fuckyeahmarxismleninism:

By Glenn Greenwald

This morning, the New York Times has a very lengthy and detailed article about President Obama’s counter-Terrorism policies based on interviews with “three dozen of his current and former advisers.” I’m writing separately about the numerous revelations contained in that article, but want specifically to highlight this one vital passage about how the Obama administration determines who is a “militant.” The article explains that Obama’s rhetorical emphasis on avoiding civilian deaths “did not significantly change” the drone program, because Obama himself simply expanded the definition of a “militant” to ensure that it includes virtually everyone killed by his drone strikes. Just read this remarkable passage:

Mr. Obama embraced a disputed method for counting civilian casualties that did little to box him in. It in effect counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants, according to several administration officials, unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent.

The Stateless Society

If justice be not a natural principle, it is no principle at all. If it be not a natural principle, there is no such thing as justice. If it be not a natural principle, all that men have ever said or written about it, from time immemorial, has been said and written about that which had no existence. If it be not a natural principle, all the appeals for justice that have ever been heard, and all the struggles for justice that have ever been witnessed, have been appeals and struggles for a mere fantasy, a vagary of the imagination, and not for a reality.

If justice be not a natural principle, then there is no such thing as injustice; and all the crimes of which the world has been the scene, have been no crimes at all; but only simple events, like the falling of the rain, or the setting of the sun; events of which the victims had no more reason to complain than they had to complain of the running of the streams, or the growth of vegetation.

If justice be not a natural principle, governments (so-called) have no more right or reason to take cognisance of it, or to pretend or profess to take cognisance of it, than they have to take cognisance, or to pretend or profess to take cognisance, of any other nonentity; and all their professions of establishing justice, or of maintaining justice, or of rewarding justice, are simply the mere gibberish of fools, or the frauds of impostors.

But if justice be a natural principle, then it is necessarily an immutable one; and can no more be changed — by any power inferior to that which established it — than can the law of gravitation, the laws of light, the principles of mathematics, or any other natural law or principle whatever; and all attempts or assumptions, on the part of any man or body of men — whether calling themselves governments, or by any other name — to set up their own commands, wills, pleasure, or discretion, in the place of justice, as a rule of conduct for any human being, are as much an absurdity, an usurpation, and a tyranny, as would be their attempts to set up their own commands, wills, pleasure, or discretion in the place of any and all the physical, mental, and moral laws of the universe.

[The] greatest obstacle to the maintenance of a certain moral level in our present societies lies in the absence of social equality. Without real equality, the sense of justice can never be universally developed, because Justice implies the recognition of equality.

Whoever says commerce, says exchange of equal values; for, if the values are no equal, and the injured party perceives it, he will not consent to the exchange, and there will be no commerce.

Commerce exists only among free men. Transactions may be effected between other people by violence or fraud, but there is no commerce.

A free man is one who enjoys the use of his reason and his faculties; who is neither blinded by passion, nor hindered or driven by oppression, nor deceived by erroneous opinions.

So, in every exchange, there is a moral obligation that neither of the contracting parties shall gain at the expense of the other; that is, that, to be legitimate and true, commerce must be exempt from all inequality. This is the first condition of commerce. Its second condition is, that it be voluntary; that is, that the parties act freely and openly.

I define, then, commerce or exchange as an act of society.

c4ss:

C4SS FAQ

This is of those “gotcha!” questions that when asked libertarians are supposed to shrivel up and concede the point that in a free society we would all just lay in the mud and cry.

Road provision needs to be addressed from several angles.

The first point that needs to be brought up is that the central planning of transportation or anything else is inefficient due to what F.A. Hayek refers to as ‘the knowledge problem.‘  The individuals directly responsible and affected by projects should be the ones planning it, not a top-down and distant bureaucratic entity.  The costs of acquiring all of the local information necessary to calculate such a complicated endeavor is insurmountable.

People who invest in developing infrastructure should not be allowed to force everyone inside of an arbitrary geographical area (like the United States of America) to subsidize its construction and maintenance either.  Why should you have to pay for a road you will never see in St. Augustine, Florida?  A port in Galveston, Texas?  The people who want such development should bear the full cost o their actions and allow consumers to support or not support their plans at the point of consumption (i.e. voting with one’s dollar).

Kevin Carson and Noam Chomsky have both posited the extremely negative dislocating effects of state transportation infrastructure.  By socializing the costs of the transportation of goods amongst all people, rather than amongst those who produce and consume the goods, there is far less of an incentive for consumers to consume locally.  As a result, this series of policies artificially suppresses local industry and benefits distant producers. This is to some degree responsible for the unnatural centralization of major market players like Walmart, whom desperately needs the state to externalize the large costs of its goods’ transport. For more information, please read Kevin Carson’s The Distorting Effects of Transportation Subsidies.

Any alternative which involves indirect forced labor is not nor could it ever be anarchistic.  There are many other practical arguments as well, and details about the ones mentioned, in Walter Block’s paper [pdf warning], Free Market Transportation: Denationalizing the Roads.