Steven Clyde joins us to discuss “First They Killed My Father” a 2017 biographical historical thriller film directed by Angelina Jolie currently available on Netflix. The story is about Loung Ung, based on her memoir detailing how she as a 5-year-old girl embarks on a harrowing quest for survival amid the sudden rise and terrifying reign of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.

Steven writes for the site and is always has a fun and interesting take on all things related to liberty and Murray Rothbard.  We would each other in the Tom Woods Elite last year and have become good friends.

Here is the recent article he referenced in our discussion:

True Libertarianism Is Colorblind

Google Description:

Loung Ung is 5 years old when the Khmer Rouge assumes power over Cambodia in 1975. They soon begin a four-year reign of terror and genocide in which nearly 2 million Cambodians die. Forced from her family’s home in Phnom Penh, Ung is trained as a child soldier while her six siblings are sent to labor camps.

Wikipedia article:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_They_Killed_My_Father_(film)

Whenever you encounter the “it wasn’t real communism” argument; remember this from Jordan Peterson:

But Hoppe could do it right, right?!?!

Hoppe can make socialism work

The classic “That Wasn’t Real Communism” meme:

Thank you for joining us on this episode of the Actual Anarchy Podcast!

The Actual Anarchy Podcast is all about Maximum Freedom.

Robert and I analyze popular movies from a Rothbardian/Anarcho-Capitalist perspective. If it’s voluntary, we’re cool with it. If it’s not, then it violated the Non-Aggression Principle and Property Rights – the core tenants of Libertarian Theory – and hence – human freedom.

We use movies as a starting point for people who may not be familiar with this way of thinking. Discussion of the plot and decisions that characters make in relation to morality and violations of the non-aggression principle are our bread and butter.

We also will highlight and discuss any themes or lessons from Austrian Economics that we can glean from the film.

The point is to show what anarchy actually is with instances that are presented in film.

We publish new episodes on Sunday just in time for your Monday commute; and occasionally will do specials surrounding holidays or events (elections/olympics).

For our show where we talk about movies from a Rothbardian/Anarcho-Capitalist perspective, we often watch them on our various devices via Netflix, Amazon Prime or on VUDU (which lets you redeem UV content as well).  The VUDU one is nice because once it is in there, you know it will still be there a few months later:

ABOUT

Actual Anarchy, an anarchy unlike what the average idiot thinks it would be. Anarchy means no rulers, not no rules. The non-aggression principle and a respect of property rights are what makes it go.

We host a podcast where we take pop culture movies and showcase moments or scenes or themes throughout that are literally actual examples of anarchy.

Any place, around the world, there are always examples of Actual Anarchy all about you. Sometimes you just have to sit back and take a look. It’s easy once they’ve been pointed out a few times.

Actual Anarchy is real world examples of anarchy in action.

Movies, Shows, Books, News, etc… we host all sorts of content on the site from a bevy of writers enthusiastic for one goal: human freedom

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Read Rothbard is comprised of a small group of voluntaryists who are fans of Murray N. Rothbard. We curate content at www.ActualAnarchy.com and on the www.ReadRothbard.com site including books, lectures, articles, speeches, and we make a weekly podcast based on his free-market approach to economics. Our focus is on education and how advancement in technology improves the living standards of the average person.

Hit us up on our Tip Jar page to see all the myriad was you can support the show and the site:  www.actualanarchy.com/tipjar

Also, be sure to give us your likes, comments, shares, ratings, reviews, and other feedbacks!

For the history you didn’t learn in school, check out Liberty Classroom:

The post Episode 43 – First They Killed My Father (1:32:27) appeared first on Actual Anarchy.

If your first thought is “well libertarians surely care about green!”, I’ll concede and state that this is the point of this article.

Humans, each with their own individual goals and interests, seek a better life for themselves and other people they care about. We are born into an impossible situation though, having signed a supposed “social contract” at birth which guilts us into thinking we owe something to future generations because of the sacrifices made in the past.

And thus lies the root of the problem: the confusion between positive and negative rights. Negative rights, justifiably, state that you as an individual have the right not to have force initiated against you and not  to have your property confiscated from you, while positive rights, which state that things are owed to you or other people, is a fallacy of the highest degree and should be abhorred by anyone familiar with logic.

The logic for positive rights proceeds as follows:

Person A of the past, did something to help or to hurt person B in the past, and therefore person C in the present who either gained or lost because of person A and B’s interactions in the past, owes something to or gets to take away something from person D in the present or the future.

It should be obvious why this doesn’t make sense, because if it’s true that I’m a user today of say the internet and its true I’m a benefactor of this past invention, then it would seem to imply that I “owe” something to the internet. But I pay for my internet services because I value its use, so in what sense am I a free rider?

And furthermore, any argument could be thought up to imply I owe something to somebody or I get to take away something from somebody, because of someone’s actions in the past. Its so nonsensical that’s its difficult to sum up into words, because it can imply almost anything.

Libertarianism however gives the individual a voice though because they are not responsible for things of the past, only their actions in the present. It allows for people to be judged by their character, and not by a collective (namely the state). The core aspect of communism is egalitarian in nature, seeking total equality in horrors that’s have been lived through by millions in which attempts to banish individualism not only goes against human nature (people having dreams and goals) but specifically uses violence to achieve its means, an impossible means to achieve at that.

There have been several articles circulating stating that white nationalism (which I won’t be facetious and leave out that some were written by an Asian guy) isn’t incompatible with libertarianism, which on the surface of it appears to be true in that libertarianism does not tell you that you can’t exclude people from your own private property, whether it be a business or your private home. The reasons for exclusion can be grim or nonsensical even, but the logic still follows that private property allows for inclusion and exclusion.

But then comes the question of, is racially motivated nationalism, hence a nation that wishes to have a private society based on some arbitrary traits unrelated to how a person conducts themselves (such as how tall you are, what color your eyes are, what your skin color is, etc.), able to be accomplished in a manner that is not contradicting to the main principle which is to not harm anyone else? How do you go about removing all the people who don’t look like you, and where do you draw the line? This argument only has plausibility in theory, in which we have a small private society that started from homesteading land and allowed people in one by one.

Society, in its present state, would have to use violence to create a nation of a single race, and even worse, it would have to utilize state functions itself.

On a simpler and more hysterical level, we can imagine the complications that would occur with mixed people, that is people that have different shades of skin tone in their own race; would a half black person be allowed in a white only society if they at least appeared white? It would be an odd and humorous question on the contract being signed entering into the private society that requires you to be 100% white, and many would lie their way in if they thought they could have a better life there.

From the perspective of private businesses, the question that needs to be asked from time to time is, what is more greedy: being racist and catering to the most amount of people you can, or being racist and limiting the amount of profits you earn to constrict your business?

If being greedy in business means that all you care about is profit, surely the former scenario is more greedy, as they are overlooking their racial bias to achieve more profit. The private business owner who chooses to exclude certain groups from their stores are limiting their profits, and hence being less greedy.

Finally, there is a reason why the Mises Institute and their senior fellows don’t use all their energy putting out information in opposition to white nationalism: because when something is so clearly the opposite of what you believe in, why even acknowledge the absurdities? As if people who spend their time thinking about how government harms the individual, also wishes to group the individual into collectivist classes. It just doesn’t make any sense to promote this line of thinking.

Putting people into classes is what collectivists do, while libertarians recognize the importance of a person’s actions versus their appearance.

Racism is collectivism at its core, and though it’s such an obvious facet of the libertarian mind that it hardly needs to be restated, collectivism is antithetical to individualism. It’s not that a private society couldn’t be formed in which only one race exists, but it seems to be problematic that it’s impossible to do that without violence.

For the history you didn’t learn in school, check out Liberty Classroom:

The post True Libertarianism Is Colorblind appeared first on Actual Anarchy.

If you grew up in the 90’s, and were lucky enough to have access to TV without your parents around, you may have watched Jerry Springer in all its glory.

From girls in the audience flashing their breasts in exchange for bead necklaces, to fights breaking out on stage after a “ding ding” sounds off to start them, to Jerry himself throwing out his opinions in the matters, it made some of us feel like our lives were that much more “normal”.

But what of Jerry to call out ANYONE, even Trump, for a lack of dignity? Ben Shapiro, the sometimes good friend of freedom, had a funny response:

Just to put that into perspective:

Dignity….riiiiiiight.

Just a snippet from Springer’s illustrious past:

Springer was elected to the Cincinnati city council in 1971. He resigned in 1974 after admitting to hiring a prostitute. The episode was uncovered when a police raid on a Fort Wright, Kentucky massage parlor found a check Springer had written pinned to a wall in their office with “for services rendered” written in the memo.

The post That Feeling When Jerry Springer Calls You Out On Your “Dignity” appeared first on Actual Anarchy.

In the midst of the hearsay of the common babbler, we time and time again find instances of the Dunning-Kruger Effect. To the dismay of scholars and people of the like who have an unquenchable lust for the truth there is no shortage of deranged talking points which not only have zero basis in reality but also fails to recognize its abhorrent contradiction of itself.

In Plato’s provocative work Allegory of the Cave , he described a fictitious instance in which there were subject humans who spent their entire lives in a dark cave tied down while staring at a wall of the cave, and there was a fire behind them which cast shadows on the wall. All they ever saw their entire lives were shadow figures made from people behind them. When one of them is released in the the real world, they are in disbelief; there is a sun that casts bright light and things have texture, appearance, a feeling, there are many sounds, etc.

Plato describes that, its impossible for the other subjects back at the cave to understand what the subject who was freed was really saying to them, and furthermore described the freed subject as insane. Though controversial as a philosopher, Plato offered us a great insight that any of us can ponder on: its impossible to comprehend the unseen. And within the realm of logic and economics, its impossible to comprehend what you don’t know.

This situation I describe here is of that of someone who quite literally, cannot comprehend economic theory, and their argument fails from every angle. A friend online asked her for data showing that raising the minimum wage helps businesses and the local economy, and this was the response he was given:

Okay, so lets break that down.

“It’s not about helping businesses, it’s about helping people pay their bills”

This is completely oxymoronic, and without using a direct ad hominem attack I would like to say that I indeed am going to attack this persons character, as they completely fail to use logic as a normal person should and lets face it: completely contradicting yourself isn’t worthy of praise.

On one hand, they claim they don’t want to help businesses. They didn’t say “businesses might feel some pain”; they just flat-out said they don’t care about the actual businesses themselves. But then what of the employees? Are they better off now that their employer is no longer in existence? And how does a sudden increase in labor costs amount to helping more people pay their bills, on any planet?

An artificially set wage level by government isn’t, at least the way its implemented now, a type of legislation that forces businesses to hire anybody in the first place. This is crucial. It might be true that, wage increases wont push certain people out of the job market supposing they have the necessary skills to produce enough according to what the wage increase demands via their productivity, but what about all those people who didn’t have that high of a level of productivity to begin with? Namely, we’re  speaking of people who are just entering the job market for the first time, and this sets a dangerous path into adulthood in which the lack of the most basic skills (and the knowledge on how to gain skills) leads to a completely avoidable life of poverty.

And to effect our opponent here on a more visceral level, lets not forget who we’re mainly talking about when we say “those people that will lose their jobs or not get hired in the first place”. We are speaking of young minorities in their teens and early twenties. Its young minorities who wont be able to pay their bills, and now they should be further handicapped according to this person. They should not only be handicapped by an existing minimum wage law that’s making it difficult for people of low skills to advance in their current jobs, but they should be handicapped further by raising the wage so high that most will never get a job in the first place.

This was a common tactic of unions in South Africa during the apartheid era, in which “Equal Pay for Equal Work” campaigns were created to rid employers of the need to hire black workers. It was thought that, since black workers had a lower productivity than that of whites (because of disadvantages as a result of the government), equal pay for equal work really meant that whites needed to be paid more than blacks. The other option was just to not hire them at all.

It was a clever strategy,  but it’s rooted in racism.

Walter Williams, the brilliant (and black) PhD economist at George Mason University, spent much of his life studying what has so heavily played a part in the destruction of his race, which was exactly this: the minimum wage.

He has said on many occasions, that not even slavery has had such devastating effects on the black community as did obscene and racist laws like the minimum wage law. When describing how the minimum wage influenced the disparities between whites and blacks, he notes[1]:

From 1900 to 1954, blacks were more active than whites in the labor market. Until about 1960, black male labor force participation in every age group was equal to or greater than that of whites. During that period, black teen unemployment was roughly equal to or less than white teen unemployment. As early as 1900, the duration of black unemployment was 15 percent shorter than that of whites; today it’s about 30 percent longer. To do something about today’s employment picture requires abandonment of sacred cows and honesty.

His point is this: Are you telling me that the world we live in currently, struggles from more racial tension then we did back during the civil rights era of the 50’s and 60’s? If not, then there must be another explanation, and empirical data confirms the grim scenario Williams gave us insight to.

“Most businesses do fine, you hear a few go under but it gives people more buying power and less stress”

Again, this is completely contradictory.

This just in: lowering the supply of businesses that provides goods to the public, does not equate to people have MORE buying power. It equates to less. When you take away people’s options, you aren’t giving them better ones; you are depriving them of other potential options which may have worked just fine for them but are less expensive.

It’s probably the strangest scenario to this person that, Amazon and other retailers are able to sell goods for so cheap (even with shipping costs), but more so that there’s so many people providing those goods in the first place!

“If a business fails because of a $2 increase then it is mismanaged and it is only a matter of time before it goes under.”

Not everyone is good at math, so its no surprise they fail so miserably on this account.

I would give my own analogy, but I give credit to Brian Herr who laid it out so concisely that it would take a large mental strain to try and sidestep his theoretical:

So let’s say you have a store that requires 10 employees to run. All your employees are paid $8 per hour and you are open from 8am till 8pm. That leaves your labor costs at $465, 920 per year (before adding benefits, etc.). So lets see what happens when we increase minimum wage by just $2 per hour: it comes out to be $582,400 per year in labor, which is an extra $116,480 in labor costs. That is a 20% increase. Think of what that business owner could do to invest in his business with that extra $116,480. Hire more employees? Open a second store (which needs more employees to run).

Secondly, think of what the employer will have to CUT in order to make up for the extra $116,480 he now has to pay the same employees for presumably the same amount of output? Oh idk, how about cutting benefits? Or fire employees?

What Brian  brilliantly points out is that, the unseen is the real costs of labor; its easy for the average person to misconstrue what the average person makes based on the idea of say a $10 an hour wage. A 20% increase in a employers labor costs will most likely be devastating, had they not been pouring every dime of profit back into the business in the first place (versus pocketing it), which still leaves an unlikely scenario of surviving the obstacles down the road.

Furthermore, what our opponent sinisterly attacks is the person who has just started their business. Starting one either requires having capital on hand acquired through sacrifice, a loan from an entity, or a magical pile of money you can play with. Most people only ever get one of the first two options, and the very first is a result of pure self-sacrifice. The second is a result of proving you can pay off your debts (at least in theory, but not comparable to how government warped banking procedures).

James Herrold also added a convincing analysis:

Minimum wage hurts the poorest among us. It’s amazing that she says “if you can’t afford to pay a higher wage, you don’t deserve to be in business”. I doubt she would ever say “if you’re not talented enough to earn a better wage on your own merits, then you don’t deserve the job anyway.

Or would she? By her logic, is it inconceivable she would?

“Many people don’t know how to run a business”

Which is why eight out of ten businesses fail in the first 18 months of business. It’s not completely because of mismanagement though. Archaic regulations keep employers strapped for pennies (with the general public being duped into believing they have untold riches they refuse to share). Competition is enough alone to drive many people out of business, but competition in a free market is healthy.

The difference between this persons view and that of one that understands economics, is that while both agree that failing businesses are (in theory) market signals that resources should be allocated in a different and more efficient way in the economy, one proposes that we should use the state to shut down businesses which wont allow voluntary contracts to exist below a certain wage, while the other proposes that businesses that mismanage their resources from everything to capital goods costs, to depreciation costs, and yes to even labor costs will fail anyway and that this is not necessarily a bad thing. The former will push many people out of business that had good products but couldn’t afford the plethora of regulations and fines placed against them, while the latter pushes businesses who had bad products, and where the resources they were currently using would be better suited in a different sector of the economy.

“The minimum wage is not an issue for stable companies. These sad stories are blaming others for the mistakes they make because they don’t know what they’re doing”

Lets take the sliver of truth that is there and work backwards. Yes, it is true that companies that have been around for quite some time and have developed clientele relationships, a solid customer base, an ethical work environment, etc. will have an easier time adapting to higher costs. Why wouldn’t they? This is like being surprised that an equal tax cut across the income brackets will harm people of lower incomes more than people of higher income brackets; you missed the point genius! Taxes are what hurt people in the first place, and it doesn’t matter if you’re rich or poor.

Poor people are hurt by taxes because they have very little money to consume with in the first place.

Rich people are hurt by taxes because it warps incentives and rather than investing money back into the economy, they now need to focus on battling for their own money against interests that want to deplete them of said profits.

This is exactly what we saw happen in the midst of the two world wars, in which propaganda needed to be heavily used to urge citizens to pay their taxes.

A raise in the minimum wage is nothing but an extra tax on a business, which, according to the person’s comment shows they don’t care about anyway.

To sum up the rebuttal points:

1.) You aren’t helping workers by destroying the place where they work. By limiting the amount of businesses in existence with minimum wage laws, you aren’t “leaving just the well-managed businesses” but rather you are giving companies that have been around longer an edge against those who want to be entrepreneurs themselves. This is the tactic of a monopolist, and not one of an egalitarian.

2.) By closing down current businesses, you are not adding to the number of jobs that are available; you’re lessening that amount and these now unemployed workers will have a hard time getting back in the workforce.

3.) Who does this really effect? It effects the unseen, which is the young teens and young adults (who are most likely minorities) that cannot get a job in the first place.

Notes:

[1] https://townhall.com/columnists/walterewilliams/2013/04/10/black-unemployment-n1561096

For the history you didn’t learn in school, check out Liberty Classroom:

The post What Better Way To Help People Pay Their Bills Than Unemployment! appeared first on Actual Anarchy.

In the 1940’s, efforts to boost tax revenues reached moral lows. The general public, being duped from all angles, managed to file taxes in higher proportions by the end of World War II then in all of prior history. The effects of the propaganda of the 1940’s was that it got nearly every worker on board with the idea that paying their taxes was a duty, and more eerily a “privilege”.

This clip from December 9^th, 1941 has FDR on record saying quote:

“It is not a sacrifice for the industrialist or the wage earner, the farmer or the shopkeeper, the praying man or for the doctor to pay more taxes, to buy more bonds, to forego extra profits, to work longer and harder at the task for which he is best fitted; rather, it is a privilege.”

We see a similar pattern in World War I with regards to an increase in people filing for taxes, but focusing on the era of World War II and Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s presidency we notice something completely different.

At the start of his first term in 1933, 7.2% of citizens were filing taxes, while by the end of his presidency in 1945 there were 84.6% of citizens that had filed. By 1947, 91.7% of citizens were on record for filing taxes.[1]

Instead of focusing attention directly at the 84.5% increase over the span of these 14 years, if we simply look at what happened year to year we notice that:

1.) The percentage of people filing taxes increased every year!

2.) The biggest increases happened during wartime. 71% out of the 84.5% of the increase in the tax filings between 1933 and 1947 occurred between 1939 and 1945, with these specific increases per year:

• From 1939-1940 there was a 12.1% increase from 13.6% to 25.7%
• From 1940-1941 there was a 19.3% increase from 25.7% to 45%
• From 1941-1942 there was a 18.3% increase from 45% to 63.3%
• From 1942-1943 there was a 11.6% increase from 63.3% to 74.9%
• From 1943-1944 there was a 5.1% increase from 74.9% to 80%
• From 1944-1945 there was a 4.6% increase from 80% to 84.6%

 So how could this be? What were the incentives for more people to file taxes, aside from being in a state of war in which citizens are already pressured to do so and aside from FDR basically declaring that paying taxes is in the nature of any good samaritan?

When assessing the lowest and highest marginal tax rates from 1939 -1945 using data from The Tax Foundation for nominal tax rates[2] and rates adjusted for inflation[3], we find that:

• In 1939, the lowest marginal rate was 4% on income between $0 and $4000[4], while the highest marginal rate was 79% on income over $5,000,000.[5]
• In 1940, the lowest marginal rate was 4% on income between $0 and $4000[6], while the highest marginal rate was 79% on income over $5,000,000.[7]
• In 1941, the lowest marginal rate was 10% on income between $0 and $2000[8], while the highest marginal rate was 81% on income over $5,000,000.[9]
• In 1942, the lowest marginal rate was 19% on income between $0 and $2000[10], while the highest marginal rate was 88% on income over $200,000.[11]
• In 1943, the lowest marginal rate was 19% on income between $0 and $2000[12], while the highest marginal rate was 88% on income over $200,000. [13]
• In 1944, the lowest marginal rate was 23% on income between $0 and $2000[14], while the highest marginal rate was 94% on income over $200,000.[15]
• In 1945, the lowest marginal rate was 23% on income between $0 and $2000[16], while the highest marginal rate was 94% on income over $200,000.[17]

Understanding Tax Brackets and Marginal Tax Rates:

The first thing to understand is what these numbers mean, which is crucial because it’s a widely held myth that from the early 1930’s up until the days of Reagan the citizens paid incredibly high tax rates and therefore that resulted in a prosperous economy.

What the intelligent yet misleading economists would have the public believe is that, for example in 1945 when the top marginal tax rate was 94%, if you earned a million dollars in 1944 your tax burden would be $940,000. Not only is this intellectually dishonest, but it’s used as an endless talking point for why paying taxes is not only patriotic but “empirically efficient at high levels”.

I’ll examine the year 1939 to help illustrate this:

For the lowest tax brackets, you would be taxed 4% on any income you made up to $4000, so if you made $4000 in 1938 you would own $160 on tax day in 1939.

The middle tax brackets, taking for example the 25% rate on income between $32,000 to $38,000, means that any amount of income earned between $32,000 and $38,000 would be taxed at 25%. For example, if one person made $35,000 their tax burden would be $8,750 and if another person made $37,000 their tax burden would be $9,250. Both would’ve paid a rate of 25% if they are in that income range, and this applies for all middle brackets.

The highest tax bracket being 79% on income over $5,000,000 means that I have to first earn at least $5,000,000 a year, but every dollar after that amount would be taxed at 79%. For example, if someone made $6,000,000 in 1938, they would be taxed at a rate of 79% on the extra million dollars over $5,000,000 for a tax burden of $790,000. If however, they made $5,000,001 their tax burden would be $0.79.

What Conclusions Can Be Derived From The Tax Rates From World War II?

In layman’s terms, by the start of the war the poorest workers in society were paying 4% of their income to the government (if they filed taxes at all), while by the end of the war the poorest were paying a whopping 23% of their income if they made any amount of income at all!

The richest in society were a different story completely. To be subject to the highest marginal tax rate, you would have had to make over $5,000,000 in 1939, while in 1945 to pay the highest rate you would only have to make $200,000, so by the end of the war not only did you have to make much less to be subject to the highest tax rate, but the highest tax rate jumped from 79% to 94%!

[1] https://eml.berkeley.edu//~saez/piketty-saezOUP04US.pdf, Table A0

[2] https://www.scribd.com/doc/190499803/Fed-U-S-Federal-Individual-Income-Tax-Rates-History-1862-2013

[3] https://www.scribd.com/doc/190500966/Federal-Individual-Individual-Income-Tax-Rate-Adjusted-for-Inflation

[4] $66,070 adjusted for inflation

[5] $82,585,770 adjusted for inflation

[6] $65,598 adjusted for inflation

[7] $81,997,857 adjusted for inflation

[8] $31,237 adjusted for inflation

[9] $78, 093,197 adjusted for inflation

[10] $28,171 adjusted for inflation

[11] $2,817,104 adjusted for inflation

[12] $26,543 adjusted for inflation

[13] $2,654,266 adjusted for inflation

[14] $26,090 adjusted for inflation

[15] $2,609,023 adjusted for inflation

[16] $25,510 adjusted for inflation

[17] $2,551,044 adjusted for inflation

The post World War II Propaganda & Taxation appeared first on Actual Anarchy.

The struggle to fund World War II led to the most desperate attempts of persuading the general public, from FDR’s fireside chats speaking of how paying taxes is a “privilege”[1], to the introduction of the withholdings tax in which Americans would have the taxes they owe siphoned off from the employers to the government throughout the year to avoid paying a lump sum on March 15^th.[2]

The third tactic?

Disney.

After what happened with World War I and the doubling of prices from a military budget constricted to a limited amount of taxes, the government came up with these seemingly foolproof schemes. To even our current dismay in the 21^st century where over 90% of people file their taxes on average, it was heavily effective at getting people to file taxes. With a dramatic increase from 13.6% having filed at the beginning of the war to 84.6% having filed by the end of the war, the propaganda was indeed successful.

But alas, brainwashing kids is wrong, correct? It couldn’t be possible that say Walt Disney Productions had a knack for getting the “patriotic” message sent through in the form of a cartoon. In fact, by 1942 over 90% of Disney’s staff were devoted to pumping out propaganda films for different sectors of the government and military. The Navy alone had ordered over 50 films to be produced.[3] To those who may have noticed how our society and media can somewhat be cartoonish, it’s no surprise that much of our history is riddled with misinformation in the form of cartoons.

“But you must save for tax time…this is your war!” says the patriotic duck![4]

“I’ll show you how to spend your dough” says the Nazi duck!

At first glance, Disney didn’t leave us with too many options here. On one hand, we could save for taxes to fund the war which we may or may not support, but the other option is we spend our money and essentially support the Nazis and starve our soldiers! That’s a tough one!

“Spend for the axis, or save for taxes!”

“Every dollar spent on something you don’t need, is another dollar spent helping the axis!”

You read that right: when you spent money on yourself you were spending it for the axis meaning you were essentially funding your own death if the Nazi’s attacked! How terrible!

But it gets worse!

“Our taxes run the factories, working day and night making guns, machine guns, heavy range guns, guns all types of guns to blast the aggressors from the seas!”

“Taxes to bury the axis!”

“Taxes for ships, battleships, battlecruisers, destroyers, all kinds of battlewagons!”

At least they eventually got to the truth, which is that what we really needed the tax money for is the military industrial complex, or in other words the massive weapons contracts from the government.

But these weren’t just ANY weapons factories of course. They were America’s weapons factories, and to underfund them would be to shoot yourself in the foot really!

“Taxes will keep democracy on the march!”

And indeed they did, yet democracy seems too nice of a word to describe imperialism, as it implies whatever the government does is the will of the people, and whatever they spend the tax money on is the will of the people.

Disney, incredibly, was an extremely efficient conveyer of the message that the federal government wanted to give to the American people which was essentially:

“Pay your taxes to bury the axis…or else!!!”.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fuBvxb2UUHo

[2] https://www.law.cornell.edu/topn/current_tax_payment_act_of_1943

[3] http://www.waltsapartment.com/wp-content/uploads/Life-Magazine-Walt-Disney-Goes-to-War-August-31-1942.pdf

[4] This was thought to be the first appearance of Scrooge McDuck

The post Disney: Statism’s Forgotten Friend appeared first on Actual Anarchy.

By Steven Clyde

“Money, get away. Get a good job with more pay and you’re O.K.

Money, it’s a gas, grab that cash with both hands and make a stash. New car, caviar, four star daydream. Think I’ll buy me a football team.

Money, get back. I’m all right, Jack, keep your hands off of my stack.

Money, it’s a hit. Don’t give me that do goody good bullshit. I’m in the hi-fi fidelity first class traveling set. And I think I need a Lear jet.

Money, it’s a crime. Share it fairly but don’t take a slice of my pie.

Money, so they say, is the root of all evil today. But if you ask for a rise it’s no surprise that they’re giving none away.”[1]

Money is one of the most misunderstood facets of our personal lives, and we spend a large portion of our existence attempting to acquire more of it. Furthermore, the general public lacks a realistic sense of the world we live in based on media propaganda and misinformation spread through the lens of “conventional wisdom”; so it’s no mystery why there exists this gap of knowledge.

Still it must be true that at least some of us realize in some aspect that this same thing we use every day is exorbitantly complex in nature. Does the average citizen really know what the Federal Reserve is? What a reserve ratio is? What inflation is (beyond the thought of their price of living rising)? Should they be expected to?

To quote Murray Rothbard from a 1970 piece when he was attacking the Anarcho-Communist school of thought, which was heavily attracting Marxist-Stalinists at the time:

“It is no accident that it was precisely the economists in the Communist countries who led the rush away from communism, socialism, and central planning, and toward free markets. It is no crime to be ignorant of economics, which is, after all, a specialized discipline and one that most people consider to be a “dismal science.” But it is totally irresponsible to have a loud and vociferous opinion on economic subjects while remaining in this state of ignorance. Yet this sort of aggressive ignorance is inherent in the creed of anarcho-communism.”[2]

Yet, to this day most have not even the slightest interest in economics or history, yet take positions which would have to imply they are masters of both.

Before we examine money in full, a few examples of how our thinking is heavily influenced by information that is false will illustrate why it’s critical to dissect these assertions. There will never come a time when it won’t be important to stress the pontifications of the main stream media, and their half-truths.

The State and Education:

Education, surely, would be non-existent if not for the system in place. We would all be illiterate if not for the standards set up by the Department of Education. This is of course regardless of places like Detroit where the illiteracy rate is thought to be 47% of adults[3]; facts like this are to be left out of the discussion if we are to be taken seriously in academia. And despite rising costs and flat lining results across public schools[4], it is deemed to be a spit in the face of teachers to examine their effectiveness. They work so hard to educate our students on the taxpayer dime, so this isn’t to be questioned.

The State and Healthcare:

And we would be enamored to believe that without the government there would be access to healthcare. “We would all just die in the streets” they proclaim, and they could point to the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor act signed in 1986 by Ronald Reagan as proof. This required hospitals to accept new patients regardless of their ability to pay or their legal status and only applies to hospitals that accept Medicare, so surely we all must be better off. Despite the decades of rising costs[5] and the extremely high deductibles (essentially catastrophic coverage) on plans whom poor people tend to use, there is still the belief that more people are insured now than ever because of Obamacare. To quote the IRS Revenue Procedure for 2017, it states:

“For calendar year 2017, a “high deductible health plan” is defined under § 223(c)(2)(A) as a health plan with an annual deductible that is not less than $1,300 for self-only coverage or $2,600 for family coverage, and the annual out-of-pocket expenses (deductibles, co-payments, and other amounts, but not premiums) do not exceed $6,550 for self-only coverage or $13,100 for family coverage.”

You read that correctly: If you are a poor person and you are gaining “health coverage” for the first time, your out of cost expenses will be anywhere between $1,300 to $6,550 before your insurance will cover anything. So despite the fact that poor people are by definition more uninsured than ever, and are essentially given the bread crumbs from the loaf of bread, the statistics that are produced paint a startling picture. Between 2014 and 2015, 7.4 million people gained access to insurance according to National Health Interview Survey[6], yet in the same graph they show that trends are starting to reverse: more people are starting to opt for private insurance plans over public insurance plans now that they are realizing they are getting the short end of the stick with government insurance.

Why Do We Use Money?

Quite simply, the reason we have mediums of exchange is because humans want more than they have. It is because of this circumstance, that we must also want things we do not have, regardless of whether we have access to any resources at all. I, as person “A”, can logically deduce that if I want person “B’s” product that I must offer them something in return. It must be something that I value less then what I want from them, and they must find more value in what I offer then what they are willing to give up.

Trade[7], by definition, only exists in the paradigm that person “B” and I both benefit.

If only one person benefits in a transaction, it can also be deduced that one party is using violence or coercion against the other party. When dealing with human action, it’s always assumed that people act to improve their current condition, not stifle it.

Carl Menger points out in “Principles of Economics” that:

“As long as the development of a people is so retarded economically that there is no significant amount of trade and the requirements of the various families for goods must be met directly from their own production, goods obviously have value to economizing individuals only if the goods are themselves capable of satisfying the needs of the isolated economizing individuals or their families directly.”[8]

His point is that the reason we trade in the first place is because otherwise, we’d be solely relying on our own productive capacities. Even if we could transform the resources around us from soil to commodity, we would be unable to use them because they coalesce with other resources to form usable goods.

What Money Is and Where It Came From:

The majority of the population will tend to fall in line with what society has told them to be true, and the proof is that most would look at you strangely when you explained that money is a commodity, just like any other good. We are very much hardwired to believe that money exists as an external part of our economy, and that it’s all thanks to government.

The origin of money is one of much controversy among historians. New pieces of information regarding how homo sapiens[9] have traded with each other comes to light all the time, and all we really know from research is that where there was trade there were was money; at least if we’re defining money as a medium of exchange (rather than fiat money or bank notes). For example, in August 2016 a group of researchers from the University of Victoria in Canada discovered “scrapers, flakes, projectile points and hand axes” among other ancient tools that seem to date back to 250,000 years ago[10]. This is very significant because up till now we thought based on the Omo bone remains discovered in Ethiopia between 1967 and 1974 that modern humans emerged about 195,000 years ago.[11] Though the answer is always changing, Wampum Beads are thought to be one of the first types of currency used, if not the first at least in American history. Marc Shell discusses this in his book “Wampum and the Origins of American Money”, which has received exuberant criticisms and which will inevitably push for more research in this area.

What we deem to be “money” in the present day is dollar bills and coins, but yet there is still an important corollary between barter and indirect exchange. We are lifetimes past the idea of simple barter because of the great utility we get from having a medium of exchange that represents value; it allows us the freedom to buy what we want. The other alternative, which history has shown to be ineffective, is the daily coincidence of having the exact good someone else needs, and them having the exact good you need. Not only do these values hardly ever line up, but both parties are ending up in worse situations when they can’t trade because they are stuck with a good that has little value to them, at least in contrast to what they really need.

Murray Rothbard gives this example:

“Consider the case of A, the farmer, who wants to buy the shoes made by B. Since B doesn’t want his eggs, he finds what B does want – let’s say butter. A then exchanges his eggs for C’s butter, and sells the butter to B for shoes. He first buys the butter not because he wants it directly, but because it will permit him to get his shoes. Similarly, Smith, a plow-owner, will see his plow for one commodity which he can more readily divide and sell – say, butter – and will then exchange parts of the butter for eggs, bread clothes, etc. In both cases, the superiority of butter – the reason there is extra demand for it beyond simple consumption – is its great marketability. If one good is more marketable than another – if everyone is confident that it will be more readily sold – then it will come into greater demand because it will be used as a medium of exchange. It will be the medium through which one specialist can exchange his product for the goods of other specialists.”[12]

Stay tuned for next week when I’ll discuss the most important idea: Why Money and Governments are incompatible.

[1] From Pink Floyd, Dark Side of The Moon, Money, 1973

[2] Murray Rothbard, The Death Wish Of Anarcho-Communists, Libertarian Forum, January 1^st, 1970

[3] https://cbsdetroit.files.wordpress.com/2011/05/basicskillsreport_final.pdf

[4] http://www.unitedliberty.org/articles/12869-tons-more-spending-no-new-results

[5] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hus/hus15.pdf#093

[6] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nhis/earlyrelease/insur201605.pdf

[7] Exchange (something) for something else, typically as a commercial transaction.,Oxford Dictionary

[8] Carl Menger, Principles of Economics, 1871, 226.

[9] Modern day humans

[10] https://phys.org/news/2016-08-archaeology-team-world-first-tool-discovery.html

[11] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/02/050223122209.htm

[12] Murray Rothbard, What Has Government Done to Our Money

The post Money & Government: Part 1 appeared first on Actual Anarchy.

This is part 3 of a 3 part series on the Social Contract, for part 1 click here, for part 2 click here

“If everyone draws from it only the equivalent of what he has contributed to it, your law, it is true, is no plunderer, but it does nothing for me who want your money – it does not promote equality.”[1]

Robert Nozick gave us a great underused parable titled “The Tale of the Slave” in his 1974 classic “Anarchy, State, and Utopia” which he describes the state of society as it is now but from the perspective of a slave in nine stages.

In the first stage, you have no rights and more importantly no property rights (the right to oneself being the most important). In each ascending stage, you are given more and more rights (such as time off, etc) and at some point are given the right to go get a job anywhere; a portion or your rights and 3/7’s of your wages are still retained by your master. And finally at the last two stages, you are given the right to vote but only to break a tie (but there has never been a tie), and 3/7’s of your wages are still retained by your master.[2] It’s interesting to note that, if you take all the marginal tax rates adjusted for inflation for a single person filing in 1974 and take a mean average of them, you get 39.24%,[3] slightly less than 3/7.

Though marginal tax rates don’t reflect what was actually paid in but rather what was paid in as a percentage on what a person makes above a certain income level,[4] could Nozick have been onto something that yet again mimicks U.S. society whether he intended to or not? Regardless, if individuals are able to use tax breaks or a loopholes to retain more of their wealth made through personal sacrifice then this is something to be applauded, though it is often demonized in the current political climate.

How can this then be that those who recognize that they never signed a direct contract to be deprived of the full value of their employer contracted wages are the ones at fault by refusing to be extorted? What rational claim could they possibly have to justify an action that would be forbidden had it been done by another private individual?

To paraphrase Lysander Spooner on this issue, he noted that if governments are able to exercise complete power over other people and their property, then all a group of thieves would have to do is declare that they are now a government and all of their extortion and coercion would be valid and justified under dubious laws which they are able to craft at will.

Obviously, the U.S. government would respond and try to take them down, but what if the thieves increase the size of their government in the hundreds, then the thousands, then the millions? Is that not essentially what street gangs do across the continent(s)? And if we reconcile this as true, that a street gang is of the same nature, then what difference is there between that of a street gang, and a government formed street gang, versus the U.S. government we have now?

The difference is one controls streets, and maybe cities, while the other controls the whole country except with a lot less people at play. The largest gang in the U.S. has around 70,000 members; in contrast if you take all the elected officials in the U.S. it totals to approximately 520,000 officials, 537 of which are at the federal level, and 18,749 are at the state level.[5]

All others are at the small local level. This should alarm anyone. On one hand, there are over half a million represented officials in our country, but on the other hand less than 20,000 are in control of what makes up the majority of the legislative laws that actually have an effect on the citizens daily lives.

If property is gained through personal sacrifice, while simultaneously through the extortion of the same people making the sacrifices, then it can only be insinuated that a thief acting upon a benevolent person(s) is no different than a temporary slave owner as they are depriving others of property while offering little to no compensation or just reason for the logistics at hand, the same as which a slave owner does.

[1] Bastiat, The Law 1850, 21.

[2] Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia 1974 , pp. 290-292.

[3]https://files.taxfoundation.org/legacy/docs/fed_individual_rate_history_nominal_adjusted-2013_0523.pdf

[4] E.g. To be subject to the highest income bracket in 1974 (70%) filing as a single individual, you would have had to make at least $455,131 and then you would be taxed 70% on anything over $455,131

[5] Jennifer Lawless, Becoming A Candidate

The post Taxation: Partial Slavery Is Still Slavery appeared first on Actual Anarchy.

I can only attempt to speak the words that too often go unspoken; yet who am I but an individual making a case for the individual?

We live at a strange time in the existence of humanity, and nonetheless at a time when poverty is at its lowest[1] and where the capacity to be productive and acquire wealth for oneself has been increasing steadily for centuries[2].

In the pursuit of the most functional society we can only ponder on whether our actions, which merely amount to the pursuit of our goals, can make up the society we live in; an effective society at that.

The only other alternative aside from pursuing our own endeavors is 1.) total war or 2.) a society set up through a set of rules enacted by a few men or women to create order; the same type of order we’re willing to sacrifice a huge portion of our life to in order to be secure from our own persons.

So do we dare deny that governments are coercive in nature, or even violent? Surely not our own in the United States (at least never in the name of evil we think), but unequivocally we know the answer for North Korea, Cuba, the somewhat recent (in terms of history) dissolution of the USSR, etc, no?

If it rings true for us in the states that our overlords don’t have as much blood on their hands as the nearly 70 years of communist Russia[3] and the 60+ million deaths, or Pol Pot’s Cambodia wiping out 20% of the population, or Hitler’s insidious genocide of six million Jews and 5+ million others, then we could easily rationalize why our government is supposedly unlike any other in the world, no?

And so I ask again, but in different context: Do we accept lesser crimes as overlookable, compared to the vast monstrosities those have faced under oppressive dictatorships? It’s an easier question not to ask in the first place, but it’s difficult when we’re forced to answer it.

Most of all then, why do we deny the longstanding conspiracy against all nations and their personal freedoms[4] of their citizens, and most of all their dignity, when we can take them back? It’s only the false notions we’ve allowed to manifest amongst the masses through centuries of denigration of the so called “greedy” or the “gluttonous” which have led to a destructive cycle of what we have come to know about human nature: that we aren’t robots and each want a better life for ourselves.

Our happiness is subjective to each of us, and objectivity can’t come through the lens of a Keynesian formula, nor can it be mandated. Above all else, we want more than we have, so quite simply, we act.[5]

How long then shall we question our own intents and our willpower to make an impact[6] in this world; as if the good decisions we must make are the end results of the micro management of our personal lives? And as if ideas are to be held to such a miniscule standard when formed at the individual level that we must form governments to legislate and implement the proper climate of human activity and nourishment, except when they end up starving their people.

So in what way can a government be made up of the nation’s collective[7] thoughts about state policy without the same citizens being held at gunpoint forced to cast a vote? How can we justify the consent of the majority who votes, when there has never been a time where 100% of eligible voters in the U.S. have participated. Nonetheless, the highest turnout rate ever in the U.S. among eligible voters was 81.8% in the election of 1876. The average turnout rate over the entire 20^th century was 48.7%; more often than not less than half the population was putting people into power that was supposed represent the majority of the population. Isn’t the goal of democracy supposed to be majority rule? Not minority rule? But essentially, that’s exactly what we have.

The Inevitable Epiphany

We are humans, capable of completing the most astonishing of tasks, yet we would throw our own ambitions out the window in order to satisfy the superficial needs of the state[8], at least until we the people dissent and ask ourselves if we’re worth more.

Is freedom simply a buzzword then for the freedom to dominate others as some might claim? Or could it be that freedom first comes with the responsibility to own oneself, and to recognize ones self-worth; how else could we then theorize about whether others must own themselves as well? And nevertheless, are there not those that ascribe prejudices against some of the same people that manage to be successful within the same framework? We sometimes call this greed, or self-interest, but according to our intellectual superiors we can rid ourselves of greed and live selflessly for the community, so long as we have a revolution.

But then we find ourselves in a state of irony when they claim you are a parasite if you reject the idea of state redistribution: you still use state roads, state post offices, state educational facilities they will say. This is all of this under the notion that the tax money we paid in benefits us in a way that would’ve have been impossible so long as the people were never plundered, and that these goods and services we speak of would fail to exist had the state not had a direct interest. It never begs the question of the possibility of the state itself being a parasite for having used coercive deprivation of the countries resources to create their so called order.
We (or at least those of us fortunate enough to live in a free society) have access to vast amounts of information, and have an unprecedented amount of opportunities at least in comparison to even a hundred years ago, yet we somehow tend to doubt our fellow man on his ability not only to do things for themselves, but to assimilate freely and voluntarily with their fellow man to accomplish long term goals.

The Ultimate Questions

• Who would build the roads without the government and who would keep them from falling apart?
• How would the healthcare system work without the government mandating that citizens purchase insurance, all under the notion that they really want access to healthcare for all?
• How would money work without the government centralizing the currency and controlling the money supply, while simultaneously legislating that other currencies can’t compete?
• How would the rule of law work without the government and their system of courts and their hundreds of thousands of laws which even they can’t keep count of?[9] That last part I added in to make a point: We literally don’t know how many laws are on the books, only that the average person commits three felonies a day without realizing it.[10]

To a free thinker, one might be able to form a reductio ad absurdum out of these analytical questions:

• Is it really true that individuals are so helpless as to not be able to assimilate and coordinate with other individuals and accomplish goals?
• Does there really need to be the presence of a higher authority that’s perceived to be better suited to plan the entirety of the initial goals?
• Do we dare classify these so called authority figures as “more intelligent” than the rest and that their political clout will guide us, if our second question rings true?

Aren’t people too untrustworthy to have the ability to shape the world around us without a central authority guiding their path?

Do we ultimately reject our existences as being a necessary one? One must be a fool to not realize the consequences of such a notion.

To be Continued…

[1] Max Roser and Esteban Ortiz-Ospina (2017) – ‘Global Extreme Poverty’.  Retrieved from: https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty/

[2] “Slouching Towards Utopia?: The Economic History Of The Twentieth Century”. 1997. J-Bradford-Delong.Net. http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/TCEH/Slouch_wealth2.html.

[3] 26 years of which Stalin ruled

[4] Some of which are theorized not to exist, see Chapter

[5] See Ludwig von Mises, Human Action (1949), 11. & Murray Rothbard, Man, Economy and State, 1962, 1.

[6] The “right” or “moral” impact.

[7] “Collective” as in the total population; versus the small portion of the population that actually votes for representatives

[8] Necessarily their own drive for more access to resources

[9] Cali, Jeanine. 2017. “Frequent Reference Question: How Many Federal Laws Are There?”. Blog. Law Librarians Of Congress. https://blogs.loc.gov/law/2013/03/frequent-reference-question-how-many-federal-laws-are-there/.

[10] “Harvey Silverglate On ‘Three Felonies A Day'”. 2009. Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JwsLAqjqnxo.

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When you troll commies pretending to be a commie and they think YOU’RE crazy XD #Nomoredoctors #Resistcapitalism

Join in on the fun over at:  https://www.facebook.com/groups/1620190871547616/

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