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Liberty Through Long Life – Article by G. Stolyarov II

Liberty Through Long Life – Article by G. Stolyarov II

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The New Renaissance Hat
G. Stolyarov II
April 14, 2013
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            It is commonly recognized among libertarians (and some others) that the freedom of individuals to innovate will result in a more rapid rate of technological progress. In “Six Libertarian Reforms to Accelerate Life Extension” I described six liberty-enhancing political changes that would more swiftly bring about the arrival of indefinite human longevity. But, as is less often understood, the converse of this truth also holds. Technological progress in general improves the prospects for liberty and its actual exercise in everyday life. One of the most promising keys to achieving liberty in our lifetimes is to live longer so that we can personally witness and benefit from accelerating technological progress.

            Consider, for example, what the Internet has achieved with respect to expanding the practical exercise of individual freedom of speech. It has become virtually impossible for regimes, including their nominally private “gatekeepers” of information in the mass media and established publishing houses, to control the dissemination of information and the expression of individual opinion. In prior eras, even in countries where freedom of speech was the law of the land, affiliations of the media, by which speech was disseminated, with the ruling elite would serve as a practical barrier for the discussion of views that were deemed particularly threatening to the status quo. In the United States, effective dissent from the established two-party political system was difficult to maintain in the era of the “big three” television channels and a print and broadcast media industry tightly controlled by a few politically connected conglomerates. Now expressing an unpopular opinion is easier and less expensive than ever – as is voting with one’s money for an ever-expanding array of products and services online. The ability of individuals to videotape public events and the behavior of law-enforcement officers has similarly served as a check on abusive behavior by those in power. Emerging online education and credentialing options, such as massive open online courses and Mozilla’s Open Badges, have the power to motivate a widespread self-driven enlightenment which would bring about an increased appreciation for rational thinking and individual autonomy.

            Many other technological advances are on the horizon. The private space race is in full swing, with companies such as SpaceX, Virgin Galactic, Deep Space Industries, and Planetary Resources embarking on ever more ambitious projects. Eventually, these pioneering efforts may enable humans to colonize new planets and build permanent habitats in space, expanding jurisdictional competition and opening new frontiers where free societies could be established. Seasteading, an idea only five years in development, is a concept for building modular ocean platforms where political experimentation could occur and, through competitive pressure, catalyze liberty-friendly innovations on land. (I outlined the potential and the challenges of this approach in an earlier essay.) The coming decades could see the emergence of actual seasteads of increasing sophistication, safety, and political autonomy. Another great potential for increasing liberty comes from the emerging digital-currency movement, of which Bitcoin has been the most prominent exemplar to date. While Bitcoin has been plagued with recent extreme exchange-rate volatility and vulnerability to manipulation and theft by criminal hackers, it can still provide some refuge from the damaging effects of inflationary and redistributive central-bank monetary policy. With enough time and enough development of the appropriate technological infrastructure, either Bitcoin or one of its successor currencies might be able to obtain sufficient stability and reliability to become a widespread apolitical medium of exchange.

            But there is a common requirement for one to enjoy all of these potential breakthroughs, along with many others that may be wholly impossible to anticipate: one has to remain alive for a long time. The longer one remains alive, the greater the probability that one’s personal sphere of liberty would be expanded by these innovations. Living longer can also buy one time for libertarian arguments to gain clout in the political sphere and in broader public opinion. Technological progress and pro-liberty activism can reinforce one another in a virtuous cycle.

            To maximize their hopes of personally experiencing an amount of personal freedom even approaching that of the libertarian ideal, all libertarians should support radical life extension. This sought-after goal of some ancient philosophers, medieval alchemists, Enlightenment thinkers (notably Franklin, Diderot, and Condorcet), and medical researchers from the past two centuries, is finally within reach of many alive today. Biogerontologist Aubrey de Grey of the SENS Research Foundation gives humankind a 50 percent likelihood of reaching “longevity escape velocity” – a condition where increases in life expectancy outpace the rate of human senescence – within 25 years. Inventor, futurist, and artificial-intelligence researcher Ray Kurzweil predicts a radical increase in life expectancy in the 2020s, made possible by advances in biotechnology and nanotechnology, aided by exponentially growing computing power. But, like de Grey and perhaps somewhat unlike Kurzweil, I hold the view that these advances are not inevitable; they rely on deliberate, sustained, and well-funded efforts to achieve them. They rely on support by the general public to facilitate donations, positive publicity, and a lack of political obstacles placed in their way. All libertarians should become familiar with both the technical feasibility and the philosophical desirability of a dramatic, hopefully indefinite, extension of human life expectancies. My compilation of Resources on Indefinite Life Extension (RILE) is a good starting point for studying this subject by engaging with a wide variety of sources, perspectives, and ongoing developments in science, technology, and activism.

            We have only this one life to live. If we fail to accomplish our most cherished goals and our irreplaceable individual universes disappear into oblivion, then, to us, it will be as if those goals were never accomplished. If we want liberty, we should strive to attain it in our lifetimes. We should therefore want those lifetimes to be lengthened beyond any set limit, not just for the sake of experiencing a far more complete liberty, but also for the sake of life itself and all of the opportunities it opens before us.

Enemy of Ruin – Quiz and Badge – Fifth in TRA’s Series on Indefinite Life Extension

Enemy of Ruin – Quiz and Badge – Fifth in TRA’s Series on Indefinite Life Extension

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enemy_of_ruin

G. Stolyarov II
March 30, 2013
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The Rational Argumentator is proud to announce the fifth in its planned series of quizzes on indefinite life extension, a companion activity to the Resources on Indefinite Life Extension (RILE) page.

Enemy of Ruin Quiz

Read “The Real War – and Why Inter-Human Wars are a Distraction” by G. Stolyarov II and answer the questions in the quiz below, in accordance with the essay. If you get 100% of the questions correct, you will earn the Enemy of Ruin badge, the fifth badge in The Rational Argumentator’s interactive educational series on indefinite life extension.  You will need a free account with Mozilla Backpack to receive the badge.

This badge was designed by Wendy Stolyarov, whose art you can see here, here, and here.


Leaderboard: Enemy of Ruin Quiz

maximum of 9 points
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The Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences: Turning the Tide for Life Extension – Video by G. Stolyarov II

The Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences: Turning the Tide for Life Extension – Video by G. Stolyarov II

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The tide of funding for life-extension research has turned. With the announcement of the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences – sponsored by such renowned entrepreneurs as Yuri Milner, Sergei Brin, and Mark Zuckerberg, as well as Zuckerberg’s wife Priscilla Chan and Anne Wojcicki of 23andMe – there is now a world-class mechanism for rewarding outstanding scientists whose work contributes to understanding and curing debilitating diseases and extending human life. Mr. Stolyarov explains the incentives that the Breakthrough Prize creates for cutting-edge life-extension research and a more meritocratic society.

Remember to LIKE, FAVORITE, and SHARE this video in order to spread rational discourse on this issue.

Support these video-creation efforts by donating here and here.

References
– “The Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences: Turning the Tide for Life Extension” – Essay by G. Stolyarov II –
– Article on Transhumanity.net
– Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences Website
– List of first 11 laureates of the Breakthrough Prize
– “Mark Zuckerberg, Sergey Brin, Yuri Milner Create $33 Million Breakthrough Prize For Medical Research” – Addy Dugdale – Fast Company – February 20, 2013
– “Breakthrough Prize announced by Silicon Valley entrepreneurs” – Rory Carroll – The Guardian
– “Bill Gates Wants to Be Immortal” – Adam Clark Estes – Motherboard

The Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences: Turning the Tide for Life Extension – Article by G. Stolyarov II

The Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences: Turning the Tide for Life Extension – Article by G. Stolyarov II

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The New Renaissance Hat
G. Stolyarov II
February 23, 2013
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The tide of funding for life-extension research has turned. With the announcement of the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences – sponsored by such renowned entrepreneurs as Yuri Milner, Sergei Brin, and Mark Zuckerberg, as well as Zuckerberg’s wife Priscilla Chan and Anne Wojcicki of 23andMe – there is now a world-class mechanism for rewarding outstanding scientists whose work contributes to understanding and curing debilitating diseases and extending human life. (You can find out more about this prize from The Guardian and Fast Company.) The first eleven laureates of the prize have already been selected, and every subsequent year eleven more will receive $3 million each.

The incentives behind the Breakthrough Prize are exactly right. In short, they move our society ever closer to a meritocracy. By receiving a sizable fortune, each scientist – still at the top of his or her career – would no longer need to worry about finances. He or she would at last have a justly deserved reward for ingenious work that advances the struggle of human civilization against disease, decay, and death. To produce ground-breaking research in biology, medicine, and biotechnology requires a kind of passion that does not get extinguished just because one’s day-to-day material needs have been satisfied. By getting the material worries out of the way, that passion is allowed full and free rein. Innovation becomes the dominant motive force of further projects, and further research and breakthroughs can proceed without fear of running out of funding.

The people funding the prize are themselves excellent exemplars of meritocracy. They became wealthy by their own efforts – not through inheritance, political pull, or expropriation of others, but through providing services that millions of people voluntarily sought out and recognized as enhancing their lives. It is not surprising that these entrepreneurs of merit would seek to reward the merit in others – particularly merit that, through its further exercise, can eventually save the lives of us all, from the wealthiest to the poorest. The ideal of a societal meritocracy is one in which personal wealth is directly proportional to earned achievement. Meritocracy does not require central planning, because people of merit will naturally seek to exchange values and reward one another on a free market – provided that central planners do not distort the incentives toward doing so. The distribution of wealth will, over time, approach a purely meritocratic one solely as a result of such enlightened and free interactions. Of course, we are far from having a pure meritocracy today, for the incentives are significantly distorted by special political favors, barriers to entry, and the cultural corruption they engender. However, given the slightest opening, the meritocratic ideal will gradually penetrate into an ever-expanding array of endeavors. By the accident of history, computer and internet technologies have been some of the least centrally controlled in the 20th and early 21st centuries. The result was the emergence of a group of merit-based entrepreneurs who could use their wealth to fund productive benefactors of humankind in other fields.

Another ubiquitously known member of the larger group of merit-based achievers is Bill Gates, who has recently expressed his personal desire not to die during a Reddit AMA.  This makes perfect sense: a man who has everything that wealth in today’s world can provide, and who leads a happy and fulfilling life besides, must still confront the fundamental injustice of his personal demise – an injustice that the wealthiest among us have not been able to rectify, yet. While Bill Gates is not sponsoring the Breakthrough Prize (at least not at present), his philanthropic efforts are already going a long way toward alleviating many life-shortening diseases in the less-developed parts of the world. We can all hope that, over time, he and others like him will devote increasing shares of their wealth toward overcoming the more formidable barriers of biological senescence.

For now, the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences is an excellent start. It will raise the profile of life-extension research and inspire others to pursue ambitious projects in hopes of earning the prize. Unlike the Nobel Prize, which scientists earn many decades after their most prominent achievements, this prize will come much sooner to those whose transformational work strikes blows against some our least tractable adversaries. With the accelerating pace of technological progress, it only makes sense not to wait over a generation before recognizing their accomplishments. Not only the recipients, but also their benefactors – Milner, Brin, Zuckerberg, Chan, and Wojcicki – are to be saluted for giving a critical and ongoing boost to life-extension efforts on many fronts.

Dynamists vs. Stasists: Virginia Postrel’s “The Future and Its Enemies”, 15 Years Later – Article by Bradley Doucet

Dynamists vs. Stasists: Virginia Postrel’s “The Future and Its Enemies”, 15 Years Later – Article by Bradley Doucet

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The New Renaissance Hat
Bradley Doucet
February 18, 2013
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This article was originally published as part of the 15th anniversary issue of Le Québécois Libre.
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Fifteen years ago, in 1998, Le Québécois Libre was launched by Martin Masse and Gilles Guénette. I did not know them at the time. I was finishing up my bachelor’s degree that year, and only met them seven years later, in 2005, shortly after submitting my first article to them. I quickly became a regular contributor, and three years after that, in 2008, English Editor. To date, I have written 64 articles and reviews for the QL, along with 34 shorter Illiberal Beliefs, and a handful of blog entries in French. I’m proud of this work, and proud to have been a part of this web magazine for the past eight years, and I look forward to many more.
***

For this 15th anniversary edition, then, I thought I would look back at a book that was published way back in 1998. I did a little sleuthing and found an excellent one in my library, one that appropriately enough has its gaze firmly fixed forward: Virginia Postrel’s The Future and Its Enemies: The Growing Conflict Over Creativity, Enterprise, and Progress. On one level, Postrel’s book is a celebration of the technological wonders of the modern world. She writes eloquently about the benefits of everything from biotechnology to computers, from tampons to contact lenses. But on a deeper level, she is celebrating the creativity and enterprise that generate open-ended, unpredictable progress—and warning us against those who would stifle it or stop it altogether.

Pro vs. Con

Postrel refers to those who embrace the idea of an open-ended future as “dynamists.” Although they are a diverse group and certainly not a proper coalition, dynamists “share beliefs in spontaneous order, in experiments and feedback, in evolved solutions to complex problems, in the limits of centralized knowledge, and in the possibilities of progress.” While many libertarians will recognize themselves in such attitudes (Postrel herself was the editor of the libertarian Reason magazine from July 1989 to January 2000), so will others who consider themselves progressives, liberals, or conservatives, or who are frankly apolitical. Dynamism is a broad category, and it cuts across party lines.

So, too, is its opposite. People who are opposed to the idea of an open-ended future, Postrel dubs “stasists,” and they in turn fall into two broad subcategories: “reactionaries, whose central value is stability, and technocrats, whose central value is control.” Certain types of conservatives who long for the way they imagine the world to have been in the 1950s (or the 1850s) are examples of reactionaries, but so are certain environmentalists who long for the way they imagine the world to have been before the Industrial Revolution, or before agriculture, or before man. Technocrats, for their part, do not want to stop or reverse change; they just want to tame it, to bring it under centralized, expert control by subsidizing and regulating businesses, controlling international trade and immigration, and requiring their stamp of approval before anything new can be allowed to flourish.

In countering reactionaries, dynamists need to emphasize the great benefits that have accrued to humankind from things like penicillin, modern dentistry, and electric motors, which have eliminated many early deaths and much pain and backbreaking toil. In responding to the siren call of technocrats, dynamists need to explain why the future cannot be effectively controlled without crippling it, that in order for there to be much technological innovation and material progress, people need the freedom to experiment.

Reactionaries, says Postrel, used to be opposed to technocrats, but now “they attack dynamism, often in alliance with their former adversaries.” In response, one of her tacks is to celebrate dynamism as being, in fact, more truly natural than either stability or centralized control. She also cleverly counters the charge that people who value freedom are “atomistic” by pointing out that atoms are rarely found alone in nature; they form molecular bonds, and free people form social bonds without having to be coerced into doing so. In closing, she calls on dynamists to start seeing themselves as a real coalition, a coalition not based primarily on fear or self-interest, but rather “bound by love: love of knowledge, love of exploration, love of adventure, and, just as much, love of small dreams, of the textures of life.”

The World Today

A lot can change in fifteen years. In celebrating the gradual development of contact lenses through the messy, undirected process of trial and error, Postrel imagines what the future of this technology might be: “Someday we may expect our contact lenses to function as computer screens and navigation guides, to see infrared or enhance night vision. Or we may displace them altogether with laser surgery or other procedures, as yet undiscovered.” Laser eye surgery, which was still very new in 1998, has more than come into its own in 2013, as my friend and QL colleague Adam Allouba personally experienced just recently.

But if technology has not stopped evolving, the dynamist coalition Postrel envisioned to defend the future does not yet appear to have become a significant player on the political scene. Part of the reason is surely the 2001 destruction of the World Trade Centre in New York, which breathed new life into old Cold War, hawk-dove political divisions that had up until then been fading, and thereby forestalled any restructuring along dynamist-stasist lines. It also gave technocratic peddlers of fear on the right another excuse to exert more centralized control, as the 2008 financial crisis did for technocratic peddlers of fear on the left.

Part of the challenge for libertarians has been to show that both of these traumatic events were failures of rigid, centralized, bureaucratic control—and that flexible, spontaneous order can do better. Hopefully, given the work we do here at Le Québécois Libre, and the work done by Postrel and many others around the world, in another fifteen years, the kinds of lessons contained in The Future and Its Enemies will be more widely appreciated, and that dynamist coalition for an open-ended future will be a burgeoning reality.

Bradley Doucet is Le Quebecois Libré‘s English Editor. A writer living in Montreal, he has studied philosophy and economics, and is currently completing a novel on the pursuit of happiness.
The Patent Bubble and Its End – Article by Jeffrey A. Tucker

The Patent Bubble and Its End – Article by Jeffrey A. Tucker

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The New Renaissance Hat
Jeffrey A. Tucker
February 3, 2013
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“Then they pop up and say, ‘Hello, surprise! Give us your money or we will shut you down!’ Screw them. Seriously, screw them. You can quote me on that.”

Those are the words of Newegg.com’s chief legal officer, Lee Cheng. He was speaking to Arstechnica.com following a landmark ruling that sided with a great business against a wicked patent troll company called Soverain.

What is a patent troll? It is a company that has acquired patents (usually through purchases on the open market) but does not use them for any productive purpose. Instead, it lives off looting good companies by blackmailing people. The trolls say, “Pay us now or get raked over the coals in court.”

Soverain is one such company. Most companies it has sued have paid the ransom. Soverain has collected untold hundreds of millions in fines from the likes of Bloomingdale’s, J.C. Penney, J. Crew, Victoria’s Secret, Amazon, and Nordstrom.

It sounds like a criminal operation worthy of the old world of, say, southern Italy (no offense, guys!). Indeed, but this is how it works in the U.S. these days. The looting is legal. The blackmail is approved. The graft is in the open. The expropriation operates under the cover of the law. The backup penalties are inflicted by the official courts.

To be sure, the trolls may not be as bad as conventional patent practice. At least the trolls don’t try to shut you down and cartelize the economy. They just want to get their beak wet. Once that happens, you are free to go about your business. This is one reason they have been so successful.

Soverain’s plan was to loot every online company in existence for a percentage of their revenue, citing the existence of just two patents. Thousands of companies have given in, causing an unnatural and even insane increase in the price of patent bundles. Free enterprise lives in fear.

Let me add a point that Stefan Molyneux made concerning this case. The large companies are annoyed by the patent-troll pests but not entirely unhappy with their activities. The large companies can afford to pay them off. Smaller companies cannot. In this way, the trolls serve to reduce competition.

[Stefan made his comments on an edition of Adam v. The Man, in which we were both guests. you can watch the entire show here.]

When Soverain came after Newegg’s online shopping cart demanding $34 million, a lower court decided against Newegg, but only imposed a fine of $2.5 million. Newegg examined the opinion and found enough holes in the case to appeal. It was a gutsy decision, given the trends. But as Cheng told Ars Technica:

“We basically took a look at this situation and said, ‘This is bull****.’ We saw that if we paid off this patent holder, we’d have to pay off every patent holder this same amount. This is the first case we took all the way to trial. And now nobody has to pay Soverain jack squat for these patents.”

It’s true. The case not only shuts down the Soverain racket. It might have dealt a devastating blow to the whole patent hysteria and the vicious trolling that has fueled it all along.

And truly, the patent mania has become crazy. No one 10 years ago would have imagined that it would go this far.

“It’s a sign of something gone awry, not a healthy market,” attorney Neil Wilkof told Gigaom.com, with reference to the utterly insane amounts that well-heeled tech giants have been paying for patents. “I think we’re in a patent bubble in a very specific industry. It’s a distorted market and misallocation of resources.”

[Note: This entire racket is anticipated and debunked in the pioneering work on the topic. The new edition of Stephan Kinsella’s Against Intellectual Property is now available for free to Club members.]

Earlier this year, Google shelled out $12.5 billion for the acquisition of Motorola Mobility. Facebook threw down $550 million for AOL’s patents. Apple and Google spent more last year on patent purchases and litigation than on actual research and development. The smartphone industry coughed up $20 billion last year on the patent racket. A lawsuit last year against Samsung awarded Apple $1 billion in a ridiculous infringement case.

These are astronomical numbers — figures that would have been inconceivable in the past. Everyone seems to agree that the system is radically broken. What people don’t always understand is that every penny of this is unnecessary and pointless. This market is a creation of legislation, and nothing more. The companies aren’t really buying anything but the right to produce and the right not to be sued, and that is not always secure.

Let’s back up. Why are there markets in anything at all? They exist because goods have to be allocated some way. There are not enough cars, carrots, and coffee to meet all existing conceivable demand. We can fight over them or find ways to cooperate through trade. Prices are a way to settle the struggle over goods that people grow or make, or services people provide, in a peaceful way. They allow people to engage to their mutual benefit, rather than club or shoot each other.

But what is being exchanged in the patent market? It’s not real goods or services. These are government creations of a bureaucracy — an exclusive right to make something. They are tickets that make production legal. If you own one, there is no broad market for it. It has only a handful of possible buyers, and the price of your good is based entirely on how much money you think you can extract from deep pockets. Sometimes, you actually force people to buy with the threat that you will sue if they don’t.

That’s not how normal markets operate. There was a time when patents didn’t even apply to software at all. The whole industry was built by sharing ideas and the spirit of old-fashioned competition. Companies would work together when it was to their mutual advantage and hoard competitive reasons when it was not. It seemed to work fine, until legislation intervened.

Today the entire fake market for patents is sustained by the perception that courts will favor the patent holders over the victims. The Newegg case changes that perception, which is why it has been the most closely watched case in the industry. This might signal the end of the reign of terror, at least one form of it.

But, you say, don’t creators deserve compensation? My answer: If they create something people are willing to pay for, great. But that’s not what’s happening. Soverain’s bread and butter was a handful of patents that had been on the open market, changing hands through three different companies over the course of 10 years, until they landed in the laps of some extremely unscrupulous wheeler-dealers.

In other words, patents these days have little to nothing to do with the creators — any more than mortgage-backed securities at the height of the boom had anything to do with the initial lender and its risk assessments. Once a patent is issued — and they are not automatically valid, but rather have to be tested in litigation — it enters into the market and can land anywhere. The idea that the patent has anything to do with inspiring innovation is total myth. It is all about establishing and protecting monopolistic weapons with which to beat people.

Many people have been hoping for patent reform. It probably won’t happen and might not even need to happen. If this case is as significant as tech observers say, a sizeable portion of this fake industry could be smashed via a dramatic price deflation. When something is no longer worth much, people stop wanting it.

Patents date from a time when a great industrial innovation made the headlines just because it was so rare. That’s not our world. Government has no business allocating and centrally planning ideas. Here’s to Newegg: Take a bow. Someone had the guts to say no. This time, for once, it worked.

Yours,
Jeffrey Tucker

Jeffrey Tucker is the publisher and executive editor of Laissez-Faire Books, the Primus inter pares of the Laissez Faire Club, and the author of Bourbon for Breakfast: Living Outside the Statist Quo,  It’s a Jetsons World: Private Miracles and Public Crimes, and A Beautiful Anarchy: How to Build Your Own Civilization in the Digital Age, among thousands of articles. Click to sign up for his free daily letter. Email him: tucker@lfb.org | Facebook | Twitter | Google.

This article has been republished pursuant to a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

Against Gun Control, Media Sensationalism, and Political Exploitation of Sandy Hook – Video by G. Stolyarov II

Against Gun Control, Media Sensationalism, and Political Exploitation of Sandy Hook – Video by G. Stolyarov II

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A senseless tragedy should not be used to justify the deprivation of the liberties of millions of innocent people. Media sensationalism, oriented toward jarring negative events – as well as ulterior political agendas – have utilized the tragic Sandy Hook massacre to justify proposals that damage innocent people and do not solve any problems. From gun control to religious fundamentalism to attacks on video games and gamers – the Sandy Hook tragedy, because of the irrational climate of public opinion it has invited, has the potential to damage even more innocent lives.

References
– “Crime in the United States” – Wikipedia
– “Mike Huckabee Explains Bizarre Claim That God’s Absence From Sandy Hook Led To Massacre” – The Huffington Post – December 17, 2012

Workplace Freedom and Right-to-Work Laws – Article by Edward W. Younkins

Workplace Freedom and Right-to-Work Laws – Article by Edward W. Younkins

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The New Renaissance Hat
Edward W. Younkins
December 14, 2012
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On Tuesday December 11, 2012 Michigan, the birthplace of the nation’s organized labor movement, became the country’s 24th right-to-work state. This short excerpt from pages 81-83 of my 2002 book, Capitalism and Commerce, explains the propriety of right-to-work laws.

Before the Norris-La Guardia and National Labor Relations Acts (NLRA) in the 1930s, the employment relationship consisted of voluntary exchange contracts between employers and employees. A return to the common law of contracts, property rights, and tort would permit each person to decide if he wanted to contract with or join any union for representation services. Under such an arrangement there would be competitors among labor organizations and the possibility of having workers represented by a variety of unions and other workers having no representatives. Instead, they would bargain for themselves as individuals.

Before these acts, an employer had the common-law right to fight the unionization of his company. The employer could enter into “yellow dog contracts” with the employees in which the two parties would agree not to have a union—one reason for such contracts was the desire of the employees to avoid the loss of work and wages that would occur during strikes. Because these agreements were voluntary, they must have been to the mutual benefit of both parties. In addition, before the 1930s, the employer was free to attempt to persuade workers that unionization would not be to their benefit. Also, in his efforts to gain loyalty to his firm, the employer could refuse to hire workers who wanted to engage in union-related activity. The employer also had the common-law right to establish a company union. Then, of course, the company always had the right to voluntarily agree to hire workers who belonged to a specific union.

Unions were subject to the antitrust laws before Norris-La Guardia—not so thereafter. The National Labor Relations Act then destroyed the common-law right of an employee to join a union of his own choosing or to represent himself. After such New Deal legislation, unions operated with the help of laws and court decisions to force employees to join them to gain a monopoly of particular jobs. Unions were free to use violence (picketing) against competing workers and intimidation against the employers through the strike.

After a union has been certified as an exclusive bargaining agent, it is presumed to have majority support indefinitely (unless there is a decertification election) even if all the workers who originally chose it are no longer with the company. Section 8(a) 3 of the National Labor Relations Act empowers unions with monopoly bargaining privileges to agree with employers that all workers represented by the unions must join the union or at least pay union dues. Section 14(b) of the Act permits states to forbid such arrangements. Twenty-one right-to-work states have chosen to do so by banning all forms of union security. In these states workers can be forced to have a union (selected by majority vote) represent them, but they cannot be forced to join or pay dues to any unions. However, in the twenty-nine other states, security clauses are permitted. In these states, workers who do not want to be represented by a union (but are forced to because of monopoly representation) may be compelled to pay for the unwanted representation or be fired. Nonunion (i.e., union-free) workers who don’t want to become members of a union may be forced to pay dues (or their equivalent) as a requirement of their employment.

If a union security agreement specifies a union shop then the worker must join the union after a probationary period. However, if it specifies an agency shop, the worker does not have to join the union but must pay dues or their equivalent. In an agency shop, workers do not have to become members, but they all must pay dues or “service fees” to the unions that represent them. Unions employ a free-rider argument to justify this coercion. They argue that, without the imposition of forced dues, some workers would choose to receive the benefits of union representation but not pay for them. The goal of compulsory union dues is apparently to prevent free riders. Of course, if a union simply represented those who wanted it, there would be no free-rider problem. The union’s free-rider problem stems from section 9-A of   the National Labor Relations Act that requires that a certified union be the exclusive representative that bargains with the employer for all workers, both union and non-union. Unions that have gained monopoly bargaining privileges by majority vote must represent all workers, whether those workers want it to or not. The unions created the free-rider problem themselves when they persuaded the authors of the NLRA to permit monopoly bargaining. They now use monopoly bargaining as an excuse for forced dues!

By empowering labor unions the government did away with the old common-law rules of contract, property, and tort that applied equally to all involved parties. They were replaced with a coercive legal framework designed to help labor union leaders attain their goals. As a result, common-law courts were replaced by administrative tribunals (e.g., the National Labor Relations Board) which could be relied upon to implement prounion policies. The government thus promoted unions by failing to apply laws of equal applicability to unions and employers alike, used its power to support unions, and allowed unions to use force in pursuit of their ends.

Dr. Edward W. Younkins is Professor of Accountancy at Wheeling Jesuit University. He is the author of Capitalism and Commerce: Conceptual Foundations of Free Enterprise [Lexington Books, 2002], Philosophers of Capitalism: Menger, Mises, Rand, and Beyond [Lexington Books, 2005] (See Mr. Stolyarov’s review of this book.), and Flourishing and Happiness in a Free Society: Toward a Synthesis of Aristotelianism, Austrian Economics, and Ayn Rand’s Objectivism [Rowman & Littlefield Pub Incorporated, 2011] (See Mr. Stolyarov’s review of this book.). Many of Dr. Younkins’s essays can be found online at his web page at www.quebecoislibre.org. You can contact Dr. Younkins at younkins@wju.edu.

In Praise of Price Gouging – Article by Ron Paul

In Praise of Price Gouging – Article by Ron Paul

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The New Renaissance Hat
Ron Paul
November 12, 2012
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As the northeastern United States continues to recover from Hurricane Sandy, we hear the usual outcry against individuals and companies who dare to charge market prices for goods such as gasoline. The normal market response of rising prices in the wake of a natural disaster and resulting supply disruptions is redefined as “price gouging.” The federal government and some state governments on the East Coast claim that price gouging is the charging of ruinous or exploitative prices for goods in short supply in the wake of a disaster and is a heinous crime  But does this reflect economic reality, or merely political posturing to capitalize on raw emotions?

In the wake of Hurricane Sandy, the supply of gasoline was greatly disrupted. Many gas stations were unable to pump gas due to a lack of electricity, thus greatly reducing the supply.  At the same time demand for gasoline spiked due to the widespread use of generators. Because gas stations were forbidden from raising their prices to meet the increased demand, miles-long lines developed and stations were forced to start limiting the amount of gasoline that individuals could purchase. New Jersey gas stations began to look like Soviet grocery stores.

Had gas stations been allowed to raise their prices to reflect the increased demand for gasoline, only those most in need of gasoline would have purchased gas, while everyone would have economized on their existing supply. But because prices remained lower than they should have been, no one sought to conserve gas.  Low prices signaled that gas was in abundant supply, while reality was exactly the opposite, and only those fortunate enough to be at the front of gas lines were able to purchase gas before it sold out.  Not surprisingly, a thriving black market developed, with gas offered for up to $20 per gallon.

With price controls in effect, supply shortages were exacerbated.  If prices had been allowed to increase to market levels, the profit opportunity would have brought in new supplies from outside the region.  As supplies increased, prices gradually would have decreased as supply and demand returned to equilibrium. But with price controls in effect, what company would want to deal with the hassle of shipping gas to a disaster-stricken area with downed power lines and flooded highways when the same profit could be made elsewhere?  So instead of gas shipments flooding into the disaster zones, what little gas supply is left is rapidly sold and consumed.

Many governments fail to understand that prices are not just random numbers. Prices perform an important role in providing information, coordinating supply and demand, and enabling economic calculation. When government interferes with the price mechanism, economic calamity ensues. Price controls on gasoline led to the infamous gas lines of the 1970s, yet politicians today repeat those same failed mistakes. Instituting price caps at a below-market price will always lead to shortages. No act of any legislature can reverse the laws of supply and demand.

History shows us that the quickest path to economic recovery is to abolish all price controls. If governments really want to aid recovery, they would abolish their “price-gouging” legislation and allow the free market to function.

Representative Ron Paul (R – TX), MD, was a three-time Republican candidate for U. S. President. See his Congressional webpage and his official campaign website. 

This article has been released by Dr. Paul into the public domain and may be republished by anyone in any manner.

US Gone to Pot, but Not Completely – Article by Mark Thornton

US Gone to Pot, but Not Completely – Article by Mark Thornton

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The New Renaissance Hat
Mark Thornton
November 12, 2012
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The only good thing about the 2012 campaign — other than its being over — is that much progress was made on marijuana policy. Marijuana was legalized in two states, Colorado and Washington. Medical-marijuana legislation passed in Massachusetts. Marijuana was decriminalized is several major cities in Michigan and Burlington, Vermont, passed a resolution that marijuana should be legalized. The only defeats were that legalization failed to pass in Oregon and medical marijuana was defeated in Arkansas.

This is a stunning turnaround from the 2010 campaign when Prop 19 in California failed to pass despite high expectations. I explained in detail why Prop 19 failed here. It was an unfortunately common story of Baptists, i.e., people who oppose it, and bootleggers, i.e., people who profit from black-market sales, who stopped the legalization effort.

With regards to the legalization victories in Colorado and Washington, Tom Angell, Director of LEAP (Law Enforcement Against Prohibition) called the election a “historic night for drug-law reformers.” Paul Armentano, the deputy director of NORML (National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws), called the Colorado and Washington victories “game changers,” noting that “both measures provide adult cannabis consumers with unprecedented legal protections.” He noted that “until now, no state in modern history has classified cannabis itself as a legal product that may be lawfully possessed and consumed by adults.” Writing for the Marijuana Policy Project, Robert Capecchi called Colorado and Washington “historic victories,” saying that they “represent the first bricks to be knocked out of the marijuana prohibition wall.”

Following is a list of all marijuana measures on the 2012 ballot as provided by LEAP:

Colorado Marijuana legalization Passed
Washington Marijuana legalization Passed
Oregon Marijuana legalization Failed
Massachusetts Medical marijuana Passed
Arkansas Medical marijuana Failed
Detroit, MI Decriminalization of adult marijuana possession Passed
Flint, MI Decriminalization of adult marijuana possession Passed
Ypsilanti, MI Marijuana to be lowest law enforcement priority Passed
Grand Rapids, MI Decriminalization of adult marijuana possession Passed
Kalamazoo, MI Three medical-marijuana dispensaries permitted in city Passed
Burlington, VT Recommendation that marijuana should be legalized Passed
Montana Referendum restricting medical marijuana Likely to pass

Some readers might not be fired up at the prospects of legalization, decriminalization, and medical marijuana, but the benefits are higher than you might think. First of all, the economic crisis is a great opportunity to get this type of reform passed. There are several economic dimensions at work here. The most obvious thing that comes to mind is that legalized marijuana might be a source of tax revenues and possibly excise taxes and license fees. It would also be a source of jobs, although the net gain in jobs and incomes is probably initially small.

A major benefit would be a reduction in the size of government. Marijuana prohibition results in hundreds of thousands of people being arrested, tying up police, jails, courts, and prisons. When the city of Philadelphia decided to make marijuana prohibition a low priority and treat it like public intoxication ($200 fine), they ended up saving $2 million in the first year.

One of the most important benefits of these measures is that they make for a more liberal society in the Misesian sense. Marijuana prohibition is public violence, prejudice, and partiality. Legalization and liberalism is private property and public tolerance. As Ludwig von Mises wrote,

The essential teaching of liberalism is that social cooperation and the division of labor can be achieved only in a system of private ownership of the means of production, i.e., within a market society, or capitalism. All the other principles of liberalism democracy, personal freedom of the individual, freedom of speech and of the press, religious tolerance, peace among the nations are consequences of this basic postulate. They can be realized only within a society based on private property. (Omnipotent Government, p. 48)

The key thing, economically speaking, is that more liberalism is good for business, jobs, and prosperity. Legalizing marijuana, along with things like same-sex-marriage laws, may be appalling to some people, but when companies are looking to get started or establishing new operations, those are some of the things that are looked at, just like taxes, schools, crime, etc. States that are competing for the best companies that offer the highest paying jobs are the same states that are liberalizing their policies.

Therefore, it should come to no surprise that a state like Washington legalized marijuana even though it does not have a history of marijuana-reform activism. Washington needs to compete with other states for computer programmers, engineers, and technicians for Washington-based firms like Boeing and Microsoft. Do not be surprised if what happened in Colorado and Washington spreads to other states in coming elections.

The most important aspect of the victories in Colorado and Washington is that the people of those states stood up and voiced their opposition to the federal government and its policy of marijuana prohibition. They are directing their state governments to no longer cooperate with the federal government. You can bet that federal officials will seek to intimidate local officials and businesses as they have done in California. They seek to use fear and violence to maintain their power.

However, demographically and ideologically, they are fighting a losing battle. Supporters of legalization are younger, smarter, better educated, and have above-average incomes. The leaders of the reform movement do not seem to view their efforts as “pro-marijuana,” but rather as anti-prohibition, and they realize that the benefits are in terms of health, public safety, and prosperity.

When my book The Economics of Prohibition was published 20 years ago, I was often asked my opinion if marijuana should be or would be legalized. My stock answer was that medical marijuana would start to be legalized in 10 years and that marijuana would start to be legalized in 20 years, probably during an economic crisis. My only prediction in print was that the reform process would begin around the turn of the century. The first reform was actually a medical-marijuana law passed in California in 1996.

Mark Thornton is a senior resident fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, and is the book review editor for the Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics. He is the author of The Economics of Prohibition, coauthor of Tariffs, Blockades, and Inflation: The Economics of the Civil War, and the editor of The Quotable Mises, The Bastiat Collection, and An Essay on Economic Theory. Send him mail. See Mark Thornton’s article archives.

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Copyright © 2012 by the Ludwig von Mises Institute. Permission to reprint in whole or in part is hereby granted, provided full credit is given.