How you can resist funding the government → other forms our opposition can take → Temporary Autonomous Zones and such

Jesse Walker, over at The Perpetual Three-Dot Column, discusses the dilemma that radical critics of government have when coming up with strategies. Without political power, how can you hope for results? But to get political power means to compromise and in some sense become the enemy you’re trying to defeat.

I prefer a different approach. Albert Jay Nock distinguished social power, rooted in the voluntary institutions of society, from state power, rooted in coercion. Both coexist in our culture, each one waxing as the other wanes; the libertarian’s goal is to maximize the former at the expense of the latter. Washington is not always the best place to do this. The most promising transformations in America over the last few decades have taken place not when state officials voluntarily relinquished some of their authority, but when social institutions either seized new ground or (more often) crept onto it while no one was watching. Examples range from the homeschooling revolution, which achieved tremendous victories while school choice legislation was at best sputtering forward, to the various DIY alternatives eating away at licensed professions from building to broadcasting. Useful libertarian activism is a matter of defending the zones of free action that exist and assisting the people who are trying to push them further.

To his list, I’d add the internet, which has allowed people to reach mass audiences — independent of government licensing (unlike television and radio, for instance), and also much less dependent on large hunks of money (unlike television, radio, and print publishing).

This really has changed things for the better. People are much more able now to choose their own information filters, or indeed to be their own information filterers — there is less reason to rely on sanitized versions of reality, since non-sanitized versions are more up-to-date, less-biased, more-informative, and more easily-verified.

Imagine trying to implement such an important and beneficial social change through legislation, or to force it in any way by means of the government? Imagine the internet as designed by a “Democratization of Media Act” or a “Department of Public Information Access.”

It would never have survived as a free public space if politicians had designed it to be one. It’s only because of the lucky accident that the society that makes up the internet arose on its own and chose its own paths that it’s stayed free and stolen the talking stick from the official news speakers.

At this point I’ll put in a plug for the Electronic Frontier Foundation which is doing great work “defending the zones of free action that exist and assisting the people who are trying to push them further” on-line.

I don’t mean to gush in this oh-so- way about the Internet, but I’m so impressed with the way getting news has changed. It used to be that you’d hear about some event or policy debate through the newspaper or on television news. Maybe the next day there’d be an op-ed or two from somebody with specialized knowledge. The next week, the newsweeklies might publish a more in-depth article, or some TV interviewer or 60 Minutes-style show would give some more background.

Today, you get the news first on-line. Along with it, you’ve got Google to follow-up or clarify things you don’t understand, and you’ve got links to people with specialized knowledge and to relevant data. People with expertise in or first-hand knowledge about the issue are on-line instantly, sharing their views.

The news media, in contrast, is late on the scene, does a sloppy job with overworked reporters who don’t know enough about what they’re covering, and fails to provide links to sources that can verify or refute the story they’re telling. They’ve always been like this, but only now that this new internet journalism is here do they suffer from the contrast.

Now someone could have looked around in and complained that the news media was shallow, misinformed, manipulative, and shoddy — and then hoped that some top-down program of legislation, education, or BBC-style subsidy could be used to encourage better journalism. Instead, the internet came along, and through no organized, centrally-directed program, became the cure we needed for the disease we barely knew we had.

I use the decentralized internet communications medium as my model when I look at problems like this now — instead of asking, as I did in my liberal days, “why doesn’t the government do something about this?” I ask instead, “what would it look like if we solved this ourselves?”

Today: a roundup of some things I’ve found on-line:

  • Silence and Courage: Income Taxes, War and Mennonites : An interesting paper from the Mennonite Central Committee that gives a good overview of the history of the income tax and its close association with war. If it seems awful to you that fully half of your income tax dollar goes to pay for military spending, you might be surprised to find that this is a historically low percentage — in , 92.4% of the money raised by the federal income tax went to the military. This paper also discusses the response of Mennonite institutions to war taxes. Mennonites in the United States took unpopular stands against paying for war bonds during World War Ⅱ, but most didn’t argue with the income tax. The paper quotes a letter from the Hutterian Brethren to Lord Frederich von Zerotin of Moravia in in which they plead for some way to be considered good citizens without paying war taxes: “Our greatest fear, however… is that only the name, but not the tax would be changed, so that we would be led into it before we could turn around. If we then discovered that it was used for war or other purposes we oppose, this would distress us greatly.” The paper’s authors ask: “When the government introduced a permanent mass income tax during WWⅡ, did the tax for war (war bonds) change in name only? Did the government overcome our refusal to purchase war bonds, by creating a mandatory income tax which was used for the same purposes?” If this page of testimony is anything to go by, Mennonite tax resistance has become more substantial in recent years.
  • Hiroshima and Nagasaki is part of Ralph Raico’s analysis of Harry Truman’s presidency. It puts the lie to many of the revisionist myths that still cloud the memory of these bombings in the United States. He quotes Leó Szilárd, a physician who worked on the Manhattan Project: “If the Germans had dropped atomic bombs on cities instead of us, we would have defined the dropping of atomic bombs on cities as a war crime, and we would have sentenced the Germans who were guilty of this crime to death at Nuremberg and hanged them.” (Here’s an interview with Szilárd in which he reflects on the bomb.)
  • The Borgen Project is trying to dramatize the contrast between the cost of addressing global problems like, say, getting rid of recklessly-distributed landmines, providing safe water to people without it, or charitably retiring the debt of developing nations, with, say, the U.S. budget for Star Wars or for stealth bombers.
  • Brian Doherty asks us to go Beyond Conventional Thinking — ignore the political conventions and newsblahblah and advertisement: “Believers in progressive politics who are interested in the arts and experiments-in-living, as they so often are, have much more to offer the world — and, if I may be so bold, their own lives — by producing art and experiments in living rather than indulging in electoral politics… While attempting to perfect the entire world, or even an entire nation, is inherently futile and impossible, attempting to make our own lives, and those of our immediate family, friends, and block, successful and peaceful and cared for is something within the realm of possibility. And it’s a path whose rewards (and, of course, failures) would be real and immediate and fulfilling. But it is, make no mistake, harder than voting, or getting out the vote, or attending political conventions, or writing about them… The people who try to forge something new — whether an object, or a technology, or a way of life — will change and benefit the world far more directly than any conventioneer or politician is likely to, and probably have more fun doing so.” I take him even more seriously since he’s using the Burning Man festival as his case-in-point (he’s written a book on the subject).
  • I was curious as to how much of what we pay for gasoline is actually excise taxes and such. Thanks to the fabulous internet, I’ve got some numbers: a stack of taxes from my home state plus a short history of the federal excise tax on gasoline. Dubya’s Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors thinks that we ought to “cut income taxes by 10% and finance it with a 50-cent-per-gallon hike in the gasoline tax” (a view Dubya doesn’t share, at least in when gas prices are already high) but it’s bad enough already, and tax resisters should take note that they’re paying 18.4 cents per gallon to the federal government. One more reason to hop on the bike instead.