Tag Archives: libertarian

Vox Day: Free Trade Violates The Property Rights Of The Nation

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Christian libertarian Vox Day turns propertarian arguments against free-traders:

“In the comments, PG constructed an interesting and effective logical argument against free trade, which I have organized thusly:

1. Free traders insist upon the existence of property rights and the sovereign exercise of those rights as axiomatic. From this foundation, they argue that all actions concerning with whom one will trade, regardless of their location or nation, are protected by those property rights and cannot be morally infringed.

2. If a group of people happen to share the rights to a property in an ownership group, they must decide together on how those rights are exercised. No single individual can sell the property or permit its use by others without the agreement of the other rights holders. The ownership group collectively has the right to decide who and what are permitted to enter their property. It is not an infringement of any one owner’s property right if the greater part of the ownership group does not wish to sell the property or to permit entry to certain parties or items.

[Lila: Libertarians and classical liberals would argue that property rights cannot be exercised by an abstract collective entity like “the nation” and can only be exercised unjustly by any government that claims to represent the nation.]

3. A nation is a group of people who share a common property that is delineated by the national borders. This group of people must therefore decide in some consensus manner how the rights to that property are exercised. They can therefore decide who and what are permitted to enter the national property in precisely the same manner that a house-owning group decide who and what are permitted to enter their house. It is not an infringement of any one individual’s property right if the greater part of the nation does not wish to sell the land possessed by the nation or permit entry to certain parties or items.

4. To deny a nation the property right to enact tariffs or refuse permission for goods, capital, or labor to cross its borders, is tantamount to either denying a) property rights or b) the nation’s existence.

[Lila: Rather than enact laws against the property rights of companies wanting to trade under the present “managed trade” regime, it might be more conducive to freedom to undo the subsidies that currently exist, whether in the form of fixed prices, welfare, preferential tax treatment,  or any other grant by the government.  Doing so, would probably make it far less beneficial for some companies to trade, discourage some movements of labor, and generally have the same effect as a sanction or tariff, without needing to invoke group property rights.]

5. However, denying the existence of nations is not only empirically false, it creates a logical contradiction for the free trader because it requires denying the individual property-owner the right to form collective property-ownership groups from which nations are made. The free trade position depends upon the idea that individuals possess property rights, but groups of more than one individual cannot.

6. Therefore, free trade doctrine requires the denial of the very property rights upon which it is founded. As PG correctly concludes, “their whole argument is an outright logical contradiction”.

As evidence in support of PG’s logical construction, I offer the following statements concerning the existence of nations from two champions of the dogma, Mr. Gary North and our own Unger.

North: “Defenders of tariffs present themselves as defenders of the nation, when in fact the nation, from the point of view of economics, is not a collective entity. The nation, from an economic standpoint, is simply a convenient name that we give to people inside invisible judicial lines known as national borders.”

Unger: “I do not consider myself an ‘American’, except as a verbal convenience, or have any care at all for ‘America’.”

Now, it can certainly be pointed out that the mere existence of a nation does not mean that all of its members are voluntary members of it and it cannot be denied that the legitimate property rights of the nation can be abused or ignored just as they are in the case of individual property rights. But PG’s logic suffices to demonstrate that the property rights argument upon which many free traders heavily rely is far from the conclusive one that they believe it to be.”

[Lila: A version of this argument was made by David Boaz in reviewing the movie, Avatar]

Is Latin America Moving Right?

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Alvaro Vargas Llosa of the Independent Institute asks whether Latin America is moving right and what that could mean:

“Chile’s runoff election this month will probably mean the end of the center-left coalition’s two-decade hold on power and the emergence of businessman Sebastian Pinera as a political tour de force. Continue reading →

Swine-Flu Vaccine Facts That Should Frighten You

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One of the best read articles in 2009 on Lew Rockwell was  one by Bill Sardi on eighteen reasons you shouldn´t take the swine flu vaccine.  Here´s an excerpt, but it´s worth reading the whole piece.

“4. The vaccines will be produced by no less than four different manufacturers, possibly with different additives (called adjuvants) and manufacturing methods. The two flu inoculations may be derived from a multi-dose vial and in a crisis, and in short supply, it will be diluted to provide more doses and then adjuvants must be added to trigger a stronger immune response. Adjuvants are added to vaccines to boost production of antibodies but may trigger autoimmune reactions. Some adjuvants are mercury (thimerosal), aluminum and squalene. Would you permit your children to be injected with lead? Lead is very harmful to the brain. Then why would you sign a consent form for your kids to be injected with mercury, which is even more brain-toxic than lead? Injecting mercury may fry the brains of American kids. Continue reading →

Insights From the Bears

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I had a conversation recently with some insiders in the financial industry, of a rather bearish persuasion. So bearish that they’re interested in leaving the United States.

Which is how I’ve felt for about five-six years.

The conversation yielded interesting tidbits.  Some of them confirm my own thinking; others contradict it. The contradictory parts interested me the most, of course. I tend to pay more attention to people who think differently from me than to people who agree, perhaps because of some diffidence about my own judgment….Unfortunately, my own instincts have turned out to be more accurate than I’ve been able to believe.

Anyway, here’s what I came away with from what I consider honest and reliable professional money managers:

1. China is overvalued greatly. By around 50%-60% or more (not the first time I’ve heard this, of course).

2. Jim Rogers knows commodities, but doesn’t know gold as well (this was new to me).

3. Marc Faber has one of the best reputations as an investor among insiders (well-known to me). His newsletter is worth the money.

(Full disclosure: I don’t subscribe to Mr. Faber’s newsletter, work for him or receive any kind of compensation for this statement. I’m passing it along as well-founded opinion that might help readers struggling to find reliable guidance in the welter of news….)

4. Gold bars sold by some firms have tungsten underneath, so be careful from whom you buy. James Turk is a reliable person to buy gold from. (Full disclosure: I don’t use Mr. Turk’s services nor have I been paid by anyone to make this assertion).

6. A lotof Several money-managers think there may be no gold at Fort Knox – or very little – not just confirmed “conspiracists” – among whom I am proud to number myself. (Correction, Nov. 13: “No gold” doesn’t have to mean the absence of physical gold. Gold could be present physically, but it could owed to other entities, like a house that is technically in your name, but is really owned by all your creditors).

7. Rogers was more the driving force behind Quantum’s success than Soros.

8. There will be no secession. Americans aren’t up to it. The cognitive dissonance between perceived reality and “real” reality is too great for most people to grasp the extent of the corruption in the system. Any hope of rebellion rests with “red-necks” (apologies for using a racist term – I  use it ironically here), not with yuppies.

9.  The Indian market is riddled with fraud and hype. Jim Rogers thinks the Indian market is a scam. (I wouldn’t use that harsh a word, but I worry about hype and corruption in it too).

10. Brazil’s Fortaleza area, which has been attracting a lot of investor interest, has great beaches and weather…as well as slums, crime, and deadbeats of all kinds. Recommended for investing, not for living.

11. Argentine property laws are not as safe as US property laws (despite Kelo) – at least, at the level where it concerns the ordinary joe. Aggressive, organized squatting is a problem in rural areas.

12. The ongoing investigation of insider trading (eg., Galleon) is not just a one-day wonder, but might bite harder than expected.

Uruguay Cost of Living

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Is Uruguay first world living at third world prices, as some of the less accurate newsletters will tell you?
Don’t believe it.

In some cases, you’re paying less than US prices, but remember that that’s cheap only to dollar holders. People who make the average Uruguay salary- about a quarter of what they’d earn in the US – aren’t going to find it cheap at all. In other cases (supermarket processed food, for example), you’re actually paying more than in the US. In the case of electronics or clothes, you’ll be paying considerably more.

To give you an idea, here’s a link to a site (in Spanish), where you can see uptodate prices.
It’s at the Ministerio de Economía y Finanzas –Sistema de Información de Precios al Consumidor

Eggs, as you can see, are expensive – equal to or higher than in the US. In a country of farms that’s a bit of a mystery to me. Chips, crackers, cereal and orange juice are also expensive.

However, if you go to the street stalls and buy vegetables, you’ll find them cheaper.

Services in general are cheaper. Which means what? I hate to tell you. It means that labor is overpaid in the US – relative to the world market, at least.

Independence Day: Alfredo Zitarossa Sings Adagio en Mi Pais

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Adagio en Mi Pais (Adagio in My Country), written and sung by Alfredo Zitarossa.

Zitarossa was a beloved and important Uruguayan composer, poet, singer, and journalist, who was ostracized for his involvement with the Frente Amplio of the left, during the 1970s, at the time when the military junta (with its torturous secret police) came to power in Uruguay. Zitarossa’s songs were banned in the Southern Cone countries and he himself was forced to live in exile in Argentina, Spain, and Mexico. He died young in 1989 at the age of 52. The most characteristic voice of resistance in Uruguay’s second “independence,” he makes a good subject for a post on Independence Day (Dia de la Independencia) , which happens to be today.

Behind every door
my people are alert,
and no one can silence their song,
and tomorrow they will sing again.
In my country we are tough,
the future will show that.

[Here is a complete translation by Yoshi Furuhashi, Monthly Review Press]

A bit of history: Uruguay won its independence from a triangular war between Spain, Argentina, and Brazil between 1825 and 1828. As the second smallest country in South America (after Surinam) it’s still somewhat overshadowed by its giant neighbors, Argentina and Brazil, with whom it shares it western and northern borders respectively.

Uruguay has many things to recommend it to a libertarian temperament. It’s a small country. The culture is unpretentious and laid back. It’s the home of the gaucho, the ferociously independent vagabond cowboy of South America. And the national motto, Libertad o Muerte (Liberty or Death) echoes Patrick Henry’s famous words (“Give me liberty or give me death”) before the Virginia Convention in 1775.

It’s traditional to go out on the night before Dia de la Independencia and I made it to a neighbor’s asado (barbecue). According to the Uruguayans, the asado, mate (the ubiquitous herbal tea that is sipped through a straw), and tango all come from Uruguay, not Argentina. Of course, in Argentina, you hear another story.

The asador did a fine job with the wood fire that cooks the meat. I took a shot at it too. The idea is to spread out the embers as they fall through the grate of the parrilla (grill)* from the log fire. Too many in one place and the meat gets burned. Too few and it doesn’t cook. Most of our guests wanted their meat – the world-famous Uruguayan organic beef – well done, so the asador and I were quite busy. The beef cut is called tira de asado (a cut from the ribs) and is mixed with other kinds of meat, like chorizo (sausage). We served the asado with chimichurri – a relish from oil, oregano, garlic, and chopped belly peppers – and with baguettes and clerico (made by mixing fruit drinks and wine).

*The term parrilla is also used, by analogy, to refer to torture and to the torture-rack, which were wide-spread in the 1970s and 1980s in Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, and Brazil…..

For the role of the US in fostering the routine use of torture in Uruguay, read this piece by Bill Blum.

Renouncing America in India (Comment added)

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Jeff Knaebel tore up his US passport out of hatred for the state and became a stateless person wandering through the villages in India. In case you’re thinking he must be some kind of hippy, Knaebel is a former CEO of a company and an engineer trained at Cornell University.

“The one actual, real and direct action that I could take was to break the paper chains that were holding me as a slave to the Empire. I tore up my U.S. passport at the Gandhi Samadhi, Rajghat, New Delhi. Rather than arrest me, the Indian police told me that I was free to roam anywhere in India, and to call them for help if I ran into any trouble.

The great Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote, “Man is moral choice.” This is what I have been calling the Law of Moral Causation. By unilateral renunciation of my citizenship, I chose to assert my responsibility by denying that the U.S. government could act in my name and on my behalf.

Here is the quotation of a freedom fighter in Mexico which seems equally relevant to the India of today:

“Why is it necessary to kill and to die so that you should listen to Ramona, seated here beside me, tell you that Indian women want to live, want to study, want hospitals, want medicines, want schools, want food, want respect, want justice, want dignity? ~ Insurgente Marcos to President of Mexico Salinas after the cease fire in Chiapas, San Cristobal de las Casas, February 1994 (Our Word Is Our Weapon, Seven Stories Press).

I plan to continue to present to the State and to humanity the question of whether we are ready to permit a peace-loving man to exist and to move about freely, without tracking tags and permission-to-exist documents. Or have we been so thoroughly conditioned that everyone except third world villagers and tribal people is destined to live in the big surveillance sheep pens constructed by states all over the world.

Hat-tip to Lew Rockwell for running the article on his site.

My Comment

Bravo for the gesture.  But as an Indian by birth I must say I wouldn’t advise any expat Indian to try this. The Indian police will treat you very differently from a vellakara (this is Tamil for ‘white man’ ).  A friend of mine, a graduate of one of the Indian Institutes of Technology, spent the year after his graduation roaming India, minus “English language privilege” – i.e. he pretended he didn’t speak it. He said he saw a side of India he hadn’t experienced until then.

Besides, the cynic in me wants to know –  did Knaebel dispose of his assets before this gesture….or after? And if so, how? I’m sorry if my questions seem derisive. They’re meant respectfully.

I feel the same way about some…some... elements in the “patriot” movement.

Did civil liberties and the police state work them up so much when George Bush was in power? Is it civil liberties or the thought of an African-American president that incenses some people?

I’d say in a few cases it’s the latter….


Kevin Carson on the Revolutionary Potential of Barter

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From a Kevin Carson comment on his own blog, Mutualist.org:

“So long as an industry is controlled by a handful of firms with the same organizational culture, using some form of oligopoly pricing, colluding to spoon out incremental improvements, and using push distribution methods for whatever crap they agree is the “new thing” this year, calculational chaos doesn’t cause much of a competitive penalty for any particular firm.

The main thing that will cause them real harm, IMO, that will cause the “walls to come tumbling down” for American state capitalism the same as for the old Soviet system, is the looming singularity in small-scale production technology that will enable much of the population to meet a large share of its needs through direct subsistence production for use in the household/informal/barter economy. (That’s the theme of one of the sections in forthcoming Ch. 15)”

My Comment

Carson is always an interesting and productive thinker, and this snippet is from commentary on a blog post of his about the seizure of some of his writings by the police. The commentary goes from this incident to discuss various other things, including whether big business is really no different from the state, and if it is, how that fact can be squared with the wealth it produces.

Carson argues that its wealth is produced despite the existence of the same “computational chaos” suffered by states, because big business enjoys subsidies, cost-externalizations, and benefits deriving from its size and privileged relationship to the state. That means its wealth isn’t really “its” wealth but the appropriation of wealth actually created by others. (I’ve made much the same argument myself).

Small-scale production and barter withdraw the life-blood of the huge corporations – which is the consumer. The direction of consumption away from the corporate economy is thus an effective form of direct revolutionary action against the corporate state.

Now, one man’s revolutionary struggle is another man’s budget shopping. but why quibble? The main thing is to reclaim the human being as the focus of economic theory, rather than any spurious “economic man,” “factor of production,” or “felicific calculus”…

Libertarian Living: Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay as Libertarian Destinations“

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I promised some of you a few tips about countries you might be considering fleeing to.

Here’s a quick guide to how three of them might work for runaway libertarians:

1. Cheap Living:

Forget what you’re reading about Chile being expensive and Uruguay being cheap. It all depends on where and how you’re living and what you’re doing. Comparing capitals, Santiago has more and cheaper living options than Montevideo. So does Buenos Aires. But you can find cheaper living in a smaller town in Uruguay. On the other hand, in smaller towns, don’t expect to find the variety of accommodation you find in a city like Buenos Aires. You may not find youth hostels, camping, budget hotels, or house-shares. In general, the more of an international crowd a place draws, the more and better your options.

If you are planning to live off the earth, farmland is relatively cheap and high-quality in all three countries, with Brazil and Uruguay being the cheapest. Soil quality is high in all these southern countries.

For organic growing, Chile and Uruguay are the places to go..

2. Eating/Shopping

But rent is not the only consideration. What about food and clothes?

Uruguay isn’t as cheap as Argentina, especially with the Uruguayan peso so much stronger than the Argentine peso.

Brazil is also more expensive.

In general, you’re wise to buy whole food in the markets and leave international brands alone in the supermarket aisles. Eating out is still cheap in Argentina, but less so elsewhere.

Again, you can always find a deal if you look. Brazil has the most variety. I had an all-you-can-eat meal in the border town of Chuuy, where the variety and quality of the asado was far superior to anything I’d eaten in Argentina.

Clothes tend to be relatively expensive, but again, if you look around, you can find places where there are sales, just as you have them in the US. A recent find, a jacket for about $4.

Electronic items like computers are more expensive. Make sure to buy the correct equipment for electronic appliances. Ask at a web forum before you visit.

3. Investment: Buying an apartment in Santiago, Buenos Aires, or Montevideo requires a lot of thinking right now. It all depends on whether you are buying it to live here or as an investment.

Prices are high in Buenos Aires, but evidence of the global crisis is everywhere, and the expectation is that prices will come down soon – perhaps sharply.

Santiago realtors are expecting a 15-20% drop in the next 6 months.

In Montevideo, the general feeling is that any price-drop in the other markets won’t be felt as sharply there. But everyone knows that even in Montevideo, prices have climbed as much as 30% in good areas, as rich Argentines move their money out of Argentina and put it into the stabler Uruguay economy.

That’s true not only of apartments but of land as well, although that’s a topic that would take too long a post to do justice to.

In general, don’t let anyone rush you into buying. Nothing is ever the dead certainty it’s made out to be, and getting in and out of a real estate transaction has costs. None of the property here is very liquid at all, in my opinion.

Also, don’t forget that old houses require constant maintenance and that if local currencies strengthen against the dollar, your labor costs for maintenance or renovation may end up being higher than your budget. Same goes for labor costs for management. You really might be better off buying a condo in Miami, no matter what Faber or Rogers thinks, if economic reasons are your only ones for living abroad.

Right now, you can find a waterfront apartment in Florida for a lower price than a comparable one in Uruguay. So if cheaper living is your only criterion, you might want to chew on that.

4. Privacy:

Uruguay is no longer on the black-list for tax havens, which is a good thing. On the other hand, it’s been a bit too compliant with US demands for transparency. Chile is a morass of bureaucracy, but predictable. Argentina is the least reliable, as far as banking goes.

This might not be something libertarians are going to like to hear. But the chances are that these societies too are going to be moving toward greater control. This is more true of Argentina than of Uruguay in my opinion.

5. Business Culture:

Chile gets top marks for a culture that is business positive, for those libertarians hoping to start a new life here. With English widely-spoken, low corruption and good property laws, it’s the best place to build a business. But watch out for a cultural problem – Americans I meet seem to find Chileans rude.

Brazil and Colombia (of which I know nothing else) are also good places for starting a business. Uruguay has some problems in this respect. It doesn’t have as much of a market or a business culture and the market also relies too much on foreigners. You’d have to know exactly how to work that. As Brazil, Argentina, and Chile go, so goes Uruguay. On the other hand, Uruguay seems to be the most accessible and easy-going culture of the three.

Businessmen I met uniformly thought Argentina was a terrible place to do business – and some even called it the most corrupt country in South America, much to my surprise. Portenos (those who live in Buenos Aires) were singled out for blame – although for myself, I had nothing but a positive experience of them. People in the provinces were said to be more honest.

But then, I wasn’t doing business, I was trying to find out more about Monsanto….and in my off-time, figuring out salsa. People saw me as an Indian, assured me they loved India, and spent their time complaining about America to me, as though I wasn’t from there. So much for the liberal view of citizenship as purely political and cultural….

Brazil gets good marks, but with plenty of warnings about corruption and street crime…
I found the Brazilians I met more politically aware than the others., for what that’s worth. A lot of fans of Chomsky and much discussion of 9-11.

So there you have it…a quick guide to selecting what you can do where..
In three important countries very far south of the border..