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PayPal & Pornhub

For about ten years now, every time the owner of some platform or another decides, for whatever reason, to change its terms, you’ll almost immediately hear a wild outcry for “justice,” followed by a backlash against “robbing people of their livelihood,” and then there often begins the predictable protests against “late-stage capitalism” and “unregulated markets” and “disempowerment.” Et cetera.

(Please note and remember: nowhere have markets ever been completely unregulated, and they most certainly are not today.)

This phenomena happened with Google.

This happened with YouTube.

This happened with Bing.

This happened with Facebook.

This happened with Patreon.

This happened with Tumblr.

This happened with Reddit and confounded people with college educations.

This happened with Instagram and confused Erika Lust, the porn director mentioned below.

This happened with many, many other companies, some of which (and there is a clue here) went out of business for the decisions they made, and it will continue to happen.

Yesterday, it happened (again) with PayPal, so that as of yesterday PayPal now no longer “partners with” PornHub.

Very big deal, I know. And yet to judge from the outcry, you’d think it was armageddon.

PayPal’s decision may or may not have had something to do with the recent and horrifying story which hit headlines October 30th.

This story concerns a 15-year-old girl who’d been missing for a year and who was then spotted in 58 videos which had been uploaded to Pornhub — as well as Snapchat and Periscope — videos which show the girl, who’d been abducted, being repeatedly raped by her abductor. These videos proved sickeningly popular, and I have a very good idea about why precisely this is, but that’s a subject for a later post.

It is, I’m afraid, time again for me to state the obvious — the obvious and the fundamental — and I admit I find it exceptionally disheartening that such elementary things are so poorly understood:

These are privately owned companies. They can change their terms if they want, and they can change them whenever they want, as you can leave and delete them from your life whenever you want. Users did not use these platforms before they existed, and users do not now suddenly have claim to ownership or a say in how these privately owned companies choose to run their business. Users use these platforms by choice. If these platforms change their terms of service, they are allowed to. Users can write letters and can post as much as they’d like on their own platforms and on any other platforms that allow it, but there is nothing wrong with private companies doing this, and there’s (currently) nothing illegal about it, nor should there ever be. PayPal can choose to do business with Pornhub, or not.

This is not at all a complicated subject. The fact that so many putatively educated people don’t understand something so elementary is a sad testament to the world’s understanding of basic economic principle. You know what it’s like? It’s like a fucking joke to me. 

Thanks entirely to social media, a whole new subculture and a whole new generation has recently discovered a term which, for the most part, they did not know anything about even ten years ago. This partially explains why so many among this generation and among this subculture use the old and venerable term as if it were somehow novel and even new.

But in actuality, this term — and, more precisely, the principle behind the term — is something which many have fought tirelessly for for decades and even centuries: fought for in full, I should say, by which I mean, in every aspect of human life.

That term is “decriminalization.”

Decriminalization is similar to deregulation and to legalization, but it is not synonymous.

You’ll be excused, by the way, if you don’t quite recognize the full word — decriminalization — since the term is these days most often used in truncated form, presumably to fit character-count and the trendy terminology of social-media speak: decrim.

Today, the overwhelming majority of people whom you’ll hear discussing decrim are referring to one and only one industry, and that industry is not, unfortunately, the healthcare industry with all its licensing-law monopolies and mandatory health-insurance laws and so forth.

Nor is it unfortunately in reference to zoning laws.

It is not in context of nationalizing and socializing and subsidizing any of the many arms of agriculture, nor any of its offshoot industries, and it’s not about decriminalizing property rights on Native American Indian Reservations.

It also, I regret, has nothing to do with government bailouts of banks or automobile companies, nor does it concern the thousands and thousands of bureaucratic pages added to the Federal Register each year, nor the preposterous gambling laws in America, which are often backed with equal fervor by left-wingers and right-wingers alike.

It’s not about decriminalizing those who don’t comply with mandatory solar-panel laws, or any other mandatory “renewable energy” laws, and it has nothing to do with emissions and the sheer stupidity of officially labeling CO2 (one of the building blocks of life) a “pollutant.”

Neither does it have anything to do with decriminalizing the building of new nuclear reactors, nor to hydraulic fracturing decrim, nor to decriminalizing waste-disposal — specifically by abolishing any and all mandatory recycling laws, which mandatory laws have generated astronomically more pollution and waste.

It’s not about decriminalizing our absurd drinking-age laws, which so many countries in the world do not have — to no detriment whatsoever — and it’s not any decrim related to drugs or alcohol or tobacco or firearms or firecrackers or compulsory education or military conscription or progressive taxation or mandatory licensing laws for any number of other industries, or anything like this. Nor is it about decriminalizing all marriage, so that this institution is separated from the state entirely. Neither is it about any and all forms of coercive welfare, including but certainly not limited to all publicly funded, non-voluntary healthcare subsidization. (You may, of course, voluntarily subsidize any form of welfare-pool or “safety net” you’d like, as was once the case, should anybody choose to organize one, instead of relying upon government compulsion to do it.)

Nor, I very much regret, is it about decrim of all interstate trade and all international trade by abolishing all trade tariffs and all prohibitions against such trade.

Today, rather, decrim is used almost exclusively in the context of the sex industry.

I, along with many others who advocate full unadulterated laissez-faire, have fought long for the total decriminalization of all voluntary trade and consensual transactions, which of course includes drugs, sex, rock-and-roll, gambling, et al, and I have done so for a very long time, and I’m on written record as having done so, and over this subject I’ve lost many people whom I thought were friends. My convictions remain.

When, however, any industry, no matter what that industry is, explicitly pedals pedophilia and rape and other atrocity exhibitions, it falls squarely within the proper jurisdiction of the law. This of course goes without saying, though perhaps not for some.

I am not, for the record, talking about the depiction of non-consensual strangulation and other acts of extreme violence (including snuff), unspeakably disgusting as I find it, which depictions of violence are everywhere in porn — so much so, incidentally, that a number of so-called sex-positives (a bullshit term if ever there was one, and I say that primarily because people who coin terms like this are precisely the people who can’t conceive that there are humans who are completely positive about sex, to the point of loving it — yes — who are open and experimental and not phobic in the least, and yet who nonetheless abhor violence and phoniness and, in addition to that, and more importantly, actually like to spend time thinking about and reading about and talking about a great many other things besides sex), such as Dan Savage now saying:

“There’s this normalization of strangulation and other violence during sex — strangulation without asking: one recent survey showed 13% of sexually active girls aged 14 to 17 had been choked nonconsensually.”

Yes, you read that age-range right: 14 years old to 17 years old, and the boys are statedly getting this from the “edgy” porn they watch.

Quoting porn director Erika Lust, who laments nominally — and only nominally — that “face slapping, choking, gagging, and spitting has become the alpha and omega of any porn scene and not just within a BDSM context. These are presented as standard ways to have sex when, in fact, they are niches…. Young people will go to the internet for answers. Many people’s first exposure to sex is hardcore porn. [It teaches children] that violence and degradation is standard.” (Niche? Hardcore? Violent? Degrading? But I regard “face slapping, choking, gagging, and spitting” as nonsense boring vanilla shit, strictly for squares. And don’t even get me started on the subject of actual “love” and emotional connection between two human beings who have brains and who delight in each other’s company even apart from sex. But if you lament it, Ms. Lust, one wonders why you yourself simply don’t stop contributing to it as “the standard,” and work instead to keep it, as you say, “niche.” Upon second thought, though, so what? Why not make it the standard? What’s the problem with that? What’s the problem with 14-year-old boys and girls watching mere depictions of extraordinarily violent nonconsensual sex acts, including staged snuff and necrophilia? Where’s the problem? I see none. What’s the problem with making depicted nonconsensual strangulation and any and all other forms of violence and brutality and “degradation,” as you say, standard and non-niche, since everyone knows that fantasy enactments, no matter how bloody and brutal and degrading and disgusting and pathological they may appear [to the prudish and religious, of course], are not real life, and that’s one of the main reasons for porn, isn’t it? And, anyway, sex-positivity forbids drawing any such patriarchal distinctions as “standard and non-standard” — because when you get right down to it, there isn’t a standard, and for a porn director to presume any sort of demarcation-of-standard, especially a white Scandinavian female porn director, is, if I may speak frankly, privileged, non-inclusive, hegemonistic, sexist, and quite possibly even racist.)

Other sex-positives, if you’ll permit me further use of this bullshit terminology, sex-positives who still work in porn, discuss sex-trafficking and the number of scenes that take place without the performer’s consent, and this, if you ever feel like making yourself sick and if you feel like implanting ghastly images inside your brain that you will never expunge, is a topic you may read about for weeks which stretch into months and months. But I don’t recommend it.

Yes, the porn industry would normalize this, just as Erika Lust correctly notes. They would normalize this and much more. Normalizing is a type of desensitization. Escalation of tastes is largely for this reason, particularly among men, commonplace, and this is not — not by any reasonable person of whom I know — denied.

Recently, in fact, the discussion — if it can even be called that — has fixated (to the point of absurdity) upon whether or not sex can be an “addiction,” or is it just “potentially compulsive.”

This is an absolute non-issue. It’s also stupidly basic.

All addictions involve compulsion — all of them — and virtually all pleasurable things are “potentially compulsive,” including something as fundamental as eating food.

Furthermore, some of the most difficult compulsions to treat and overcome are not technically “addictions,” anorexia and gambling being two of the most notorious. (I once had a customer — Dr. Berry, an M.D. in psychiatry, recently retired at the time that I knew him, who’d graduated top of his class from Stanford School of Medicine — tell me that in his decades of professional experience the toughest compulsion to treat “by far” [his words] was not heroin or meth or tobacco or any other drug or substance, but gambling.)

So please let me repeat this: PayPal, like any and every privately owned company, may partner with whomever they voluntarily, consensually fucking choose, and they can withdraw that consent, just as Pornhub can stop accepting credit cards or whatever, and just as they can all change their terms of service, and they can buy-out Venmo if Venmo chooses to sell (which Venmo consensually did), and you or I can start up a new payment-processing company or invent an app that people can download onto their phones and soon not be able to live without, or we can start-up a new porn platform — or all of the above — or whatever other 101 shit.

Note also that to the extent that laissez faire does exist, when a platform enacts a policy which causes users to leave, new businesses and companies are free to start up and fill this newly created void which, in enacting whatever policy, opened up a demand — and that’s exactly what we’ve always seen and will continue to see, until government and its advocates implement protectionism. (The rivers of tears had not finished drying over Patreon’s change-of-terms before a hundred new and better platforms sprung up, almost overnight, to take its place. Meanwhile, we watch Patreon’s popularity gradually but inexorably fade. It’s called Creative Destruction.)

It is worth noting here, as well, if only in passing and in closing, that the overwhelming majority of advocates for sex-industry decrim are leftist-progressive-socialists, who, as strident and hysterical as they are for decrim, would, however, CRIMINALIZE any number of other industries (including, for example, PayPal’s right not to do business with whomever they choose [see also most of the list above]); and this is especially true, I’ve noticed, of the psychologists and pseudo-neuropsychs arguing on behalf of the sex industry (but no other industry) for decrim, all of whom, without a single exception in my personal experience, are economically illiterate — one even going so far as to say that “there are no good billionaires.” (He wrote this on a phone or computer or tablet invented and brought into existence by a billionaire, in the comfort of a first-world society made possible by billionaire wealth, upon a platform created and popularized by a billionaire. But I’m quibbling, I know.)

This encapsulates why this group will never ultimately fully succeed in the cause — a cause I support though not in mere isolation without reference to its underpinnings — never fully, I say, because they don’t understand the principle behind the cause, which is this.

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Tiananmen Square: Twenty-Five Year Anniversary — But Do You Know About Chengdu?

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Do you remember Tiananmen Square?

It’s difficult to believe that it was twenty-five years ago, but today, June 4th, indeed marks the twenty-fifth year anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre in Beijing, China.

This was when the communist dictatorship of that country quashed a political reform movement, which was begun by Beijing students who sought to bring about more freedom.

At that time, other protests, in other Chinese cities, sprung up as well. Do you know about Chengdu?

Twenty-five years ago, on April 15, 1989, Chinese students were mourning the death of a reformist leader. But what began as mourning evolved into mass protests demanding democracy. Demonstrators remained in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, day after day, until their protests were brutally suppressed by the Chinese army — on June 4. Hundreds died; to this day, no one knows how many.

The media captured some of the story of the massacre in Beijing. But Louisa Lim, NPR’s longtime China correspondent, says the country’s government has done all it can in the intervening 25 years to erase the memory of the uprising. Lim’s forthcoming book, The People’s Republic of Amnesia, relates how 1989 changed China and how China rewrote what happened in 1989 in its official version of events. Her story includes an investigation into a forgotten crackdown in the southwestern city of Chengdu — which, to this day, has never been reported.

It was in Chengdu, which is now a bustling mega-city with a population of 14 million, that Lim met Tang Deying (source).

The People’s Republic of China (PRC) ended these protests by force — which, really, is the only way governments can ever resolve disputes of this sort, since government by definition is an agency of force.

When it was all over, the People’s Republic of China began arresting its people on a widespread scale.

They also went to great lengths to suppress protesters and other people of China who were supportive of the protesters’ cause.

The People’s Republic of China banned the foreign press and controlled all later coverage of the event.

Members of the Party who had publicly sympathized with the protesters were purged, with several high-ranking members placed under house arrest, such as General Secretary Zhao Ziyang. The violent suppression of the Tiananmen Square protest caused widespread international condemnation of the PRC government (Andrew Nathan, The Tiananmen Papers).

The protesters — among whom were advocates of laissez-faire as well as disillusioned communists and Trotskyites and many other groups besides — were united only in their hatred of that oppressive regime. The Tiananmen Square protest was a protest against authoritarianism.

It actually began some seven weeks before, on April 15th, 1989, after the death of a largely pro-free-market, anti-corruption government official named Hu Yaobang. Many Chinese people wanted to mourn his death because they regarded him as something of a hero. By the eve of Hu’s funeral, a million people had gathered in Tiananmen Square.

In fact, many large-scale protests sprung up all throughout China, including Shanghai. These others remained relatively peaceful, however — except the now virtually forgotten Chengu:

Protests in Chengdu mirrored those in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, with students mourning the sudden death from a heart attack of reformist party leader Hu Yaobang on April 15, 1989. This soon morphed into mass protests, followed by a hunger strike beginning in mid-May.

Students occupied Chengdu’s Tianfu Square, camping at the base of its 100-foot-tall Chairman Mao statue and proudly proclaiming it to be a “Little Tiananmen.” The initial move by police to clear protesters from Tianfu Square on the morning of June 4 went ahead relatively peacefully.

But on hearing the news that troops had opened fire on unarmed civilians in Beijing, the citizens of Chengdu took to the streets once more. This time they knew the risk; they carried banners denouncing the “June 4th massacre” and mourning wreaths with the message: “We Are Not Afraid To Die.”

Soon the police moved in with tear gas. Pitched battles broke out in Tianfu Square. Protesters threw paving stones at the police; the police retaliated by beating protesters with batons.

At a nearby medical clinic, the bloodied victims of police brutality lay in rows on the floor. Kim Nygaard, an American resident of Chengdu, recalled that they begged her: “Tell the world! Tell the world!”

A row of patients sat on a bench, their cracked skulls swathed in bandages, their shirts stained scarlet near the collar, visceral evidence of the police strategy of targeting protesters’ heads.

But the violence went both ways: Dennis Rea, an American then teaching at a local university, watched, horrified, as the crowd viciously attacked a man they believed to be a policeman. The crowd pulled at his arms and legs, then dropped him on the ground and began stomping on his body and face, crushing it.

Eight people were killed that day, including two students, according to the local government’s official account. It said the fighting left 1,800 people injured — of them, it said, 1,100 were policemen — though it described most of the injuries as light.

But U.S. diplomats at the time told The New York Times they believed as many as 100 seriously wounded people had been carried from the square that day.

Protests continued into the next evening, and as June 5 turned into June 6, a crowd broke into one of the city’s smartest hotels, the Jinjiang. It was there, under the gaze of foreign guests, that one of the most brutal — and largely forgotten — episodes of the Chengdu crackdown played out after a crowd attacked the hotel (source).

It isn’t known exactly how many people died altogether in these Chinese protests, although at one time the Chinese Red Cross gave a figure of 2,600 for Tiananmen Square alone, a number which they later denied.

During those seven weeks, many of these protesters were openly discussing a principle that we almost never hear discussed even in this country — though it was this country’s foundational principle — a principle that is so profound and so complex that only a small minority of people today grasp its awesome logic. That principle is the principle of individual rights.

It was, incidentally, this same communistic Chinese government that American pseudo-intellectuals, like Norman Mailer, Howard Zinn, and Noam Chomsky, have described as (quoting Chomsky’s own words) “a relatively livable and just society,” about which “one finds many things that are really quite admirable.” Furthermore says Chomsky:

China is an important example of a new society in which very interesting and positive things happened at the local level, in which a good deal of the collectivization and communization was really based on mass participation and took place after a level of understanding had been reached in the peasantry that led to this next step.

The word Tiananmen literally translates to “Gate of Heavenly Peace.”

From the previously quoted article entitled “After 25 Years Of Amnesia, Remembering A Forgotten Tiananmen“:

What happened in Chengdu 25 years ago matters enough that the local government continues to devote financial and human resources to muzzling Tang. Her treatment shows how scared the Chinese authorities are of their own recent history.

A quarter-century ago, the government used guns and batons to suppress its own people. Now it is deploying more sophisticated tools of control — censorship of the media and the falsification of its own history — to build patriotism and create a national identity.

Though China’s citizens have become undeniably richer and freer in the post-Tiananmen era, Tang Deying’s experience shows the limits to that freedom. Simply by keeping alive a memory that others have suppressed or simply forgotten, Tang has become seen as a threat to social stability.

What happened in Chengdu matters because it shows the success of the Chinese government in not just controlling its people, but also in controlling their memories. In the China of today, that most personal space of all — memory — has become a political tool.

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Tiananmen Square: Twenty-Four Year Anniversary

Do you remember Tiananmen Square?

It’s difficult to believe that it was over two decades ago, but today, June 4th, indeed marks the twenty-four year anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre in Beijing, China.

This was when the communist dictatorship of that country quashed a political reform movement, which was begun by Beijing students who sought to bring about more freedom.

The People’s Republic of China (PRC) ended these protests by force — which, really, is the only way governments can ever resolve disputes of this sort, since government by definition is an agency of force.

When it was all over, the People’s Republic of China began arresting its people on a widespread scale.

They also went to great lengths to suppress protesters and other people of China who were supportive of the protesters’ cause.

The People’s Republic of China banned the foreign press and controlled all later coverage of the event.

Members of the Party who had publicly sympathized with the protesters were purged, with several high-ranking members placed under house arrest, such as General Secretary Zhao Ziyang. The violent suppression of the Tiananmen Square protest caused widespread international condemnation of the PRC government (Andrew Nathan, The Tiananmen Papers).

The protesters — among whom were advocates of laissez-faire as well as disillusioned communists and Trotskyites and many other groups besides — were united only in their hatred of that oppressive regime. The Tiananmen Square protest was a protest against authoritarianism.

It actually began some seven weeks before, on April 15th, 1989, after the death of a largely pro-free-market, anti-corruption government official named Hu Yaobang. Many Chinese people wanted to mourn his death because they regarded him as something of a hero. By the eve of Hu’s funeral, a million people had gathered in Tiananmen Square.

In fact, many large-scale protests sprung up all throughout the cities of China, including Shanghai. These others remained peaceful, however.

It is not known exactly how many people died altogether in Tiananmen Square, although at one time the Chinese Red Cross gave a figure of 2,600, which they later denied.

During those seven weeks, many of these protesters were openly discussing a principle that we almost never hear discussed even in this country — though it was this country’s foundational principle — a principle that is so profound and so complex that only a small minority of people today grasp its awesome logic. That principle is the principle of individual rights.

It was, incidentally, this same communistic Chinese government that American pseudo-intellectuals, like Norman Mailer, Howard Zinn, and Noam Chomsky, have described as (quoting Chomsky’s own words) “a relatively livable and just society,” about which “one finds many things that are really quite admirable.” Furthermore says Chomsky:

China is an important example of a new society in which very interesting and positive things happened at the local level, in which a good deal of the collectivization and communization was really based on mass participation and took place after a level of understanding had been reached in the peasantry that led to this next step.

The word Tiananmen literally translates to “Gate of Heavenly Peace.”

Among the people who died in the Tiananmen Square massacre was a young girl, a student, who worked as a pastry chef in a Dim Sum cafe on the Yangtze. She was the daughter of an engineer. In a country that did not (and does not) permit freedom, she came to understand the principle of individual rights and the inseparable link that exists between property and person — which is to say, economics and politics, or body and brain, all of which amount to the same thing. And that, reader, is no small thing.





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Michael Moore: Old Fashioned Capitalism When “Wealth Was Shared”

In a recent interview with CNN’s Piers Morgan, socialist documentarian Michael Moore — who, not coincidentally, made a socialist propaganda movie called Capitalism: A Love Story — revealed Monday (September 27th, 2011) what we all already knew: he has no understanding whatsoever of what capitalism really is.

The video clip won’t embed, but you can watch it here (and I suggest you do).

This is what Michael Moore said:

When you say the word capitalism, you have to talk about it in its current sense. You can’t told about the old days or the way maybe, you know, Adam Smith. The sort of old capitalism….

[In the] old days when you worked hard and prospered, everyone else prospered as well. And not only that, as you prospered, the wealth was shared with your employees, with the government. Everybody had a piece of the pie. You, who started the business or invented the light bulb or whatever, you got a bigger piece of the pie. And you know what, nobody cared because you invented the light bulb. That was a pretty cool thing….

None of the major religions, in fact they all, say it’s one of the worst sins you could commit, is to take such a large piece of the pie while others suffer.

Isn’t that heavy?

But the truth is, capitalism is the diametric opposite of what Michael Moore would have you believe.

What is capitalism?

Capitalism is a social system based upon private ownership of the means of production and the preeminence of the individual over the group.

This issue — capitalism-versus-socialism — hinges upon one thing, and this one thing is the only thing you’ll ever need to know about the subject: private ownership (capitalism) versus public or government ownership (socialism).

Do we each own ourselves and (corollarily) our property?

Or do others own us and our property?

Money is property.

Capitalism is an entire political theory — not, as is sometimes supposed, merely economic.

The exclusively economic component of capitalism can be described as the right to life, liberty, and property applied to commerce and industry.

Pure laissez-faire capitalism, which does not exist now and has never existed fully, means that government removes itself from all commerce (and that includes healthcare), in the same way that government removes itself from the bedroom.

In addition to early America, there is at least one other society that has come close to laissez faire capitalism:

“After the War Hong Kong had no minimum wage, low and simple taxes, zero tariffs, zero capital controls, and a stable legal environment. Postwar Hong Kong went as far with economic laissez faire as any other country in history. This resulted in economic development that benefited virtually all the people of Hong Kong. Living standards increased substantially even for the poorest people in Hong Kong” (Stefan Karlsson, “Inflation Leads to Protectionism,” 2004).

Capitalism means that commerce and industry are entirely privatized.

Corporations that receive government subsidies are not capitalistic. They’re the opposite: they’re mercantilistic.
The same is true of small businesses and farms that receive subsidies.

Trade tariffs are not capitalistic but mercantilistic.

Mercantilism is an ancient and more primitive form of socialism. It is socialism before Karl Marx.

Political theory is the theory of government, and government, properly defined, is the body politic that possesses rule over a certain specified geographic region.

Economics is the science of production and exchange, but production does not just mean agriculture, although that is certainly included.

Productive work is any kind of work geared toward the task of survival — survival in the fully human sense of the word, including, therefore, arts, sports, industry, and so on.

Thus the essential questions of government are these:

Do humans exist by right or by permission?

Are we free by nature?

If so, why?

Are we free to produce, exchange, and exist, or do politicians, elected or not, have authority and jurisdiction over the lives of us — to any degree?

Obviously, there’s only one sane answer to all these questions; for to say that humans do not exist by right is the same as saying humans only exist when someone permits us to. But if that were true, we must then ask: who permits? And why? And who gives these people permission?

Fundamentally, political freedom can be achieved only through recognizing each and every single individual’s right to life.

If, then, you believe that we are each individuated and sovereign, and if you believe that our lives are entirely our own and not the government’s and not another’s, if, in short, you believe “we each have a property in our person,” as John Locke said, then you believe in the inalienable right to life, liberty, and property.

You believe, therefore, in laissez-faire capitalism.


More here on the many permutations of socialism.

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Tiananmen Square Twenty-Two Year Anniversary

June 4th marks the twenty-two year anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre in Beijing, China. This was when the communist dictatorship of that country quashed a political reform movement, which was begun by Beijing students who sought to bring about more freedom.

The People’s Republic of China (PRC) ended these protests by force, which is the only way governments can ever resolve disputes of this sort, since government by definition is an agency of force.

When it was all over, the People’s Republic of China began arresting its people on a widespread scale.

They also went to great lengths to suppress protesters and other people of China who were supportive of the protesters’ cause.

The People’s Republic of China banned the foreign press and controlled all later coverage of the event.

Members of the Party who had publicly sympathized with the protesters were purged, with several high-ranking members placed under house arrest, such as General Secretary Zhao Ziyang. The violent suppression of the Tiananmen Square protest caused widespread international condemnation of the PRC government (Andrew Nathan, The Tiananmen Papers).

The protesters — among whom were advocates of laissez-faire as well as disillusioned communists and Trotskyites and many other groups besides — were united only in their hatred of that oppressive regime. The Tiananmen Square protest was a protest against authoritarianism.

It actually began some seven weeks before, on April 15th, 1989, after the death of a largely pro-free-market, anti-corruption government official named Hu Yaobang. Many Chinese people wanted to mourn his death because they regarded him as something of a hero. By the eve of Hu’s funeral, a million people had gathered in Tiananmen Square.

In fact, many large-scale protests sprung up all throughout the cities of China, including Shanghai. These others remained peaceful, however.

It is not known exactly how many people died altogether in Tiananmen Square, although at one time the Chinese Red Cross gave a figure of 2,600, which they later denied.

During those seven weeks, many of these protesters were openly discussing a principle that we almost never hear discussed even in this country — though it was this country’s foundational principle — a principle that is so profound and so complex that only a small minority of people today grasp its awesome logic. That principle is the principle of individual rights.

It was, incidentally, this same communistic Chinese government that American pseudo-intellectuals, like Norman Mailer, Howard Zinn, and Noam Chomsky, have described as (quoting Chomsky’s own words) “a relatively livable and just society,” about which “one finds many things that are really quite admirable.” Furthermore says Chomsky:

China is an important example of a new society in which very interesting and positive things happened at the local level, in which a good deal of the collectivization and communization was really based on mass participation and took place after a level of understanding had been reached in the peasantry that led to this next step.

The word Tiananmen literally translates to “Gate of Heavenly Peace.”

Among the people who died in the Tiananmen Square massacre was a young girl, a student, who worked as a pastry chef in a Dim Sum cafe on the Yangtze. She was the daughter of an engineer. In a country that did not (and does not) permit freedom, she came to understand the principle of individual rights and the inseparable link that exists between property and person — which is to say, economics and politics, or body and brain, all of which amount to the same thing. And that, reader, is no small thing.

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A Brief History of Economic Thought — By Jim Cox

Professor Jim Cox

Jim Cox is one of my favorite living economists. His slim but pregnant book — The Concise Guide To Economics — is a miniature masterpiece. The following comes from Chapter 37:

The Spanish Scholastics of 14th through 17th century Spain had produced a body of thought largely similar to our modern understanding of economics. The work of these scholars was largely lost to the English speaking world we’ve inherited. The French physiocrats carried the discipline forward in the 18th century with prominent economists of the time including A. R. J. Turgot and Richard Cantillon. A strategic error was made by these French advocates of laissez-faire as they attempted to change policy by influencing the King to embrace free markets, only to have the institution of monarchy itself delegitimized. Thus a guilt by association undermined the credibility of the laissez-faire theorists.

In 1776 Scotsman Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations only to set the discipline back with his cost of production theory of value. (Smith did properly emphasize specialization and the division of labor in his analysis.) The correct subjective theory of value had been understood by both the Spanish Scholastics and the French laissez-faire school. Why Adam Smith chose the faulty cost of production theory over subjectivism is a mighty mystery as it is clear from Smith’s lecture notes that he had endorsed marginal utility analysis prior to the publication of his book. The marginal revolution of the 1870’s–with Carl Menger in Austria, William Stanley Jevons in England, and Leon Walras in Switzerland each writing independently and in differing languages–reestablished the correct marginal approach. As stated by Joseph Schumpeter in The History of Economic Thought:

It is not too much to say that analytic economics took a century to get where it could have got in twenty years after the publication of Turgot’s treatise had its content been properly understood and absorbed by an alert profession. p. 249

Unfortunately, the theory was perverted into a mathematized method with the rush to positivism in the 20th century.

The Austrian tradition of Menger was completed in the theories of Ludwig von Mises with the application of marginal utility analysis applied for the first time to money, which in turn led to the correct business cycle approach during the 1920’s. This approach was gaining headway in the English speaking world with F. A. Hayek’s appearance in England in the early 1930’s. But in the late 30’s the well-named Keynesian Revolution displaced the Austrian theories–not by refutation, but by neglect–taking economic theory to the bizarre point of splitting macro-theory from an underlying micro-emphasis; a point where it still is today.

Jim Cox is an Associate Professor of Economics and Political Science at the Gwinnett Campus of Georgia Perimeter College in Lawrenceville, Georgia and has taught the principles of Economics courses since 1979. Great Ideas for Teaching Economics includes nine of his submissions. As a Fellow of the Institute for Humane Studies his commentaries were published in The Cleveland Plain Dealer, The Wichita Journal, The Orange County Register, The San Diego Business Journal, and The Justice Times as well as other newspapers. His articles have also been published in The Atlanta Journal and Constitution, The Margin Magazine, Creative Loafing, The LP News, The Georgia Libertarian, The Gwinnett Daily News, The Atlanta Business Chronicle, The Gwinnett Post, The Gwinnett Citizen, The Gwinnett Business Journal and APC News. Cox has been a member of the Academic Board of Advisors for the Georgia Public Policy Foundation, and is currently on the Board of Scholars of the Virginia Institute for Public Policy.

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I, Pencil — By Leonard Read

Image drawn in pencil, on paper.


What goes into the making of a single pencil?

In 1958, Leonard E. Read asked himself that very question — and wrote an elegant explication:

I, Pencil, simple though I appear to be, have a profound lesson to teach. And I can teach this lesson better than can an automobile or an airplane or a mechanical dishwasher because—well, because I am seemingly so simple.

In his piece we’re taken step-by-step through the entire process of how a single pencil is produced.

First, there are the many materials required to make a single pencil, among them: wood, rubber, paint, lacquer, graphite, metal, zinc, wax, and many other things.

We are then shown how these materials are really only the beginning of the process, for a whole industry is in turn required to produce each of those materials.

There is, for example, the lumber industry needed to produce the wood; the mining industry to mine and mill and smelt the zinc and lead and metal; the rubber industry, of course, and the paint and graphite, and so on.

Then, within each of these industries, there are numerous sub-divisions, such as chemical industries, which make up the groundwork for paint and lacquer, and the engineering companies to supply all the tools, and the shipping and transportation companies, and even the lighthouse workers to guide the ships safely into port.

Of course there is also the singular fact that our solitary pencil could neither be manufactured nor produced without all the various other forms of transportation required to get the products from place to place, and of course this transportation requires its own set of industries (not just oil), and on and on, all of which industries — and please take a moment to process this — are, in turn, no less involved than the manufacturing of the wood or graphite or rubber.

So that when everything is said and done, the making of one pencil requires thousands and thousands of people, most of whom have specialized knowledge and specialized jobs, in thousands of different industries.

Furthermore, these people come from all over the world. No centralized planning committee or commune imaginable, even with an army of super-geniuses, could organize the countless factors that go into the making of that one small pencil.

And yet in this country, as in all developed countries, pencils are so cheap and abundant that nobody thinks twice about them.

How is this so?

The answer is devilishly simple: private property and the freedom to trade that property.

The freedom to produce and trade and then reap the subsequent rewards are what bring these thousands and thousands of people, from these thousands of different industries the wide-world over, into peaceful and mutually beneficial cooperation with one another.

Think about that.

Think long and hard about it, I beseech you.

In fact, I insist you do.

Your entire understanding of human existence — whether you’re a billionaire, a bartender, or an artist, and whether you live in a cult, condo, or commune — depends upon it.

Your life depends upon it, I submit.

Think about some of the things you use in your day-to-day existence. Think about your private path of least resistance.

Think of your eyeglasses, which Galileo and Spinoza would have given their eyeteeth for.

Think of the exercise mat upon your floor. Think of the ab-roller for your core.

Think about the utensils you use to cook and clean your food, the cups you use to drink your potable water, and the faucets you use to turn that water off and on.

Think of the hoses and the sprinklers for your lawn.

Think of sponges and your soap.

Think of rope.

Think of your chocolate truffle and think of the package that it comes in.

Think of packaging again and again (and again).

Think of your clothing, no matter how fine or how shabby it may or may not be. Think of your underwear, down to the tag we do not see.

Think critically.

Think about your toothbrush and your toothpaste, and its tube. And the cap that goes on that tube.

Think of your lube.

Think about your medicine: aspirin, ibuprofin, Pepto, Lipator, antihistamines for the cough and wheeze.

Think of braces for your elbows and your knees.

Think of your transportation — bicycle, train, plane, bus, boat, automobile, jumbo jet, or even your walking shoes — and think of the sheer number of discrete parts that each of these things contain, and which you use.

Think of other technological breakthroughs.

Can you?

How about your jacket and its worn buttons, the lovely denim of faded blue, the toothpicks and the gum you chew?

Your bedding and your hygiene and your make-up.

Think of the alarm clock that every morning helps you wake up.

Think of your books and your paints and paintbrushes. Your chisel and hammer.

Your megahertz of memory if your a computer programmer.

Think of your keyboard and your mouse, your voice-recognition software.

Think of filters for your water and air.

Think about your entertainment: wine and wine bottles, dark beer. Think of all the brandy that you’ve consumed or stored.

Think of your playing cards or tarot cards or magic cards, your hoops, your chess-or-checker-board.

Think of packaging again. Think of the packages that all your things arrive in.

Think of your gardening equipment, or any other metal or wood or plastic or glass items you may use.

Think of your ball-peen hammer and your nails and your screws.

Think of your tape measures and pliers, your wrenches, your saws and your multicolored chalks.

To say nothing of your electricity — the lights, the cameras, the watches, the clocks.

Your computers and modems, MP3’s and stereos, word-processors and photo-editing software — and of course your phone, your phone, without which you’d be alone.

And televisions and lights (“More light!” said Goethe, then died) and musical instruments and medical equipment and rocket ships and edible water bottles…

Think of anything. Think of airplane models.

Look around you. Is your chair metal or wood? Does your desk or table have bolts and nails?

Notice details.

I insist, I positively insist.

Think of me as a kind of oculist.

Because I promise you — I absolutely promise — that the filthy, hardcore industry, which I believe in and love so much, the industry that went into producing, for instance, just one small component of your phone, or your bicycle, or the paperback book in your hand, or the shoes on your feet, or the glasses on your face, or the contact lenses in your eyes, or the ring in your navel, nose, or nipples, or the needles which tattooed your skin, that industry was amplified a thousandfold compared with one solitary pencil, no matter how cheap or how thin.

So please take one more look — and then look again.

Take one more look at the blue-black ink across your skin.

There’s a moral to this story and that moral is this:

Embrace technology.

Look suspiciously on the buzzword ecology.

Technology got us to this point. Only technology can get us beyond.

It is a magic wand.

There’s something profoundly paradoxical in the quest for less technology and a more simple way of life, while flying the world in jumbo jets. In fact, it’s about as paradoxical as it gets.

Celebrate, rather, human progress and specialization.

Celebrate the division of labor that technology creates, thereby freeing us all to pursue the things we most enjoy and at which we excel, since we are no longer each yoked to the task of day-to-day, week-to-week, month-to-month survival, but can trade freely and peacefully with those who have the things we need and want, in exchange for the things we ourselves have in turn worked to produce — being no longer condemned to a life of drudgery and tedium.

(Money is only a medium.)

Celebrate individualization.

Celebrate civilization.

Civilization is the progress toward independent, private lives, wherein we are no longer dominated by the group, gang, tribe, or community but live freely: free to associate with others as we please, or not.

This is the fundamental thing you’ve never been taught.

It’s the only thing that’s truly sustainable. It’s what you’ll never hear from any of the postmodernists, the intellectuals, the politicos, the hipsters, the academic phonies and imposters:

Celebrate human freedom and the independent mind that freedom fosters.





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Laissez Faire and Hong Kong


Laissez faire is a social system based upon private ownership of the means of production and the preeminence of the individual over the group.

The word capitalism was popularized by Karl Marx, in the 1850’s. Marx used it to denounce private ownership of the means of production and the autonomous workings of the free market.

Many people use “capitalism” to denote laissez faire, but the word capitalism has become a laden and loaded word, easily misunderstood with its opposite: crony capitalism.

Laissez faire is an entire political theory — not, as is sometimes supposed, merely economic. In this regard — and only in this regard — it is akin to communism.

The exclusively economic component of laissez-faire may be described as the right to life, liberty, and property applied to commerce and industry.

Pure laissez-faire, which does not exist now and has never existed fully, means that government removes itself from all commerce (and that includes healthcare), in the same way that government removes itself from your bedroom.

In addition to early America, there is at least one other society that has come close to laissez faire:

After the War Hong Kong had no minimum wage, low and simple taxes, zero tariffs, zero capital controls, and a stable legal environment. Postwar Hong Kong went as far with economic laissez faire as any other country in history. This resulted in economic development that benefited virtually all the people of Hong Kong. Living standards increased substantially even for the poorest people in Hong Kong (Stefan Karlsson, Inflation Leads to Protectionism, 2004).

Laissez faire means that commerce and industry are entirely privatized.

Corporations that receive government subsidies are not capitalistic. They’re the opposite: they’re mercantilistic.

The same is true of small businesses and farms that receive subsidies.

Trade tariffs are not capitalistic but mercantilistic.

Mercantilism is an ancient and more primitive form of socialism. It is socialism before Karl Marx.

Political theory is the theory of government, and government, properly defined, is the body politic that possesses rule over a certain geographic region.

Economics is the science of production and exchange, but production does not just mean agriculture, although that is certainly included.

Productive work is any kind of work geared toward the task of survival — survival in the fully human sense of the word, including, therefore, arts, sports, industry, and so on.

Thus the essential questions of government are these:

Do humans exist by right or by permission? Are we free by nature? If so, why? Are we free to produce, exchange, and exist, or do politicians, elected or not, have authority and jurisdiction over the lives of us — to any degree?

Obviously, there’s only one sane answer to all these questions; for to say that humans do not exist by right is the same as saying humans only exist when someone permits us to. But if that were true, we must then ask: who permits? And why? And who gives these people permission?

Fundamentally, political freedom can be achieved only through recognizing each and every single individual’s right to life.

If, then, you believe that we are each individuated and sovereign, and if you believe that our lives are entirely our own and not the government’s and not another’s, if, in short, you believe “we each have a property in our person,” as John Locke said, then you believe in the inalienable right to life, liberty, and property.

You believe, therefore, in laissez-faire capitalism.