François-René Rideau writes about the root of the struggle of libertarianism in Government is the Rule of Black Magic: On Human Sacrifices and Other Modern Superstitions.#

In the introduction he acknowledges his sensationalism and states his goals:#

That question is: are there any rational justifications to the existence of government? What can we say of existing explanations that serve as official justifications? In other words: is government the answer to the problems it claims to solve?

Of course, the answer that we libertarians have reached is that no, there are no rational justifications for government 5, its official explanations are bogus, and not only does it not solve the problems it claims to solve, but it creates these problems to begin with. This answer even defines us as libertarians. But this answer is not enough. It is a mistake to close the debate there and think that we've solved the problem — just our knowing that government is wrong won't in itself make government go away. We must ask: if these explanations are fake, then what is the real reason for people to believe in government? What is the rational explanation for these irrational explanations 6? In other words: if government is the answer, then what was the question?

As another kind of introduction, he briefly describes some of the official justifications for government. One argument, externalities, is explained particularly well:#

The Externalities Theory of ``public goods?? states that some activities intrinsically imply externalities 11, and that government is a magic solution to managing these externalities, — whereas it is but a way to coercively concentrate externalities, from lots of small, manageable ones, into the huge and overwhelming externality of ensuring there is a ``good?? government, which turns out to be completely unmanageable 12.

By arguing that government is based in irrationality, he ponders at what kind of irrationality it is, and tries to create patterns and ways of understanding the true justification for government.#

One pattern, with a very clever and persuasive flourish at the end:

A second pattern that can be found to accompany the first pattern is that government is seen as an external entity, something outside of society and above it. And this divine nature is precisely what allows it to create and dispense goods, services, trust or whatever, at no cost. This divine nature can be put clearly in evidence through the awe of people before the visible power of the State: ``how could mere individuals accomplish that??? will they wonder, when it is suggested that a government monopoly on this or that activity should be abolished. Yet, government monopoly or no government monopoly, it is always ``mere?? individuals doing things! Of course it is, and it cannot be otherwise. Politicians and government officers are not more than other individuals; actually, experience as well as theory shows that they are usually less than other individuals — because they are irresponsible. Government doesn't sprinkle any pixie dust on its masters and servants, it doesn't endow them with any magic power. Actually, Government does grant them a special ability that normal individuals don't have — and this ability is indeed what characterizes Government: it is the ability to recourse to legal coercion against those who refuse to obey. The God that statists worship is Brute Force. So, translated in real terms, without the veil of magic, the question that those awed people wonder about really is: ``how could this be achieved without coercion??? And the answer is then obviously ``with less suffering?? 30.

And, his brief definition of the real justification and the real problem:

From our study of them, it appears that all the justifications of the State ultimately boil down to this: religious worship of the State as an almighty supernatural authority. The State is the idol of a self-denying pagan cult. Belief in such nonsense would be considered a mental disease, if it were not so common. And hopefully, in a not so far away future, it will indeed be considered as a mental pandemic, an infantile disease that swept away the world at a time when mankind is still very young. However, for the time being, it is still up to us to devise a cure — and to be able to do so, we must first understand the disease, how it survives, how it propagates. We must investigate the psychological mechanisms underlying such a belief system, identify the weaknesses of the mind through which this parasite belief enters people's mind.

With this initial conception of white and black magic, also explained here, Faré contrasts the two:#

Everyone seeks happiness, success or redemption; but we can distinguish two radically opposite path to follow while striving for them. A follower of Black Magic begs for grants, he humiliates himself, submits to superior forces. An observer of White Magic earns rewards, he develops self-pride and mastership of nature (in a non-hierarchical sense). A follower of Black Magic tries to obtain favors from superior forces by making sacrifices, by destroying things or people, by making a show of one's friendly intents, or even by humiliating himself in groveling submission. An observer of White Magic tries to obtain satisfactions from earthly things and people (in a non-hierarchical relation 47), by enhancing himself and his property, by creating goods and services, by doing actual work, by proudly developing his skills. Followers of Black Magic are ignorant of nature and how it works, and they rebel against it when it doesn't satisfy their whims. Practitioners of White Magic try to understand nature and its mechanisms, they accept it as it is, and use their knowledge of it to achieve satisfactions. To followers of Black Magic, Gods are supernatural beings above us; their nature is Holy and suffers no questioning. To practitioners of White Magic, in as much as things can be explained in terms of Gods, Gods are but aspects of Nature itself. To followers of Black Magic, the ultimate goal is the fulfillment of all wild desires, with impossibility being vanquished in a surreal paradise to be granted to worshippers in some far future or after death. To practitioners of White Magic, the ultimate goal is to achieve appreciated satisfactions before death, with the wisdom to reevaluate one's desires so as to fit the realm of the possible.

After contrasting at a personal and philosophical level, the two memesets are now contrasted with regards to their conception of social organization. The Black Magic description is below:#

To Black Magicians, certain knowledge flows from the Authority to the mere mortals. The ideal society of Black Magic is thus organized hierarchically around the Authority, in a caste division: At the top are the priests, wise men, brahmins, inner party members, official intellectuals, politicians, or whatever the name, from whom flows the order of society. Afterwards are the military, warriors, policemen, administration clerks, civil servants, teachers and other political commissars, who disseminate and enforce the superior order upon society. Below is the mass of producers, workers, peasants, craftsmen, technicians, engineers and other slaves, who do the grunt work; though a minority of them may have advanced skills regarding mastery of nature, they are themselves considered socially but as tools in the hands of the elite; and while these skilled laborers have to be paid more (or else they would abandon their skills and do grunt work like others), the official ideology will make them less than physical laborers. At the very bottom, barely tolerated if at all, are the traders, merchants, money-lenders, speculators, who do some despicable job, that is best understood as scavenging the leftovers of the orderly administration, profiteering from the misery of people in mysterious ways, doing dirty tasks that are below the current higher concerns of the Hierarchy.

As caricatural as it may seem, this is exactly the model of all the totalitarian utopias: it is the ideal followed by the ancient empires of Egypt, China 64 or Andies; it is the model proposed in Plato's The Republic, in the theories of indian brahmins or european legists; it is the vision of communism and its softened social-democrat spin-offs.

The next section is about how the forces of Black Magic work to keep the mental disease alive in their slaves. (Faré's language has caught on.)#

Black Magic is a cult that must be kept alive by constantly occupying the minds of people. And the best way to occupy their minds is to also occupy their bodies. The Godvernment will seek to intervene in any and every aspect of social life. It will even intervene in so very personal things as intimate relations between people in love, by regulating marriage, giving it an important place in fiscal and civil regulations, etc. Any domain that is not subject to heavy regulations is disconsidered as lawless savagery, a wild anarchy, a lack of legislation, to be promptly remedied by new legislation. At the same time, all this intervention must be accompanied by constant rhetorics, by appeal to the citizens' spirits, and ultimately by actual concern of anxious citizens, so that the Godvernment will appear positively rather than negatively. This is why Black Magicians will resort to a series of tricks so as to stage the public worship of Black Magic.

In the concluding remarks, François reminds us that just when Russia collectivized agriculture it did not spoil the act of agriculture, there are some things that governments do that would be good were they voluntary. With this in mind, it is important to acknowledge who is real "Enemy" of liberty is:#

Thus, Government, as an instituted body, is not the main Enemy, it is but the manifestation of the Enemy. Should we manage to destroy the current government, evil as it may be, if we didn't dispel the belief in Black Magic, then Black Magic will spurt off a new government, just as evil as the preceding one; and any violent means we used to destroy the previous government will only have resulted in pain and destruction while evicting the old government, and pain and destruction again as a new government struggles to establish its new power over people. Our main Enemy is more elusive, it resides in people's minds: it is the very belief in Black Magic, it is a disease from which we want to cure people. It is not Government as a body, it is Government as an idea; it is not the State, it is Statism; it is not the political militants, it is politics. Our Enemy is a mental illness, not the victims it infects. Our Enemy is a view of the world where the interests of people are antagonistic instead of harmonic. Our Enemy is the principle behind Enmity itself 89.

I was very inspired by these remarks and I consider the analogy to be apt:#

In his 1860 article, Panarchy, P. E. de Puydt suggested that someday, people would cease to consider violence as a legitimate way to impose political opinions, just like they don't consider violence anymore as a legitimate way to impose religious opinions. This is our hope: someday, in civilized countries, governmental oppression will be remembered as a nightmare of ancient barbarian times, something unthinkable to civilized people, just like Wars of Religion now seem a barbarous thing of the past to inhabitants of most civilized countries.

And indeed, this utter delegitimation of aggressive violence will be but the final achievement of a long process of individualization of society. It is the same process by which religion was individualized 92, with the recognition that each individual has to seek his salvation independently from the collective, and much later with the official separation of Church from State. This process will be complete when people commonly accept the separation of Morality from Justice 93.

François-René Rideau writes another interesting article about liberty and discussion of liberty, entitled, The Enterprise of Liberty vs. The Enterprise of Politics.#

One of the main points of the article is that liberty is a resource that must be created. Nowadays there is less taking (fighting against) liberty than there is simply not an active production enterprise. Faré explains this and how libertarianism is the technology of this enterprise:#

That's where a Theory of Law such as Libertarianism comes handy: it can be a tool for the cheap mass production of such resources. Libertarian ideas are technology to build freedom — they are a Freedom Technology. But they only work when they are accepted by all people concerned. And then you need to find and use other Freedom Technologies upstream so as to convince other people of your ideas, so as to discover and spread good laws, and so as to cancel bad laws.

We are much better off than in the Middle Ages, in terms of many Rights that we have secured: freedom of thought, freedom of expression, freedom of movement, freedom of possession, freedom of trade, etc. Surely, there are many defects in the details of those rights that we do have secured, but despite these defects, there has been a global progress in the last few millenia. All in all, we have much better Freedom Technology today in western countries than anyone ever had in the Middle Ages. Yet, though they didn't a have good Freedom Technology in terms of knowing what Liberties should be, could be, and how to enforce them, people in the Middle Ages did have a much better understanding than we do of the nature of Liberties, as resources that have to be built or bought: the explicit recognition of individual rights by other people, and especially so by the people able to enforce or violate those rights.

Continuing on this idea that liberty must be created, Faré has an interesting theory about how liberty comes "not from the unconquered, but from the freed."#

In the earliest stages of mankind, the only way to parasite other people was murder and pillage: kill all who resist, take all you can — cattle, weapons, clothes, women, hunting grounds. Between predators and victims, there was no notion of rights. Liberty was still uncreated.

As agriculture was invented, the invention of sedentariness made possible a great innovation: slavery. Instead of repeatedly coming to kill and pillage, risking a lot and taken little every once in a while, the parasites could now earn more at remaining in place, becoming ``stationary bandits??, and compelling the conquered to work for them permanently. This was an immense progress for the victims as well as for the victors — a matter of life and death, really. So yes, slavery was a progress in its time 9. And paradoxically as it may seem, slavery is how liberty was initially created: ``I reckon your right to live, if you do as I tell.??

From this description of the business that a liberty enterprise is engaged in, Faré looks at the type of questions that are often asked in libertarian circles. His bottom-line: Many of these questions have erroneous assumptions and are thus irrational.#

As to the question of which is better between government intervention and no government intervention, it may be relevant as an abstract, long-term, question, but it is completely irrelevant as a question of current immediate international policy. The vast majority of people in the world today believe in the necessity and utility of States and State intervention, and as long as they do, there will be States and State intervention. There is no ``magical button?? to push, and no magic wand to wave, so as to abolish the state in the minds of all these people. Now, if you think there is such a button, well, show me. But, first and foremost, and without any further delay whatsoever, for goddess's sake, just... push it. We'll have plenty of time for your telling me about it afterwards. Until that time, stop wasting your and everyone else's time with such childish silliness as discussing such non-existent alternatives. That's wishful thinking, and when someone, even Murray Rothbard, indulges in asking and answering questions of this kind that depend on the existence of such a button, he is relapsing into the basest form of Black Magic wishful thinking. At least Rothbard had the lucidity of making this dependency explicit; but all who make decisions base on the existence of such a button are foolish, and so are those who like Rothbard spend their life desperately seeking such a non-existent button. Thus, as applies to immediate action and current policies, this question is utterly irrelevant and must be un-asked.

I think his conclusion is fabulous:#

In earlier essays, I have proposed the idea that the right approach for libertarians to spread liberty was to cure people from their static statist state of mind. In so far as the memes of statism are an illness indeed, I won't deny this earlier claim of mine. But I would like to go further.

Though there are forces that actively fight and destroy liberty, the main problem is not that there is liberty that is being destroyed; it is that liberty remains essentially unbuilt. The forces of evil prevent liberty from being built more than they destroy it when it exists. People who are victims to the influence of statism are mostly not people formerly acquainted with freedom and its technology and who suddenly forget about this freedom. They are mostly people who never learnt about freedom and its technology and are unable to use it. A few people indeed are prevented from using technology they know about; but most victims are just made to remain plain ignorant or become confused 12. They don't have an illness to cure; they have to grow a new sense of freedom, a whole organ where the System left atrophied stubs.

François-René Rideau writes in Economic Reasoning vs. Accounting Fallacies: The Case of "Public" Research of the "Myth of Public Service" and related topics.#

First off, Faré explains why he is writing on this particular topic with interesting comments on French culture:#

I am subscribed to a french-speaking mailing list about zetetics, the art of skeptical inquiry — as applied to debunking pseudo-science and superstition. And from time to time, I receive through this list messages that appal me by the economic fallacies they convey. What is most remarkable is the way that these messages are seemingly accepted with seriousness and solemnity by the other members of the list (at least among those who express their opinions), whereas my debunkings are greeted with repetitions of the fallacies, ad hominem attacks and rehashing of communist propaganda, in a general consensus. Thus, people who are proud of their critical mind, and endowed with a robust scientific training (though admittedly in France) end up defending, in irrational ways, absurd theses.

Self-interest explains part of this behavior: when economic fallacies serve to defend the funding of public research and more generally to defend the welfare state, out of which a scientist lives, believes he lives, or intends to live, it can be expected that the first reflex of said scientist be to defend his turf. Rationality comes second after self-interest — which tears down the myth of scientists and other "experts" as objective, pure minds, rather than as humans primarily move by their self-interest, like all other humans. But beyond this reflex, the ease with which these fallacies prevail, the almost complete lack of resistance to these fallacies, are the sign that something is rotten deep down in the way that opinions are made, by scientists in particular, and by the public at large.

This second paragraph contains the jewel of something I have been thinking about recently: How much does the instinct of self-preservation in general deplete progress? Just as the rent-seeker fashions himself a Statist, so will a teacher of Roman history promote the cult of the Emperors, and the Ford automobile dealer is an advocate for Ford cars. I think it can be generally stated that everyone who does something, A, for which there is not something, B, that is easily substituted will over-value the importance of A.

A way to think about this has to do with the investment in human capital, i.e. training. To become a doctor of Marxist economy, I must invest time and money. To maximize the benefit of this investment, it is in my interest to promote Marxism, whether I believe it or not and whether it is true or not. It may be best to "play the game" of Marxism and get a check, then to undergo new training.

This idea could go further and probably has been looked at before. I will offer one more thought, however. Understanding this notion will help in understanding why the advocates of mind-control target youth, and why it is nearly impossible to change the mind of a newly minted Ph.D.:

• The young have not yet invested in their particular capital, so they are open to new ideas.
• The studied have much to lose if they forsake their training.
• The old and out-of-work have less to lose, because they are out-of-work anyways, so they have the benefit of leisure or the necessity of finding a new skill.
• It is therefore curious why tenured professors would not be more apt to changing their mind, they are like the old, living on a pension. Perhaps they are seeking to maximize the return of prestige in the field they have devoted themselves to becoming noticed in, and thus are committed to it egotistically, rather than economically.

Next, Faré reveals the theme of his critique: The distinction is not between "public" and "private" research and work, but between "political" and "free" work.#

Indeed, notice that what "public" means in this context is nothing else but "managed by the state monopoly of violence", as opposed to "left for free citizens to take the responsibility of organizing it". The right term to describe the phenomenon should thus be "political" management of research, as opposed to "freedom" in research. And this freedom includes of course the freedom to choose which research to fund and which researchers to fund, as well as the freedom to decline participation in research endeavours in which one isn't interested. For the public benefits as much or more from research when the funding of research is "private", that is, done on a voluntary basis through donations and contractual exchanges between members of the public than when the funding of research is "public", that is, done on a compulsory basis, with citizens being deprived from taxes that profit to a privileged cast.

The consequences of political management of research are thus as follows: numerous research endeavours are half completed but never finalized, were never made useful for the public; other research endeavours receive titanic credit lines totally disproportionate with their utility; yet other research endeavours remain unfunded; funds are distributed through nepotism, that is, people receive credits according to their relation with committee members rather than to their achievements; researchers are isolated from each other, from manufacturers, as well as from the public; researchers are generally demotivated; the public completely loses any sense of responsibility in research, not having any influence on the allotment of funds (qualitative aspects of the distribution of funds is never the stake of an electoral ballot). Such are the inconveniences of political monopoly, and we may summarize them as: injustice, plunder, responsibility deficit, inefficiency.

He explains that this central fallacy and its supporting fallacies can be resolved when one moves beyond accounting calculation to economic calculation, particularly to acknowledging the existence of opportunity costs of government-managed research. And this conclusion clearly follows:#

In conclusion, we will recall that public research is always done at the expense of other, private, spendings. And this other spendings, by definition, would have had more benefits in the very opinion of those people who had to be forced to contribute against their will to the political intervention. Political intervention, far from being useful to research, is deeply harmful to it. In the domain of research as everywhere else, the best civil services are private services, are more exactly, free services traded on a voluntary basis, as opposed to compulsory services imposed by the coercive ways of political intervention.

Another argument that Faré resolves is whether the government-managed monopoly of research would be more or less conducive to sharing of research information with the public:#

Another argument of the monopolist was the sharing of results: according to him, public research would allow to share results between everyone, whereas private research would lead to a partitioning of knowledge. As usual, this argument is based on a lot of confusions, that we'll have to unmangle before we can debunk it.

To begin with, let's assume a complete public monopoly on research, as the statists longs for. In such a case of monopoly, would knowledge really be shared? Such an affirmation stems directly from statist mysticism: The "public" nature of research is worshipped, which in actuality means that it be in the hands of politicians, on the ground that these politicians are meant to act in the name of the people, of God, or any other official reason, dogmatically accepted as legitimate. 19. Now, with a monopoly on research, by definition of a monopoly, the monopolists are the only ones who are entitled to use the monopolized knowledge for further research. Those who would try to use these informations outside of the monopoly would have no public funding, but instead endless judicial and administrative trouble if they were to try and find private funding for such research; they are forbidden to do their research but on their own, funding themselves with a day job, being relegated to the fringe of amateur work on projects that require very little capital investment. In fact, "the people" is more effectively excluded from research with a public monopoly than with a private monopoly.

I think this question, and its answer, aptly summarize the attack on public research and public funding in general: Would people freely consent to this, or not?#

To determine whether a person is verily an exploiter or an exploitee, we should ask one question: Would this person be payed as much or more by freely consenting people to whom this person would render the same kind of services? If the answer is "no", then this person is a political exploiter. If the answer is "yes", then this person is being exploited. Thus, without the government monoply on agriculture, most of the "civil servant" working in North-Korean sovkhozes would still be farmers and would make a better living; and in North Korea, were everybody is a "civil servant", the huge majority is made of slaves owned by the Communist Party. Without government monopoly on research, the researchers in public laboratories would also for the most part still be researchers, and they would be able to fulfill their calling while getting a better paycheck.

François-René Rideau writes in Design Ideas for a Future Computer Virus... and for a Future Security Architecture about a next-generation virus in a world of free-software, studying how sophisticated it would have to be as opposed to the simple viruses of the proprietary world.#

His description of how a virus detector can be made useless is very scary. Basically, because each virus detector is based on pattern matching, if the form/code of the virus can be very random it can be incredibly expensive to detect. This strategy is named Polymorphism.#

This is a particularly hilarious strategy:#

Before to enter a more malicious mode that will incur a much higher risk of getting caught, try to find a scapegoat that can be blamed for the damage. For instance, in a multi-user system, you can pick an innocent user, and only have externally observable malicious effects when this user is logged in, run malicious processes under his name, etc. Or in a server, you can trigger malicious behaviour right after some upgrade or maintenance operation, etc., and produce a binary and/or source containing the code for the malicious behaviour without any reference to the rest of the virus infrastructure. The idea is that by blaming the wrong person or binary, some silly administrators won't tackle the real problem, and may even restore already infected binaries. A successful scapegoat tactic of course depends on careful selection of the scapegoat, hence on a very good understanding of the way system administrators think and react, and on the events that they think about.

The conclusion is, of course, fabulous:#

For a virus to be successful in surviving and doing malicious things in current and future free software operating systems, it would require quite an amount of proficiency, work, tenacity. Making a virus that can robustly scale to a large range of situations, is really a particularly hard instance of the problem of making a robust and adaptative piece of software, with the additional constraint that it is hardly possible if at all to upgrade, fix or patch the software after it was originally let loose, whereas those who will attack the virus, though they start without much information, will be able to disassemble it, test it in laboratory conditions, exchange information, grow new intrusion-detection techniques, learn better habits, etc.

With a fraction of the work invested in building a really robust virus, the person or group of developers able to build it could get rich and famous at developing actually useful software: writing compilers or decompilers, doing security consultancy, developing copy-protection schemes, growing expert systems, engineering large projects, teaching software design, building systems that automate tasks currently done by human administrators. In contrast, as far as infecting proprietary systems goes, viruses need be neither robust nor scalable, neither stealthy nor architected around multiple layers: a dedicated teenager can write one that will spread all over the world. Meanwhile, the overhead cost of entry before one can do useful, worthwhile work is very low in free software communities, whereas it is very high in proprietary software communities. These economic considerations again explain why viruses are such a constant nuisance with proprietary systems, whereas it is unlikely that they will ever be much of a danger with free software systems.

This article, Public Goods Fallacies: False Justifications For Government, from Faré is dedicated to debunking some myths about why the government is necessary, particularly with regards to having it's hands in the economic pot.#

The Public Goods theory is the idea that some services or goods must be provided by some central organization who will look out for the public's interest and the public's benefit. Of course, the core of Libertarianism is that a private solution can always be found and will always be better.

Unhappily, many libertarians concede some "public goods" to the statists, but then they are on a slippery slope, for there is no reason to stop the public goods argument to any particular service. To paraphrase Emile Faguet: minarchists are libertarians who do not have the courage to accept the full consequences of their ideas; anarchists are uncompromising libertarians. Indeed, using arguments of the "public goods" type, government can intervene into just any domain — and once it does, it will make sure that the domain is so messed up that, by the same argument, it will have to extend its grasp over it until the domain is both completely under its control and completely messed up. But of course, intervention is based on the premise that government intervention is useful, to begin with — and this is precisely the point that statists posit as a petition of principle; it is precisely the point that needs to be disputed.

Faré also eloquently differentiates between government as an organization of force and a monopoly of force. The second case is what most people mean and is the immoral and unproductive one, the first will always exist and is okay. It is okay because one can opt-out and thus it will always exist for the mutual benefit of its members.

The first fallacy is that of externalities, that some activities cause "accidental" problems or benefits to people who are not formally engaged in the activity. Examples are pollution from factories that harm communities. Faré writes that the problem is really that the communities' property rights were not respected in the first place and that this can be extended to any externality.

Actually, governments create new externalities. Indeed, an externality always corresponds to either the lack of definition of a formal property right, or to the lack of enforcement of an existing property right, or to the contradictory enforcement of overlapping property rights. In as much as governments coercively impose their monopoly on the definition and enforcement of new and old property rights, they are the cause of any lasting externality. Governments prevent the use of natural mechanisms by which property rights emerge and externalities disappear: homesteading and the common law.

An example private solution that I can think of for the externality of water pollution would be for the polluting factory to have to negotiate with all the owners of property on the waterfront. These people may be organized, but they may not, and it is not a problem if one refuses to agree to contamination--what right does someone else have over your health?

 

The second fallacy comes from Game Theory, that many services and goods are most efficiently produced or practiced when they are properly coordinated. While Libertarians like Faré do not reject the notion of coordination, he explains the benefit and why it is desirable, they do however reject the monopoly of government in coordination. Faré frames coordination as a service, and like any service there should be a market for different coordinators of difference skill. But like any market dominated by a de jure monopolist, the result will not be best for the consumers,

Let us now consider the case of government as a coordinator. Just like any private service provider — for government is made of private individuals, just like any institution — government is a player that will maximize its interests. The only thing that distinguishes government from a free market coordinator is that government detains the means of coercion, with which it can exclude or discourage any competing service providers. Thus, in equilibrium, a government will monopolize the coordination of a game; it will then reap off most benefits of the game, leaving the players with just what it takes for them to make the game profitable. In an opt-in situation, where people have the choice to either call for government coordination or relinquish coordination, the government will leave to the players barely more profits than the ambient marginal interest rate (with respect to stakes invested in the game) — and that only if this cooperation proves profitable to all concerned despite the monopoly cost of government. Things are much worse, in an opt-out situation, where a government can coerce people into accepting its protection services for some pattern of services. In such situation, government will not only reap out all the benefits of coordination, but will also go further and charge a surcharge that makes players worse off than if they had not played.

So in fact, game theory does not support government, but the Statist will try to blind you with its faux authority of numbers, rather than use it to show the truth.

 

The often central theory of "Public Goods" is that they are different from Private Goods in that their use cannot be restricted and are by very definition public in all sense. Faré refers to this as the "Impossibility to Exclude" Fallacy. It is a fallacy because the non-excludable property is the justification of the use of government force to exclude some from its use. Some might say that the only effect control is then by the government and armed forces, but...

Maybe exclusion is indeed impossible without the use of armed force, but the only reason why the use of armed forces seems impossible without government is because the premise that government should have a monopoly on the use of armed force was silently posited, from the outset, in a hugely circular reasoning: government should have a monopoly on some goods, because it has the monopoly of force — which original sin of a monopoly is admitted as necessary without justification. Once again, the government is supposed to be made of superior people, or to have some magic pixie dust, that enables it to do what is admitted to be impossible to mere mortals. And once again, we find that in the end, the magic pixie dust is nothing but the power of legal coercion.

It seems to me that the vast majority of situations where private solutions are ignored comes from the learned laziness of certain people. These people are constantly told by the government and social norms that they are not responsible or intelligent and must always be told what to do by the Boss--either a government official or a government sponsored "expert." The government claims itself as the only solution to these problems--and why would it not? It serves itself, not the people.

 

Next is the Catastrophe-Prevention Fallacy, that the government is the only organization of suitable power to repair an industry that has been faced with a great failure. Now, either that industry is not desirable by the people, and thus should not exist because no one is willing to pay for it. Or, it is desirable and something has been keeping the people from supporting it for their own benefit. This implies a de jure monopoly imparted by the government to a particular group in an industry that then fails. Upon this fall the government must find a new champion and source of profit. This is the reality of Catastrophe-Prevention and it should be enough to stop it flat out.

 

One of my most loathed fallacy that it warms my heart to see debunk is that of "The Collective Will." The idea is that certain things are good in theory, and thus we should want them, but in practice we don't actually want them and need to be forced to support them. This corresponds to the government saying one thing is the will of the country when there is in fact no consensus and possibly minority support to begin with.

For instance, in democracies, "the people" is to be coerced to do what it is alleged to want to do but is blatantly admitted to not want at all, to begin with (or else, it wouldn't need to be coerced). Indeed, if, say, 50.1% of the population wanted to fund this or this other insurance, charity, research project, army, etc. then there's no doubt that said insurance, charity, research project, army, etc., will be abundantly funded, without the need for coercion. In a free society, each of the "public" goods that a majority of the people want to fund, and even those goods that only a minority wants to fund, will be funded, by people who care, confiding their money to people that they — caring people — deem able to best provide these goods. That is, each "public good", charity, or whatever, will be controlled by those responsible people who are most interested in it. In contrast, in a democracy, these goods are actually controlled by a class of politicians and public administrators, who are not checked by people who do care, but by a vast mass of people who don't care; most people are disinterested in any particular "public good" or charity, and won't vote for one of the two main parties (those who have a chance of making a government) based on any particular issue. Finally, the knowledge that they will have to pay for something on which they have little control anyway makes them cease to care: they are made irresponsible, deprived from any will, by the very system that claims legitimacy from their responsibility and their will.

Even if you do not aspect Libertarianism full on, it would seem easy to me to apply this idea to political campaigns. Rather than the money and monopoly power a few trying to seduce and confuse the people into supporting a particular candidate, a candidate should provide information about themselves and an avenue to get word to that candidate. The candidate should then find the policies that the most people desire and then support those--rather than trying to coerce or confuse the populous into supporting a policy they do not want at all. You can taste this abhorrent style clearly in the way that the two major political parties in America play off each other: the Democrats try to convince that the Republicans are evil and that they must be supported or else; and vice-versa. This renders a situation where it is considered naïve to actual vote for who you want and you should instead vote against who you do not want.

This is not a democracy that serves the people. It is a government that serves itself.

 

The next public good fallacy is the "Broken Windows Fallacy," which I feel is poorly named--not that I can think of a better, but I think it is non-obvious name. The idea is that there a certain goods that only the government can create and if they were to be created by a private individual they would be criminal. Examples center around the application of force: stopping people on roads, charging fees on them, forcing people to support a war they do not agree with, etc.

The only difference between these criminals and government agents is the official seal, this magic pixie dust that creates legitimacy when it is sprinkled over the worst crimes, including mass killings. Ambrose Bierce, in his The Devil's Dictionary, once characterized this superstition in the case of democracy:

Majority, n.: That quality that distinguishes a crime from a law.

Behind this double-standard is the fallacy of What Is Seen And What Is Not Seen: the statists will count only the "positive effects" of intervention on people who benefit from it and conspicuously forget to count the negative effects on people who suffer from it — because the benefits are concentrated, whereas the cost is spread. Although the fallacy is most often used in this crude form, when confronted to its substance, statists will go a long way toward sweeping their fallacy behind the veil of complexity.

A subtle point: Faré is not saying that these are valuable services that the government is preventing others from carrying out. Instead, he says that they are crimes in essence and the government hides behind is supernaturally granted carte blanche power to call them law.

 

The next fallacy is a blatant attack on the sovereignty of Man, that he is too evil or irresponsible to take care of himself and thus needs the government to take care of him. But of course, the government is made of men and if we grant the Statists that men are inherently evil then there is no reason to that the evil does not get extended and become amplified in government. Faré makes this interesting note:

Libertarians are often unduly reproached to worship a myth of the good savage — quite on the contrary, it is statists who worship the myth of the good statesman. To quote Edward Abbey,

Anarchism is founded on the observation that since few men are wise enough to rule themselves, even fewer are wise enough to rule others.

Actually, it is a common pattern that statists will reproach to libertarians what is actually a blatant failure of their own way of thinking.

 

Another related fallacy is that only the State can be altruistic and the people are completely egoistic. Faré notes that not only is self-care an important component of altruism, but also the government is not a magical source of altruism and in fact:

Thus, altruism, in its mutualistic form, is already included in personal self-interest. Not only cannot government increase total utility by magically unleashing a secret source of altruism in people; but government can and will only act in an altruist way if it is actually controlled by the altruist tendency in people, which must preexist to any altruism by government. Government is not a superhuman source of altruism, but can only give back the human altruism that was successfully put into it. And then again, nothing warranties that this altruism rather than antagonism will dominate the coercitive apparatus of the state. On the contrary, by concentrating coercive power, government is a great incentive for people without scruples to strive toward seizing power, whereas really altruistic people won't partake in the struggle for power.

It is important to consistently underlines the ideas that if organization is truly desirable then people will seek it without coercion. And no amount of illogical and hand-waving will change that.

 

This is an interesting fallacy that is a combination of others: Only the government can consider the long-term effects of actions and thus is the ideal place to create those decisions. As stated in the previous arguments, not only the government can not be any greater than the people who make it up, but also there is a fundamental flaw in the perception of the talents of historic governments.

Thus, contrary to the implicit prejudice behind this fallacy, governments only ever manage things on the short run. Indeed, the horizon of foresight of any political party is the next elective mandate. If ever one politician wanted to see further than the rest, his party would soon remind him of his duties toward it; political parties that do not force politicians to think in the short run get quickly wiped out of significance by parties that do; politicians without a political party simply don't get elected; and since even "good" political parties can't remain in power very long, even if their policies are oriented toward the long term, these policies will be changed with next government. In conclusion, politics mean that whatever is politically managed will be led by short term demagoguery.

I am reminded of something Dave Winer said of Gray Davis' comment about the threat of recall elections being a threat for politicians to never stop campaigning. Dave said something to the effect of, "That is the a fundamental lie. Who does he think he is kidding saying that they are not always campaigning anyways?"

Campaigning constantly is an obvious sign that the government and its composition is only interested in the short-term results of their actions. Namely, more temporal power of their own.

 

A concern that seems central to many Statists is uniformity. That for some reason it is desirable for as many things as possible to be the same and discourage diversity. This is seen in regulation and certification of trades. It is considered a major leap in reason to suggest that because uniformity is sometimes useful it must be applied as often as possible.

However, uniformity is not always good in itself; coercion by governments is neither the only way nor the best way to enforce standards; moreover the domains that standards will optimally regulate are seldom either large or territorial; and most importantly, a system of coercion hampers the very discovery of which better standards should be commonly adopted and enforced, because it destroys the points of comparison, neglects most opinions save that of the authority and its lobbyists, and prevents dynamic adjustment to varying and evolving individual circumstances.

When uniformity is desirable, it will be sought naturally by private forces and will be best encouraged rather than coerced.

Liberty and Responsibility are the only possible warranty that people will choose to obey good laws rather than bad laws. Peaceful persuasion through rhetorics filtered by critical reasoning and demonstrable benefits is the only way that good habits, good laws, and good institutions can be durably spread among the population, while at the same time discarding bad habits, bad laws and bad institutions.

 

Any interesting point that Faré makes is that any collectivist scheme contains an essential fallacy, that if this is such a good idea then why not apply it universally and as broadly as possible?

Indeed, why collectivize or not collectivize, say, "toilet paper"? Isn't there but a more specific need to collectivize "green soft toilet paper in 5 inch wide rolls sold under a brand the name of which ends with an S"? (After all, some company may very well have a dangerous monopoly on these!) Or why isn't there instead a need to collectivize production of all paper? Why collectivize at the scale of Great Britain? Why not collectivize at a smaller scale, say Westminster or the block next door? Or at a larger scale, say Northern Eurasia, or our quadrant of the Milky Way? And why collectivize it on a geographical scale at all? Why not collectivize for people whose name begin with an "R", or who wear black socks?

It seems to me that this exposes the power-hunger of collectivists. They seek to control at the greatest scale they can. They recognize that they could control a scale greater than a neighbor and thus seek to do so. At the same time, they recognize that they would like to control an entire continent but sadly cannot directly--instead they try to influence with imperialism and colonialism. What this suggest to me is that these people are fundamentally and unmistakably greedy but recognize the volatility of the system the support, so they take what they can safely get.

I think this point was made clear in George Orwell's 1984 when there was not one totalitarian government controlling the world, but two that cooperated. Each knew that they could not be larger and that they needed the other.

I can't decide if the fear they have is good or bad because on one hand it would nice for them to be arrogant and seek to control everything, but on the other it gives up hope that they know as well as we that their system cannot last.

 

Final words...

In each case we saw, some "problem" without solution was described, followed by the non sequitur claim that government is useful and necessary as the only (or best) possible solution to said problem. Actually, government was not a solution to any of these problems, and could only be seen as such based on a one-sided view of government: a view that insists on the visible benefits of government action, but that doesn't take into account the costs associated to any government action, and the costs of ensuring that government will act in the interest of the people rather than to their detriment. Government is supposed to be a magic wand that bestows services at no cost, directed by some godly will above the failures of mankind — but it isn't.

Faré wrote this article, White Magic vs. Black Magic as a prelude to a longer essay, Government is the Rule of Black Magic. First I will read this one and then the second.#

The core of the article is that having faith in the State, which promises that after it takes everything from you it will give it back and treat you well, is very similar to having faith in Black Magic or illogic.

That's the principle of black magic: to expect miracles, happiness, success, redemption from failures, etc., from external and superior entities that feed from the humiliation of those who voluntarily make sacrifices to them and who reduce unbelievers to subjection, from spirits that rejoice from one's destruction of oneself and other people, from gods that demand one's contempt for oneself and other people, from supernatural beings with unlimited powers and arbitrary desires that are not bound by any law knowable by reason but are meant to be influenced by a show of feelings from their humiliated followers. In short, this black magic consists in the irresponsible tying of one's hope of future satisfactions to the whim of external and superior intervening powers.

In contrast to this is what Faré calls White Magic, the ideals that promote knowledge and understandable laws that people are free to make or break. Rather than being forced on their knees in worship and adoration of the all-powerful divinities, the would-be servants are assured of their own responsibility and free will. They are respected as individuals and not just numbered masses worshiping the feet of some deity.

Prayer in black magic is passivity and destruction, in an attitude of humiliation and worship. Prayer in white magic is work and creation, in an attitude of determination and respect. The disciple of black magic does evil with the hope that some good will emerge out of it through a miraculous violation of the laws of nature. The disciple of white magic does good by consenting an effort appraised as the least evil according to the laws of nature. Priests of black magic invoke authority as the source of knowledge, and claim that the ways of their gods are unfathomable to anyone but them. Priests of white magic propose conjectures that are subject to the open review of everyone's reason and experience, and gaining insight into their divinities is the very essence of their religious practice. Priests of black magic extend their cult by subjecting the infidels to their creed, by humiliating and degrading other people. Priests of white magic extend their religion by subjecting their beliefs to the criticism of other people, by freeing and bettering themselves. Believers of black magic are the slaves of their gods. Believers of white magic are the masters of their gods.

While these distinctions exist in religions, and coexist as Faré notes, they can also be extended into any institution. At the core of every organization or institution are a set of values which place importance in the members themselves--or in their contributions. A group that admires the sacrifice of the individual in favour of the mass is one that worships in the style of Black Magic. Opposing this are those who seek to better themselves and realize that this is often done most efficiently when working together. But, they do not work together and sacrifice sovereignty for the sake of itself--organization is a tool that can be used for good or evil, not an end unto itself.

This is the distinction between different forms of government as well. Communism and other forms of Totalitarian governments seek to sacrifice the individual while the Libertarian ideal praises the eternal free will and sole of the self. A dictatorship is always immoral and wrong, no matter how many authorize it.

I imagine that this is the direction that Government is the Rule of Black Magic knowing Faré and his ideological leanings.

Faré wrote an article on the two challenges facing computing today entitled, Metaprogramming and Free Availability of Sources. Faré is behind the TUNES project that seeks to solve these problems.#

We introduce metaprogramming in a completely informal way, and sketch out a theory of it. We explain why it is a major stake for computing today, by considering the processes underlying software development. We show, from the same perspective, how metaprogramming is related to another challenge of computing, the free availability of the sources of software, and how these two phenomena naturally complement each other.

The core of the argument is that because computers and the problems they solve are getting more advanced and complicated it has become essential to think about computer programs at a higher level. This higher level is the realm of meta-programming, where abstraction is higher and the ability to manipulate other programs is essential. And of course, to be able to manipulate those other programs more completely the sources must be available. This is what ties these two ideas together.

Faré talks about various types of metaprogramming that exist in the real world but are not done very effectively or well understood. Examples: compilers, interpreters, debuggers, checkers, etc.

The core of the power of metaprogramming is making working with computer programs easier and this often means allowing them to be accessed in the most desirable manner.

If we investigate existing applications of metaprogramming, we realize that it is used to automatically manage the transition between several different aspects of same computational objects: for instance, when one compiles a program, one is interested in the ``same'' program, under different forms (source or object code), each suited to its own set of tasks (human modification, or machine execution).

[...]

In this way, a plane will be for a engineer designing the fuselage, a set of curves and equations of which some parameters must be optimized, for a component manufacturer, it will be a schedule of conditions, for the builder, it will be an assembly process, for the maintenance officer, a set of tasks to perform, for the restoration engineer, a set of problems to fix, for the hardware manager, a set of spare parts, for the pilot, a ship to take to destination safe and sound, for the passenger, a disagreement to minimize to get to another place, for the traffic controller, a dot to route among many others, for the commercial clerk, a set of seats to fill, for the commercial strategist, an element of a float to deploy, for the director of human resource, people to manage, for the accountant, a historic of transactions, for the insurance agent, a risk to evaluate, etc, etc.

What it is important then, is that metaprogramming is a tool that can possibly be used to increase the expressiveness of your computing system. Faré makes the point that this is not the same kind of expressiveness as computability refers to--what problems can be solved--but more over what problems can be understood.

Nevertheless, it is obvious that not all Turing-equivalent languages are worth the same from the point of view of the programmer: all those who made the respective experiences will agree that it is easier to program in a high-level language (like LISP) than in a low-level language (like C), which in turn is easier to use than assembly language, which is better than binary code, which is simpler than the transistor-per-transistor design of a dedicated electronic circuit, or the specification of a Turing machine. Actually, Turing's result is but the very beginning of a theory of the expressive power of computing systems, and certainly not the end of it. To stop with this mere result, and say that ``since all languages, in practice, are not equivalent to each other as they are according to Turing, then theory cannot say anything'', would be to abdicate one's reason and to look in a vague nowhere for an unspeakable explanation, it would be giving superstition and ignorance a gratuitous and preposterous dignity.

And this expressiveness is desired because it reduces the human costs associated with creating, deploying, and maintaining any particular piece of software. Human time is more expensive that computer time these days and processes should respect and realize that.

Thus, the problem is not only technical, it is also economical, moral, and political, in as much as it involves shifting of human efforts. In the development of computer programs, as anywhere else, the process matters. And it is this very process that the popular notions of code reuse, modularity, dynamic or incremental programming, development methods, etc, attempt to enhance, though without a formal rational approach. Similarly, the trend in computer science to leave too low-level languages in favor of higher-level languages is precisely due to human intelligence being a limited resource, a scarce one indeed, that has to be saved for the most important tasks, the ones where it is indispensible (if not forever, at least for now).

Therefore, a satisfying modelling of the expressiveness of programming languages, even though it be abstract enough not to overly depend on ephemeral technological concerns, must take into account the man-computer interaction in a way that includes a notion of human cost (and perhaps also a notions of error and confidence).

So, how does the lack of freely available software sources impede metaprogramming?

We personally find it obvious that barriers to the distribution of sources are as many brakes to the development of metaprogramming. In fact, the very condition for the use of a program-reading metaprogram is the availability of a program to read; the condition of usefulness of a program-writing metaprogram is that the output program may be distributed and used; and these conditions combine when a metaprogram at the same time reads and writes programs, and even more when the metaprogram depends on the long term accumulation of knowledge about programs! Every limitation on the manipulation of programs is as much of a limitation on the feasability or the utility of metaprograms, and a discourages as much their potential authors.

And secondly, metaprogramming introduces a great deal of fuziness over who the author of a newly created piece of software is.

Actually, as long as the only operation that leads to production of code is manual addition, the writing out of the blue by a human mind supposedly inspired directly by the Muses, then it is possible to attribute an ``origin'', an ``author'' to every word, to every symbol that constitutes a program. Now, as soon as is allowed metaprogramming, that is, arbitrary operations that act on code and produce code, as soon as is considered the environment inside which lives the author (man or machine) of a program then this one is no more the inventor of the program, but only the last link of a holistic process of transformation, in which it is not possible to attribute an unequivocal origin to any produced element whatsover.

(Note: Faré, of course, does not agree with the notion of "intellectual property" in any way, shape, or form, but puts this belief mostly aside and focuses on the technical and legal problems from a not judgmental point of view.)

The answer, a system that acknowledges the benefits of both of these tools is a reflective system, wherein the tools some how manipulate "themselves."

The free Unix systems (GNU/Linux, *BSD, etc) as well as some others (like Native Oberon) are as many complete reflective systems: they are freely available, and come with the sources of all the software tools required to their self-development, from the user interface to the compiler and to the drivers for peripheral devices. But their ``reflective loop'' is very long, which identifies programmer and metaprogrammer. If we consider as ``given'' the operating system and its basic development tools (including a C compiler), then, the many programming language implementations written in the implemented language itself are as ``reflective'', and with a shorter reflective loop between implementation and usage; however, these implementations do not constitute complete systems (and do not usually seek to become so), since they depend for their development on numerous external services.

The problem facing any project that seeks to be completely and thoroughly reflective, is finding or developing a programming suitable for a reflective style of development.

Faré has hopes for the future...

Let us then hope that practitionners of computing arts shall free themselves from the flashy but empty slogans like ``multimedia'', ``object-oriented'', ``design-pattern'', ``virtual machine'', ``intelligent network'', etc, that are by-products of a culture of partitioning and loss of responsibility. Shall they rather adopt a scientific attitude, that is open and critical at the same time, with respect to the essential process that underlie their activity, which processes, for technical that they be, nonetheless have economical, political, and all in all, moral implications.

Faré proposes a Church of Freedom to allow you to be exempt from taxes by donating all your property to the tax-exempt Church and it giving you sole access to it as a Minister of the Faith.#

In the name of freedom of thought, couldn't there be a Church of Tax Evasion? A Church that would allow those who believe that taxation is evil to be exempt from any tax? A Church that anyone could join, and that would spread the godsend miracle of prosperity to its members, should they religiously abide by the following divine rules of the Church:

Adult individuals may become members by selflessly donating to the Church part or totality of their wealth and income.

The Church, in exchange, will name each donator Minister of the Church, and confide him by a solemn act of eternal validity of the totality of the riches that he donated to the Church.

With the riches thus entrusted to him by the Church, every minister may do, in the name of the Church, whatever God inspires him to do with, as the holy Minister of the Church that he is. This includes giving it back to the miserably poor member of the Church that he has become by donating so much riches to the Church.

After mulling on this for a while and getting some feedback, he realizes that tax-exempt status that is given to some cults but not others is yet another way that the State is not truly separate from the Church.

I've been told that the IRS and other national equivalents would take measures against people who "abuse their right" of being exempted from tax. Similarly, governments will gladly sue you, retroactively tax you, etc., without much recourse, whenever they think that there is a "hole" in the letter of the law.

Now, what does this mean? It means that government and its minions are both judge and party in such matters. They are the ones who judge if they have to abide by the law, or whether after all, they will ignore it. Of course, the ultimate sanction should they abuse this situation is for them to be overthrown. But then, this is no different with any regime, and the same tricks of slowly accustomizing people to more tyranny will drive them to forget all their liberties.

All in all, through this administrative decision of tax exemption or not, government is deciding which acts of cult are legit, and which are not; it is effectively favoring some religions as opposed to others, some gurus as opposed to others (or lack thereof), etc. In other words, differential tax exemption is but a subtle means by which church is kept in non-separation from State. In practice, we see that it is favoring superstition over reason, just because traditional religions are very superstitious, and it has come to identify religions with this worst aspect of them. Thus, government is effectively promoting ignorance and superstition through a subtle mechanism of state-funding of particular churches.