Back in ,
Karl Hess was a true
believer of the right. As a speechwriter, aide and ideologue to Presidential
Candidate Barry Goldwater, he packaged the slogan that may have helped lose
the campaign: “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. Moderation in
the pursuit of justice is no virtue.” , at
51, Hess is a welder. He now opposes war, government in general and most
U.S. Government
activities. He has become, in fact, an anarchist and a tax resister. As much
out of sheer angry cussedness as conviction, he admits, he refused to pay
the Internal Revenue Service a penny in ;
nor has he given them any money since then. The
IRS,
in response, slapped a 100% lien on any money Hess earns and any property or
savings he may have. So Hess lives mainly by barter, trading his welding
skill directly for food, clothing and shelter.
…and further along…
As Time Correspondent Arthur White learned when he
visited Hess recently, the man seems to be practicing the classical,
nonviolent anarchism he advocates. Hess owns little more than welding tools
and the blue denim clothes on his back. “I had a bicycle,” he admits, “but it
was stolen.”
He owes the
IRS
some $15,000, and to outwit them he has even sold the rights to
Dear America to a community organization for which
he works. “I can’t own anything,” he explains in a soft voice. “Those
IRS
people are like a gang of thugs.” … He exudes what a friend has described as
“the ethereal, inexplicable cheerfulness of a nun scrubbing floors.”
An argument I never expected to see explicitly uttered on
Cato Unbound showed up there last week.
You very likely own stolen goods. The gas in your car, the circuits in your
cell phone, the diamond in your ring, the chemicals in your lipstick or
shaving cream — even the plastic in your computer may be the product of
theft. Americans buy huge quantities of goods every day that are literally
stolen from some of the world’s poorest people.
What you say? For instance:
The lavishly tyrannical Teodoro Obiang of Equatorial Guinea has become richer
than Queen Elizabeth Ⅱ
by selling off the country’s oil and gas while killing or menacing anyone who
might try to stop him. Obiang is the kind of dictator who has not shied from
having himself proclaimed “the country’s God” on state-controlled radio, or
from having his guards slice the ears of political prisoners and smear their
bodies with grease to attract stinging ants. Obiang sells two-thirds of
Equatorial Guinea’s oil to American corporations like ExxonMobil and Hess,
and has recently spent 55 million of these petro-dollars to add a sixth
private jet to his fleet. His playboy son and heir (who earns $5,000 a year
as a government minister) prefers Lamborghinis, and recently spent $35
million on a house in Malibu. Meanwhile raw sewage runs through the streets
of the country’s capital, three quarters of the country’s people suffer from
malnutrition, and most citizens are forced to exist each day on what you can
buy in America with one dollar. Obiang does not need to worry about the
health or education of the population: he gets the money he needs to maintain
his despotic rule by allowing foreign corporations to set up offshore
platforms to extract the country’s oil.
Did the internet’s tubes get crossed? This doesn’t sound like Cato — it sounds
like Kevin Carson writing a guest
column for CommonDreams.
The natural resources that the strongmen and civil warriors sell off are
made into products sold in America. The money we spend on these products
goes back to pay for their Kalashnikovs, helicopter gunships, and fleets of
private jets. Paul Collier estimates that 290 million of the world’s “bottom
billion” people are caught in what he calls “the resource trap.” Millions of
these poor people must watch helplessly as their countries’ resources are
sent overseas while our money flows in to the men with guns.
How bad is the problem of stolen resources? The
U.S. government
uses the seven-point Freedom House scales to rate each nation on how much
control citizens have over the those who hold power in their country. The
very worst countries — the “sevens” — are places like Burma, Equatorial
Guinea, Libya, North Korea, Somalia, Sudan and Zimbabwe. Taking these very
worst countries as the places where the people could not possibly be
authorizing the dictators and civil warriors to sell off their country’s
resources, we can measure the amounts of stolen resources that enter America
each year. By these official
U.S. criteria
over 600 million barrels of oil — more than one barrel in eight — have been taken illegitimately from their countries of origin. Stolen oil
may be in your car’s gas tank right now. Stolen oil might have been used to
make the computer mouse in your hand.
The author’s solution to this problem strikes me as unlikely, but I’d enjoy
seeing what would happen if it were tried: “to enforce property rights
directly: to take legal action in
U.S. jurisdictions
against the middlemen who trade Americans’ dollars to the worst regimes
in exchange for stolen resources. This means taking corporations like
ExxonMobil and Hess to court for receiving stolen goods.” To supplement
this, he advises attaching tariffs to imports from countries that use such
stolen resources as raw materials for their exports, and using this money
to reimburse the people the resources were stolen from.
