Now, as a particular method of stabilization there is merit. But the strategy itself has nothing particularly of value to spontaneous market order.  To say that X is worth Y amount of currency is still to set a fixed price, even if the variable X is replaced by a quantity of gold; in other words, there is nothing particularly Laissez-faire about such a policy. Even if you claim a policy that the value will henceforth NEVER for any reason be changed, politics will always find a way to change it — and honestly, the total freezing of value doesn’t strike me as inherently making sense anyway.

Gold, in my interpretation, is not itself an intrinsic use, but a signal, a canary in the proverbial coal mine — if people more want to hold shiny rocks than currency, then your currency and the economy that goes with it is screwed.  What I fall back on effectively is an open market in currency that in practice pegs itself to labor, because what I see as the most important issue is not that money fluctuates.  Of course money fluctuates, it even did so before its creation at all, as different people engaging in barter valued different things as equivalent to different other quantities of different items.  Money moves, that is unavoidable.  The true issue, from my interpretation, is why money moves (currently it moves in ways designed to serve state-connected banking interests, which the mainstream Left then inaccurately thinks of as private, thus the result of the free market gone crazy), and how well or not it tracks productivity.  In a rapidly moving economy with explosive growth, faster than usual expansion of money strikes me as reasonable, as long as it tracks with the pace of activity.  If, in contrast, activity is limited to shuffling around of the same few lumps of debt, as is the case now with modern state-capitalism, with little or no attachment to growth, then no, the monetary supply should not grow, because nothing is being created.  As I’ve asserted previously, with a spontaneous market order with regard to currency, over time money would attach itself not to gold, nor to vague state promise that government swears to rob enough people to cover all denoted debts — which is impossible, as if they remotely attempted it there would be war (note how persistently across demands regardless of size debt balloons. You show people how expensive the modern state is to pay for all that is promised through it, they will balk at the price tag, period) — but to a measurement of labor, adjusted for efficiency by default simply to keep things honest.  Want more money? Make more shit.  Want less in the system?  Then eat more of what you kill.

Where we’re at right now, there is in practice a huge class divide where a few people have access to cheap money for gambling, while the rest of us are stuck with expensive credit to paper over bills, if anything.  Assertions that this is simply the way things are, as opposed to intentional result, are false.

+4…

[A]s many a liberal journalist left the park, they lamented the fact that Occupy Wall Street wasn’t more tightly organized. They worried that the demonstration would dissipate without a proper list of demands or a specific policy agenda. They suspected that the thefts, sexual assaults, vandalism, and filth in the camps would limit the occupiers’ appeal. The conservative reaction has been similar. A great many conservatives stress the conditions among the tents. They crow that Americans will never fall in line behind a bunch of scraggly hippies. They dismiss the movement as a fringe collection of left tendencies, along with assorted homeless, mental cases, and petty criminals. They argue that the Democrats made a huge mistake embracing Occupy Wall Street as an expression of economic and social frustration.

The “liberal” journalists he refers to are Dem partisans, who obviously aren’t going to acknowledge any order to anything that doesn’t funnel itself to Donkey Crip allegiance and the state.  That he follows this by outright stating the similarity between their view of the protests and that of conservatives — while simultaneously acting as if the Democratic Party embraced the entire thing — shows his real intention doesn’t go far beyond the basic political.  Note the claim that “mental cases” are a significant category to the protests; the insinuation is that agitation against the status quo is an inherent mark of insanity — the sane citizen simply does what they are told regardless.

A smaller group of conservatives, however, believes the occupiers are onto something. The banks do have too much power. Wages have been stagnant. The problem, these conservatives say, is that Occupy Wall Street doesn’t really know what to do about any of the problems it laments. So this smaller group of conservatives, along with the majority of liberals, is more than happy to supply the occupiers with an economic agenda.

I’d like to hear from some of these folks he describes, because other than the types that embrace Ron Paul — who are permanently on the verge of being evicted from the party — I haven’t witnessed that animal.

Matt then brings up the specter of revolutionary anarchism…and traces it to a speech before the U.S. congress.  Really.  Don’t believe me?  Look:

It was February 25, 1825, and the U.S. Capitol was under occupation​—​sort of. Robert Owen, a successful Welsh businessman and socialist, wasn’t standing in the Rotunda holding up a placard. He was addressing a joint session of Congress from the dais of the House of Representatives. President James Monroe and president-elect John Quincy Adams were present for at least a portion of the speech. As Joshua Muravchik explains in Heaven on Earth, a history of socialism, the elected officials were mesmerized by Owen’s plans.

This would be like claiming that the technique of barbecuing meat was invented by vegans.  Of what use is the government to an anarchist?

Describing the kind of society Robert Owen desired, the “anarchism” root hits a major snag since it’s clearly regimented up the wazoo, based on the idea that utopia is possible if things are designed carefully enough.  The obsession with planning cited in Owens’ example takes the view of anarchy Matt has in mind and throws it against a wall, looking more like the end result of the elites-will-figure-it-out logic behind the modern state as we know it.  Even leaving aside the contradiction inherent in pointing at pseudo-scientific rigorous design of a society and yelling “anarchy!” like how a child may claim that anything with four legs is a dog, there’s a question available for Matt about how he can define as more idealistic a view that no man can be trusted to rule another in comparison with “so’n'so can hold the gun because…shut up”.

Further into the utopianism swamp, the following comes out:

When he looks at the world, the utopian is repelled by two things in particular. One is private property. “The civilized order,” Fourier wrote, “is incapable of making a just distribution except in the case of capital,” where your return on investment is a function of what you put in. Other than that, the market system is unjust. Economics is a zero-sum game. One man holds possessions at the expense of another. For another nineteenth-century French utopian, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, property was theft. (emphasis mine)

Nice job leaving out what else Proudhon said: “property is liberty” and “property is impossible”.  He was making rhetorical distinctions between different forms of property, based on how they are obtained.  But to someone holding a philosophy that theft is A-OK as long as it either took place long enough back or had some form of elite sanction as being for the common good, finishing the statement is out of the question.  Better to make it seem as if the point being made was something obviously implausible like “no one can own anything!!”.  Show me someone honestly embracing such a strawman, and I will join you in laughing at them — until then, it’s you I’m holding up for ridicule.

From anarchy-as-strict-utopianism we go to anarchy-as-regression-to-infancy:

The utopian’s other great hatred is for middle-class or “bourgeois” culture. Monogamy, monotheism, self-control, prudence, cleanliness, fortitude, self-interested labor​—​these are the utopian’s enemies. “Morality teaches man to be at war with himself,” [Charles] Fourier wrote, “to resist his passions, to repress them, to believe that God was incapable of organizing our souls, our passions wisely.” What were called the bourgeois virtues had been designed to maintain unjust social relations and stop man from being true to himself. Thus, to recover one’s natural state, one “must undertake a vast operation of ‘desanctification,’ beginning with the so-called morality of the bourgeoisie,” wrote the twentieth-century utopian Daniel Guérin. “The moral prejudices inculcated by Christianity have an especially strong hold on the masses of the people.”  (emphasis mine)

In other words: “Not enough Jesus? You’ll eat each other, defecate in your pants after digestion, and jump off a bridge Because F*ck It. Now prove me wrong.”  Yet, subtract the use of force from the equation, and who cares what anyone chooses to follow as a faith?  As for self-interest, since Matt is deliberately assuming that anarchy is inherently utopian — again, completely ignoring significant foundation on a rational cynicism — I suppose it’s no shock that he claims any questioning of work structure amounts to Commie Crap.  Never mind that a part of such questioning has been for the longest that laborers have interests too.

At Brook Farm in Massachusetts, which lasted from 1841 to 1847, men and women were encouraged to interact as complete social, political, and sexual equals. Residents of the Oneida Community (1848-1880) in upstate New York engaged in “complex marriage,” in which older members of the commune “introduced” younger members to sex. The Oneidans engaged in selective breeding. These practices, radical at the time, have been characteristic of left-wing movements ever since. The free love associated with the New Left and student rebellion in the 1960s, for instance, is today so deeply embedded in American culture that only social conservatives pay it any mind.

You know what?  The contradiction here is so blatantly obvious I don’t feel like pointing it out.  Take a guess.

Throw in a couple Chomsky quotes, leaving out completely his fair-weather anarchism and the fact that views differ, then stir in an unacknowledged return to the same they-don’t-organize-how-I-define-organization critique that was supposed to have been flushed at the beginning:

This permanent rebellion leads to some predictable outcomes. By denying the legitimacy of democratic politics, the anarchists undermine their ability to affect people’s lives. No living wage movement for them. No debate over the Bush tax rates. Anarchists don’t believe in wages, and they certainly don’t believe in taxes. David Graeber, an anthropologist and a leading figure in Occupy Wall Street, puts it this way: “By participating in policy debates the very best one can achieve is to limit the damage, since the very premise is inimical to the idea of people managing their own affairs.” The reason that Occupy Wall Street has
no agenda is that anarchism allows for no agenda. All the anarchist can do is set an example​—​or tear down the existing order through violence. (emphasis mine)

If “legitimacy of democratic politics” (implied meaning: “there was a vote, dammit! Now shut up!”) were really Matt Continetti’s hangup, then he’d take one look at the makeup of the White House and the Congress, say “eh…wait until next November”, and take his ball & go home.  In a way, we both question the legitimacy, he just questions it on the grounds that he thinks people like himself don’t have enough power over others, while I question it on the basis that a few having power of others regardless of their stated views is itself walking into a trap.

It gets worse…:

Just as hostility to property is inextricably linked to utopian socialism, violence is tightly bound to anarchism. “Anarchists reject states and all those systematic forms of inequality states make possible,” writes Graeber. “They do not seek to pressure the government to institute reforms. Neither do they seek to seize state power for themselves. Rather, they wish to destroy that power, using means that are​—​so far as possible​—​consistent with their ends, that embody them.” What seems aimless and chaotic is in fact purposeful. By means of “direct action”​—​marches, occupations, blockades, sit-ins​—​the anarchist “proceeds as if the state does not exist.” But one who behaves as if the government has no reality and the laws do not apply is an outlaw, not to say a criminal. (emphasis mine)

Well no duh!  Though, when you look at the extent of law as it now exists, who isn’t to some degree in violation of it?  And what about when the lawmakers  and law enforcers break them?  I hear crickets…

When you see occupiers clash with the NYPD on the Brooklyn Bridge, or masked teenagers destroying shop windows and lighting fires in downtown Oakland, you are seeing anarchism in action. Apologists for Occupy Wall Street may say that these “black bloc” tactics are deployed solely by fringe elements. But the apologists miss the point. The young men in black wearing keffiyehs and causing mayhem are simply following the logic of revolutionary anarchism to its violent conclusion. The fringe isn’t the exception, it’s the rule. The exception would be “direct action” that took care to respect the law. (emphasis mine)

…I thought you said the logical conclusion was tightly structured utopia?  Make up your mind.

BTW: the distinction between the “black bloc” morons and others isn’t “respect [for] the law”.  Those that write and apply the law don’t even respect it themselves anyway.  Rather, the gulf is between people that think indiscriminate smashing of everything constitutes a coherent point and those that realize such actions are no different than what is being railed against in the first place.  Hell, if you think violence is valid, why stop at property?  The “black bloc” might as well just start taking shots at people at random — or even more convenient for them, just join the police.

I’m not saying in the least that what OWS represents is somehow ideal.  Nothing is, and I never expected it to be.  There are elements I think make sense, and elements I think do not.  Still, when you consider their opposition…

+4.

1. State contains significant amount of migrant laborers, many involved in strenuous food crop operations that don’t pay much
2. State legislature passes flamboyantly anti-immigrant law
3. Immigrants vanish, leaving said low-wage strenuous positions open for Real Merkins (the morons who pushed the law had among their claims “they’re takin our jobs!”)
4. Real Merkins balk at picking fruit for peanuts, thus leaving the fields to rot.
5. Morons switch from “they’re takin’ our jobs!” to “why is no one takin’ these jobs?”

The raw market implication on one hand is blindingly obvious: the price you offer is a signal of how badly you want something.  Thus, if you need labor so desperately then offer better compensation.  Since undocumented workers can be threatened with deportation, there is additional leverage against them when negotiating pay — taken in aggregate, their legal status functions as a subsidy for the employer.  Agribusiness owners continuing to offer the same rates after their subsidy has effectively been yanked is clearly counterproductive, yet many seem to persist.

Now think further: suppose within the context of these kind of laws becoming The New Normal, the farm employers finally wised up and offered wages high enough where those positions were in decent demand, filled by people less likely to be subjected to “random” police harassment on their way to work — and their bosses expected the same profit margin they previously had in the pre-Juan Crow era.  Prices crawl upwards at the grocery store, and eventually people panic, some clamoring for…yet more intervention.  Maybe more outright subsidy to replace the indirect one of having workers you can not just fire but have deported, maybe buying into the right-wing fever swamp dream of having convicts pick fruit (which is actually happening in some places already), the impulse of “just DO SOMETHING!” rings out.

This is an example of how a population, digging deeper in a hole that should never have been started to begin with, becomes increasingly complicit in utter nonsense.  We get so used to the distorted prices that when reality makes the slightest break for the light of day we think that is the problem rather than the distortion.

So…how much?  Enough to pay a decent wage for the hard work of others getting them to your salad bowl, burger, or homemade salsa?  Perhaps enough to even try your hand at growing some?

Or enough to use force to get them?

1. To commit an offense or a sin; transgress or err.

2. Law: To commit an unlawful injury to the person, property, or rights of another, with actual or implied force or violence, especially to enter onto another’s land wrongfully.

3. To infringe on the privacy, time, or attention of another: “I must . . . not trespass too far on the patience of a good-natured critic” (Henry Fielding).

Example of incorrect usage of the term:

According to the Daily News, at least 20 Occupy Wall Street protesters have been arrested this afternoon. A group of protesters marched to Citibank at 555 LaGuardia just after 11 a.m. this morning with NYPD shadowing them. They report that one protester’s hands were bleeding as he was pulled into an NYPD van. [...]

The NYPD has announced that 24 people altogether were arrested at the Citibank incident earlier today. They were all charged with criminal trespass, while one was also charged with resisting arrest. Many of those protesters had gone to the bank to close their accounts. (emphasis mine)

It’s a bank. They had these things at the bank called “accounts”. The accounts contained their money. They went to the bank they were doing business with to withdraw their money and close their accounts.  It not being a Sunday or after 5pm, the bank was open for conducting business with the public, which included the protesters since they had accounts at the damn bank!  On what planet is this trespassing?

If they were being violent, then there’d be cause to kick them out.  But that is not called trespassing, that’s called “assault”, which they are not being charged with.  So basically, going to get your own money back has now been declared a crime.  Great…

See, when significant amounts of people cease to do business with you in the real world, you rethink your business plan so as to correct what is turning them away.  Off in SillyMakeBelieveFinanceLand, you don’t need to trouble your pretty little head with such trivial matters, because you get to have unsatisfied customers jailed.  This is a clear micro-example of the kind of ridiculous system that people are fighting against, a system built on the blatant, total abandonment of the idea of mutually beneficial exchange in favor of systemic robbery and intimidation.

Satirical news publication The Onion broke the news on Twitter about an hour ago of a hostage situation involving Congress, but the story is not true and a number of Twitter users are saying it’s not funny.

It all started with this tweet:

@ TheOnion : BREAKING: Witnesses reporting screams and gunfire heard inside Capitol building.

That was quickly followed up by this: “BREAKING: Capitol building being evacuated. 12 children held hostage by group of armed congressmen.”

Here’s your hint that this is in fact not happening:  

This got retweeted a bunch of times, eventually transitioning from Lulz to “OHMYGAWDTHATISTERRIBLE!!!” in the spectrum of reactions.

Again, the tipoff that this was not happening: 

In response, the Capitol Police released a statement saying that they’re surprised people took this seriously.  Actually, no, I take that back:

Capitol Police told the Washington Post in a statement, “Conditions at the U.S. Capitol are currently normal. There is no credibility to these stories or the twitter feeds. The U.S. Capitol Police are currently investigating the reporting.” (emphasis mine)

WTF?  There is nothing to investigate, making things up is the heart and soul of what The Onion does, either you laugh or you don’t.  Are we going to see jackboots approaching the Onion offices looking for computers to seize and writers to assault, all because some moron out there on the web thinks the site that publishes this would suddenly go all CNN on their twitter feed, rather than waiting for the details then deciding whether to A) crack a joke or B) say nothing?

Ben S. Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman, offered a new twist on a familiar subject Thursday, revisiting the question of why growth continues to fall short of hopes and expectations.

Mr. Bernanke, speaking at a luncheon in Minneapolis, offered the standard explanations, including the absence of home construction and the deep and lingering pain inflicted by financial crises. He warned again that reductions in government spending amount to reductions in short-term growth.

Then he said something new: Consumers are depressed beyond reason or expectation.

Oh, sure, there are reasons to be depressed, and the Fed chairman rattled them off: “The persistently high level of unemployment, slow gains in wages for those who remain employed, falling house prices, and debt burdens that remain high.”

However, Mr. Bernanke continued, “Even taking into account the many financial pressures that they face, households seem exceptionally cautious.” Consumers, in other words, are behaving as if the economy is even worse than it actually is. (emphasis mine)

People have been slammed by yet another bubble bursting, and harder than in recent history due to the Financialization of Everything.  Even people with jobs are in poverty at rates big enough for media attention.  Most real gains have stayed at the top for a long time.  Oh, yeah, and while unemployment stays high and people struggle with all that debt there’s a new report about record corporate profits seemingly every other day.  A few well-connected people, with the help of the state, are doing just fine.

Bitter?  Depressed?  Gee, you think?

I’ve got an idea for job creation of my own, by the way: hire people to fill Bernanke’s office with cement.

Let me explain something to you.  “The Social Safety Net” is not a benefit or an entitlement; it is a bribe.  It is a package of bribes offered to fictitious, created entity called “The Middle Class” in order to entice them away from any sense of solidarity with the poor.  Its origin is anti-Communism.  And it has been very effective.  Middle-class entitelements, from Social Security to the mortgage deduction, have kept you poor slobs in line for seventy years, toiling away, building the foundations and walls of your own prison.  The ongoing “attacks” on those entitelements are not attacks on the middle class by conservatives.   There are no conservatives.  The mass grave has been dug and it is no longer necessary to offer you rations as you stand at its edge.  There never was a middle class; there is an ownership class and there is everyone else.  You don’t own anything that you own.

Yeah, whatever happened to the poor, anyway?
*looks in mirror*
Damn…

[...] Obama could always just solve the crisis with a pair of magical platinum coins. Sure, that sounds preposterous, but Yale’s Jack Balkin argues that this is actually a perfectly legal strategy. Here’s the logic: Under law, there’s a limit to how much paper money the United States can circulate at any one time, and there are rules that limit how many gold, silver and copper coins the Treasury can mint. But the Treasury is explicitly allowed to mint however many platinum coins it wants and can assign them whatever value it pleases. So the Mint makes a pair of trillion-dollar platinum coins. The president orders the coins to be deposited at the Federal Reserve. The Federal Reserve moves this money into Treasury’s accounts. And just like that, Treasury suddenly has an extra $2 trillion to pay off its obligations in the near term without issuing new debt.

This crap deads itself by simply asking one question: “what would stop the government from minting a 100 trillion dollar platinum coin then?”  Value has to have some form of grounding otherwise no one has reason to believe it, and if no one believes the value of something then the value becomes by default (no pun intended) zero.  The problem is not one of money (fiat currency can be endlessly created), but of value; there’s a point past which additional creation of currency strikes the big players in collecting it as reason to stop accepting it as payment.  You want to see where that point is?  Watch what happens when August 2nd comes and goes, the U.S. government will cross that line fairly quick.

Oddly enough, despite the oncoming creation of a fuckton of new “liquidity” as they frantically scramble to fill the now-obvious gaps (the structural issues with any institution that regularly spends 40% more than they have in resources doesn’t seem to be a popular topic for the various talking heads and pundits; their loss…), there is the inescapable fact exploding the assumptions on monetary policy that the state and its largest benefactors lean on for survival: there’s already plenty of money in the system.  It’s just concentrated in a few hands.  On purpose.  If the nature of political power were somehow to reverse itself, the resulting policy would be a massive claw-back from high finance (after all, they exist due to political favor anyway, and as a result their gains are morally equivalent to armed robbery, thus void).  The privilege, ideally, should simply be abolished, but barring that it would be completely justified to require fee for the service, and give the proceeds of it to those who were robbed in the first place.  That this isn’t a possibility shows why politics is a black hole.

+…hell if I know.

Since no limit is actually enforced, the “limit” itself is meaningless.  The real problem, going by the umbrella description, is when the umbrella is high up enough, it stops being much use as a rain shield, and becomes excellent as a lightning rod.

+4