Several Brilliant Essays by Kevin Carson - Read and Learn

I have placed snippets below of some of Carson's recent thoughts which I found particularly well formed. I encourage you to read the full articles and not just the highlights. You're not going to find better political editorializing anywhere else so might as well spend you're time here. At the bottom are a list of some other of his articles which were also good but didn't make the cut.

Childhood's End for Humanity?

History, since the agricultural revolution, can be usefully conceptualized as an offensive-defensive arms race between technologies of abundance and social structures of expropriation.

Until the appearance of agriculture, human society didn’t produce a large enough surplus to support much in the way of social organization above the hunter-gatherer group. Agriculture was the first technology of abundance sufficiently productive to support parasitic classes on a large scale. With agriculture came a superstructure of kings, priests, martial castes and landlords who milked the producing classes like cattle.

We now seem to be nearing the end of an interval of ten thousand years or so between two thresholds. The first threshold was the appearance of the first large-scale technology of abundance — agriculture.

Since then we have been in that aforementioned arms race. Sometimes technologies of abundance produce an increase in the social surplus faster than the class superstructure can expropriate it, and things become better for the ordinary person — as in the late Middle Ages, when the horse collar and crop rotation caused a massive increase in agricultural productivity, the craftsmen of the free towns developed new production technologies, and the decay of feudalism resulted in falling rents and de facto emancipation of large sectors of the peasantry. Sometimes the advantage shifts to the social structures of expropriation, and things get worse — as in the case of the absolute monarchies’ suppression of the free towns, what Immanuel Wallerstein called the “long sixteenth century,” and the Enclosures.

We’re approaching the second threshold, when the technologies of abundance reach a takeoff point beyond which the social structures of expropriation can no longer keep up with the rising production curve.

America's Peculiar Institution

Once upon a time, a major portion of the American economy centered on a peculiar institution, which depended on a certain bizarre “property right.” The peculiar institution was defended by preachers and politicians, by lobbyists, and by an army of editorialists, arguing that this peculiar form of property was property in the same sense as any ordinary form of property. Any violation of this form of property, they proclaimed, was “stealing” in exactly the same sense as taking away a person’s ordinary possessions.

The federal government resorted to censorship to protect this form of property, and an intrusive police state developed in order to carry out the federal government’s legal obligation of enforcing the peculiar property right that this peculiar institution depended on. Government was forced to become more and more authoritarian in defense of this peculiar institution, because it flew in the face of every human instinct for freedom.

On the other side, there was a proliferation of advocacy groups and public figures who condemned the peculiar institution, and called for the abolition of the peculiar form of property it depended on. They argued that this so-called “property” was utterly spurious and abhorrent, and was not in fact genuine property in the same sense as ordinary possessions. Further, there were organized efforts to ignore or defy these spurious property claims, and to evade government’s attempts to enforce them.

That time is now.

To Solve the Problem of Money in Politics, Just Get Rid of the Politics — and the Money

Trying to put an end to such “continuing education” projects by regulating the money — by such expedients as McCain-Feingold or public financing — is futile. The people with the money are much better at finding ways around such restrictions than “progressives” are at creating them. Money, with apologies to Jeff Goldblum in “Jurassic Park,” will find a way. Money flows toward power like water flows downhill.

The only solution is to get rid of the power. Political power is, in fact, the source of the wealth concentrations that fund the industry lobbyists and the campaign contributions. The wealth of big business and the plutocracy is funneled to them by subsidies, protections, oligopoly markups on state-cartelized markets, scarcity rents from artificial property rights, etc., none of which would exist without the state.

The Defeat of the United States by Al Qaeda

It’s quite plausible that, given enough incompetent attempts, somebody will eventually succeed in detonating a bomb and blowing up a plane in the air. Enough monkeys with enough typewriters and enough time, and all that. But even if it happens, the damage will be limited to the passengers on one plane out of millions of flights in any one year. With hardened cockpits and passengers who understand that the goal of hijacking has changed, it will never be possible to fly a plane into a high-value target again. And it’s unlikely all the TSA security theater in the airports, aimed at preventing the previous attack, is good for anything except satisfying the “Well, we have to do SOMETHING!” idjuts.

The interesting thing, though, is that however poorly planned and executed the attacks have been, they were conducted in accordance with a brilliant strategic vision of maximizing bang for the buck in terms of the U.S. government stupidity they provoke. An attempt to smuggle explosives on a plane doesn’t have to be anything more than crude and ineffectual, because TSA’s knee-jerk overreaction — not blowing up the plane — is the real goal. The goal is to make the passenger screening process, the x-raying of all cargo, etc., so onerous, humiliating, expensive and time-consuming that air traffic shrinks radically and the U.S. economy takes a hit. The goal is for the American people to see their government as intrusive, arbitrary, and callous.


It Doesn't Matter What "the law" Is
If you’re willing to fight it out before judges or police commissioners, for weeks or months, you may or may not get a decision overruling the cop’s actions. But in the meantime you’ve had your camera (and maybe your nose) smashed, spent time in a holding cell, had your name dragged through the dirt, and maybe lost your job. And meanwhile, the cops just keep on doing it anyway. I mean, seriously, they can kill innocent people and wind up on paid administrative leave pending a wrist-slap, so how worried do you think they are about breaking a camera and roughing up some dirty effing hippie?


How to "Ban" Nuclear Power

The disaster at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear facilities, which turned the 8.9 earthquake and tsunami into a sort of Irwin Allen trifecta, has spurred new calls to ban nuclear power.

Certainly Japan’s recent experience suggests that attempts to plan for worst-case scenarios tend to err on the low side. Nuclear power plants designed to withstand quakes an order of magnitude less still managed to shut down as designed; nevertheless, the earthquake and tsunami also damaged the backup power for their cooling systems.

So given the high stakes of a nuclear meltdown, and the manifest inability of planners to anticipate what might go wrong, it would make sense to ban nuclear power, right?

Well, the actual problem is that governments worldwide have been actively intervening for decades to prevent the market from banning nuclear power. Precisely because the stakes are so high and there’s so much room for unforeseen things to go wrong, nuclear power is uninsurable on the private market.

Is Money Too Cheap, or Too Dear? Both

Knowing the Real Enemy

Beyond the Education Bubble

Mr. Obama, Tear Down This Wall