The Misers: a sci-fi book series.

This series of fiction novels by Ursula Le Coin is another interesting exploration of a truly alien society and way of thinking, based on the writings of obscure economist Ludwig Von Miser. The Misers exist in the anarchist Permanent Free Zone universe.

1. The Misers Claim Planet Argela-4

In this first novel of the series, we see the Misers establish themselves on a planet called Argela-4, then making a property claim on the whole planet and renaming it Ancapistan. Sociologists and diplomats from the Permanent Free Zone visit the planet, and are puzzled at the ideology of the Misers, who believe that they can own a whole planet of which they can only use or occupy a tiny fraction at a time.

A good introduction to the Miser society and ideology, which is very selfish, underhanded (Misers are very cruel to each other, going so far as exploiting each other with price manipulations and charging interest on loans) and xenophobic. Their interactions are dominated by the desire for economic conquest, including the use of money and reputation to get laws passed in their favour by the king, and the routine bribing of courts. Despite their obvious flaws, the Misers are shown to have their good sides, such as an inordinate fondness for operas.

PFZ courts declare the Misers’ property claim to be incoherent and invalid, and the Misers respond by breaking off from PFZ jurisdiction and refusing to uphold Common Law, preferring their own arbitrary rules. Diplomacy winds down and a period of isolationism begins.

2. The Misers Blow Up a Fountain

A business owned by a Miser, Stephan Rothbard III, is contracted to build a fountain on planet Walden. After it has become clear that no one understands what the shape of the fountain is a metaphor for, Rothbard III becomes enraged, goes on a 20-page rant about the primacy of existence over consciousness, and then blows up the fountain.

Rothbard III is found guilty of unauthorized destruction of social assets and endangering people’s lives. His business is kicked out of Walden and he is ordered to pay a heavy fine to Walden society. Rothbard III refuses to pay and escapes Walden, swearing revenge in a 32-page speech against all socialists for refusing to admit his genius and not letting him boss over others. An extraordinary PFZ grand jury officially declares Rothbard III an outlaw.

3. The Misers Against the Space Hippies

A colony of nomadic Space Hippies settles on the opposite side of planet Ancapistan. The Misers are outraged and claim that their property is being infringed, but are unable to find the Hippies. When a lone trading party from the Inner Rim comes to barter with the Hippies, the Misers are hot on their heels with laser rifles. Fighting soon turns to disaster for the Space Hippies and their new allies, and they must escape nothing less than genocide.

4. The Misers Sell Themselves into Slavery

After the PFZ’s Land Distribution Bureau tightens the noose on the Misers for their invalid property claims by sending a strongly-worded memo, the Misers sell themselves as slaves to the Mendelians, a society where people believe in owning bodies. This is all part of a Miser plan to have themselves classified as non-sentient and thus protected by PFZ law as part of the Ancapistan ecosystem. As the PFZ bureaucracy is mainly composed of people too incompetent to do any other job but pushing paper, it charters two adventurers, diplomat Voltarine and lawyer Lysander, to convince the Mendelians that their policy is unwise before the Misers can do irreparable damage to Ancapistan’s natural resources as the Mendelians’ new slave-exploiters.

During this whole process, the Misers also deny the nature of the Space Hippie Genocide that they perpetrated in the last book, bizarrely calling it “self-defense.”

Although Voltarine and Lysander are familiar characters to Le Coin fans, this is their first adventure in the Miser series, and they are amongst the main characters in all subsequent books.

5. The Misers and the Doomsday Cult

Five years after the previous book, a new group has emerged on the isolated planet Zapata. Its members predict the imminent collapse of the PFZ due to internal divergence of interests and lack of economic information. They become a doomsday cult which uses what they call “counter-counter-economics”: claiming an area by force and barring anyone else from using it, by murder if necessary. Their doctrine of total control over nature and other people’s actions awakens the animal within and turns reasonable people into brutes. They also have a strange fetishism for using gold as currency.

Voltarine and Lysander are commissioned by the shadowy Septapartite Organization for the Valuation of Internal and External Threats (S.O.V.I.E.T.) to get to the bottom of this doomsday cult, and they find out that the Misers are behind it all, trying to stir up a propertarian revolution against the socialist iron rule of the PFZ and its monetary bureaucracy. In order to get the inside scoop about the cult, they have to befriend a young girl called Margaret, who is frightened to betray the cult because they made her sign a billion year contract.

6. The Misers Declare War

The king of the Misers dies in a suspicious industrial accident. Having greatly risen in reputation on the basis of his anti-socialist rhetoric, Stephan Rothbard III, the man who was declared an outlaw by the PFZ in “The Misers Blow Up a Fountain,” is crowned the new king. Hot on the heels of an official report by the S.O.V.I.E.T. which declared Miser society oppressive and a possible target for “liberation,” King Rothbard III pre-emptively declares war on the PFZ.

Still investigating Miser wrongdoings from the previous book, Voltarine and Lysander accidentally stumble upon the invasion force, but are captured by the battleship HMS Agora before they can report it. They are prisoners of an invasion fleet which aims to lay waste to the Outer Rim and strong-arm the PFZ into conceding their property claim. We learn that the Misers consider all prisoners to have “surrendered their rights,” and so Voltarine and Lysander become temporary slaves to Miserian commander Albert Bastiat and, after dodging an attempted rape, are put to work on the bilge deck. Can they escape and get to the communications room in time to warn Galactic Defense Command of the imminent threat?

Both this and the last book change the general tone of the series from a slower-paced sociological study to a nail-biting thriller, but the depth of ideas is still there.

7. The Misers: Spy and Counter-Spies

In the final work of the series, the PFZ’s military fleet, after defeating the Miser fleet, has been blockading Ancapistan for two years and is now preparing to deploy a Perpetual Winter Screen to drown the Misers in an eternal ten feet of snow and crash their burgeoning refrigerator industry. At the same time, Miser spy Dagny Reardon finishes a three-year mission to find the blueprint of a revolutionary new space missile, the Galt-X, which is virtually invulnerable to defensive lasers, said blueprint having been left behind during the massive emigration of the Misesian State Project. We follow her as she uncovers the blueprint and devises a way to break through the blockade. We then follow the adventures of Voltarine and Lysander as they play spy in turn and try to sabotage the Galt-X manufacturing attempts before they come to fruition and threaten the whole fleet.

Here we really get a full sense of the Misesian insanity in the head of spy Dagny Reardon. She believes in all sorts of outdated 21st century economics nonsense like offer and demand curves, man as “purely selfish being,” universal scarcity, and so on. It’s really quite fascinating. While we are not told what happens after the Galt-X plans are confounded, it is probable that the Misers were defeated and relegated to the dustbin of history. And that is as it should be, in the opinion of this reviewer.

Exploding the “tragedy of the commons” myth…

It is common knowledge amongst Anarchists that most of the economic principles we hold as fundamental are worthless and dangerous myths (scarcity, offer and demand, man as homo economicus, the GDP as accurate measure of “the economy,” trade balances, the necessity of government, the “invisible hand,” usury- including profit- as reward, and so on). However, the Tragedy of the Commons argument is one myth that I have yet to see exploded, until now. Hot on the heels of our recent Nobel Prize winner, Ian Angus is the one who blows it all up.

Given the subsequent influence of Hardin’s essay, it’s shocking to realize that he provided no evidence at all to support his sweeping conclusions. He claimed that the “tragedy” was inevitable — but he didn’t show that it had happened even once.

Hardin simply ignored what actually happens in a real commons: self-regulation by the communities involved. One such process was described years earlier in Friedrich Engels’ account of the “mark,” the form taken by commons-based communities in parts of pre-capitalist Germany:

[T]he use of arable and meadowlands was under the supervision and direction of the community. . . .

Just as the share of each member in so much of the mark as was distributed was of equal size, so was his share also in the use of the “common mark.” The nature of this use was determined by the members of the community as a whole. . . .

At fixed times and, if necessary, more frequently, they met in the open air to discuss the affairs of the mark and to sit in judgment upon breaches of regulations and disputes concerning the mark. (Engels 1892)

Historians and other scholars have broadly confirmed Engels’ description of communal management of shared resources. A summary of recent research concludes:

[W]hat existed in fact was not a “tragedy of the commons” but rather a triumph: that for hundreds of years — and perhaps thousands, although written records do not exist to prove the longer era — land was managed successfully by communities. (Cox 1985: 60)

Quote of the Day

Goldman Sachs advisor Brian Griffiths says: “We have to tolerate the inequality as a way to achieve greater prosperity and opportunity for all.”

Reference

Pride as the desire for non-confront.

The maxim “pride goes before the fall” (which is actually from the Bible, but says “pride goes before destruction”) illustrates that the idea that the arrogance of pride is easily seen as self-destructive. Yet nowadays this maxim doesn’t seem to be very much taken to heart. We talk of pride in one’s country, in one’s family, in one’s accomplishments, as being a healthy, laudable sort of expression.

And yet, it should be obvious, to anyone who has the least experience in the ways people trick each other, that the best known way for criminals and charlatans to escape punishment is to incite their followers to always be positive and never look at the negative, to always speak of nice things and never criticize. In that way, they indoctrinate people into accepting the value of non-confront.

This applies all the more to politics. We are constantly told “my country right or wrong,” that we cannot question war, that we cannot question the institutions we live under, that we depend on them for our national strength, that to dare to question our way of life is tantamount to wishing our own society’s destruction. All of these points are constantly hammered into us by the rhetoric of politicians, their media lackeys, and their combined marginalization of alternative viewpoints.

This swelling of willful ignorance, which is expressed as mindless pride, has two main consequences, the first being to provide codewords that divert attention from the injustice and exploitation which permeates the system being praised, and the second being to nullify any possible counter-power already existing in the targeted group or society.

The concept of counter-power is one that I’ve never heard discussed before, but it’s an interesting one. That is to say, if there is power, then there must also be counter-power. If hierarchical societies which survive have processes which concentrate power, then egalitarian societies which survive must have processes which go counter to the accumulation of power. If you think about it, it’s pretty obvious.

I think the main reason why we are not aware of this concept is because, in our modern capital-democratic societies, there is no counter-power. There is basically nothing that keeps hierarchies in check in our culture or religion or mores. In the United States, there persists a vaguely individualistic belief in natural rights, but this belief is not grounded in anything concrete except the nationalistic constructs, and therefore it is very easily wiped out by pride, which relies precisely on its manipulation of nationalistic constructs.

Post-WW2, one important counter-power was the desire to prevent future nazi-like uses of political power. But this proved to be relatively ineffective, since it is easily evaded by not using what people recognize as nazi trappings (like emotional speeches, grandiose parades or sterile, cold architecture). As long as you can escape being labeled a nazi by people’s stereotypical ideas of what the word means, you are free to use political power in a nazi-like way.

Pride makes us lose the desire to confront, and this willful ignorance makes us retreat into self-congratulation. Making ourselves believe that we, or our group, are great prevents us from confronting anything bad about ourselves, or our group.

This impulse towards self-congratulation extends itself all the way through our worldview, into some of our most profound beliefs about reality. For instance, look at the popular view of evolution. We believe that man is the pinnacle, the end point of evolution, the superior being that transcends animal nature, and that “the animals” represent some kind of linear progression towards man, that they are all flawed versions of the ideal that is man. Man, in this view, dominates “the animals” by virtue of his superior faculties, intellect, strength, and so on. The truth (that man’s cruelty is not limited by his instincts, and thus let to run wild) is too inconvenient to examine.

Our view of social organization is no less arrogant. We believe that our Western brand of capital-democracy, with its strict hierarchies and built-in inequality, is the pinnacle of organization in the history of the world. All other forms of organization are grunting, primitive “tribalism” or sketchy versions of capital-democracy that need to be corrected and prodded along the linear progression from the base anarchy of the state of nature to the glorious order we enjoy in the West. All must be “liberated” so they can enjoy the benefits of our glorious order.

Ironically, the modern nation-state is no less “tribalist” than the tribes of the “primitives” that we exterminate or disdain, merely on a larger scale. The belief in the superiority of “citizens,” and the belief in “immigration policy,” is predicated mainly on the basis of a national reproductive group, which is tribalist. The foreign policy belief that other “races” are inferior and therefore can be murdered with impunity is a tribalist belief.

We are kept in ignorance of the world and its history by our stultifying schooling system and corporate mass media. One therefore is necessarily content with what one has to live with, and accepts the empty rhetoric of politicians. There’s no framework for people to evaluate how the rhetoric measures up to the existing knowledge about what has existed and what is possible in this world.

Placing claims about what is possible and what is desirable within a larger context should, in a rational society, be the role of anthropologists, but anthropologists are too concerned with keeping their little fiefdom protected from attacks by the dominant hierarchies to speak up against the lies. This role is therefore reserved to intellectual rebels like David Graeber, who run extra risks because of it (Graeber was fired from his associate professor post in a controversy in 2007).

Kept in an intellectual vacuum, it should therefore be no surprise that people have no perspective on any issue. There is no past or future, only the perpetual present.

Nobel Prize winner won for… validating Anarchist economics?

Unlike Barrack Obama, who won the Nobel Peace Prize for being a warmonger (like most winners of the Nobel Peace Prize), there’s one winner who actually won for a good cause. Infoshop reports that Elinor Ostrom, co-recipient of the Nobel Prize in Economics, won for her work in the analysis of commons and how they flourish… something which, until recently, was considered an ironclad impossibility by the capitalist Establishment (as anyone who knows about the very badly named “tragedy of the commons” can testify).

Central to anarchist theory is the idea that parties with disputes will agree to third party mediation or arbitration of those disputes. One of the inanities of government is that any dispute between the government and private persons is adjudicated by the government itself. The evolution of common law went far beyond the ad hoc choice of an arbiter to arrangements that let parties know in advance how disagreements would be resolved. Disputes are inevitable: dispute resolution methods are necessary, and do evolve.

Unjustified vileness