Blog Carnival

Hello Market Anarchists and lovers of freedom! It's that time again, for the Market Anarchy Blog Carnival! As usual, we've got some great entries by some of our regulars and some contributions from new writers to this carnival.

Warren Wong of INTJ Personal Development submitted an excellent entry entitled The Gap Concept. In it, he discusses how the barrier of entry for a second business entering a market is higher than for the first business.

"This is because it takes extra incentive for the customer to switch to your company’s product. If the two products are exactly the same, there would be no reason for them to take the effort to switch to yours. In fact, oftentimes, your product will need to be much better than the other company’s in order for them to switch."

Wong provides an excellent analysis of why market competition results in improved products and innovation, apparently without reliance on patents and copyrights. His argumentation also seems to nicely corroborate the contention that the right to first sale is enough to gain a strong foothold, and other businesses cannot easily step in and take control of the market from you.

Next we have an entry entitled Just Don't Pay Your Taxes by Francois Tremblay of Check Your Premises. In it, he provides a scathing attack on "war tax" protestors' methods, namely the fact that any tax money can be used for any purpose by the State.

The State doesn’t give a shit about what you believe: it will take a proportional percentage of your money and fund the military anyway. There are no dollar bills marked “for the military” : any money can be used to finance anything, whether you object to it or not.

At the end of his post, he provides an excellent link showing how to avoid paying federal (and even State, in most cases) income taxes by completely legal means, in the case you're worried about the consequences of other methods of tax protesting.

Wenchypoo of Wisdom from Wenchypoo's Mental Wastebasket has submitted two entries this time around. The first is a criticism of Michael Moore's pressing for socialized health care in his new documentary Sicko entitled Who Needs Universal Healthcare?

In the words of Ted Nugent: "to have health care, you have to first care about your health." People should be lining up in the produce section rather than the drive-thru lane!

The second entry is Invasion of the Pod People, round 2. In it, she gives a lengthy criticism of the "Pod People", or the "Greenies" as Tremblay would call them, pointing out a great number bullshit policies and ideas they have been peddling to gain politcal strength. While I disagree to an extent on a couple of the listed items, it seems to pretty comprehensively demonstrate:

What’s different about this new batch of pod people issues is the amount of money they insist we spend to avoid certain doom, and how rabidly radical some people have gotten over their issues.

Jdavidb of Christian Anarcho-Capitalism writes about why "we" don't have the right to set immigration laws for "our" country, pointing out the weasel words of collectivist thinking used to sidestep the fact that my property is mine, and yours is yours, and we don't own everyone else's. He also includes in his post numerous Biblical arguments for his position, for any Christian Anarchist readers. Upon reading the following excerpt, I got a taste of Atlas Shrugged:

The gigantic power continually repeats the collectivist mantra: that we are all in this together, that it all belongs to all of us, that we all have the right (really those who happened to get the turn at power this term) to tell individuals what they may and may not do with what is theirs, or even to take away all or some of it, to make completely blameless actions into illegal acts.

From Jimmy Atkinson of Dedicated Hosting Guide we have his first post - 11 Web Hosts That Won't Dump You at the First Sign of Controversy, ones that won't cut your site for posting something on it they don't like (aside from illegal content - kiddie porn and 'copyright infringement', which can have negative consequences for the hosting company and kill their business). This is especially important to libertarians and anarchists in a time when many web hosts want to just sidestep any controversy and are willing to kill your free expression by censoring their hosted sites. So if you've had problems with your anti-State site coming into conflict with your provider, you may want to take a look at some of them.

There is a large online movement to keep the Internet free of censorship and unfair sanctions. While no reputable Web host would knowingly support illegal content, most mainstream hosting companies also shy away from any controversy. Luckily, the few dedicated hosting services that do support free speech are going strong.

However, he loses several points for use of the phrase 'exercising our first amendment rights'. Surely, without the first amendment the rights still pertain. Also, the phrase 'civil liberties' mean freedoms protected from government control, a la a constitution. Nevertheless, there isn't anything inherently pro-state in the post, and the content is pro-liberty and useful, so I have decided to let it remain.

Aaron Kinney of the Radical Libertarians blog has submitted a thorough examination of illegal immigration: who's at fault, the economic reasons for immigration, and why it wouldn't be a bad thing. He does such a thorough job trashing the argument for constrained immigration so well, I think I'll just let his post speak for himself. Here's a snippet from Illegal Immigration Explained:

The fact of the matter is that there is a worker shortage in the US, both for high-skilled and low-skilled workers. If there wasn't, then there wouldn't be so many immigrants flocking here! The main reason that there are so many immigrants coming to the US year after year, decade after decade, is because there are still so many human resource shortages in the US.

Next, we have our first video entry from YouTube! It is entitled Objectivism and Anarchism, and XOmnivese counters a floundering Objectivist argument against anarchy. He does a very good job at pointing out Rand's contradiction and misunderstanding in arguing against anarchy.

Her argument against the system without a State is surprisingly utilitarian - she pretty much says 'because it won't work'. She never addresses the argument I just pointed out, she never even mentions the fact that a government has to initiate force in order to maintain itself as a monopoly, so she completely doesn't even address the main argument against government from an Objectivist position.

Finally, we have my post called Send a Letter to Your Representative, in which I point out the extensive use of weaselly collectivist language that is used to maintain the notion that you, the individual, have any real say in what the government does to you.

I have no representative, I have appointed nobody to speak on behalf of me. Nor will I. It's this kind of language that has corrupted reality and led so many people to think that they actually run or regulate that body called government that controls them.

In our oddities section, we have two posts this time around. The first endorsed a multi-level marketing scheme that I'm not even going to link to, for fear that someone reading this might actually fall into its trap and lose money. For anyone who doesn't know what a multi-level marketing scheme is, wiki it. Think Amway.

The second is a short post and comic about money from wttf.org. In the post, he criticizes credit cards as not real money, and its knack for helping people get into debt, but he doesn't explain his positions and shifts the blame away from those that should be taking it - the people misusing their credit cards. I just couldn't see any relation to anti-state, pro-market, market anarchy, or libertarianism, so it's going in the oddities. I did crack a smile at the comic though.

Thanks to everyone for submitting their entries, I hope you all submit again next month and we expand our number of entries and readership. Remember - if you don't want to make the oddities section next time, make sure your content matches the criteria of the carnival!
Carpe Libertatem!