John

Since we last communicated, I got a motorcycle, wrecked it, swore off riding motorcycles, I got a second job and left it 3 months later, my grandfather died, my family took a trip to North Carolina for his funeral, I got a car, I started hanging out with a friend who I never thought I'd have anything to do with again, she moved to Ohio a month later, and I've started attending the local Unitarian Universalist church (which is where my meditation group meets. So I've had a lot of ups and downs.

More things that have happened lately:  
I've started to explore different wines.  I like making spaghetti, using some in the sauce, and having a glass with dinner. 
The A.C. at our apartment had been giving us a lot of trouble, but the unit was replaced.  I spent a night at my parents place, and broke my cell phone while moving a couch the next day. 
My friend Aaron is going on a 4 month road trip.  He is also leaving the job he has had as long as I've known him (5 years?).
I've also had some personal things on my mind.

Nowhere has the coercive and parasitic nature of the State been more clearly limned than by the great late nineteenth-century German sociologist, Franz Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer pointed out that there are two and only two mutually exclusive means for man to obtain wealth. One, the method of production and voluntary exchange, the method of the free market, Oppenheimer termed the "economic means"; the other, the method of robbery by the use of violence, he called the "political means." The political means is clearly parasitic, for it requires previous production for the exploiters to confiscate, and it subtracts from instead of adding to the total production in society. Oppenheimer then proceeded to define the State as the "organization of the political means" -- the systematization of the predatory process over a given territorial area.

[Franz Oppenheimer, The State (New York: Vanguard Press, 1926), pp. 24-27 and passim.]

Murray Rothbard, The Libertarian Manifesto 

Manorialism, commonly, is recognized to have been founded by robbery and usurpation; a ruling class established itself by force, and then compelled the peasantry to work for the profit of their lords. But no system of exploitation,including capitalism, has ever been created by the action of a free market. Capitalism was founded on an act of robbery as massive as feudalism. It has been sustained to the present by continual state intervention to protect its system of privilege, without which its survival is unimaginable.

The current structure of capital ownership and organization of production in our so-called "market" economy, reflects coercive state intervention prior to and extraneous to the market. From the outset of the industrial revolution, what is nostalgically called "laissez-faire" was in fact a system of continuing state intervention to subsidize accumulation, guarantee privilege, and maintain work discipline. 

Kevin Carson , The Iron Fist Behind The Invisible Hand -Corporate Capitalism As A State Guaranteed System Of Privilege


Mr. Coke said to Mr. Mayor, "You know we got a process like Ice T's hair.
We put up the fund for your election campaign
And, oh um, waiter can you bring the champagne.
Our real estate firms said opportunities arousing
To make some condos out of low-income housing
Immediately we need some media heat
To say that gangs run the street and then we bring in the police
Harrasing everybody till they look inebriated
When we buy the land mother****** will appreciate it
Dont worry about the Urban League or Jesse Jackson
My man that owns Marlboros
Donated a fat sum"

Fat Cats, Bigga Fish - The Coup 

cross posted to: 

libertarianism
left_libertaria

All right Hal, here's that journal entry you wanted.  I went to see Municipal Waste and Iron Lung last week with my friend Hal.  I showed at Hal and Michelle's, had a brief conversation with Michelle, and we headed off.  Shortly after we got there Iron Lung went on.  I hadn't seen them before, but I'm not sure if I'd heard them before.  They were really good.  There are things about their sound that people who different tastes in heavy music could latch on to.  Municipal Waste set up and started to play.  They had a big banner behind them, they had a good sense of the fun in their music, and were just plain awesome.   It was great to see an 80's crossover style band (Suicidal Tendencies, DRI, MOD, etc,) live.  This sort of stuff is some of the first non-mainstream music I heard when I was in middle school.  I got in the pit during the first Municipal Waste song, and

"I've never noticed anybody who's a libertarian and an atheist saying that the way we should get rid of religion is to become the pope and then dissolve the Catholic Church." -Stefan Molyneux

Human beings can fly.  AWESOME!

found  here.

"These large corporations have the internal characteristics of a planned economy. Information flow is systematically distorted up the chain of command, by each rung in the hierarchy telling the next one up what it wants to hear. And each rung of management, based on nonsensical data (not to mention absolutely no direct knowledge of the production process) sends irrational and ass-brained decisions back down the chain of command. The only thing that keeps large, hierarchical organizations going is the fact that the productive laborers on the bottom actually know something about their own jobs, and have enough sense to ignore policy and lie about it so that production can stagger along despite the interference of the bosses.

When a senior manager decides to adopt a "reform" or to "improve" the process in some way, he typically bases his decision on the glowing recommendations of senior managers in other organizations who have adopted similar policies. Of course, those senior managers have no real knowledge themselves of the actual results of the policy, because their own information is based on filtered data from below. Not only does the senior management of an organization live in an imaginary world as a result of the distorted information from below; its imaginary world is further cut off from reality by the professional culture it shares with senior management everywhere else. “…in a rigid hierarchy, nobody questions orders that seem to come from above, and those at the very top are so isolated from the actual work situation that they never see what is going on below.”12

The root of the problem, in all such cases, is that individual human beings can only make optimally efficient decisions when they internalize all the costs and benefits of their own decisions. In a large hierarchy, the consequences of the irrational and misinformed decisions of the parasites at the top are borne by the people at the bottom who are actually doing the work. And the people doing the work, who both know what's going on and suffer the ill effects of decisions by those who don't know what's going on, have no direct control over the decision-making."

-Kevin Carson, Studies In Mutualist Political Economy (In print: page 322, online: http://www.mutualist.org/id88.html )

The book: http://www.mutualist.org/id47.html

Journal Of Libertarian Studies' Symposium Issue on Studies in Mutualist Political Economy: http://www.mises.org/jlsDisplay.asp?action=sort&volume=20&number=1&submit=View

( My thoughts on this quote )

Hi, I'm John, and this is my new journal.