I also take liberty to be of far more importance than equality. All other things being equal, however, “equality” of wealth and power is a value, and is conducive to liberty. The checks inherent in power balances is conducive to liberty. I’ve put it this way before: I don’t want the State to steal from the rich to give to the poor, but so long as it insists on stealing, I’d rather it steal from the rich instead of the poor. This is largely a vain hope, however, because it is the very nature of the State to steal from the poor to give to the rich. The deleterious effects of its long history of doing so is why we should have a “preferential option for the poor.” We can even recognize that if the State against its nature started stealing from the rich instead of the poor this might go some distance towards repairing some of the inequalities the State itself has created. (I’d suggest, though, that if the State persisted long in thus acting against its nature this would likely eventually spell its happy demise.) I happen to subscribe to the Georgism of Steiner et al., but I think the term “left libertarianism” encompasses not only them but others who are biased towards equality. Indeed, I take a righteous bias in favor of equality to be the very essence of the “left,” as defined, for example, by Karl Hess. And aren’t BHLs also defined by that bias? Who is your heart bleeding for? The poor, and the suffering which typically attends poverty? That strikes me as a bias in favor of equality. Granted, BHLs can define themselves any way they want, and I’m not completely clear on the definition yet. Note that a bias in favor of equality doesn’t equate to a belief that actual equality of wealth and power is a practical or desirable goal. Part of the attraction of Georgism is that it approximates an actual equality in the use of natural resources, to which every person born into the world has an equal right. Such a recognition of the natural and equal right to natural resources would tend towards equality of wealth and power, while still leaving individuals free to earn and accumulate wealth unequally according to their disparate and unequal talents and drives.

Then there’s this, from the local news story on the “Wall Street” protesters:

Katie Robbins and Michael Obregon went to the protest with their two daughters, ages 1 and 4.

“I want to be able to take care of my family,” said Robbins, 27. “We don’t even want the American dream. We just want a safe home, affordable health care.”

But the old recipe of hard work and playing by the rules isn’t working, she said.

The family is surviving on about $35,000 in annual income, they estimated. Obregon, 39, works full-time at a distribution center and is also a full-time student studying business at Indiana University South Bend. Sometimes they must choose between paying the electric bill or going to the grocery store.

Robbins said people just tell them to work harder.

The counter-point to that is this post titled “How I live on $7,000 per year” at the Early Retirement Extreme blog by a guy named Jacob, who writes:

Okay, that does it. I’m getting tired of the pervasive media articles that detail how people are “surviving” or “barely managing” on what qualifies as average or definitely median household incomes. This is like writing a articles about 5’10″ guys who are “struggling” with their height issues complete with tips and tricks on how to cope with the shortage. Ha!. For the record, 5’10″ is the average height of a US male. Fun fact: This is also the median, since there are few 12′ tall guys to skew the distribution.

The waterfall that finally crushed the camel was this yahoo article which discusses how a single person “survives” on $20,000/year, but that’s just one out of many. In particular, it followed an initial article on how a family survives on $40,000/year. This is pretty close to the median household income in the US! It means that about half of everybody, that’s 150+ million people, is currently living on LESS than those amounts. Surely, that’s no secret, and surely that’s not very remarkable either.

PART I. My final comment responding to another commenter in a thread on an Althouse post quoting Glenn Greenwald’s reaction to Althouse’s distortion of something Greenwald said about the Drug War:

John Kindley said…

Scott M said … “Does that mean you think universal health care is a left-wing or a right-wing cause?”It’s a right-wing cause. As Greenwald recently wrote (on July 7th): “Congressional Democrats began the health care debate by categorically vowing — in writing, by the dozens — never to support any health care bill that did not contain a public option (on the ground that it would be little more than a boon to — an entrenchment of — the private health insurance industry) … (and that debate followed the same template as the deficit battle: the White House publicly pretending to advocate for a public option while leading the way in private to ensure it never happened).”

PART II. Karl Hess on the Left / Right spectrum:

The overall characteristic of a right-wing regime, no matter the details of difference between this one and that one, is that it reflects the concentration of power in the fewest practical hands.

Power, concentrated in few hands, is the dominant historic characteristic of what most people, in most times, have considered the political and economic right wing.

The far left, as far as you can get away from the right, would logically represent the opposite tendency and, in fact, has done just that throughout history. The left has been the side of politics and economics that opposes the concentration of power and wealth and, instead, advocates and works toward the distribution of power into the maximum number of hands.

PART III. Norm Pattis, reviewing a novel, The Oregon Experiment, about a “not-so-young college professor with a professional interest in anarchism [who] puts his theory into practice in Oregon”:

My heart belongs with anarchists everywhere. I can’t quite shake the sense that government is a hoax, especially now, when I see right and left posture about the debt ceiling. While these fools bob and weave and avoid any pragmatic sense of compromise, the rest of us sit helplessly by, watching, paying taxes and, at least for the believers among us, praying that the it all doesn’t come crashing down around our ears. Some part of me says bring the crash on. I’ve an active apocalyptic gene.

But I am also late-middle-aged, a man with mortgages, children now out of college, employees, a vast network of commitments in a social web that seems forever out of control, but just serviceable enough to provide an anchor. Like the politicians I abhor, I have become vested in a world that doesn’t work. I behold anarchy with something like a pleasing sense of horror: I want to see what happens when the walls come tumbling down; I just don’t want one of those walls to fall on me or my family.

PART IV. Albert Jay Nock’s essay “A Little Conserva-tive,” published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1936

PART V. Kevin Carson at the Center for a Stateless Society on “counter-economics”:

The late Samuel Edward Konkin III (SEK3), in the New Libertarian Manifesto, coined the term “counter-economics” to describe the building of an economy outside the corporate-state nexus, and operating below its radar.   The counter-economy would evade both state regulations and state taxation, starve the state of the revenues it needed to operate, and eventually supplant the corporate-state economy.

Unfortunately, SEK3 took too narrow a view of the counter-economy:  rather than viewing illegality as a means to an end, he viewed it as an end in itself, and as the defining characteric of counter-economics.  That approach is unsatisfactory, since it means we define our efforts in terms of the state rather than in terms of our own self-derived goals.

Indeed, the state’s own statism is a means to an end, and defined largely in relation to our own self-determined goals:  to prevent us from supporting ourselves in comfort, independently of the corporate-state nexus and wage employment, and from receiving the full product of our labor.

If counter-economics is the means, we should also remember that the means is the end in progress.  Evading the state is not an end in itself; it is, rather, a means of accomplishing what we would want to accomplish for its own sake, even if the state never existed.  Counter-economics is the building of the kind of society and economy we want right now.  And if we define it that way, it dovetails nicely with many similar concepts prevalent on the libertarian, decentralist Left:  counter-institutions, dual power, and (that wonderful Wobbly slogan) “building the foundation of the new society within the shell of the old.”