "nonviolent individualist seccessionism." It would depend heavily on the emergence of alternative, voluntary systems for energy, banking, trade, and communications that could operate relatively freely from Statist reprisal. I certainly now place more faith in technology in the not too distant future to allow one to non-violently opt out of the State without reprisal than any delusion of "limited monopoly enforcement government."

I'm also pretty sure that this movement would not consist of the "petty bourgeoisie" middle class 401K'ers; they would have too much to lose. It would consist of freaks, geeks, undesirables, drug war casualties, organic farmers, etc. It would be a mixture of the creative class rungs and lower class rungs in society...

I've never heard of ACORN until this week

They aren't really high profile, but I have a couple of second-degree connections to them, and I think they (and their allies) have had substantial success.

ACORN does put a lot of emphasis on political and legal activities, but I'm pretty sure that they do/would use a number of independent (though confrontational) tactics, such as disruption, public shaming, and boycotts.

I could also see "community organizers" setting up things like neighborhood watches, neighborhood cleanups, community gardens, and community centers -- though I'm not sure that ACORN does any of these. Perhaps groups like ACORN could provide good infrastructure for this "individualist successionism" if they were willing to work with people who were interested in establishing alternative institutions (finance, communication, utilities, and others you mentioned)--however, they seem to be more interested in bringing excluded groups into the mainstream institutions.

...successful evasion/avoidance of state reprisal.

This could be the hard part, since we know that many victimless activities are still criminal, and any participation in these activities opens a person to penalties. It seems like we'd have to gather a substantial community of scofflaws (city neighborhood, or small town perhaps) that would be willing to tolerate illegal but victimless activities.

alternative, voluntary systems...operate relatively freely from Statist reprisal.

As with above, it may be hard for them to be both open and safe from Statist reprisal. One issue I'm wondering about right now is how much can be accomplished by a dispersed network of activists (such as we have now) and how much requires the formation of local communities of like-minded individuals.

I certainly now place more faith in technology in the not too distant future to allow one to non-violently opt out of the State

We're doing what we can. Do you think that there is any way to promote the development of these technologies (aside from experimenting with them on your own)?

I'm also pretty sure that this movement would not consist of the "petty bourgeoisie" middle class 401K'ers; they would have too much to lose. It would consist of freaks, geeks, undesirables, drug war casualties, organic farmers, etc. It would be a mixture of the creative class rungs and lower class rungs in society...

I was envisioning the petty bourgeoisie as just a portion of the middle class -- focused more on the people who run small business or sell their creative labor (scientists, engineers, artists), rather than middle-managers and bureaucrats who rely on the mega-institutions for their influence (including bureaucratic professions like law and accounting).

Anyway, the current economic crisis could sound alarm bells across the middle class (and the rest of society) that our current system is not as stable as we imagined...which may increase interest in alternatives. On that note, you might enjoy this critique of bank slogans.

We also have differences in the socio-economic status of the "ACORN movement" and the libertarian movement: ACORN focuses on the people at the bottom whereas libertarianism typically appeals to middle class people with "petty bourgeoisie" mentality.

I think the comparative overtly intellectual/"ivory tower" aspect of advocacy of libertarianism as a political agenda is what's mainly holding it back. Though the intellectual aspect always has to be there -- no movement w/o a foundation, y'know -- it doesn't have to be stated as such.

Considering the current financial crackup and how much of it involves collusion between government and big business, conditions are ripe for criticism of financial statism with a left-populist attitude to it. The relative lack of this being aired I can only assume is because of the following: simple weakness in numbers of people who could articulate such that would see a point in doing so, or the patience required to unwind the current false narrative of "free markets did this!" just isn't out there.

My own view of electoral politics has been to approach it only to protect the radicals & potentially influence the non-radicals to ask deeper questions. Yet even in that limited, deliberately subversive sense, when it comes to influencing common left-wing opinion on economics I feel like we're standing in the path of an oncoming train lately.

I think the comparative overtly intellectual/"ivory tower" aspect of advocacy of libertarianism as a political agenda is what's mainly holding it back.

I agree that libertarian's over-intellectualism can lead to it being ignored or dismissed by a large part of the population who want to deal with the practical.

I'll lay out three levels on which libertarianism is intellectual:

System building (ideological and economic theory)
Undermining statist ideologies
Policy

I think the first is what you are referring to as "overtly intellectual". This should probably be kept to the "back rooms" and not be brought to the face of people who aren't interested. We also need to be wary of treating our own ideologies as "The Truth". We also need to be wary of using our own terminology (such as "statist") when talking with non-libertarians.

I think that the second approach has the most promise, especially if you can attack the assumptions behind statist ideologies without making those people feel too threatened by your attack (for example, I recently attempted to do this with an article at Swords Crossed called Krauthammer: in my fantasy world, politcians are respectable). I'm trying to make this kind of subversion my specialty :^).

The third aspect is policy debate, which is the level at which most Americans approach politics. I guess that much of the question here is to what extent this is useful. I think it can be useful as an attempt to get others to envision another world (for example, "what if we eliminated copyright?") but in the big picture libertarian policy advocacy may be futile.

I think most "practical" political activists focus on policy advocacy and electoral organization. Going with kaligula's thoughts, we may be able to one-up them in the practical sphere, and focus on activities that directly impact how people live. Unfortunately, I think those efforts require a lot more concentrated and sustained effort than does purely intellectual (or even electoral) stuff. I have no idea of when I'll be in a position to do any serious work on this level, but it will probably be 5-10 years if I'm not hit with unforseen burdens.

Edit: I just realized that I missed much of your point. I think that much of the need to focus on intellectual development/activities is because we don't have the critical mass to do much else. If we have a strong influence among the country's intellectuals (amateur and professional), I think we'll find that practical issues of organization (electoral and alternative institutions) will take care of themselves in a sense.

"In the 1980s rural China was in the ascendancy. Peasants, far from being tied to the land, as has been assumed, were free to set up manufacturing, distribution and service businesses and these were allowed to retain profits, pay dividends, issue share capital and even a form of stock option. State banks rushed to provide the finance. Nian Guangjiu, a farmer from impoverished Anhui province, built up a business selling sunflower seeds (a popular snack), employed over 100 people and made a million yuan (nearly $300,000) in profit in 1986—just a decade after Mao’s death. Because most of this activity was set up under the misleading label of “Township and Village Enterprises”, Western academics largely failed to spot that these ostensibly collective businesses were, in fact, private."

It's an interesting article, but nowhere does it mention the buying and selling of land. What it says is that small businesses were allowed to function independently. I would argue that property rights are more important, but I guess you disagree. Whether real property rights are what will develop is a different question, and remains to be seen.

However, thanks for the reference, it sounds like an interesting book.

Just what I read in the news. I wasn't really making an argument--just playing devils advocate to point out a relevant and interesting article.

China's development is really fascinating, and doesn't seem to fit neatly into our Western categories. Of course, they can become "more capitalist" and "less capitalist" at the same time...or they can move forward and backwards in succession.