Solidarity Between Libertarians and Socialists: Achieving Freedom and Equality Through Bottom Unity

     We can distribute resources equitably, without resorting to hierarchy or violence, as long as people know how much they're entitled to, as a share of the Earth's resources.
     Each one of us is entitled to our share of Earth's resources - as a fraction of the human population - as property; plus whatever we can produce, through using and developing that share, plus our use and development of our own talent, skills, and intellects.


     In order to distribute resources equitably, and to understand "whose is what", we need to stop thinking in terms of "private or public" and realize that there are more sectors of the economy, and more types of property ownership, than just these two categories.
     Club goods are being neglected. So is the voluntary third sector, the sector of charity and social purpose enterprises. So is the commons; which comprises nearly the entire category of the factor of production which we call "land" (the others being labor and capital).
     Private-public partnerships exist as well, as do N.G.O.s (non-governmental organizations), and Q.U.A.N.G.O.s (quasi-nongovernmental organizations).
     We must expand our knowledge about rivalry and excludability of resources, economic sectors, types of ownership, and forms of mixed economies and economic systems aside from capitalism and socialism, if we want to achieve anything resembling economic mobility in the future.

     The United Kingdom has depoliticized its environmental affairs through having quasi-non-governmental agencies decide on environmental regulation instead of voting. It has also depoliticized other scientific, financial, and juridical duties.
     As long as depoliticization can be done without succumbing to the evils of privatization, we can have science-based policies that establish health and safety standards which cannot be voted away. These policies should be added to the Constitution via amendments, so that they can be permanent rather than temporary, and cannot be tampered with without the overwhelming agreement of the supermajority.

     I support depoliticization of land and environment and resource related issues - basically having panels of scientists determine scientific and environmental policy through consensus-building - and bioregionalism, as ways to achieve more balanced distribution of natural resources.

     Private property does not exist at the mercy of the community; nor should the community be viewed as merely a private club made up of, and serving only, those who own property. Instead, the community and private owners recognize one another's legitimacy when they come to mutually beneficial agreements about whose is what.

     As such, anything that is unfairly monopolized, or owned and leveraged to the detriment of the community, should be occupied by the people who can rightfully claim that they are harmed by the continued ownership of any firms which may be unfairly exploiting labor, land, and natural resources. This occupation should always be done through the use of non-violent resistance.

     The notion that the Earth is common to all men, and can be shared equitably, can be realized and revived, as long as the spirit of giving and sharing does not die in the hearts of private owners.

     World land area divided by human population comes out to 4.8 acres per person. Which means that a four-person family can own 19.2 acres. But room must be left over for animals and plants, and future human population (which will increase, so the number of acres per person will decrease accordingly).
     This 4.8 acre per person rule tells us that any one person with 20 acres should allow at least three people to live on his property. Until then, he should either have a family, give up some of his land, let people forage and glean on his property, or compensate the community for monopolizing more resources than he needs.

     Libertarianism and socialism - or private property and community, or production and environmentalism - are not antithetical to one another. Furthermore, the mere fact that people associate with one another, does not make them "socialists".

     Libertarian socialists - and non-socialistic libertarians, too - want the same thing. We all want voluntary association and voluntary cooperation. We want cooperation to occur solely on totally voluntary terms. And those terms must be mutually beneficial to all parties involved.

     This is why Mutualist economics will guide libertarians and socialists to the right economic ethics. Mutualist economics do not reject private property, nor do they reject markets. But Mutualists still realize that not all property which exists, and is claimed, was rightfully earned. When a market is rigged, Mutualists will criticize this fact, and note that freedom and fairness of markets (and money) lie in their transparency and accessibility.

     Libertarian free-marketers and libertarian socialists have a reason to work together, because of people like Barry Goldwater and his speechwriter Karl Hess, who agreed that voluntarism is the prerequisite for cooperation. They agreed that no barriers should be raised against the freedom not to associate (libertarianism), and also that no barriers should be raised against the freedom to associate (voluntary cooperation / voluntary "socialism").

     We must oppose redistribution by the state, but that does not mean we must oppose all activity by all cooperatives and communes and collectives. The individual and collective drive for self-improvement results in a distribution, but not a redistribution. The economic system of distributism calls for everyone to be capitalists; this is what libertarians must want, for everyone to share in the American dream of owning property outright, and being wealthy enough to create jobs, if they wish to do so.

     Autonomous communes maximize decentralization, which brings governance closer to the individual. Collective enterprises reduce risk and reinvest profits, thus reducing the need for taxation, making it easier for the collective enterprise to self-govern. There is no reason why collectivists and libertarians should be arguing about the ability of an enterprise to govern itself; some forms of communism are based on the idea that a collective can be partially self-governing (as long as it coordinates with other collectives). If this coordination is done voluntarily, and markets are not prohibited, then markets and communism would exist side by side with little conflict.

     Through decentralizing property, and decentralizing governance, we can maximize productivity, and minimize the punishments and fees and fines which are levied in exchange for the privilege to produce.

     For libertarians to oppose redistribution, means that we oppose the legalized theft from the taxpayers, to give to either the wealthy or the poor. But at the same time, we must consider that much more taxpayer money has been wasted propping-up the military and large corporations, in comparison to how much has been spent on lifting the poor out of poverty.

     That is why the Libertarian Party must agree with Rand Paul that not a dime should be cut from the social safety net until all corporate welfare is eliminated. Or else the party must doom itself to being labeled "to the right of the Republican Party".

     We must not pretend that the poor don't share an inordinate burden of the sales taxes. The poor bear an inordinate burden of taxes overall, due to their sales tax burden.

     Opposing redistribution also means that we cannot allow companies like Amazon, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, and Raytheon, to keep the wealth they extracted from the pockets of the poor with the state's help.

     These companies are monopolies, they receive taxpayer subsidies and tons of favors, and the fact that they receive taxpayer money is not constitutional. Wealthy companies "redistribute" wealth upwards, away from the poor. But the fact that it is redistribution, should not lead us to believe that this "socialism for the rich" resembles actual socialism in any way. If the state is performing the redistribution, rather than society, then it is statism, not socialism.

     The point being: If not for public charters, these monopolistic companies would not even formally exist, as far as the government (a private corporation, for financial purposes) is concerned. Americans could easily do away with the problem of military-industrial complex monopolies by prohibiting the Department of Defense from making a contract with any military components producing firm which wields more than 5% of the market share. That would not be a limitation on the market, but rather a limitation upon our monopolistic, violent, corrupt government.

     Communities have every right to require companies to perform some stated, transparent social purpose - or else a fee, or allowing the community to hold stock in the company, setting up mutual funds in the company, or something - in exchange for the public assistance and property protection they receive. This is not communism; it is a user fee based system.

     That's why Land Value Taxation, bolstered by user fees and voluntary contributions, are the way to go. No more tinkering around with income, consumption, or sales taxes. Eliminate investment taxes as soon as the stock markets are no longer rigged.

     The conditions necessary for total equality and total liberty are the same. We must either embrace the law and achieve equal protection under the law, or else we must become so totally free that we are equal in that freedom. The equality of opportunity must be so great that we no longer argue over how to distribute resources because each individual person's productive potential would be so great.

     We must put aside our differences, and oppose fascism, centralization, and monopoly. We will not fight each other after they are defeated; but rather we will build our own communities as we please, whether together or separately, but always in peace.

     Bottom Unity now.

Written as two Facebook posts on February 22nd, 2021

Edited and Expanded on February 22nd, 2021

Published on February 22nd, 2021

The Economic Spectrum: Visualizing Politics in Terms of Ownership and Distribution

     The below image was created in order to depict political economy in purely economic terms. This is to say that the purpose of the image is to focus on the economic facets of each political theory, to such of a degree, that the two axes depicted are not economic and political, nor economic and social, but economic and economic.

     The left-vs.-right axis depicts "Who owns the means of production?" (that is, productive workplaces, farms, factories, etc.), while the up-down axis (which would normally depict political authority, centralization, or concentration of power) has been replaced with the question of "How are resources allocated?".

     The purpose of the image is to show that ownership and distribution can be done by different entities, and that mixed economies have been proposed. Mixed economic systems are unique in that they do not always believe that just because one group owns everything, it should necessarily allocate everything; and vice-versa.

     It would be worthwhile to ask the following questions while reading this image: "Does 100% of the wealth (or resources) really need to be owned by private entities, in order for us to say that capitalism exists? Which is more important to capitalists; that literally 100% of all resources be owned and distributed by private entities, or that private ownership exist at all? Wouldn't a mixed economy be more likely to satisfy everyone, than either a 100% private, 100% societal, or a 100% market-based system?

Click on the image,

(and, if necessary, open it in a new tab)

to see it in greater detail.

Explaining the axes in this image:

     Since the up-down axis usually shows high centralization of power and authority at the top, and decentralization and separation of powers at the bottom, it should be easy to understand why high levels of planning are at the top and low levels of planning are at the bottom.

     However, this does not necessarily imply that government planning is the only type of authoritarian planning. The fact that the top-right corner exists, shows that corporate planning can be just as oligarchical as government planning can be.

     What this means is that, although I have aligned and associated the axis of political planning with the axis of economic planning, they are not necessarily one and the same. It is debatable, and should always remain debatable, whether there is any intrinsic relationship between political, economic, and moral concentrations of power. While they often appear together, that doesn't mean that there aren't any political philosophies which support (for example) high amounts of social and economic control but low amounts of political control.

     Moreover, the fact that two economic axes exist, makes it even more difficult to depict economic positions alongside social and political positions (without resorting to using models consisting of three dimensions of more).

     Note:

     The above image, which I created, is based on several versions of the same type of image, which depict the same axes (ownership and distribution/allocation). Those images are available at the following links, and an example can be seen below.

http://www.differencebetween.net/miscellaneous/politics/difference-between-mixed-economy-and-market-socialism/

http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=https%3A%2F%2Fupload.wikimedia.org%2Fwikipedia%2Fcommons%2Fthumb%2F1%2F10%2FEconomic_Systems_Typology_%2528v4%2529.jpg%2F750px-Economic_Systems_Typology_%2528v4%2529.jpg&imgrefurl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.wikiwand.com%2Fen%2FEconomic_system&tbnid=cc-wWI_4RQgKZM&vet=10CAMQxiAoAGoXChMIiLC89qKr6QIVAAAAAB0AAAAAEAY..i&docid=H7EBpT5hC3kqDM&w=750&h=656&itg=1&q=market%20socialism&safe=off&ved=0CAMQxiAoAGoXChMIiLC89qKr6QIVAAAAAB0AAAAAEAY

http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=https%3A%2F%2Fimage.slideserve.com%2F1396589%2Ftraditional-economic-systems-l.jpg&imgrefurl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.slideserve.com%2Fryo%2Fglobal-marketing-chapter-2&tbnid=_rjOgedAEgTEfM&vet=10CBMQxiAoAmoXChMIiLC89qKr6QIVAAAAAB0AAAAAEAY..i&docid=SzTy8X6cx7QB7M&w=1024&h=768&itg=1&q=market%20socialism&safe=off&ved=0CBMQxiAoAmoXChMIiLC89qKr6QIVAAAAAB0AAAAAEAY

http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=https%3A%2F%2Fslideplayer.com%2Fslide%2F8666906%2F26%2Fimages%2F6%2FEconomic%2BSystems%2BMarket%2BCommand%2BResource%2BAllocation%2BPrivate%2BResource.jpg&imgrefurl=https%3A%2F%2Fslideplayer.com%2Fslide%2F8666906%2F&tbnid=8HkgCcDSAs4TbM&vet=10CAUQxiAoBWoXChMIiLC89qKr6QIVAAAAAB0AAAAAEAY..i&docid=FRS0cH7Hm09F7M&w=960&h=720&itg=1&q=market%20socialism&safe=off&ved=0CAUQxiAoBWoXChMIiLC89qKr6QIVAAAAAB0AAAAAEAY

     Readers wishing to learn more about the economic spectrum, should consider researching the following topics:

     1) The debate over whether the Soviet Union was practicing communism or "state monopoly capitalism";
     2) The debate over whether Lenin's "New Economic Policy" (N.E.P.) was market liberalization and whether it worked;
     3) The debate over whether the Nazi regime achieved any privatization;
     4) The debate over whether fascism is socialist or capitalist, or whether fascism is part of dirigism, a distinct economic system focusing on government's authority to direct the economic affairs of the nation; and
     5) The "market socialist" economics of Yugoslavia under Josip Broz Tito, and articulations of "left-wing market anarchism" which value high degrees of social ownership alongside mostly market-based systems of distribution.

Based on Notes Taken in Early May 2020

Image Created, and Explanation Written,

and Post Originally Published,

on May 11th, 2020

Resource Map for the March 2010 Rainbow Gathering Near Apalachicola, Florida

     The map below is based on data I and a friend collected at the March 2010 Rainbow Gathering near Apalachicola, Florida.

     Rainbow Gatherings are events in which "hippies" and people of alternative lifestyles come together to camp in state and national parks, set up mobile "kitchens", trade arts and crafts and other things, and enjoy festivities and one another's company.

     I collected this information to assist another camper in a student project of his. His aim was to collect information about the camping, kitchen, and trading locations on the campsite.

     You can learn more about Rainbow Gatherings and the Rainbow Family of Living Light by visiting www.welcomehome.org and www.welcomehere.org.

     Note: "Yippie! Joe's Reaganville" refers to the tent which was set up by the author. The term "Reaganville" is a neologism combining "Reagan" with "Hooverville" (a kind of makeshift home which became popular during the Great Depression).

Map created in February 2010

Published on October 9th, 2019

Thoughts on Education

     It matters what children are learning. But it also matters why they're learning it.

     Why do we send children to school? Is it to “compete in the economy” and “compete for jobs”? Well, whom are they supposed to compete against? What if they'd rather cooperate to get what they want? What if encouraging a culture of competition in school, and the economy, and sports, and our militant culture, is actually harming us, and we need a dose of cooperation to balance it out?

     Children will never learn anything – especially not critical and abstract thinking skills - as long as they are expected to learn most information in the context of “how can I use this information to climb the socioeconomic ladder?” After all, nobody should be willing to compete against their own neighbors, friends, and family for resources, for the bare scraps of survival. Yet many of us are, because of what we're taught in school, and how we're taught.

     In rich and poor districts alike, youth culture glorifies raking money in through whatever means necessary, and in an educational system which decreasingly teaches valuable practical hands-on skills, that could very well mean more young people becoming unskilled janitors and food service employees, failed rappers, drug dealers or prostitutes, or sellouts to the interests of exploitative companies.

     Education should be about transmitting knowledge and skills, and teaching students how to think critically, think for themselves, and independently investigating what other people are teaching them is the truth.

     Schools and economics textbooks assume and teach that there is not enough to go around, and that therefore government and markets need to distribute and allocate what scarce resources we have. However, the study of economics – and economizing (that is, saving money) – do not need to be applied to resources which are abundant, because they are not scarce, and there is enough of them go around. The resource in question might be fixed (as in the case of land), but fixedness does not necessarily guarantee that the resource is scarce.

     Between one-third and one-half of all food in America is thrown away, and without food waste there would be enough food to support 2.5 billion additional human beings. Not only is food not scarce; air, water, land, and many other of our basic needs, are abundant, or could easily become abundant or free (or at least cheaper) by removing government interventions and cronyist privileges.

     It makes absolutely no sense for a child to go hungry at school, and be expected to concentrate while hungry, because their parents have failed to keep current on their lunch payments. Teaching kids that we have to work and compete for everything we want, and that even food is a privilege that can be taken away from us, might prepare them for a cruel world, but it also normalizes such a cruel world in the process.

     Our society has chosen short-term financial gain over the real purpose of living: learning how to live a long, healthy, fulfilling life, doing so comfortably, and helping others to do the same. Nobody is going to care about truth over money, nor people over profits, until they stop prioritizing short-term gains, and keeping up with the Joneses, and frantically saving and stowing away for the future, refusing to share what they have earned with other people.

     As far as my thoughts on education policy go, education vouchers (just like housing vouchers) could serve as a popular multi-partisan compromise. Libertarians, progressive Democrats like Elizabeth Warren, progressive conservatives, conservative Democrats, and maybe even some neoliberals, could be convinced to support vouchers, if the proposal for it were triangulated right.

     During his 2016 campaign, Gary Johnson suggested that students engage in a year-long nationwide boycott of colleges and universities. This, he says, would increase colleges' demand for students (and their money), thus drastically lowering the price of tuition as soon as the boycott ends. Hopefully, this would lead to at least a few good years of low tuition, driven by people engaging in voluntary exchange through the market. Of course, that only works for privately funded schools, because publicly funded universities can only be fully boycotted once the flow of taxpayer money into them ends completely.

     The decline over the last few decades in the number of wood shops and auto shops in high schools concerns me. While I understand parents who say they're concerned that their children might get injured while taking wood or auto shop classes, acquiring hands-on skills is a valuable professional skill to have; especially now that trade skills are in higher demand. While students should not be pressured to take these classes, students who are enthusiastic about taking them should be asked to sign forms and waive the right to hold the school responsible for any injuries they sustain while taking them (but within reason, and with the schools' and teachers' responsibilities to ensure safe operation clearly defined).

     I personally spoke to a former high school shop teacher, who told me that his classroom equipment was removed without notice, after the course was terminated, on account of wealthy parents who were concerned that trade skills would lead their kids into “low-class jobs” like carpentry, electrician work, H.V.A.C., and plumbing. Of course, that is nonsense, because these are needed and valuable skills, there is no shame in providing them.

     Additionally, students introduced to such skills early could easily become interested in more advanced fields; specifically S.T.E.M. fields (science, technology, engineering, and math), which often pay even more than trade jobs. Getting more people into the trades, and into S.T.E.M. fields – and making sure that everyone owns, or at least has access to, means of production - could very well be the only way to protect our nation's future when it comes to jobs, technology, and industry.

     I hope that America's educational future is one which features the inexpensive and efficient transmission of knowledge and skills. It's not that teachers owe students an education; teachers and students each deserve a seat at the negotiation table when it comes to the costs involved. Online learning, distance learning, PDFs, e-catalogs, and other technologies have made education less expensive, and if universities expect to survive, then tuition must fall.

     Additionally, I hope that America's educational future features the dissemination of knowledge through decentralized learning. Little could be more effective at ensuring that such decentralization of knowledge becomes possible, than encouraging people to not only read, but to question what they read; to do their own research, verify facts independently, and come to their own conclusions.

Written on July 4th, 20th, 26th, and 27th, and August 1st through 4th, and 6th, 2018

Edited and Expanded on September 4th, 2018

Originally Published on September 4th, 2018