audiobook

The latest instalment in my tour round the libertarian/anarchist "classics" brings me to a work very appropriate for today's messed up world.  In "Mutual Banking" American Individualist Anarchist William Batchelder Greene explains clearly what is wrong with the current banking system (now, just as much as then) and proposes a non-profit mutual bank as a solution.

The bankers, he says, are the new aristocracy who, with state collusion through banking licensing and legal tender laws can buy up all the assets of a country and leave its people bankrupt and destitute.  They control access to money and credit and can pick and choose those industrious would be entrepreneurs who will win and lose by their actions.

He presents, at one point, an interesting argument for the repudiation of our current national debt - no real value would be destroyed by so doing, just an unwinding of the legal values that gives the elite few such an upper hand over the rest of us left paying for that debt.  If ever there was a time for revolution against the bankers it seems to me to be now.  

This will also be a good read/listen for those who do not understand the nature and inherent flexibility of money, such as a few of those at the "Speak Easy" last week.  Greene's solution, he says, would be inflation free, low cost, circulating currency backed by real assets that does not allow for a parasite class of bankers (or, indeed politicians) to take control.  If you ever wanted to know how a credit union worked, this will also provide much background information.

I am often finding that ideas that I develop for today's problems turn out to have been thought of many times before - Greene's model here describes with uncanny accuracy my proposal for an Oxfordshire local currency network for example.  This is not history - it is living proof that the problems we are facing now have been at the forefront of men's minds for decades and centuries - and that if we had only listened to the likes of Greene then we would be unlikely to be up this particular shit creek.  The Mutualists' message is, if anything, more important today for us having comprehensively ignored it for over a century and the problems getting a hundred times worse in the meantime.

You can get the text I have used (the 1870 publication) at the Libertarian Labyrinth website (.pdf), and attached you will find 12 files - an MP3 for each section, a .zip file of all the MP3s and an iTunes/iPod optimised .M4B file that has everything in one audiobook file with chapter bookmarks and so on.  

Enjoy.

So, my latest audiobook recording, this time actually "commissioned" by Stephan via the Mises Institute, is Stephan Kinsella's monograph "Against Intellectual Property".  You can get the text at the Mises.org website, or buy a dead tree version, or read it online at Scribd or in HTML at the author's own site.  Attached to this blogpost though you'll find the audiobook version in several formats - a single MP3 that will work on more or less anything, a set of one-per-heading MP3s (and a zip file of those), and for iTunes/iPod users an m4b version that comes in one file but with chapter markers that show up in those Apple devices and you can skip back and forward to.

I find the whole area of Intellectual Property fascinating.  We are so conditioned that, for example, pharmaceutical companies would never develop any important drugs ever again if they were not able to secure a twenty year monopoly in the form of a patent on their discoveries, or that the music industry is on the brink of collapse because of copyright "theft", when actually what you have to consider is that by granting these state protected monopolies, as Kinsella explains, we are actually restricting our own rights to use our own property as we like.

Got a blank CD you want to burn the latest hits onto?  No can do - your right to use that blank CD, your property, as you wish, is restricted by someone you may very well have already paid a fair price for a creation from.  It's obviously a contentious one for me as a university employee - after all, academia usually worships intellectual property rights, but it's an important debate to be had.  The "monopoly of patents" is one of the four "great monopolies" identified by the Individualist Anarchists and Mutualists with which the state conspires with select, favoured or powerful interest groups to skew markets, usually to the disadvantage of consumers and always to the disadvantage of owners of tangible property.

I may try and follow this up with an audio version of Boldrin and Levine's recent "Against Intellectual Monopoly" which greatly expands on the subject set out by Kinsella here with responses to many of the common objections to the eradication of Intellectual Property protections.  In the meantime, there's a great website/blog that covers many of the issues involved at "Against Monopoly".

Incidentally, yes, there is a wonderful irony currently in the recording.  Since I read it straight from the printed version you get the title, and then, yes, you guessed it, the "copyright" notice for the Mises Institute.  But we should make clear that actually, Mises has to declare its copyrights over it just in case someone else does and excludes them from distributing the work how they please.  But since Mises gives away all its material for free, and aims at the widest possible dissemination of its work in the spirit of evangelist, you should feel free to copy, share, pass on and generally do as you please with the audiobook version too.

Oh, and I should add, you can watch a video of Stephan giving a lecture on this subject at the Austrian Scholars' Conference last year on TheUKLibertarian blog.

So for the latest of my forays into reading audiobooks I have decided to embark on a reading of Herbert Spencer's "The Man Versus The State" which is cited several times in the previous book, "Our Enemy The State" by Albert Jay Nock, who also provides an introduction in the Online Library of Liberty edition I have used for this recording.

Each of the essays probably deserve a post of their own, because they all have a tremendous resonance with some of today's pressing issues, especially as we go into a general election.  So for this post I will just link to the audio files.  Once again, there are individual MP3s for each section, an M4B file more suitable for iTunes and iPod/iPhone playing which are recognised as audiobook format and contain chapter information, and a Zip file of all the MP3s for downloading.

The Online Library of Liberty edition I have used contains much more than the four essays originally included in "The Man Versus The State" when first published.  But since I wanted to read his critique of the Liberal Party around the time of Gladstone before going to the Liberal History Group event next week, I've decided to release this section now, which is the original work, and record the other essays over the next few days/weeks and add them as and when.

NB - I have not gone through all of these chapters with the proverbial fine-toothed comb for errors and slips, but I think they're all pretty well intelligible and that any errors will be relatively trivial (and so more difficult for me to find and correct!).

See, as I'm not interesting enough to do podcast thingies of my own opinions, and to try and get me out of the habit of dipping into a book rather than reading the whole work, I started reading to my computer whenever I picked up an interesting work on political-economy.  I don't know what the computer thinks of it all, but judging by the reaction from one author whose book I gave the treatment to recently, others seem to like it, and so I have today knocked off an audiobook version of Albert Jay Nock's "Our Enemy The State" (a .pdf file of the complete work).

Nock was a friend and follower of Henry George and quite a libertarian heavyweight in his day (he died in 1945); even Rothbard cited him as a big influence on him.  He and his friend Frank Chodorov were probably the last major libertarians who, in common with many libertarians and anarchists of the preceding nineteenth century (as well as the British Liberals till somewhat later), had viewed the special privileges attached to land ownership as one of the major nuts to crack in moving toward a fairer, freer society.

In "Our Enemy..." Nock distinguishes first "social power" from "State power", where "social power" is, as described by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon in the last sections of "What is Property?", all the (good, voluntary) associations and obligations that bind us to each other, and is constantly being predated upon by "State power".  The book is essentially a warning, somewhat in the same vein as Spencer's "The Man Versus the State" and Hayek's "Road to Serfdom", that this "State power" will take over so much of what had previously been the purview of "social power" to the extent that people will no longer have the will to do anything for themselves and will always look to the State to "do something" in any eventuality.

And he distinguishes also between "government" and "the State" after the fashion of Thomas Paine, in Common Sense, in which he sees "government" as something set up by mutual consent and only to secure the negative rights of "freedom and security" when the social power proves inadequate.  This leads him to an interesting "take" on the American Revolution.  The Declaration of Independence, upon which Paine's influence was clear and formalised by Thomas Jefferson, for whom Nock has a soft spot as more or less the one person in the revolutionary band who did understand the dangers of allowing "government" to become "State", was essentially ditched just as soon as it came into being. 

Whilst the ideals of "natural rights" and "individual sovereignty" were useful for galvanising everyone, of whatever class, against the British "common enemy", just as soon as the United States was founded, these groups naturally fractured and battled with each other for access to the exploitative power of the State.  The winners were those who had been top of the pile before the revolution, the land speculators and exploiters of others' labour who deliberately framed the Constitution to be as protectionist as possible as against Jefferson's idea of widely distributed individual sovereignty where the "highest" level of political organisation was to be the township level (not entirely dissimilar to the idea of "Cellular Democracy" about which I have blogged previously).

And it is this, he says, that has marked out the State as far back as history records: that the State is founded by conquest and confiscation; that it is always a vehicle of economic exploitation by one class over another.  Man will always seek to meet his needs with the least possible effort.  There are only two ways of meeting those needs: either by work and trade - the "Economic Means" and naturally involving the most effort; or by conquest and confiscation, and economic exploitation of others, in a word, robbery - the "Political Means" which, if you happen to have influence over the people who administer that State, is the easiest way, since it does not involve work for yourself, but feeding off the work of others through State granted privilege and protection.

The catalyst for the book is Franklin D. Roosevelt's accession to power in 1932 which accelerated the progress of the State power's predation over social power, in much the same way as Nock had observed had happened for forty years or more in Europe, and, by implication at least, had led to the great global threats of Fascism, "Hitlerism" as he called it, and state Communism, each of which had promised to be different from what had gone before in their respective countries, but which were just as centred on conquest of the access to the "Political Means" as any other State before them.

And, as we are in an election year here, it is worth noting Nock's view that essentially it doesn't matter who you vote for, at each stage in the State's advance over social power, the politicians tend to accept what has already been done (after all, it gives them, as actual or putative administrators of the State, all the more power) and will never truly roll back that State.  They are the State, or want to be; they are the very people who desire most to have access to the "Political Means"; how could they do otherwise?  That every appearance of the State's receding is actually in itself an exercise in State power - temporarily offering concessions in order to maintain a semblance of actually having the interests of the people at heart.

The book ends on a depressing note: Nock says he didn't write it in the hope of changing minds, or of fomenting any kind of change in direction; the State will only change when it collapses, having taken all power to itself and still found itself insatiable with no more to confiscate.

Feel free to download my Audiobook reading of "Our Enemy, The State" if you think you can bear my dulcet tones for the best part of four hours.

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Even many who are relatively sympathetic to free market minarchist and mutualist ideals where as much as possible is done through voluntary rather than coercive statist mechanisms often have a problem envisaging a system in which no state apparatus exists.  Two of the most common objections are that we at least need a state to administer "justice" and to ensure "national defense".  Even intellectual heavyweights such as Robert Nozick felt that a de facto "state", at least at a local level, would emerge from private law enforcement agencies.

So I'm often on the lookout for literature that explains how a private law based society would work, indeed would vastly improve upon the current predominant state run model, and so I am delighted to point my reader to "Chaos Theory", a pair of short essays, one on "justice" and the other on "national defense" by Robert P Murphy.  It is available as a freely downloadable PDF at the Mises.org site.  You can also buy a dead tree version (though I find delivery costs too high at Mises.org to justify having these sent to the UK).

It also provides further illustration of the point I was making in my previous piece on how respect for private property and contracts frees us from the need for a state.

I have also prepared an MP3 audiobook version, which is attached to this post.  It's mainly just for me to listen to again on the way to work, but if you'd prefer to listen than to read, and can face my dulcet tones, feel free to use it, Robert Murphy has given his permission.  It's only an hour and a half long, so you can judge how long it will take you to read this very accessible introduction to some of the ideas involved.

Particularly on the "justice" side, I can see ways in which the Mutualist ideal of creating such institutions and mechanisms within the current system could be successful.  Since the non-aggression principle would not rely on the same ability conferred on state agents (i.e. the police) to arrest someone, there is no reason why such mechanisms could not operate successfully on private property at present.

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