The Libertarian Conundrum Continued:
There is an analytical weakness in the ideology of contemporary Libertarianism: It understands itself as negating - as much as possible - governmental regulations upon the activities of those in society. According to this discourse, the absence of governmental interferences provide the optimal conditions under which social problems can be resolved, due to the dynamics operative in what is termed as the free-market: a condition of human interaction where the economic interests of social agents compel them to find the most efficient and effective means by which to resolve social problems. 

However, Libertarianism never considers that the conditions it identifies as the free-market are not a manifestation, resulting from the absence of regulation, but the obfuscation of contravening sociopolitical mechanisms that have come to be obscured through the naturalization of a particular juridical-legal discourse, which has been endorsed and promoted so vehemently and so effectively, as the ‘natural’ socio-economic order, that we have lost sight - and hence forgotten - that these conventions were created through social processes, whereby these conditions were the emergent byproducts of social control and regulation. In short, the free-market is a historically situated specification of norms and values – as well as political operations, in which power is deployed by social interests in a social field of contending agencies. The free-market should never be granted intellectual emancipation from the explanations provided by social constructivism, which we can use in order to form our own understandings of what made the “free-market” and what allows it to persist. 

In substance, the free-market is no different than any other economic form; all of which are social archetypes essentially depended upon the interdiction, regulation, and governmentally sanctioned paths for profiteering and interposed incentives; all of which collectively provide the impetus and the momentum, along with the controls that regulate deviations, necessary for an enduring socioeconomic systemization. Let us now look to the way that we have been duped into acknowledging that the free-market is somehow a natural condition.

The contemporary transcendent Intelligent-Designer – not the disguised Christian entity that is being imposed upon teachers and students; but, rather, the Invisible Hand of the Free-market – has been granted a presence that is firmly planted in the preemptive sociocultural discourses, which serve the function of instilling among the population a shared stock of knowledge. It is through this shared stock of knowledge that we come to manifest similar interpretations when we are relating our personal experiences to the anthropomorphized and deified forces that operate outside of our control; forces that are, in their nature, social and societal. These forces act upon us as individuals. Concurrently, however, the dynamism of markets transcends the tangible and accessible spaces, whose constituent objects fall susceptible to the influences of our individual agencies.

In these respects, market forces are not emergent; instead, they are manifest; somehow residing just under or over the instrumental affairs of man, organizing the actions enacted by agencies, which embody a plurality of individualized interests.  These divergent agenda, nevertheless, as a result of the forces of the free-market, come to form ancillary relationships to the projects taken up by counterparts in the field of exchange where the pursuit of self-interests generates, on an aggregate scale, the best outcome for all participants who fall within the expansions of the market.  

What is important to note from the preceding description is the fact that the free-market is understood as a field in which individual agents pursue instrumental ends.  In other words, values and ethics – guidelines for regulations, enforceable through governmental impositions upon the actions of agents as they, otherwise, would pursue their own self-interests – are not imperatives guiding the proper conduct in this social field referred as the free-market. However, if we are to take a step backwards, in order to gain the insight of a self-imposed alienation from the commonalities that we rarely question, what might we say about this free-market that is supposedly void of governmental interferences:

The corporation is an oddity that we can consider nothing other than a legal fiction having been created and introduced into the affairs of the free-market by government: More specifically, through the powers of legislators and jurists. The corporation has been designed to mitigate the risks of investors, in order for them to own percentages of business entities without being encumbered by any liabilities that might ensue from the corporation’s conduct.

The social construction – the institution of the corporation – alone, debunks any pretenses that the free-market is the manifest condition resulting from the absence of government intervention. I would be very interested in learning how anarcho-capitalists account for the presence of this legally concocted social fiction. However, I suspect that few anarcho-capitalists, or libertarians, for that matter, could introduce any compelling excuse for the presence of this political invention in the affairs of the free-market.   

What should we say about taxation? Libertarians, of course, oppose the Income Tax. However, they do not appear to oppose the imposition by government of a Sales Tax. Other than the fact that this proposal for tax reform is one of the more socially regressive changes that could possibly be made to the taxation system; additionally, it is not really a reform; rather, it is a reaction. Nevertheless, I would be willing to make such a concession – the abolition of the Income Tax – as long as anarcho-capitalists and libertarians are willing to conjunctively abolish the legal fiction, the corporation.

I could, of course, go on. However, the thesis has already been established: What we consider to be the absence of government is really a condition created by political interests who endorse, in actuality, not the forbiddance of government in the economy, but a modality of government organizational management in society’s economic affairs that reflects their particular interests. They attempt to propagate their own version of the free-market through the following rhetorical tactic: Treat the government fixtures upon the economy, which happen to be endorsed by alternative ideologies – (those of us who promote progressive changes to the economy and its distribution of resource and opportunities) – as unnatural conditions that would qualify as interferences to the free-market. Concurrently, they fail to acknowledge the implicit expectations they have with respect to governmental interventions, such as the corporation, in order to promote their version of the economy as natural and manifest; rather than socially contrived.

Russell Cole

Tags: culture, Deregulation, economics, government
Categories: Commentary
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As much as I’ve always enjoyed Ogden Nash, the poet, I must confess that many of his writings have impacted me as if coming from the wisdom of a philosopher rather than the wit of an accomplished light verse mechanic. And, among his many vignettes, there is one that seems to have stayed inscribed on my head, as if sentry in eternal vigilance.

“There is only one way to achieve happiness on this terrestrial ball,” says Nash, “and that is to have either a clear conscience or none at all.” As hard as I search for another type of accommodation where happiness can reside, conscience needs to be part of it, either by its presence or by its absence; conscience and the state of well-being appear irremediably intertwined. Of course, such conclusion in my part stems from defining conscience as the awareness of a moral-ethical aspect to
one’s conduct together with a forceful desire to prefer right over wrong.

And therein lies the problem; we all claim ownership of a conscience… but what we are obviously lacking is a common conscience. How else can you explain a nation of over 300 million people, one would guess happy for the most part – if consumption is at the very least a low level indicator of that happiness– allowing their leaders to commit high crimes against humanity day after day of their lives? Directly, via orders carried out by the military in Iraq, Afghanistan and lesser known locations; or indirectly, via outright threats to groups and nations,
or via bully resolutions most often inflicted as sanctions; economic punishment, as a rule, on undeserving peoples or nations, such as Cuba, or Iran, just because we judge the political behavior of their leaders out of step with ours.

Two happenings this past week give us a telltale of what political America is all about, at least with reference to its foreign relations component. On Wednesday, our
Lecturer-In-Chief decided that it was high time – after four years – that he tell those loyal Cuban-Americans that populate Florida plus a splattering elsewhere, and who for the most part are die-hard Republicans, that Castro and his revolution remain anathema to this
US. Then, on Saturday, the dove in America’s conscience had been scheduled to spread its wings for peace, at least in some major population centers. Sadly, what a telltale on both counts!

Hollow in moral authority, here is George W. Bush  lecturing the world about a sovereign nation just a
hundred miles away, in a preface to a wake for Fidel, submitting to the people in Cuba, as well as the rest of the world, the need for a regime change; and, in a shameful act, urging peacekeepers of the nation – police and military – to turn their backs to those in charge. Something reminiscent of America’s ever presence in
other nations’ internal affairs, not out of idealistic friendship for people of those nations, but solely to serve the interests of powerful groups in this United States – wasn’t that what we told Chile’s police and military to help bring down Allende and install Pinochet?

If America wishes for other nations’ governments to evolve and perhaps resemble our own – which is beginning to look more and more like a joke or even a death wish – why is it that our government’s efforts always seem to be directed in a counterproductive way? Why must America resort to military threat, or economic sanctions that kill and impoverish people, but do
absolutely nothing to enlist minimal change or even low level accommodation? Our decades-long sanctions against Cuba, not Castro, have made us only enemies of 11 million Cubans, even if one-quarter million hard-core anti-castristas exiles command some attention because of their votes in Florida. The latter, something that might soon change, as Cuban-American voters, chiefly
Republicans, have become a minority (45%) among Hispanic voters in Florida, where they represented 80 percent just a decade ago.

And non-Cuban Hispanic voters tend to vote with equal fervor… but for Democratic candidates.  US-instigated UN sanctions in the 90’s against Iraq, not Saddam Hussein, only did succeed in the hush-hush infanticide of at least one-half million Iraqi children, doing absolutely nothing else. And the sanctions imposed against the Palestinians post-Hamas victory in the 2006 elections… by the US,
Israel and the me-too Europeans only brought pain and suffering, while also being instrumental in a fratricidal conflict and territorial fragmentation; and a resumption of a exclusionary peace process that is invalid and destined to fail. Now it’s sanctions against Iran,  America’s enemy-du-jour!

Of course, the peace marches on Saturday did not amount to much. They never do. It’s the same decent people with conscience, few others bothered to join.
Just because in these last four years Bush’s popularity ratings have plummeted from 80 to 30 percent, that doesn’t mean that 50 percent of the people have developed a common conscience towards peace and goodwill; only that they don’t care for the Current
Occupant of the White House, as Garrison Keillor would say.

Decency doesn’t seem to be contagious. Have you ever asked yourself how many of your “happy” neighbors have a clear conscience… and how many just don’t have a conscience at all? I bet Ogden Nash knew about the conscience-status of his neighbors.

Ben Tanosborn

www.tanosborn.com

Tags: policy, political parties, politicians
Categories: Commentary
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I had heard a report of this diplomatic dispatch that was sent to the Bush Administration by the Iranians about six months ago.  However, as the way things stand in the current state of American intellectual public discourse, I did not even attempt to disseminate the report I had encountered to a wider audience.  All too often, accurate contents pertaining to incidents, which need to be incorporated into the compilation of accurate information culminating into what will become the socially legitimated journalistic narrative that will come to define our collective representations of reality – are simply ignored or cynically discounted.  I suspect that this filtering of factual reports from the permitted descriptions circulated through the modes of communication in our society takes place because corporate journalism deems the revelations too provocative and, therefore, deviating from the mundane and lacking in knee-jerk plausibility.  Corporate journalism, consequently, discards with the stories as a matter of course, since its inclusion in the contents of mass-produced journalism might incite a backlash from social elements which would have their credibility damaged if the general public was to subscribe to the validity of the report’s contents.  Consequently, these types of illuminating accounts are redacted during their processing in the distillations, constituting the gate-keeping devices belonging to the industrial-mass-journalism-complexes. 

R Cole
D o w n s i z e r - D i s p a t c h