20 Mar 2013

Seventeen Benefits of the War on Drugs

By Kevin Carson

With American drug-use levels essentially the same as - and levels of drug-related violence either the same as or lower than - those in countries such as the Netherlands with liberal drug laws, public support for the War on Drugs appears to be faltering. This was most recently evidenced in the victory of major drug-decriminalization initiatives in Colorado and Washington. Some misguided commentators go so far as to say the Drug War is "a failure." Here, to set the record straight, are 17 ways in which it is a resounding success.

1) It has surrounded the Fourth Amendment's "search and seizure" restrictions, and similar provisions in state constitutions, with so many "good faith," "reasonable suspicion," and "reasonable expectation of privacy" loopholes as to turn them into toilet paper for all intents and purposes.

2) In so doing, it has set precedents that can be applied to a wide range of other missions, such as the War on Terror.

3) It has turned drug stores and banks into arms of the state that constantly inform on their customers.

12 May 2012

Shikha Dalmia: Half-Right on "Right to Work"

By Kevin Carson

Shikha Dalmia, writing in Reason ("Are Right to Work Laws the New Slavery?," April 26), dismisses most union objections to "right to work" laws. But she concedes that on one issue - the requirement that unions provide representation for scabs who don't pay dues - unions are "on more solid ground."

But, she continues, unions themselves are partly to blame. "They are required to represent all workers in exchange for monopoly rights over collective bargaining in the workplace. That is the Faustian bargain they made in the Wagner Act."

The problem is that she makes this sound primarily like a perk for the unions. She neglects to mention its value to employers, or more generally the way Wagner reflects the interests of employers.

17 Dec 2011

Occupy Doesn't Have a Platform - It Is a Platform

By Kevin Carson

The Occupy movement comes under frequent attack from the institutional Left (and, it goes without saying, from the liberal establishment) for not offering a clear list of official demands - for, in other words, not offering a platform.

But that criticism misses the point. Occupy doesn't have a single platform, in the sense of a list of demands. But it is a platform - a collaborative platform, like a wiki. Occupy isn't a unified movement with a single list of demands and an official leadership to state them. Rather, Occupy offers a toolkit and a brand name to a thousand different movements with their own agendas, their own goals, and their own demands - with only their hatred of Wall Street and the corporate state in common, and the Occupy brand as a source of strength and identity.

07 Jan 2011

Attack Tyranny at Its Weakest Link: Enforcement

By Kevin Carson

(Editor's note: For Jeff Ignatius' response to this guest commentary, click here.)

Liberal goo-goos and "good citizens" of all stripes are fond of saying that "we must continue to obey the law while we work to change it." Every day I become more convinced that this approach gets things precisely backwards. Each day's news demonstrates the futility of attempts at legislative reform, compared to direct action to make the laws unenforceable.

The principle was stated most effectively by Charles Johnson, one of the more prominent writers on the libertarian Left: "If you put all your hope for social change in legal reform ... then ... you will find yourself outmaneuvered at every turn by those who have the deepest pockets and the best media access and the tightest connections. There is no hope for turning this system against them; because, after all, the system was made for them and the system was made by them. Reformist political campaigns inevitably turn out to suck a lot of time and money into the politics - with just about none of the reform coming out on the other end."

Far greater success can be achieved, at a tiny fraction of the cost, by "bypassing those laws and making them irrelevant to your life."

08 Sep 2010

The Real Curriculum of "Public" Education

By Kevin Carson

An August 28 article at the privacy-rights Web site Pogo Was Right argues that schools are "grooming youth to passively accept a surveillance state where they have no expectation of privacy anywhere." Privacy violations include "surveilling students in their bedrooms via webcam, ... random drug or locker searches, strip-searching, ... lowering the standard for searching students to 'reasonable suspicion' from 'probable cause,' [and] disciplining students for conduct outside of school hours ... ."

"No expectation of privacy anywhere" is becoming literally true. The schools are grooming kids not only for the public surveillance state, but also for the private surveillance states of their employers. By the time the human resources graduate from 12 years of factory processing, they will accept it as normal to be kept under constant surveillance -- "for your own safety," of course -- by authority figures. But they won't just accept it from Homeland Security ("if you've done nothing wrong, you have nothing to fear"). They'll also accept as "normal" a work situation in which an employer can make them pee in cups at any time, without notice, or track their online behavior even when they're away from work.

This is just part of what rogue educator John Taylor Gatto calls the "real curriculum" of public education ("The Seven-Lesson Schoolteacher," 1992). The real curriculum includes the lesson that the way to advancement, in any area of life, is to find out what will please the authority figure behind the desk, then do it. It includes the lesson that the important tasks in life are those assigned to us by authority figures -- the schoolteacher, the college instructor, the boss -- and that self-assigned tasks in pursuit of our own goals are to be trivialized as "hobbies" or "recreation."

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