Politics as a Dead End, Part One

Politics as a Dead End, Part One: "C4SS
Center for a Stateless Society
building awareness of the market anarchist alternative

* Home
* About Market Anarchism
* About the Center
* Find Your Philosophy Quiz
* Press Room
* Support the Center

Politics as a Dead End, Part One
Posted by Kevin Carson on May 21, 2010 in Commentary • 5 comments

When I see the same lesson reinforced by two unrelated stories, I have to wonder if the universe isn’t trying to tell me something. It’s called “synchronicity.” Two very different incidents, the BP oil spill and Rand Paul’s comments on discrimination by private businesses, clicked together in my mind as illustrations of the same principle.

First, in his reaction to the BP oil disaster, Paul Krugman comes very close — but not quite — to stating the libertarian argument against attempting libertarian reform through the state. He begins by quoting the standard libertarian argument that the positive goals of the regulatory state could just as easily be achieved through tort law: if there were a vigorous common law liability regime with no state-imposed limits on third-party liability, investors wouldn’t put money into enterprises without robust liability insurance. And the insurance companies would have powerful economic incentives to impose strong inspection regimes on insured companies to make sure they didn’t, say, cut corners on safety measures to cut off oil flow in the event of a mishap on an offshore drilling platform.

The problem, Krugman says, is that the state did cap liability, so this economic incentive doesn’t exist. And captive politicians are now refusing to raise the liability cap, because it would impose such prohibitive costs that fewer people would be drilling for oil. When a politically powerful industry is demonstrated to be incapable of making a profit without the government socializing its costs, you suddenly hear a lot of crickets chirping among those formerly vocal “free market” advocates on the Right. And, Krugman argues, this is a telling argument against the free market agenda: the prerequisites for a properly functioning free market regime are politically impossible. Hence: “If libertarianism requires incorruptible politicians to work, it’s not serious.”

But Krugman also misses something: how is it that free market reforms like restoring vigorous tort liability are impracticable because they require incorruptible institutions, but the same critique doesn’t apply to reforms that require strenthening the regulatory state? Are “progressive” regulations made by legislators from a different species than those who refuse to make the oil companies accountable for the harm they cause? There’s a large body of literature suggesting they aren’t: that regulations usually reflect, in large part, the interests of the regulated industry.

That general principle applies to some of the most popular regulations among “progressives”: for example, the 1906 Meat Inspection Act. As recounted in detail by Gabriel Kolko, in The Triumph of Conservatism, the primary political force behind that legislation was the big meatpackers. And that same general pattern seems to prevail throughout the historical periods that “progressives” consider their Golden Age: the regulatory state wasn’t something imposed on big business from outside, against its will, but rather the creation of the regulated industries themselves acting through THEIR state.

If Krugman’s point is that it’s politically impossible to create a just free market civil liability regime that holds corporate malefactors accountable, because the political pull of the affected industries prevents it, you’d think it would suggest some implications to Krugman about how the sausage is made in the regulatory system he prefers.

Krugman actually hits on the precise reason why attempting libertarian free market reforms through the state is an uphill struggle: the state, by its very nature, is a tool to be used by corrupt interests, and they will always have the political advantage over those who attack them. Whatever effort we make to remove subsidies and protections from politically favored corporations, the final form of any legislation will reflect in large part the influence of those corporations on the legislative process.

For market anarchists, therefore, the way to achieve free market reform is to treat the state as irrelevant. The most productive thing we can do is build the counter-institutions for an alternative society despite the state, while state capitalism dies from its own internal contradictions.

To be continued.

* Share/Bookmark

C4SS Research Associate Kevin Carson is a contemporary mutualist author and individualist anarchist whose written work includes Studies in Mutualist Political Economy and Organization Theory: An Individualist Anarchist Perspective, both of which are freely available online. Carson has also written for such print publications as The Freeman: Ideas on Liberty and a variety of internet-based journals and blogs, including Just Things, The Art of the Possible, the P2P Foundation and his own Mutualist Blog.
5 comments
» Comments RSS Feed

1. AnarchoJesse on May 22, 2010, 2:57 pm:

How do you reconcile this post with your past advocacy of using the devices of the State (i.e. voting, participation in the political process) in order to create disorder within their system. If we understand that the state is irrelevant, wouldn’t it behoove us to devote our energy to more and more towards the development of counter-institutions? I guess what I’m trying to understand is if this is an indication in a shift of your views concerning using the political process, which I always understood to be a sort of “run interference” advocacy rather than a more absolutist position of refusing even to vote, which to me this article would logically conclude by way of simply measuring the effort needed to actually be politically aware and active. Contrasted with direct action, political effort is arguably more wasteful for the fact that no actual return for the effort is made after getting involved. Or do you believe that these views are not exclusionary to each other and can be synthesized?
2. Nathan on May 23, 2010, 2:30 pm:

I think Krugman is, like you say, failing in his use of logic. He wouldn’t be the only person who has trouble grasping the vision of a world where politicians have been made superfluous. To me it seems like another reason why “Libertarianism” is a corrupted term similar to “Capitalism”, because it is twisted to mean something different depending on who is talking. I start to think that you almost have to redefine what terms mean in almost everything you write, because the army of straw men is just waiting to be mobilised.

Is this a problem with English, or is intellectual sloppiness just too easy to get away with?
3. ricketson on May 24, 2010, 12:11 pm:

“I start to think that you almost have to redefine what terms mean in almost everything you write, because the army of straw men is just waiting to be mobilised.

Is this a problem with English, or is intellectual sloppiness just too easy to get away with?”

Nathan, I think that this is a general problem with communication. When words are used in a casual manner to describe complicated (and poorly delimited) concepts, and the people involved in a conversation have different frames of reference, this is almost inevitable.

In technical communication, writers go to great lengths to make sure that words are clearly defined…often saying “I’m using this term in the same way that Joe Smith used it” (then citing the paper where J.S. defined the term). Technical writing relies on everyone sharing the same background and understanding the context within which the word is interpreted. Often different fields use the same term, but with different meanings–and it isn’t always clear to a casual reader that the term is being used with a slightly different meaning.

Technical communications are very carefully thought out, and typically edited several times before publication to make sure that everything is clear and precise…and there can still be confusion.
4. ricketson on May 24, 2010, 12:25 pm:

AnarchoJesse,

“simply measuring the effort needed to actually be politically aware and active. ”

Without trying to speak for Kevin, I think that there are two levels of political activity/awareness. At the lower level, you are aware of the big issues of the day; at the higher level, you are aware of the politicians and their record. At the lower level, you talk with your peers, at the higher level, you talk to the politicians.

I think that the lower level of awareness and activity is beneficial even outside of electoral activism. It provides the context within which people organize to change society. I think that electoral activism can even contribute to that lower-level discussion, by gaining attention for an issue, and providing a framework for networking with other activists. You just have to be careful not to get sucked into the partisanship or legalistic mentality of elections.
5. Kevin Carson on May 24, 2010, 1:00 pm:

Anarcho-Jesse: I’ve got no problem with people who engage in political action to increase the scope of freedom–and if they succeed in (say) getting pot decriminalized in some jurisdiction, more power to them. I’d even go so far as to say political activism is a lot more feasible at the local level. But in general, I think going after enforcement capabilities and developing means of circumvention, building counter-institutions, etc., is a lot more cost-effective. At the federal level in particular, implementing a vision of deregulation coupled with an end to subsidies and protections isn’t just an uphill battle; it’s positively sisyphean, because that rock’s going to keep making it almost to the summit and then rolling back down all the way to the bottom again.

And for libertarians as such, the best division of labor is probably just to publicize the information about corporate welfare and its effects (or law enforcement abuses) as effectively as possible, and leave it to issue-oriented groups who aren’t libertarian per se to do the lobbying and organizing, the same way Woodward and Bernstein just published the story and then sat back to enjoy the show (we’re back to stigmergy again). Which dovetails pretty well with what ricketson says, I think. The best way to leverage voter sentiment in scaling back the state is probably just to put your main effort into changing the culture and increasing the total level of friction politicians have to work against to get something implemented. There are some things the state just can’t get away with, mainly as a result of the general political culture, and the more things we can shift into that category (as opposed to how deftly Bush et al shifted torture, indefinite detention, etc. out of it) the better.

Nathan, I think the problem is just blinders–the stuff that doesn’t even register on Krugman’s radar. He’s effectively arguing against how sick you’ll get if you eat the mushrooms with white sauce or pesto sauce, but if someone suggested maybe it’s the mushrooms, he’d say “That’s crazy talk!” Judging the effectiveness of state action by the same standard you use to evaluate voluntary alternatives just isn’t conceivable to them. The fact that the regulations are made by the same corrupt human beings who won’t remove the liability caps, that regulations are made by the same fallible human beings who’d be carrying out the voluntary alternatives–that doesn’t even register in their consciousness.

If you Google Rad Geek’s “Reasons for Counter-Economic Optimism,” he says it pretty well.

Leave a comment

You must be registered to post comments.

*
Keep up with the Center
Subscribe in a reader
Join our Facebook group
Follow us on Twitter
C4SS Audio Feed
*
Supporter Updates by Email

Enter your email address:

Delivered by FeedBurner
*
Free Content
Take our content, please!

All content on this site is available for republishing under a Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution license.

We want you to copy and distribute this stuff as widely as possible. That's what we're here for!

You don't have to ask our permission. That's what the Creative Commons licensing is for. Everybody has permission already. Just do it.

If you want to be nice, you can include a link back to us, but the only requirement is to provide attribution to the author and C4SS.
*
Archives
*
Meta
o Register
o Log in
o Entries RSS
o Comments RSS
o WordPress.org
*
[NetworkedBlogs]
Follow this blog

Copyleft 2010 Center for a Stateless Society | Articles (RSS) | Comments (RSS)


- Sent using Google Toolbar"