How you can resist funding the government →
other tax resistance strategies →
DIY
Jan Lundberg reports back from a DIY festival in Berkeley:
Skill sharing, publications, and human-to-human networking were in abundance, along with music and a vegan lunch supplied by Food Not Bombs.
The event was free, and it was easy to participate.
Bartering and education occurred with reckless abandon — a veritable descent into anarchy in contradiction of the holy free market’s prerogative to convert all common space into privatized, fenced production-zones for private gain.
There was Berkeley Liberation Radio (a pirate station), workshops on identifying local plants (cultivated and wild), as well as zine binding.
Information from women on how to control their bodies, in this mass-merchandised, industrial-medicine society, and tracts on enlightened and liberated loving, abounded.
There was no hooliganism or violence, nor police (in uniform, anyway).
Hundreds of people came and exchanged information and saw old friends and made new ones.
There was no boozing or pot smoking.
After all, this was serious business!
A DIY festival sounds like a wonderful idea for promoting self-reliance, barter and mutual aid — all ways of taking more of our lives away from the government’s tax treadmill.
If there isn’t one in your neighborhood, there’s certainly room for one — do it yourself!
This has led even some dyed-in-the-wool liberals to wonder why we keep governments around if they can’t even provide the minimum of coordinated relief and disaster-management.
It’s gonna be a lot harder to hate big bad corporations like Wal-Mart now that they seem to be more generous with their money and more concerned about their workers and customers than governments are with our tax dollars and their citizens.
Fortunately, some people learned from that when the shit goes down, it’s a good time to ignore the people with badges and titles.
The voice of authority told the people in the towers to stay put — some of the ones who thought for themselves instead survived to tell us about it.
That lesson has been reinforced a thousand times since.
The teen driver, Jabbar Gibson, 18, said he had never driven a bus before but wanted to save people.
“If it wasn’t for him, we’d still be in New Orleans on the Gulf,” bus passenger Randy Nathan said.
“He got the bus for us.”
Authorities allowed the renegade passengers inside the Astrodome but Gibson could find himself in trouble after taking the school bus.
Another account tells of “the pirate bus crew that seemed to come in and out of town through back roads that were quite dry as opposed to news accounts that water compromised all land rescue efforts” and wonders “If [they] could privately engineer a rescue effort to bring in ten buses, then how is it possible that the city and state could not organize a fleet of 100 buses to rescue all the people left behind?”
If anything good comes out of this, it will be to remind us that in times of crisis, we are better off looking to each other than foolishly waiting for our rulers to help us.
And maybe, rather than waiting for the crisis to come, we might be wise to ask in what ways we unwisely rely on government today.
Over at the always-entertaining Boing Boing, Douglas Rushkoff says that the best response an enterprising do-it-yourselfer might make to the current economic chaos would be to Print Your Own Money.
We think of the economy and its rules as given circumstances, when they are actually constructions.
In brief, the money we use is just one kind of money.
Invented in the Renaissance, and protected with laws banning other kinds of money, it has very particular biases that lead to almost inevitable outcomes.
Following this is an interesting overview sketch of the history of the development of the government currency monopoly, and its consequences.
Then, his prescription:
If we can adopt what we Boingers might call the “Happy Mutant Approach” to this crisis… this is not an entirely hopeless situation.
Yes, corporations may lose the ability to keep us employed as the banking investment they depend on to operate dries up.
But this corporate activity was always extractive in nature, getting (or, historically, forcing) people to buy mass-produced, and nationally distributed food and other goods that were once produced locally.
The collapse of centrally controlled commerce and currency simply creates an opportunity for local commerce and currency to revive.
For people to learn to work and live together on a human, local scale — as the original free market advocate, Adam Smith, actually suggested.
Admittedly, this would be a painful transition for many — but it’s better than maintaining dependence on a fiscal system designed from the start to turn people and communities into extractable corporate assets.
(Think about that the next time you’re called up to “human resources.”)
Whether or not we’ve had time to fully embrace the Craft/Maker/cyberpunk/Boing ethos, our ability to provide for ourselves and one another directly, locally, even socially instead of entirely through centralized commerce, will determine how well we can navigate the near future.
Money can be just as open source as any other operating system.
It used to be.
The other day I was out doing some errands and I noticed a nail in the bike path.
I’d been working on my “one-man revolution” post and thought about how folks of various political bents might advise me as to my civic responsibilities on such an occasion:
conservative
Call 911 and report that some criminal is throwing nails in the streets (probably a Mexican).
liberal
Write a letter to the editor calling on the city to hire more unionized street sweepers.
progressive
Collect petitions to put a measure on the ballot that would mandate that all nails sold in the city be manufactured from biodegradable recycled cardboard.
libertarian
Try to explain to people that if we privatized the roads, things like this wouldn’t happen, as the owners of the roads would have a profit motive to keep the roads clean of any debris that might expose them to liability or cause their customers to leave them for a competitor’s better-maintained roads.
one-man revolutionary
Stop and pick up the nail.
Some bits and pieces from here and there:
A new website called earthineer is designed for the do-it-yourself, homesteading sorts… and it is developing a barter & marketplace feature that looks like it could be very useful to those of us trying to move as much as possible into the solidarity economy.
(ᔥ Claire Wolfe)
Some families in Sligo and in Carlow, Ireland, barricaded their neighborhoods to prevent the installation of water meters that are going to be facilitating a new stealth tax on water.
