No, I’m not talking about me.
My friend FSK has been receiving negative feedback about his idea to monetize his blog. From cowardly anonymous respondents no less, it has brought FSK’s ideas about capitalism and capital accumulation out into the open.
It isn’t immoral for me to promote agorism and show a profit at the same time. In the present, the only way for me to do this is via State-sanctioned businesses.
Well, that is the problem with left anarchism. You’re not supposed to profit, and you’re not supposed to deal with big companies. That would be hypocritical or so the reasoning goes.
FSK makes the point, that all labour in the current statist economy aids or condones the state, but that doesn’t mean that generating a profit via the state, to use to promote the end of the state is necessarily bad.
He then addresses a situation with our mutual friend Mike Gogulski, but I think FSK misses the point.
I noticed this post by Mike Gogulski, where he refused a job for the State. The fallacy in his reasoning is that *ANY* on-the-books work supports the State via taxes.
Actually, there is a fallacy in FSK’s reasoning and I will provide it following this rest of the paragraph extrapolating on Mike Gogulski’s supposed logical error.
Suppose I have two choices. I can do $10k of work directly for the State, or $10k of work in a wage slave job. Suppose my income taxation rate is 50%. In the $10k wage slave job, I contribute $5k directly to the State. Similarly, if I accept the $10k job working directly for the State, I pay $5k directly back to the State in taxes. (In some countries, income on State jobs is tax-exempt. I’m ignoring that possibility here.) If I don’t accept the $10k State job, someone else will take it, still getting paid $10k but perhaps doing marginally worse work. However, by refusing the direct State job, I am forced to accept a marginally lower salary. Overall, the net damage to the State by my refusal to work directly for the State is negligible.
I recently listened to a presentation at Oxford featuring Hans Hoppe and he makes the excellent point that if you are paid by the state, your income is 100% confiscated wealth, aka taxes, aka theft. Which brings us to Mike’s refusal to work for the state. One could make the distinction (and should in my opinion) that generating your own market income, and giving half to the government, is not the same as taking a state income, and returning half to the government.
Public servants don’t pay taxes. If a public servant or government contractor is paid with tax money, then whatever they remit back in income taxes is merely a rebate to the state. Sure the net amount might be the same as generated in the private sphere, but movement of taxes, is merely a shifting from one pocket to another.
In a sense, it’s a form of emotional, philosophical and moral money laundering. Nudge nudge, wink wink I’ll put $10k in your left pocket, and you will return me $5k from your right pocket, and thus it looks like we have a legitimate business relationship.
Because we can’t forget, that the state gains acceptance by our voluntary participation. We voluntarily take state jobs, accept state money. This is stolen money, and while we can make the argument that some may have been stolen from us, we can never be sure, because the state itself launders ownership by socializing wealth into a pool, and then it launders morality out of the equation by selective redistribution.
Thus, I think Mike is right not to work for the state, because as much as possible, in an irrational situation, he is trying to be morally and ethically consistent. I can sympathize with this, because I have not renewed my state health care in 4 years, and I am currently eligible for unemployment insurance and have not filed, nor do I intend to. While some people say I am foolish to “turn down free money”, the reality of the situation is that by taking back what reasonably might be called my own contributions, I am validating the process of confiscation and redistribution, which to me, is the great evil of the state.
Fiscally, I may be worse off. May be. The question becomes, what sort of skewed incentives come from state redistribution? Am I better off moving on? I believe so.
Now I’ve noticed FSK has sympathies for Anti-Capitalism and Kevin Carson’s take on Mutualism. I think this is where a lot of the confusion stems from, because Mutualism, and the Anti-Capitalist movement, relies on false class distinctions (as indicated by Hoppe) and thus, draws conclusions to suit those class beliefs, which are ultimately irrational economically.
I got a bit off track here, so I will bullet point the rest.
- Left Anarchism is not compatible with rational economics. Anti-capitalists are cranks.
- FSK should, and must earn money from his blog because it consumes his time, labour of love or not.
- Google Adsense helps pay for Blogger, which is a Google property. FSK is already through the looking glass.
- I don’t believe it is a good idea to conduct a public opinion poll on how to run your business or website. Particularly on the internet, you will get so many invalid responses that will poison the data.
- Is participating in the state immoral? I say yes, so long as one has other options, the state cannot be regarded by a consistent, rational and ethical anarchist as being equal to the market, strictly on nominal measurements of profit.
- The Hoppe lecture on class theory will be covered more by me in the future.
- Mike Gogulski is a great guy and I intend to interview him here at NoTreason in the near future.
