The Common Good

By Puck T. Smith


Scene: A city street. A woman in a business suit is standing at a crosswalk waiting for the light to change as light traffic crosses the intersection. Diagonally across the intersection a destitute homeless man is huddled in a disheveled pile of filthy blankets. The are a few other people walking in the area. As she waits a large sedan pulls to the curb nearby. A well dressed man get out of the back seat and approaches her as another man sits at the wheel. 


Well dressed man, approaching the woman: Excuse me, miss.


The woman, looking up at him: Yes?


Well dressed man: Do you see that poor man over there?


Woman: Yes.


Well dressed man: It's a shame.


Woman, moving to cross the street as the light changes: I suppose it is.


Well dressed man, entering the crosswalk with her: Something should be done to help him.


Woman: It is very sad.


Well dressed man: Indeed. To think a society as rich as ours would have people in such wretched conditions.


Woman: Yes, it does say something about us.


Well dressed man, as they step up on the onto the curb from the crosswalk: I glad to hear you say so. I represent an organization dedicated to addressing the problems like these that plague society and we need your help.


Woman: I don't understand.


Well dressed man: Well, we have an important program to improve the situation, but it requires a great deal of money to implement and administer.


Woman: Well, if your asking me for a contribution I'm afraid I just don't have any money to spare.


Well dressed man: Miss, I need $100 from you.


Woman: Well, I don't have it so please excuse me.


She turns to walk away, but the man steps into her path.


Well dressed man: Miss, give me $100.


Woman: I told you, I don't have it. Now get out of my way.


Well dressed man, continuing to block her way: Miss if you don't have the money on you I will be happy to give you a ride to your bank to make a withdrawal. It's for a good cause.


The woman tries to dodge around him, but the car the man had gotten out of pulled up to the curb beside them. The driver opens the rear passenger door from the inside and the man begins to manhandle her into the car. The struggle for a moment and then the man pulls out a large pistol, points it at her face and cocks it. 


Well dressed man: Why are you making this so difficult. Don't resist. Do you hate poor people or something?


The woman screams. A few people nearby look up, but do nothing as he pushes her into car, slams the
slams shut as the car speeds off. The woman is a state near shock. 


Well dressed man: You should not resist, it will only make it worse. Why do you not want to help your fellow man? Have you no compassion?


Woman, with anger and fear in her voice: Where are you taking me?


Well dressed man: To your bank to make a withdrawal.


Woman, with an expression of panic on her face: How do you know what bank I use? Who are you?


Well dressed man: We know a great deal about you. As to who I am, it is not important. Our organization does not draw attention to individual members. Who we are is not important. All we asked it that we judged by our actions and results.


Woman: This is wrong, you have no right to do this to me.


Well dressed man: Miss, it is not a matter of rights, I have the authority.


Woman: What authority?


Well dressed man: I was appointed by the organization's Executive Committee who were duly elected by the members and supporters of our organization. Our General Assembly has authorized them to collect money for the poor and the have given me the responsibility to execute their decision.


Woman: But I had no part in that. I'm not part of your organization and I'm certainly not a supporter.


Well dressed man: Miss, because you have chosen not to participate does not relieve you of your obligations as outlined in the General Assembly's by-laws. Perhaps you'd care to change your mind, pay your share and become a part of the process.


The woman looks at him, speechless. 


After a few minutes, the car pulls over to the curb in front of a branch of the woman's bank. He opens the door and steps to the curb with his pistol still drawn. A few people nearby watch curiously, but none approach. He motions her to get out of the car. She slowly steps out and stands by the car. He motions with the pistol toward the entrance to the bank. Suddenly she kicked him in the crotch with all her might. He doubles over and she runs down the street. 


Well dressed man, raising his pistol, even as he is still bent over: Stop! Don't make me shoot!


She continues running. He steadies his aim and fires the pistol. The bullet hits the woman in the middle of her back. It explodes out the front of her chest in an eruption of blood and tissue. She falls face forward to the ground, dead instantly. 


Well dressed man, pulling himself upright: It's her fault, she made me do it. She should not have resisted the common good.

The Facts Driving the Financial Crises

Off to check the progress of the revolution.

Pictures: http://www.flickr.com/photos/inibo/sets/72157627848800404/with/6224826852/

Fort Knox

Load the Boat.

Kablam!

Mutual Aid Alert!

This from my friend Jim Davidson's Facebook notes.

My friend Lori Remp lives in Spring township, Berks county, Pennsylvania. That's quite near Reading, which is not terribly far northwest from Philadelphia. Lori prefers to keep her children in the Wilson school district, though possibly that's a court order related to the divorce.

She and her two daughters have been suffering verbal, mental, emotional, and physical abuse from her ex-husband. Apparently he is currently paying about $620 a month for child support. Naturally, it is impossible to keep bills paid and feed three people with this amount of money.

Lori has been suffering severe depression since November of last year. She needs emotional support, and a sense that she is going to find her way through.

Lori writes, "I cry almost everyday, and I feel so hopeless some days, because I know I can't do it on my own, and yet I cant work right now!!! ... It is sooooo frustrating!!! ... I pity my girls bc all they do is see me cry, and then they either get mad at me, or it brings them down too!!!!"

Also, her car is broken down, so she needs help finding better transportation.

In the area of self-help, Lori has been trying to sell a garage full of her furniture, but Craig's List is not generating any results. So if you know anyone who might help her get paid for the furniture, that would be a blessing.

Obviously, Lori's situation is not the typical "mutual aid response team" case of official oppression or abuse of office. She isn't fighting the courts, though her ex-husband has threatened to take her back to court over custody. (I think that would actually be a blessing to her, since she would likely keep custody and gain further child support.) However, her needs are simple enough that anyone can help out.

I would like to get a ChipIn fundraiser started for her. Of course, I continue to not use PayPal, so I won't simply go start that thing. But if someone reading this page would do so, that would be a beginning.

Anyone in the state of Pennsylvania (or is it a commonwealth?) would be very welcome to contact Lori directly, or through me. I'd like to show this person some of the love we share in the work we do.

Plane and simple

I am not "we"

I am not "we." I did not incur the debt. I do not owe one single cent of it. My signature is on none of their fraudulent instruments. It is their problem and they are trying to fix it by destroying what little value is left in the US dollar--and all other currencies for that matter. There is nothing you nor I nor anyone else is going to be able to do about it.

Call me a doomsayer, but I am convinced it is at most a matter of a few months before shit is really going to start coming unglued. This is the culmination of 100 years of either colossal ignorance or diabolic intent (or some malignant symbiosis of the two). There is no one in any position of power who has any clue about how to manage the Frankenstein clusterfuck of fractional reserve central fiat banking at the exponential culmination of compound interest.

All paper is on the verge of reverting to its inherent worth. I intend to be completely out of it by the end of next week with the exception of day-to-day living from my paycheck. My money will weigh a lot, shine and be well hidden.

What You Don't Know Is Killing Your Neighbours

What You Don't Know Is Killing Your Neighbours
by Jim Davidson on Thursday, May 19, 2011 at 3:43am

Economists know about a problem that you cannot solve. It is called “the calculation problem.” The reason you cannot solve this problem, calculating the market clearing price of every good in the world on every market, is because you do not have the necessary information. The nature of the calculation problem is that you *cannot* have the information, because it isn’t available. Market clearing prices are discovered by buyers and sellers in free, unregulated markets, all the time, by the choices of those in the market.

As is often the case with these sorts of things, it is actually worse, in reality, than you might imagine. My friend from Colorado Springs, Keith Hamburger, writes, "The calculation problem is almost certainly even more intractable than presented by Ludwig von Mises. He wasn't aware of the modern mathematics of recursive feedback systems known as chaos/complexity theory when he did the majority of his writing, as it hadn't been developed yet. With every individual having an infinite number of things they can value, and each of those things being infinitely variable and only ordinally measurable, and their values changing moment by moment, and every action or bit of knowledge of billions of individuals influencing the values of each and every other individual, it is absolutely impossible to predict what is the 'correct answer.' There are not enough atoms in the universe to build a computer that is capable of modeling economics."

You may imagine that you are smarter than me, and I’m quite willing to grant it for purposes of discussion. You may believe you are smarter than everyone else, and I grant that, too. But the smartest woman in the world cannot know the needs and wants and temporary emergencies of seven billion people. You cannot know what you need to know to solve the calculation problem.

Yet you demand that we all turn to the government to force our neighbours not to buy things you don’t want them to buy and not to sell things you don’t want them to sell. You demand regulations and prohibitions, you demand price controls, you demand quality controls, and you shriek and gnash your teeth.

It is tiresome. Did prohibiting abortion work? No, it failed. It failed to prevent abortion. It also prevented women from getting abortions in clean clinics, and put them in back alleys being butchered by amateurs.

Did prohibiting alcohol work? No. It failed. It failed to prevent alcohol consumption. Carrie Nation’s dream of a country where women were not beaten senseless by drunk husbands never came to be. Prohibition made bathtub gin contaminated with lead (because it is cheaper to make a still with lead pipes) widely available. It made organised crime much bigger. It justified the existence of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and other national police and espionage forces. But it failed.

Does prohibiting marijuana work? No. It fails. It is currently in the process of once again failing in Montana where dim-witted legislators have hit upon the idea of making criminals out of at least 28,000 of the roughly 30,000 marijuana prescription card holders they demanded be registered in a previous law, after the people of Montana voted 62% in favour (in 2004) of a legalisation scheme. Will they prevent weirdness, as one legislator at a Republican party "Reagan-Lincoln" event recently schemed? No. They will prevent orderly trade and commerce, they will drive the production and use of marijuana underground, they will turn over to federal authorities all the names and addresses they so cruelly demanded, they will gleefully build taxpayer-funded cages to put their neighbours in and gleefully distribute federal block grants to the states to fight the "war on drugs" and with greed all over their chins eagerly accept their cut of civil asset forfeiture money from robbing their neighbours at gunpoint.

And you never learn. You never learn that the government is not real, it is only a fiction. You never learn that the men and women who work for the government are simply men and women. They aren’t superhuman. They have no magic wands. They cannot know enough information to solve the calculation problem.

You demand that we all pay more for everything because you insist on regulations. Well, each American household pays about $15,000 more per year due to regulations, a recent study says. (Cite: http://www.ncpa.org/sub/dpd/index.php?Article_ID=19869 ) On top of that, each American household pays roughly a third of their income in income taxes and payroll taxes, plus another ten percent in other federal taxes, plus another ten percent or more in state and local taxes. Every American would be two to three times wealthier with much less government, and the cost of everything in the market would be reduced with less regulatory and tax burden.

But you don’t care. You don’t care because you demand that the government solve all your problems. You don’t care because you are smarter than everyone, and you know better than your neighbours. You don't care because what you do care about is *important* and what I care about, free people having freedom, doesn't matter to you.

So your government puts 2 million Americans in cages every year for non-violent non-crimes. Your government incarcerates more individuals in total than any other nation in the world and a higher percentage of its population than every other country in the world. Your government tortures people to death. Your government detains people without charges. Your government searches private homes without warrants, without probable cause. Your police and federal agents plant evidence, lie, cheat, steal, rape, murder, and you don't care. Your president has authorised the execution of American citizens without trial. Your president has declared, as commander in chief, at least one soldier (Bradley Manning) guilty without benefit of a trial.

You don’t like the free market because you are a hateful, violent state supremacist. You don’t want free neighbours to express differences of opinion, you want to force them into line.

People are orderly when it pleases them to be orderly. But they aren’t always orderly.

The question is: are you willing to wait for the spontaneity of order by choice, or do you insist upon the calamity of order by force?

And if you force everyone into line, then you get to answer two more questions: Who does your state kill? Why?

The above essay was first written as a comment to a socialistic state supremacist environmentalist on some blog somewhere. Personally, I blame Kent McManigal for putting me on that track. I have above acknowledged Keith Hamburger for the chaos theory comment. While making acknowledgements, I should like to thank Jennifer Lewis for her work researching the $15,000 per household article. If you people were on Facebook, instead of reading this Web 1.0 Libertarian Enterprise, you might like to join our group there.