The Pre-History of Freedom

Source: thelibertarianalliance

The following is an article written by Matthew John Hayden, a libertarian blogger. To see more of his work, click HERE.

Daniel Harding

Everything is scarce. As any rocket scientist will tell you, every gram counts. Everything is, then, subject to economic choice. I think all sane schools of economics agree on this. For all that David Graeber and others seek to make out as though the market process introduces unnecessary scarcity calculation into our lives, I’m confident a gift economy cannot give rise to the thousands of layers of today’s division of labour, and so today’s prosperity. Markets are just the consequence of and the setting for voluntary exchange between consenting human beings. That’s it. No brutality required. It is an Ur form of human interaction with strangers.

The idea, in common circulation among anthropologists, that gift economies gave rise to debt in its modern form, and that debt predates mutual exchange, while attractive, and even somewhat identifiable praxeologically, does not stand up to serious investigation because we have a very, very long history – assuming the new thesis to be correct, debt only goes back 5000 years – and at no time has it been standard operating procedure to give away gifts to total strangers, such as people from a different tribe.

So, the praxeological approach. The human actors in a pre-civilised – pre- division of labour – society will most likely operate in small social groups where everyone knows pretty much everyone else and the social graph is closed. This means a group of about 150 people or less, likely a lot less. Inside these groups every individual will be inclined toward gift giving, knowing the satisfaction that can be had from doing so – gift-giving is a category of human action – and will also expect to receive gifts in turn. Not an Xbox One, admittedly, and certainly no chance to play Halo 5, but we’re talking pre-division of labour here. These satisfactions, of the giver and recipient at the time of the giving, are the primary reasons to do so.

So why markets? Why abandon this egalitarian gift-giving society where each is kept from gaining above any else by the expectation that they will give in turn? David Graeber correctly surmises that any attempt to get ahead in terms of wealth will be self-defeating as those who seek to do so would have to resolutely avoid asserting any political influence over their peers, and vice versa, anyone seeking influence will have to give gifts until they descend back to parity with their peers. The gift economy is self-reinforcing, which is why all present-day gift-giving societies are still pre-industrial tribes with a standard of living that can charitably be described as basic.

Societies at some point experience a transition, though the reason is obscure. Eventually, just gift-giving isn’t enough any more. Why not? Possibly one gift economy tribe conquers and enslaves another, introducing the beginnings of the division of labour through slavery. Or possibly a group of socially manipulative individuals within a tribe manage to codify their dominance, likely for religious reasons, in the realisation of their desire to enjoy privilege and prestige. The lust for power is a want that we act to satisfy as much as any other. The gift and market economies are the two mechanisms anarchists of whatever stripe can offer as limiting mechanisms. And on the subject of markets, where do they fit into all this pre-history?

A pre-civilisation human being looks outward and is unsatisfied. It is the universal human condition to feel one’s present situation is in some way unsatisfactory, and that a better future lies just beyond one or more actions, like maybe settling down and figuring out a way to keep the wind and rain at bay while taking a bit more time to sow now that you’re in one place than when you kept moving around. The finer points of the settling process here are mysterious to say the least, but it seems there was nothing intrinsically feudal about the establishment of settlements, with their increased cultivation and domestication. Indeed, it’s likely that people settled gradually over time, but what of our pre-historic comrade?

He or she lays claim to a patch of land and builds on it. Remember that land is always subject to scarcity as there is always a limited supply of the stuff. Even if in theory you could just move horizontally to settle on virgin land, it might be more costly in terms of opportunities foregone than staying right where you are. What opportunities? You might want to be close to certain other people, or close to an open area for trading. And here we get into a bit of history. The free market, with its division of labour, is admittedly similar – at least when looking at these ancient examples – in its superficial appearance to the feudalism of the totally agrarian societies of the Nile, Euphrates-Tigris and Yellow Rivers. I missed one, didn’t I; the Indus River.

The Indus River, in present-day Pakistan, was the cradle of the most sophisticated of all the four Ur civilisations. Instead of transitioning from gift-giving egalitarianism to feudalism the society in this series of values in Asia went the route of private property. That means that gift-giving retreated in importance, presumably gradually, from the entire social graph of each individual – the up to 150-ish peers any one person would know – to just family members or those with serious and dire need. The rest was slowly appropriated by the market exchange mechanism using debt and currency which, like in the other three ancient civilisations, took in agricultural produce and precious metals.

The striking aspect to all of this is that the Indus Valley Civilisation‘s – hereafter referred to Harappaas after the first city of the culture to be rediscovered in modern times – response to the problem of scarcity appears to have been free-market anarchy. It is important to add the proviso that it only appears this way. As yet, no palaces or temples whatsoever have been unearthed in any of the cities, whereas highly developed sewer systems, private property title documents, and roomier homes than those of the common folk in any of the other Ur civilisations are volubly attested at almost every site until the Late Harappan, when this civilisation gave way to the Vedic Civilisation which is the first modern Hindu culture, combining the building and writing of the Harappans with the religious beliefs and myths of the incoming Northern invaders, the Aryans, who ultimately enslaved the natives of the valley and further South also and created the modern caste system, thus replacing the free markets of Harappa with the feudalism that has lasted, in a mutated and socialistic form right down to the present day.

So the land now trodden by the Urdu- and Pashtu-speaking peoples of Pakistan can lay claim to being the first free society, with both individual liberty and a division of labour, in history. Jolly good show. In the millennia before the agricultural and industrial revolutions a free society lived and thrived for thousands of years, with a ‘Golden Age’ as we would recognise it lasting about 700 years. Not bad. So surely the civilised, highly specialised peoples of the Earth in the 21st Century have reason to look backward and think on the possibility that, just maybe, we are mature enough to handle statelessnesss.

Remember that the division of labour in agriculture, textiles, housing, utilities, retail and logistics comes entirely from the private sector – that is, from civil society – meaning the state is an unnecessary feudal vestige left over because we all escaped gift tribalism the wrong way all those countless centuries ago. We are orders of magnitude more ready for anarchy than the tribes-people who embarked on the scary and original experiment of settled civilisation in the Indus Valley. Take heart in their success, and even if their culture is not with us today, let its voices ring out, in their thousands, a cacophony buying and selling and exchanging and peacefully living in liberty.

The State’s Greatest Trick Exposed: Hoppe on Democracy, Progress, and the State

Source: lewrockwell.com

By David Gordon

Mises.org

December 29, 2014

[This is David Gordon’s introductory essay to Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s new book From Aristocracy to Monarchy to Democracy.]

Hans-Hermann Hoppe is a master of theoretical history. He tells us that

It is not my purpose here to engage in standard history, i.e., history as it is written by historians, but to offer a logical or sociological reconstruction of history, informed by actual historical events, but motivated more fundamentally by theoretical — philosophical and economic — concerns.

The work of Carl Menger and Ludwig von Mises on the commodity origin of money is a prime example of what Hoppe has in mind.

In carrying out his illuminating project, Hoppe finds himself in opposition to the dominant way of looking at the evolution of government. According to this perspective, government has over the centuries become ever more democratic. Rule by the people is the final form of government; once it has been reached, history, at least as far as government is concerned, has ended. This historical movement, further, is a “good thing.” It is the triumph of freedom. History is the story of progress.

Hoppe is not a complete pessimist like the “Gloomy Dean” W.R. Inge, who, in his famous Romanes Lecture of 1920, denounced “the superstition of progress.” To the contrary, Hoppe thinks that in economic life, the Industrial Revolution enabled mankind to achieve an unprecedented level of prosperity.

In government, though, matters are entirely different, and here Hoppe is a firm opponent of progressive orthodoxy. For him, rather, history in this area is a tale of a fall — not from the Garden of Eden, but rather from a reasonable way of settling disputes.

How would real, rational, peace-seeking people have solved the problem of social conflict? … What people would most likely accept as a solution, then, is this: Everyone is, first off or prima facie, presumed to be owner — endowed with the right of exclusive control — of all those goods he already, in fact, and so far undisputed, controls and possesses. This is the starting point. As their possessor, he has, prima facie, a better claim to the things in question than anyone else who does not possess these goods — and consequently, if someone else interferes with the possessor’s control of such goods, then this person is prima facie in the wrong and the burden of proof, that is to show otherwise, is on him. However, as the last qualification already shows, present possession is not sufficient to be in the right.

Hoppe assumes that everyone agrees on the appropriate principles for settling property disputes:

The criteria, the principles, employed in deciding between a present controller and possessor of something and the claims of another person are clear then, and it can be safely assumed that universal agreement among real people will be reached regarding them.

To reiterate, Hoppe sees property as antecedent to the state; people in a “state of nature” will rationally agree on the appropriate principles.

The fact that people agree in this way does not solve all problems. Principles must still be applied to concrete issues; and here arises the likelihood of disputes. If people dispute property titles, what is to be done? Hoppe suggests that people would gravitate toward certain “natural leaders” deemed trustworthy to decide cases in an unbiased way:

In order to settle their conflicts and to have the settlement lastingly recognized and respected by others, they will turn to natural authorities, to members of the natural aristocracy, to nobles and kings. What I mean… is simply this: In every society of some minimal degree of complexity, a few individuals acquire the status of a natural elite. Due to superior achievements of wealth, wisdom, bravery, or a combination thereof, some individuals come to possess more authority than others and their opinion and judgment commands widespread respect.

Hoppe here shows himself to be a true Jeffersonian. In a letter to John Adams, written on October 28, 1813, Jefferson said:

I agree with you that there is a natural aristocracy among men. The grounds of this are virtue and talents. … The natural aristocracy I consider as the most precious gift of nature, for the instruction, the trusts, and government of society. And indeed, it would have been inconsistent in creation to have formed man for the social state, and not to have provided virtue and wisdom enough to manage the concerns of the society.

Is the process Hoppe has set forward more than just speculation? Hoppe looks to feudal Europe for confirmation of his line of thought.

Feudal lords could only “tax” with the consent of the taxed, and on his own land, every free man was as much of a sovereign, i.e., the ultimate decision maker, as the feudal king was on his. … The king was below and subordinate to the law. … This law was considered ancient and eternal. “New” laws were routinely rejected as not laws at all. The sole function of the medieval king was that of applying and protecting “good old law.”

An obvious objection is likely to occur to readers, but Hoppe is ready for it: What Hoppe has described is a Utopia “that never was, on sea or land.” The Middle Ages were in fact a period of large scale oppression. Hoppe replies,

I only claim that this [feudal] order approached a natural order through (a) the supremacy of and the subordination of everyone under one law, (b) the absence of any law-making power, and (c) the lack of any legal monopoly of judgeship and conflict arbitration. And I would claim that this system could have been perfected and retained virtually unchanged through the inclusion of serfs into the system.

Unfortunately, matters did not develop in this happy way. Instead, kings seized more and more power. They claimed to have final authority, rejecting appeals to competing authority within the territories they controlled. Hoppe finds it easy to understand why kings might endeavor to arrogate such power to themselves, but another question is at first puzzling. How were the kings able to succeed in their grasp for absolute power? Why did not the partisans of the old aristocratic order thwart them?

Hoppe offers a two-part answer to this mystery. First, the king allied with the people against the aristocracy.

He appealed to the always and everywhere popular sentiment of envy among the “underprivileged” against their own “betters” and “superiors,” their lords. He offered to free them of their contractual obligations vis-à-vis their lords, to make them owners rather than tenants of their holdings, for instance, or to “forgive” their debts to their creditors, and could so corrupt the public sense of justice sufficiently to render the aristocratic resistance against his coup futile.

In this grasp for power, the king had the aid of the “court intellectuals.” They propagandized on behalf of the king, supporting the thesis that the king represented the people.

The demand for intellectual services is typically low, and intellectuals, almost congenitally, suffer from a greatly inflated self-image and hence are always prone to and become easily avid promoters of envy. The king offered them a secure position as court intellectuals and they returned the favor and produced the necessary ideological support for the king’s position as absolute ruler.

How did the court intellectuals carry out their malign mission? They did so by promoting a twofold myth. Society began in a war of all against all. To escape this condition, people voluntarily contracted with an absolute ruler. In that way, they could escape chaotic disorder.

Hoppe firmly rejects both parts of this story, as should by now be abundantly evident. Society begins, not in a Hobbesian state of nature, but rather with people’s mutual recognition of rights; and there was no contract giving power to the king.

With the help of the court intellectuals, monarchs in Europe gained the absolute power they sought; but the appeal to the people eventually proved their undoing. The myth of the contract helped to transform the absolute monarchy into a constitutional one; and this transition Hoppe by no means regards as progress. Constitutions “formalized and codified” the king’s right to legislate and to tax.

Constitutional monarchy eventually ceased to satisfy the intellectuals.

Ironically, the very forces that elevated the feudal king first to the position of absolute and then of constitutional king: the appeal to egalitarian sentiments and the envy of the common man against his betters… also helped bring about the king’s own downfall and paved the way to another, even greater folly; the transition from monarchy to democracy.

When the king’s promises of better and cheaper justice turned out to be empty and the intellectuals were still dissatisfied with their social rank and position, as was to be predicted, the intellectuals turned the same egalitarian sentiments that the king had previously courted in his battle against his aristocratic competitors against the monarchical ruler himself.

With the help of the intellectuals, rule by the people came to replace monarchy; and, Hoppe famously argues, this transition is by no means to be celebrated.

To the contrary. Rather than being restricted to princes and nobles, under democracy, privileges come into the reach of everyone: everyone can participate in theft and live off stolen loot, if only he becomes a public official.

Democracy then does not end the depredations of absolute monarchy, but in fact increases them.

Yet a king, because he “owns” the monopoly and may sell and bequeath his realm to a successor of his choosing, his heir, will care about the repercussions of his actions on capital values.

Here it is necessary to avert a misunderstanding. Hoppe is not a defender of absolute monarchy — far from it. He argues only that democracy as it is today understood is worse than monarchy. But, as is never to be forgotten, monarchy ranks far below the best system, one of private property rights in which respected members of the elite settle disputes.

This essay, thus, is a veritable tour de force. It accepts the standard account of the evolution of government from feudal aristocracy, to monarchy, to democracy, but precisely reverses the standard valorization of this process.

If Hoppe is no exponent of progress here, though, he does not leave us with a counsel of despair. The democratic State’s frenzied finance cannot continue indefinitely; and he finds grounds for hope in a movement toward smaller, decentralized governments.

Economic crisis hits, and an impending meltdown will stimulate decentralizing tendencies, separatist and secessionist movements, and lead to the breakup of empire.

In this way the growth toward Leviathan may be reversed.

This essay provides an ideal introduction to Hans Hoppe’s extended account of his political thought in his great work Democracy: The God That Failed. Hoppe is one of the most original and important social theorists of our time, and readers will gain a clear understanding of the essence of his ideas about the growth of government.

Note: The views expressed on Mises.org are not necessarily those of the Mises Institute.

The Best of David Gordon

An excellent overview of conspiritorial history

If you have ever wondered why us 'conspiricy theorists' believe what we do, this video gives you the documented history of the seemingly unconnected events of world history and shows how they are actually woven together into one story going back six thousand years,

The Image of the State: How History Becomes Propaganda… and Doesn’t Make Sense

Source: lewrockwell.com

As much as I love history now, I found it a confused jumble when I was in school. I was able to memorize the dates and events (for whatever that was worth), but I could find no depth to anything I was taught: it had no meaning, no purpose, no clarity.

I spent decades digging through books and museums before I located the problem, which is this: The history you were taught in school wasn’t exactly a lie, but it was selectively presented. Useful facts were presented to you and less useful facts were excluded.

The big question, of course, is this: Who decided what was “useful”?

In the case of schoolbooks, the answer to the “who decided” question is simple: The group that paid for the books.

As a result, textbooks present the history that makes government look good. The government pays for all those books, after all. And since private schools typically end up using the same books, their students are affected right along with the kids in government schools.

The truth is that history books are written to justify the rulership of their place and time. That’s precisely the wrong way to write history, of course: mandating that the past must justify our current way of life, then fitting facts into that framework.

In other words, nearly all textbooks support a specific political conclusion. And since most authors and editors dare not deviate from the norm, privately produced history books usually toe that same line.

But the important fact here is not that governments do bad things—it’s that we’ve never been exposed to the great lessons and truths of history. Our intellects have been robbed.

I’m doing my part to republish those lessons and truths in my newsletter, but my reach—especially compared to textbooks—is microscopically small.

So for today, I want to do two things:

1. Explain why governments have to manipulate history.

2. Give you a few examples of how it happens.

Legitimization Is Job #1 for Government

Governments have no choice but to mold history, and the reason is simple: legitimization is indispensable to them. The populace must believe that supporting government (giving it their wealth and blood) is a higher and more important concern than their own lives. Without this, government would have to survive on fear and pain alone… and that isn’t a winning proposition.

So, convincing people to spend their lives servicing government is job number one for any successful state. This has always been true, whether the state in question was a monarchy, theocracy, democracy, socialist republic, or whatever.

And among the best ways to secure long-term legitimacy is to train the populace to see the current regime as the necessary and obvious end of human development. And that requires history to lead to this glorious present.

For example, the Goths, trying to replace the Romans as the lords of Europe, promoted their own creation myth, saying that their race began at the battle of Troy—the same place the history of Rome was said to have begun. The story was a ridiculous fraud, but they promoted it, and their people believed it just the same. The story associated the Goths with Rome, making them their logical successors.

But the lie of the Goths did even more than to make their rule look like an inevitable development—it allowed their people to elevate themselves in importance, and that has an instinctive draw, no matter how patently false the story may be.

The same self-praise trick continues throughout the world today. Frenchmen are given reasons to think that they (and their state) are superior. Italians are given reasons why they’re special, and so on. We’re repetitively trained in this (mostly at school) with pledges, anthems, and patriotic stories. This goes on in more or less every political entity on the planet. It isnecessary to effective rulership.

Truth Is an Also-Ran

Truth, as compared to the urgent need of state legitimacy, is an also-ran when it comes to history textbooks—a minor concern. The great modern example of this is the Armenian Genocide.

This horrifying event was nearly written out of American textbooks, as well as those of many other nations. Truth has been sacrificed in order to keep the bosses of Turkey happy.

Since it was the Turkish hierarchy that ordered and/or allowed the Armenian Genocide, they’d rather that the event vanished from history. And since Turkey sits in such a strategic place, the US and many others are quite willing to squash the truth if it will please the Turkish rulers.

I’ve spent decades in the publishing industry, and I happened to work with one of the editors who was forced to make these alterations. He was at his desk one day when his phone rang. The voice on the other end introduced himself as an official of the US State Department. My friend asked him what he could possibly want. “It’s about the history book you’re editing,” the man said. “We need you to cut back the section on the Armenian genocide.”

My friend was horrified and complained that it was the true history. “Yes,” said the man, “but we need to keep the Turks happy.” My friend’s 2-3 pages on the Armenian Genocide was reduced to 2-3 paragraphs, and it was a triumph that he got that much space.

This story is hardly unique, but most people involved learn to shut up about their stories—they cause too much trouble, and most people don’t want to know anyway.

Institutionalized Legitimization

The modification of history, however, is done indirectly more than directly. The educational institutions of the West are effectively government agencies; their money and approval to operate comes from government—and everyone involved knows it. As a result, they keep their areas of inquiry in line with what makes their employers happy.

College students know very well that voicing the wrong political opinions can take a solid point off their GPA, and it can be horrifying to hear how grad students are treated. Likewise, if the professors begin to step out of line, they are quickly (and unpleasantly) brought into conformity.

For example, nearly all anthropology and archeology programs are deeply focused on “state formation.” The state is at the center of their theories, their investigations, and their conclusions. To write a contrary paper would be career suicide.

I suspect that government officials rather seldom need to call universities the way they called my friend at a private publishing house. At this point, there really isn’t any need. The legitimization of government is de rigueur throughout the entire Western academy, and most of the Eastern academy with it. It’s just the way things are done these days.

And…

And that’s why history never really made sense. Making sense wasn’t a primary concern.

It wasn’t that you were stupid.

This Crisis Was Foreseeable … Thousands of Years Ago

Source: washingtonsblog

Economists, Military Strategists and Others Warned Us … Long Ago

We’ve known for 5,000 years that mass spying on one’s own people is always aimed at grabbing power and crushing dissent, not protecting us from bad guys.

We’ve known for 4,000 years that debts need to be periodically written down, or the entire economy will collapse. And see this.

We’ve known for 2,500 years that prolonged war bankrupts an economy.

We’ve known for 2,000 years that wars are based on lies.

We’ve known for 1,900 years that runaway inequality destroys societies.

We’ve known for thousands of years that debasing currencies leads to economic collapse.

We’ve known for millennia that torture is a form of terrorism.

We’ve known for thousands of years that – when criminals are not punished – crime spreads.

We’ve known for hundreds of years that the failure to punish financial fraud destroys economies, as it destroys all trust in the financial system.

We’ve known for centuries that monopolies and the political influence which accompanies too much power in too few hands are dangerous for free markets.

We’ve known for hundreds of years that companies will try to pawn their debts off on governments, and that it is a huge mistake for governments to allow corporate debt to be backstopped by government.

We’ve known for centuries that powerful people – unless held to account – will get together and steal from everyone else.

We’ve known for hundreds of years that standing armies and warmongering harm Western civilization.

We’ve known for over 300 years that going into debt to pay for war ruins any nation.

We’ve known for 200 years that allowing private banks to control credit creation eventually destroys the nation’s prosperity.

We’ve known for two centuries that a fiat money system – where the money supply is not pegged to anything real – is harmful in the long-run.

We’ve known for 200 years that a two-party system quickly becomes corrupted.

We’ve known for over a century that torture produces false and useless information.

We’ve known since the 1930s Great Depression that separating depository banking from speculative investment banking is key to economic stability. See this, this, this and this.

We’ve known for 80 years that inflation is a hidden tax.

We’ve known for 79 years that war is a racket that benefits the elites but harms everyone else.

We’ve known since 1988 that quantitative easing doesn’t work to rescue an ailing economy.

We’ve known since 1993 that derivatives such as credit default swaps – if not reined in – could take down the economy. And see this.

We’ve known since 1998 that crony capitalism destroys even the strongest economies, and that economies that are capitalist in name only need major reforms to create accountability and competitive markets.

We’ve known since 2007 or earlier that lax oversight of hedge funds could blow up the economy.

And we knew before the 2008 financial crash and subsequent bailouts that:

• The easy credit policy of the Fed and other central banks, the failure to regulate the shadow banking system, and “the use of gimmicks and palliatives” by central banks hurt the economy

• Anything other than (1) letting asset prices fall to their true market value, (2) increasing savings rates, and (3) forcing companies to write off bad debts “will only make things worse”

• Bailouts of big banks harm the economy

• The Fed and other central banks were simply transferring risk from private banks to governments, which could lead to a sovereign debt crisis

Postscript:  Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it … and we’ve known that for a long time.