by Kaleb Matson

You’re young,
you’ve got your whole life ahead of you, you’re zealous for liberty,
and in some capacity or another you want to spend your life in the
meaningful pursuit of a better world. What do you do with your life?
In this article I’m going to argue that if your goal is liberty,
electoral politics is the last path you should consider.
Then I will suggest a far more exciting, fulfilling, enriching,
and – most importantly – effective path to a better, freer
world.

“In
dealing with the problems of social and economic policies,“
Mises writes, “the social sciences consider only
one question: whether the measures suggested are really suited
to bringing about the effects sought by their authors.” The
entire course of your life will be shaped by your answer to this
question. Even more, the entire course of history has been shaped
by various leaders’ answer to this question. Isn’t it the basic
source of all political divisions? Putting aside all the polarizing
rhetoric of opposing sides, does anyone honestly believe political
leaders set out with an end goal of misery, poverty, famine, genocide,
holocaust, war and atrocities?  Yet the vastly different outcomes
of the life work of Marx and Mises, Lincoln and Jefferson, Obama
and Ron Paul, etc. clearly demonstrate the highly consequential
nature and importance of correctly discerning the best means to
achieve the mutually desired ends of liberty, prosperity and peace.
Imagine spending your whole life believing you are fighting for
the cause of liberty, only to realize on your deathbed that the
means you chose – your life work and legacy – only resulted in advancing
tyranny? Is what you’ve chosen to do with your life truly an effective
means of promoting liberty? Answering this question requires some
thoughtful inquiry into what creates liberty, and what destroys
it.

“If
there be any truth in political science, perfectly clear it is that
centralized power is but another name for despotic power. Precisely
in proportion as you centralize; in the same proportion do you approach
absolute power. Power begets power, and a tendency to centralization,
that in the long run, will reach tyranny. To render power innocuous,
it must be broken up into fragments…” (1836
Congressional Debates) If centralized power is the opposite
of liberty then the pursuit of liberty is principally the fight
for the decentralization of power. What then are the best means
to decentralize power? The American experiment was an attempt to
maintain decentralized power by making power-holders promise to
obey a power-limiting document (the Constitution) that was written
by, is interpreted by, enforced by, and usually simply ignored by
the very power-holders it is intended to regulate. Oh, but when
those in power fail to self-regulate the people are allowed to offer
pleas or threats (the political process) in hopes that power will
un-corrupt! They’ve been taking oaths and getting fired for over
two hundred years now, look around you- how’s it working out? The
political process as a means to liberty has been about as effective
as socialism as a means to prosperity. Even wild success in the
political process means only that the progress of centralization
has been temporarily delayed… until ‘our man’ retires or the next
scheme, bill, or despot comes along. Yet we continue dumping most
of our energies, monies, and lives into the political process, trying
to convince ourselves that despite its dismal record of failure
this means is still the appropriate path to our desired end. We
continue in the delusion that through the political process we can
somehow transform the will of power towards opposing centralization.
Or believing this idea that by giving power to ‘our people,’ we
can negate its corrupting effects -yet we of all people should be
able to recognize and admit the incorrigibly malignant nature of
power. I suggest we act accordingly by ceasing to waste our time
and energy attempting to redeem it, and instead begin working to
undermine power’s very ability to centralize altogether.

To undermine
power’s ability to centralize, you must understand how power
consolidates and centralizes. Imagine you had absolute control over
every molecule of oxygen on the planet, so that every human being’s
life depended on your granting him or her the use of that resource
which you controlled. Your absolute monopolization of that resource
would give you power like that of a god (ultimate power). The means
to power, then, simply consists of working towards monopoly control
of a needed resource. The stronger the monopoly, the greater the
power. The foundation of the nation state’s power over you ultimately
lies in its control over resources that you need, as your only method
of acquiring that resource is by subjecting yourself to its demands.

With that in
mind, let’s now ask the question: what is the best means of preventing
or undermining the monopolization of a resource? Despite all its
promise of god-like power for whoever controls it, oxygen has never
been monopolized. Why? Because its sheer abundance makes it impossible
to control. The scarcer a resource, the easier it is to control.
The more abundant a resource, the harder it is to control. Scarcity
seems to lend itself to the centralization of power; but abundance
denies the very possibility. The best means, then, for preventing
centralized power is to identify the scarce resources which it would
monopolize and to make those same resources so abundant that maintaining
control of them becomes practically impossible. Undermining a monopoly
of resources that remain scarce simply requires the introduction
of competition, which by definition results in a more decentralized
control of it. Fortunately the defining characteristic and function
of capitalism is to take scarce resources and make them abundant,
a process fully aided and abetted by competition.  No wonder
the state is so hell-bent on maintaining the scarcity of its monopolized
resources and will use every form of violence to crush any threat
of competition.

To figure out
specifically what scarce resources the nation state currently builds
and centralizes its power on, imagine the absence of the state.
What resources or sectors of the economy immediately come to mind?
Who would build the roads? Transportation. Who would provide
school for the children? Education. Who would settle disputes?
Judicial system. Who would protect against aggressors? Defense.
Etc. Once you’ve identified these often state-monopolized resources,
begin to brainstorm about how you could, by the nature of the capitalist
process, make the resource more abundant and/or offer competition
by providing it better and cheaper. Most of us spend our days complaining
of the utter incompetence and ridiculously wasteful nature of the
state… but from the perspective of an entrepreneur desiring to undermine
a monopoly, that attribute in your competition couldn’t provide
a better opportunity!

Now let’s consider
some real examples of the possibilities of this approach. Think
of how the printing press and ultimately the Internet have destroyed
the scarcity of information, making it super-abundant and rendering
any hopes for a monopoly over the flow of information a pipe dream.
For education, imagine how the
Kahn Academy with its incredible K-12 education available to
anyone anywhere for absolutely free could undermine the current
costly and ineffective state-run school system. For college level
there’s MIT’s OpenCourseWare,
one among many programs pioneering the trend of making the most
prestigious college educations available for free. As for gaining
an official degree (a failed approach to credentialing,)
Mozilla’s Open Badge project may present a superior model for
skills-based credentialing. All these could work together to make
education ubiquitous and free, putting the state out of the education
business.  What about other local resources like public services
and utilities? Think about the private firefighting companies like
Wildland
Defense Systems (hired by insurance companies), or even entirely
privatized cities like
Celebration, Florida. For transportation (moving beyond privatized
toll roads), how about the
Tokyo Expressway, a free-to-the-public, privately owned and
profitable highway? Isn’t this essentially what parking lots (a
substantial percentage of the paved surfaces in the US) are already?
For medicine, the Surgery
Center of Oklahoma is obliterating its state-subsidized competitors
by providing superior healthcare at a fraction of the cost, providing
a model that could make “The Affordable Health Care Act”
irrelevant. Social safety nets? Start a
mutual aid society. For trade, the Silk
Road (a black market Amazon) is offering a marketplace with
no third party limitations on voluntary transactions between individuals.
As for the state’s attempt to wield power by claiming the sole right
to sanction who you hire, to limit the division of labor, to block
your access to foreign talent with immigration barriers, and to
subsidize inefficiency through unions (with their resulting protective
tariffs and wars) -they can be easily undermined through sites like
E-lance or offshore office space like the
BlueSeed project. Currency monopolies, sanctions capital
controls? No problem- BitCoin
or
gold-based debit cards. Looking to the future, what about a
Tricorder device that helps increase the abundance of accessible
diagnostics and doctors, further decentralizing control of the medical
industry? Could advances in
3-D printing someday radically decentralize the production industry?
How do you compete with the state in more difficult resources like
geography, dispute settlement and defense?
Seasteading or free
trade zones could offer an exciting alternative to the monopolization
of land by nation states. For dispute settlement, try private arbitration
like Judge.me. For defense…if
you concealed carry you’re already decentralizing the state’s control
of defense and providing a superior alternative. Large-scale defense?
How about those insurance companies, who in the face of the incompetent
state, are forming
private navies to protect the private property of shipping companies
from pirates? Want to end war? The Middle East and Africa are a
hotbed for
water wars… imagine you take that scarce resource and through
something like
graphene desalination you make fresh water super-abundant? War’s
over. What if we did the same for energy? Imagine a scientist discovers
a source of power that fits into a freezer-sized box and can independently
power any home…. technology that completely makes energy abundant
and decentralized- suddenly geo-political strategic wars over scarce
energy resources become pointless. The only reason wars are still
fought over water or energy or anything else is because they are
still scarce and therefore hold the promise of power to whoever
controls them. Who’s fighting wars over oxygen (or for water in
the west where it isn’t so scarce)? Why don’t we, in pursuit of
liberty and peace, intentionally pursue technologies that subvert
government monopolies by offering a superior, cheaper and more abundant
product?  

After a brief
venture into electoral politics, I began to think long and hard
about what a life in the political process might look like. A long
life of money-grubbing, dirty-dealing, doing things I hate with
people I don’t like but acting like they’re my friends anyway because
I could use them politically, being backstabbed by friends who thought
the same thing, spending many nights away from my family and friends
attending obligatory boring meetings or parties I don’t want to
be at, trying to coerce and harass everyone I know into doing things
they have no interest in either, being broke and having to suck
up to the highest bidder, living with a dirty conscience and making
enemies at every turn, all for something I am fundamentally repulsed
by anyway, and would have no part of if I thought there was any
other way to preserve and advance liberty. All that sacrifice for
what, if history is any guide, would at best result in a minor slowing
of tyranny. A stopgap measure. Is that really the best we can do?

The whole prospect
compelled me to re-examine the efficacy of the political process
as a means to liberty, and I’m beginning to think that this state
sanctioned mechanism for change may not actually be the most
appropriate means for our desired end. Perhaps it’s time to rethink
all this- to demote on our priority list the stopgap measures of
the political process and to begin fervently pouring our talents,
energies and monies into a ‘targeted capitalism’, if you will. Liberty
lovers everywhere intentionally targeting state-monopolized resources
and disintegrating those monopolies through the capitalist process.
These means are by nature decentralizing and can be pursued while
completely disregarding the will of power. Enough of this pleading
with our oppressors not to oppress us so much! Let’s stop being
depressed victims of the state and instead start imagining all the
endless opportunities its incompetencies create! In the process,
we can be around people we like, create wealth by offering real
value for the masses, live adventurously, with a clean conscience,
and most importantly, live free.

And that is
why I’m quitting politics and starting a business.

August
2, 2012

Kaleb Matson
[send him mail] is
the founder of InceptionHouse,
a pro-liberty media production firm.

Copyright
© 2012 by LewRockwell.com. Permission to reprint in whole or in
part is gladly granted, provided full credit is given.