April 2008
FREE Guptastan
For a long time, I’ve been joking with people about Guptastan - the state which is in the box. It only recently occurred to me that people don’t realize that I’m absolutely serious about starting a new nation state within three or four years if conditions are historically right.
This is not a joke. It’s very, very clear to everybody that we have serious and possibly insurmountable problems in American liberty. Hakim Bey discusses the “closure of the map” meaning that, for now at least, there is no more frontier for people who want a more rugged freedom to flee to. He omits in large degree that the map has been opened and reopened by genocide, but we will put the matter of the Americas to the side for now.
Barring the sudden opening of new land, and in abundance, we are out of frontier. There are microniches which could be opened - tiny atolls in the middle of the Pacific, disused oil tankers strapped together to form new “land” as the age of oil ends - but the fragility imposed by extremely low population and geographic isolation is unwelcoming to put it mildly. Unlike many pondering the evolution of the Nation State, I’m unwilling to consider the proposition without land to back up sovereignty.
Sovereignty is the point of this. Bluntly, I do not like your law. No, Sir, I do not. I do not like the incarceration rates in the USA. I do not like a policy which seems, on the whole, to be moronic and self serving. I do not like that the effective IQ of congress appears to be around 40, resulting in obscenities like subsidizing making fuel from food, resulting in taxing Americans to cause starvation in foreign lands. I do not like the fact that everybody agrees that military procurement is broken, and nobody is able to fix it, even though everybody involved is theoretically on the same side. I do not like the absence of preparedness for a nuclear event, a pandemic flu, or the inevitable economic crash caused by lying to people for generations about the fact that they will always be richer tomorrow than they were today, and that it is possible to live well forever on the hard labor of the Chinese factory worker. No, Sirs, I do not like what you have done with America, the most bountiful nation on earth in terms of natural resources, only just scattered with people, and with every historical potential for national success, and the international role of being the beacon of liberty.
In short, all y’all have screwed up America so badly that it might be time to consider Plan B.
(This is a decision I had made for me, which is a story for another day.)
So let us say that America dies. There are three or four options: another serious terrorist strike, perhaps even including WMDs, or a mishandled economic crash resulting in feudalism or socialism of an oppressive kind or chaotic revolution, or perhaps a continuing slide into fascism until there is nothing left of the Republic, or an evolution towards internal disunion so severe that it fragments the nation into little pieces, none of which can fully uphold the spirit of the Constitution. The meaning of the whole may not be accurately reflected in the part.
The dream is alive and lives on. We all know the Founding Fathers got really, really close to something. They built aright, level, square and plumb, and their work lasted quite some time. But their envisaged revolutions - the overthrow every generation or two of the corrupt government - never happened. The tree of liberty died from lack of nourishment as the fat and idle focussed on economy, not on education and political awareness. The tax slavery of the population fed a fat and ineffective State, which every passing day resembles the latter stage Soviet Union more simply by virtue of size and general character. It’s like the Bogons that had been bound up in the Soviet Union were released at its collapse and swarmed Washington…
So we are in the position of “skimming the algorithms off” - looking at America, copying what works, and finding a new place to try it again, updated and upgraded. Modern technologies like PKI and biometrics help. Other modern technologies, like ubiquitous surveillance, hinder. But between these two pillars, we can find a middle way which could allow a new style of State to exist, offering many of the same virtues that America by rights should have by virtue of its principles, and has lost by the nature of its practices. “We do not torture” - yes you bloody do.
So here is the framework of the Libertopian Community Template. The LCT is the idea of rolling up a basic prototype for Libertarian microstates. The expectation is that even a partial success on the first or second outing will result in a swarm of successor operations. In the really dire conditions which are likely to accompany an American collapse, many Americans would be willing to try such templates. Some would try them within America in a resurgence of local government via things like elected sheriffs denying jurisdiction to federal officials and local juries imposing nullification of laws they consider unjust. Others would expatriate or “vacation” in new Weakly State-Like Entities (WSLEs) which is, I think, the most that a microstate can hope for on the first outing.
A WSLE (yes, it’s pronounced Weasel) has four basic defining properties which are, I think, likely preconditions to success.
1> WSLEs are parastate entities. They draw on loopholes and other fudges in international law for their legitimacy, rather than attempting to attain full-fledged sovereignty from the outset. Parastates are closer to free trade zones than autonomous regions, apart from in two critical matters: taxation, and criminal law. The parastate defines its jurisdiction in libertarian forms, but does not ask for recognition, only tacit acceptance. The reasons for this will become clear.
2> WSLEs are inherently temporary. They based on a 20 year land lease, or a 50 year free trade agreement, or a 30 year “open city” experiment. WSLEs do not stand and fight, WSLEs basically stay put as long as they are broadly speaking welcome, and they refer anybody who is deeply unhappy with their presence to the simple, historical inevitability of their closure when the treaty expires. If it takes 10 or 20 years to really get a WSLE going, and the lease expires in 30 years, the window for really serious opposition to get irritated, angry, scheme, research, plan, prepare, organize and then finally execute serious action to crush the WSLE is short… by the time such opponents do the math, it may well turn out to be a lot easier to plan on coming in after the lease expires and taking whatever is left over.
A “flag held high unto the ages” is not for us: we must be so far inside the OODA loop of conventional nation states that they have very little chance of understanding what that was until it is gone again. WSLEs are small, fast, live in holes, do not attempt combat with big dogs, and run from hole to hole in the event of trouble. They do not die with their boots on. Remember this is the experimental phase. Full implementation may take generations or, at current rates of change, 30 years.
3> WSLEs have police, not armies. Because they are not States, only weakly state-like entities, WSLEs do not have armies. They draw their state-type protection from the region which granted them their license to exist in the form of a free trade zone or similar agreement. However, the “police” in a WSLE might well constitute, in an emergency, the entire population armed with hunting rifles and so on. You can’t really do a WSLE without arms, which makes some jurisdictions a lot more welcoming than others. But those arms are personal possessions of the population. I’ve explored ideas like having a WSLE rent land to, say, a largish mercenary company as a training base and I think there is considerable merit to having a significant military understanding present within a WSLE just to make sure that things like regional conflicts do not turn into a problem more quickly than the residents of the WSLE can evacuate to, say, international waters and plead for protection with the governments that gave them their passports.
4> WSLEs run on tourism. Not because libertarian tourism is a cheap and easy way to make money with more-or-less any WSLE, but because the more people have visited Tor-two-ga, the less easy it is to demonize it, wipe it off the map, or sabotage the idea of libertarianism as a reasonable way of life. One has to beware the temptation to cater to sex and drug tourism exclusively: if there is sex tourism, let it be tourists having sex with other tourists, rather than rented bedmates. If there is drug tourism, let it be covered by the general rule of not prosecuting events that occurred between consenting adults, rather than by (say) specific mandate. Everybody likes to think their WSLE will be kinda like Burning Man or kinda like the Virginia Colonies. Nobody really wants it to be like the red light districts of the third world. So let’s try and maintain a framework which implements that policy goal.
As for the rest? English common law with appropriate modifications, binding arbitration agreements to implement private courts, and something like geolibertarianism to raise whatever funds the government requires to operate, with the excess being divided equally among the population. A fall-back position for economic failures might rest on a self-preservation clause which is designed to allow people to escape serious punishment for non-violent property rights violations undertaken for their own survival, based on a restorative justice framework where the lack of damages from, say, farming unused land is basically zero. (and thanks to Arto for the long discussions which came to this equilibrium.)
My proposal for starting an African WSLE in the event of disastrous developments in America around the election or the financial crash is threefold.
1> The WSLE produces anti-HIV medications legally. Without regard to patent laws of course, and delivers them at cost to the people of the State which encloses the WSLE. In exchange, it receives a land grant, the ability to nullify or ignore local laws, and an ironclad rationale for not having IP laws apply. Of course, on the other side, the WSLE does not export anything. Doctors or their agents come into the WSLE, fulfill prescriptions on behalf of patients, and then go through the “customs station” between the WSLE and the nation state it exists within. Other than that, there is no export: IP enters, but it does not leave. Electronically exporting IP which leads to diplomatic pressure being put on the WSLE is a strongly discouraged thing.
2> The WSLE publishes careful notes about how life works there. This includes especially careful documentation of problems. It needs to be an open lab for new ways of life, and it needs to be transparently not a threat to anybody. One can also imagine a large non-resident “advisory board” consisting of interested Libertarians from all around the world who could be members of the project, and perhaps enjoy visiting rights and so on.
3> The WSLE maintains an escape fleet. Simply, in the event of a diplomatic breakdown or a regional war, the WSLE maintains the ability to get the entire population into international waters, and to hold out there for a short period while help arrives. I’m going to stress this very strongly: WSLEs do not fight wars, they abandon their ground, evacuate the population, and reconstitute elsewhere if it can be arranged. Contingency planning beyond regular policing functions is oriented around flight, possibly with layered retreat defense, rather than fight.
WSLEs are guests of local governments, not nation states and it is on this distinction that their successes and failures will rest. But given that the planet has very little land free for the taking, the WSLE approach of “negotiate a corner to live in” has much to recommend it, and a foreign policy based on not being too annoying and not being at all threatening is a critical component of this approach.
Finally, we come down to population. I believe the appropriate number is a shade under 30,000 - the size of a small town. It is an M2 community (i.e. in Monkeysphere / Dunbar number terms, it’s a bit over 150 * 150 people, approximately two moneyspheres in radius.) I believe you need a population of about this size to support things like first world style medical care and regular flights to the nearest airport. It also creates some resilience in local infrastructure. It also gives some guide as to the amount of territory required: at 1 acre per person, it’s about 50 square miles or 130 square kilometers. Not a small patch of land.
If you take a look this Google Map, a suitable territory would be about two pixels.
Do you think a few tons of good quality anti-HIV medications could get ground rent and a no-questions-asked policy for two pixels of this map?
I think so. The hard part is finding 30,000 people who’ll invest $30,000 - $50,000 each in moving to Africa to live in what amounts to the world’s most interesting tourist town. That’s not going to happen without massive social dislocations in the first world so, until the time is ripe, this is where the plan sits. A small crew could do a lot of planning and research, but the money won’t flow until there’s no place else for it to go.
Natural rights limits to property?
I think I stumbled on something today, in a discussion with Arto.
Here’s the idea. The right to free speech has some natural limits - the classic statement of this being “shouting fire in a crowded theater” - a phrase with a very interesting history. Similarly, very few people think that the right to bear arms should include, say, personal nuclear weapons.
So what if the right to property has a similar natural limit. Let me give an example, which I will call the Pleasure Yacht Attending The Titanic. (PYATT)
Here is the scenario. A boat is sinking, and two survivors are clinging to a piece of wreckage. A boater comes by in their Pleasure Yacht and simply cruises by the people in the water, allowing them to drown.
Clearly this is wrong - murderous behavior, or perhaps manslaughter. A crime.
However, the rich person watching a famine unfolding in a foreign country is in exactly the same moral position. They have the personal means to prevent somebody else dying, and they choose to do nothing, and this is condoned.
So here’s my thought: PYATT shows clearly that there are limits to the natural rights of property, specifically letting other people die when using your property could save their lives. Note that this is an entirely different foundation from the schemes which give rise to, say, taxation. The goal here is not to legitimize socialism - “taxation is theft.”
However, to exactly the same degree that taxation is theft, allowing people to die of starvation while you have more money than you can spend in the bank is murder.
There is a limit to the natural right to property.
Common Sense II
http://www.stanley2002.org/CSII.htm . Very good reading so far.
It’s stuff like this that could get me re-invested in the political process. Should that happen… hide.
the problem with classical libertarianism: unequal distribution of abundance
This phrase, “unequal distribution of abundance” I use to refer to the phenomenon of people starving to death or dying of easily curable diseases in affluent societies.
I consider it a profound “bug” - apriori evidence that somebody’s natural rights to life, liberty and property have been violated.
Fabulously disagreeable but interesting blog post on America
http://blogs.salon.com/0002007/2008/04/26.html#a2139
Talking about the class system etc. I can’t agree with many of the conclusions or the underlying models, but I’m absolutely sure that some of the observations mentioned are pure gold.
Three questions at the heart of “capitalism”
http://bendiken.net/2008/04/26/zero-sum-delusion is Arto’s post on capitalism.
My issues with capitalism as it is typically formed by Libertarians are three fold.
1> Natural monopolies, like railways, networks, and irrigation and other river activities.
2> Creation of property rights over things like land by the State.
3> Limited liability as a subsidy to investors by the State.
My belief is that a close examination of the interface between the market and the State reveals that the State basically tips the scales towards the ever-greater accumulation of property in the hands of a few and, therefore, a state-backed Capitalism eventually uses state power to repress the rights of the poor in favor of the rights of the rich.
In short, my suggestion is that, in many cases, Capitalism is closely equivalent to Feudalism, but rather than the property rights being defended by the personal forces of each Baron, they are enforced by the State.
The right to take food to eat is the right to self-defense.
This has to be understood clearly: to deny a person what they need to live is an act of aggression. The choice of enforcing a property right that results in another person starving or suffering physical harm is an initiation of force, possibly by proxy.
With this in place, I believe that it’s possible to fairly quickly dismantle the normal perspective on property rights which is at the heart of the forms of libertarianism which the Icelanders have taught me to refer to as “propertarian” or even “propertopian.”
I haven’t thought through mutualism enough to know if I agree with it, but Kevin Carson’s work is highly resonant at times.
Liberty, in our time, means enforcing the law of the land on the president: nothing more, and nothing less.
WAS IT ILLEGAL for American officials [who kidnapped Abu Omar in Italy] to send Abu Omar to Egypt? Yes, according to the United Nations Convention Against Torture, which prohibits delivering someone to a country where there are “substantial grounds” to assume that he might be tortured. Were there substantial grounds to believe that transferring Abu Omar to Egypt would result in his being tortured? Plenty, according to a State Department report that detailed the methods used by Egypt’s security services during the year that Abu Omar was abducted and confined, including stripping and blindfolding prisoners; dousing them with cold water; beatings with fists, whips, metal rods, and other objects; administering electric shocks; suspending prisoners by their arms; and sexual assault and threats of rape.
http://www.counterpunch.org/whitney04262008.html
Yes, the US tortures.
Yes, this is against everything which the US was created for - Thomas Jefferson would spin in his grave.
Yes, Jose Padilla is an American citizen who the American government declared, without trial, to be an “enemy combatant,” - an un-person, a category of human beings without rights under the Constitution or the Geneva Convention. He was held illegally without charges for years, tortured, rendered effectively unfit for trial by his treatment including the claimed torture, and then the charges of torture were brought up, the tapes which could have exonerated the government - or proven torture - were mysteriously missing.
Now, let us put this into context. Consider the oath of enlistment.
“I, _____, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. So help me God.”
At this point, every US citizen who has taken this oath has a problem: the current regime is a domestic threat to the Constitution, and obeying the orders - to torture, to kidnap and have tortured, to hold American citizens without trial under made-up legal black holes like “enemy combatant” - is breaking the oath to support and defend the Constitution. It is the duty of every person who has taken this oath to uphold the Constitution, and that responsibility goes beyond the duty to obey the chain of command.
An American soldier does not get to “just follow orders” as the Nazis did. He, or she, is a citizen soldier, a guardian of the rights of every American, under the Constitution. Those who have participated in torture and other unconstitutional practices can help all of us now, by making sure that the chain of command which violated the law is not above the law and, when a new hand takes the helm at the Presidency, by making sure that everybody involved in violating the rights of Jose Padilla and countless others goes to jail.
It is your duty, under the oaths you took, to defend America against those who have violated the Constitution. This is still a nation of laws, not of men, and regardless of how powerful and privileged those who break the laws are, they must be brought to justice, tried, and punished. War crimes have been committed, likely by the President himself, and when the American Nuremberg Trials come, as they must for America to be made whole again, it is they who must carry responsibility for what was done on their orders.
If you doubt the reality of this, I ask you to imagine what Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin, George Mason or any of the others would have made of a president who authorizes the torture of American citizens, and holds them without trial?
In fact, we do not have to ask what they would have made of such a president: we know. They wrote down their opinion, in a document we call the Constitution.
The war for liberty is not the war on terror. The war on terror is a war for safety. The war for liberty is a war on the Government of America, waged in the courts, by military officers giving honest testimony about what the chain of command authorized, with names and places, so that the chain of command can start going to jail for war crimes.
It is in your hands to fix America. It starts with applying the law of the land to the President, to the Vice President, to John Yoo, and to every other hand that resulted in kidnapping and torture as America’s fundamental strategy in responding to terrorism, and to violating the natural rights of every American citizen to privacy and security of their person, among numerous other crimes.
The president should fear the law. He is not a king. It is our responsibility to make sure that every subsequent president fears the law, and this status is only to be attained by putting this president in jail for the rest of this century, and most of the rest of his administration and advisory team with him.
This is America. We do not torture. And we jail those who do.
Anything less than this, and you can kiss America good bye: the nation founded by those original guardians of liberty will be effectively dead, leaving only a pale imitation which happens to bear the same name.
Jail time for president Bush & his fellow members of the administration is the minimum standard required to give the Constitution teeth again and a toothless Constitution is no Constitution at all.
Liberty, in our time, means enforcing the law of the land on the president: nothing more, and nothing less.
On the global food crisis
Food riots have broken out across the globe destabilizing large parts of the developing world. China is experiencing double-digit inflation. Indonesia, Vietnam and India have imposed controls over rice exports. Wheat, corn and soy beans are at record highs and threatening to go higher still. Commodities are up across the board. The World Food Program is warning of widespread famine if the West doesn’t provide emergency humanitarian relief. The situation is dire. Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez summed it up like this, “It is a massacre of the world’s poor. The problem is not the production of food. It is the economic, social and political model of the world. The capitalist model is in crisis.”
http://www.counterpunch.org/whitney04262008.html
Yeah. Article further suggests that people running out of the dollar are speculating on food, driving up prices - I can’t speak to that, I don’t know. But I do know that there should be a emergency fucking bill to kill the ethanol subsidies right the hell now before the US contributes even more to this economically-induced famine.
What the world needs, right now, is Mycroftian intelligence
By the way, do you know what Mycroft is?”
I had some vague recollection of an explanation at the time of the Adventure of the Greek Interpreter.
“You told me that he had some small office under the British government.”
Holmes chuckled.
“I did not know you quite so well in those days. One has to be discreet when one talks of high matters of state. You are right in thinking that he is under the British government. You would also be right in a sense if you said that occasionally he is the British government.”
“My dear Holmes!”
“I thought I might surprise you. Mycroft draws four hundred and fifty pounds a year, remains a subordinate, has no ambitions of any kind, will receive neither honour nor title, but remains the most indispensable man in the country.”
“But how?”
“Well, his position is unique. He has made it for himself. There has never been anything like it before, nor will be again. He has the tidiest and most orderly brain, with the greatest capacity for storing facts, of any man living. The same great powers which I have turned to the detection of crime he has used for this particular business. The conclusions of every department are passed to him, and he is the central exchange, the clearing-house, which makes out the balance. All other men are specialists, but his specialism is omniscience. We will suppose that a minister needs information as to a point which involves the Navy, India, Canada and the bimetallic question; he could get his separate advices from various departments upon each, but only Mycroft can focus them all, and say offhand how each factor would affect the other. They began by using him as a short-cut, a convenience; now he has made himself an essential. In that great brain of his everything is pigeon-holed and can be handed out in an instant. Again and again his word has decided the national policy. He lives in it. He thinks of nothing else save when, as an intellectual exercise, he unbends if I call upon him and ask him to advise me on one of my little problems.
http://www.4literature.net/Arthur_Conan_Doyle/Bruce_Partington_Plans/
If you look at the farces which are pandemic flu preparedness, or the obscene lack of preparation for nuclear terrorism, or the tragedies of gross mismanagement of public health issues, drug policy, gun control and half a dozen other instances, only one conclusion can be reached: governments are too stupid to manage the real problems of the modern world. The attempt to produce clean fuels for cars turns into looting by the corn lobby which turns into mass starvation, financed by the American tax payer. Murderously stupid. The Capitalist* Ethanol Subsidy Famine might not be Stalin in the Ukraine, or Mao’s agricultural reforms, but it is bad and bad enough.
Mycroftian intelligence - the synthesizing function of the State - is neglected. The paperwork and the infighting eats all of the energy that should go into thinking about what is best for everyone and doing as little as is necessary to ensure it happens, within appropriate constitutional bounds, of course.
(* I use the term “capitalist” here loosely, as people do when describing the Soviet Union as “communist.” For an interesting discussion of these linguistic issues, see Arto’s blog post on capitalism)
new gear - zoom H2
I finally picked up a field recorder: the Zoom H2.
Unexpected bonuses
* extremely aggressive automatic gain control on “voice mode”
* 24/96 recording
* incredibly light but not chintzy
* features like automatic gain control work even when it’s in USB mic mode - ideal for skype etc.
quirks
* UI is a bit fiddley, but not horrific
* Showed up as a USB audio device fine the first time, then not again. Probably means I need to reboot.
Overall… I’d rather have bought it at American than european prices, and it’s a good enough device to open up a good deal of new ground. Good kit.