This is from my book Janio at a Point. I wrote this in 1988 as a sort of blueprint to Agorism, anarcho-capitalism. It questions everything, which is why its proscriptions often meet resistance from people who are in love with human freedom except when it’s inconvenient or prevents them from pushing other people around. I would write the book differently today — and I plan to rewrite it before I die — but there is almost nothing I would change in its philosophy.
Information Hiding
We have looked at a number of the obviously tragic consequences of government, but there are others of which we can take account that are not so obvious. You can call it “beating a dead horse” if you want, a Madness. So be it. I want to make sure that horse stays dead…
All of these non-obvious effects are the result of what I call Information Hiding. We can easily see that government commits crimes: it taxes, regulates, conscripts, murders — all in a day’s work. And there is no barrier to our noticing that the state is lousy at keeping Crime from occurring and recovering losses. What is not so easy to notice is the way the government, by its crimes, contributes to non-governmental crimes…
This is no absolution. The man who wields a gun deserves to be shot. If he is misled by the state into thinking that this is an intelligent solution to the problem of survival, it is still only he who is in charge of his brain. It is still only he who motivates himself to pick up that gun. No matter what “egged him on” and how, it is still only he who is acting. If he commits a crime, he is at fault.
But it is worthwhile to look to the actions of government, to see if they do induce people to commit crimes. I say they do, and, moreover, that the actions of government tend to dilute the value of self-preservation and self-love. Beating a dead horse though it may be, I say that the idea of government is at war with human life as such, in retaliation for being what it is. The “secret weapon” in that war is Information Hiding…
And again and again I protest that I do not think they are evil. I don’t believe anyone intended any of this. The Gangsters and their brothers under the sheepskin do intend to commit crimes. But they don’t intend to create a self-accelerating self-destruction engine. That happens as an unintended consequence. There is no “conspiracy” to send the world to hell in a handbasket. It’s just rolling that way from the causal forces acting upon it, which no one is trying to stop…
Government is Madness. Like any Madness, it achieves the opposite of its intended consequence. And like any Madness, it can only be checked by the recognition that it is a Madness. That it cannot work and that it is wasteful of the precious time of a finite life to continue to try to make it work… This they are not yet ready to do — and don’t hold your breath…
Okay: so what is Information Hiding? It is action that distorts or disguises the information content of causal events. It is not just government that does this. When the adult buys that child a second ice cream cone, he is “hiding” the lesson the child could have learned from his error, that it is wise to be careful with values one prizes. But government, by virtue of its being a “Cosmic Injustice” engine, hides information epidemically…
Here’s an easy example: currency inflation. There have been few governments in history that have resisted the urge to despoil the trading medium. They pump out paper money as though it were toilet paper, and soon enough toilet paper is worth more in trade. By this action, the state “hides” the value of personal savings. In a paper economy, cash is constantly losing value against goods. If you exchange it for goods as soon as you get it, you realize more than you would at any later time. If instead you bank your cash, it diminishes in value through time. If you leave it there for long, it will lose all of its trade value. You will still have the same quantity of cash, or even more, allowing for interest. But the quantity of goods you can buy with that money will have shrunk drastically…
Similarly, government bankruptcy laws hide the value of fiscal restraint. If you can kiss-off on your debts at any time, you have no good reason to take them seriously. Now, thank goodness, there are some fairly effective market restraints on credit fraud, notably the credit rating system. But the government, by arbitrarily and criminally “forgiving” debts owed to others, encourages those people who already suffer from an irrational view of the future consequences of present actions to further shrink their range of vision.
Now a question you might ask at this point is: how would an Anarchy deal with personal bankruptcy? I can’t dictate what choices people should make, but I can envision a system that would be Just to all parties: indenture. A person who is strapped with debts he cannot cover could sell his future labor to a bankruptcy contractor. This person would pay the debts, then provide bed and board for the debtor and keep the full value of his labor, until the debt is repaid. It’s hard to imagine that bankruptcy would be even as small a problem as it is now, since there would be no arbitrary restraints on credit reporting.
The bankruptcy laws are forms of liability limitation, of which every variation is an Information Hiding crime. Another type is the limited liability corporation. When a proprietorship or partnership causes an injury, the owners are liable for the full damages, to the extent of their assets. But when an incorporated business commits a crime, it is liable only to the extent of the assets of the business. The other assets of its owners remain untouched. This is simply an arbitrary fiat of law, but it is not without consequences. First, it tends to reward incorporation and to penalize other ways of organizing businesses. It may be, as some of the Conservatives say, that free trade is necessarily large-scale industrialism. But their argument is skewed by this and other types of laws that tend to reward large organizations at the expense of smaller ones. Second, it dramatically hides the consequences of Crime from the owners of corporations. A proprietor can lose not just his business, but also his house. Consequently, he is much more apt to be careful than the owners of a corporation, whose houses are artificially protected by the law. In an Anarchy, I would expect that the principle of full restitution would hold, the restoration of the previous condition as much as is causally possible. People would be liable for the full consequences of their crimes, irrespective of their assets.
Another form of liability limitation is the way the state responds to unintentional injuries. If you cause a traffic accident that results in a death, you will have to pay the full damage to both cars through your insurance premiums. You may be fined, and you may have your driver’s license revoked. But you will not be held liable for the death you have caused. You will not be liable to the people who have standing contracts with the deceased and you will not be obliged to compensate those contractors for their losses. If you wonder why there are so many people who do drive, but shouldn’t, here is your answer. They are not held accountable for their errors, and hence they have no utilitarian reason to seek the truth.
Welfarism is Information Hiding of a similar sort. So, incidentally, is the voluntary support of mendicants. By rewarding people for doing nothing, the state — or the “soft touch” — conceals from those people vital survival information. It hides the bodily and spiritual consequences of idleness and discounts the future value of the pursuit of righteousness. The state does this for a reason — to buy votes. But the people who allow themselves to be “bought” in this way are immeasurably damaged by it. For hand-outs also distort awareness of the true value of values, having them and fidelity to them. A life that does not have to be earned is of no value — to anyone, including the person living it. If the needs of ourselves and our children are to be provided without our having to produce them, there is no reason at all to educate our children to be independent, self-sufficient individuals. If you wonder why ghettos are such filthy, crime-infested places, here is your answer. By imposing itself between people and the awareness that error causes pain, the state hides from those people the disvalue of error. Now this is bad enough by itself, but what happens when the Cosmic Nipple dries up, as it eventually must? Many, many people who never “bothered” to learn how to live will starve to death…
“Free” “education” is a hand-out of which most Americans avail themselves — at their peril. Statist education is always propaganda, carefully contrived and ritualized lies about the greatness, beauty and virtue of organized crime. But there is information hiding as well as deceit in public education. For example: at its very best, it is lousy. Because it loudly advertises itself as being “free”, while quietly stealing its funds, public education deeply discounts the utility of pursuing alternatives to itself. The United States has not yet forbidden alternatives to government education. But by means of this trickery, it “persuades” people to submit their children to twelve years of victimization, brutalization, and damn little education, instead of seeking a product of higher quality.
Because everything it does is arbitrary — because it does not act as a real person acts, using his own resources toward his own chosen ends — everything a state does distorts information. I could name examples endlessly. The Neo-Classical Economists have done some remarkable work on the information content of the market price and how it is skewed by taxes, regulations, subsidies and price supports. One need only think of those news films of dairymen dumping milk in the rivers to see what can happen. In the same way, the concept of “public” ownership is the source of the so-called “paradox” of “The Tragedy Of The Commons”. As an example, consider that bison, which cannot be privately owned, are near extinction, where cattle, which can be owned, are more numerous than ever. The garb of patriotism in which the state wraps itself, the songs and stories and myths taught in the state’s schools, disguise the disvalue of warfare. If you have ever talked to a young man eager for the chance to get himself killed in the defense of some Gangster, you know what I mean…
It goes on and on. The state’s willingness to use “Cosmic Injustice” to mitigate politically favored crimes hides the disvalue of Crime. Taxes and other penalties on virtue discount the value of virtue. Forbidding effective self-defense and peaceful dispute resolution discounts the value of non-coercive social interaction. In general, the Information Hiding that is an unavoidable consequence of government obscures the value of life…
We can look at the history of civilization as the gradual realization, in the minds of individual people, that life is precious, that being alive is a value for which very few others ought to be traded. We can observe this process through the spread of literacy, hygiene, aesthetic appreciation, etc. Even through the spread of constitutional government, to give the devil his due. But government is never other than a Madness in the pursuit of the value of life. It is a less-threatening Madness than those that preceded it. In a tribal system, few babies live long enough to be threatened by “the bomb” or the IRS. But it is still a Madness, and it is still a very dangerous peril to life.
First and always because of the force it wields — and here the tribes come out ahead; by their very inefficiency they lack the capacity to commit assembly-line murder. But second because its “Cosmic Injustices” discount the future value of being alive. Those skittish youngsters who want to get killed in order to prove they are “men” are the perfect example… We noted that people who own homes are more likely to consider the future consequences of their actions than those who rent. Would not the same sort of relationship hold with respect to life as a value? Wouldn’t the person who treasures his life be less likely to commit acts with potentially injurious future consequences than the one who doesn’t…?
Now think of The Man Who Wielded The Gun… I’m not exonerating him and blaming the state. Only he controls his actions, and only he is at fault for the crime. But who was it who taught him to hold his life in such low esteem…?
Teri Lussier says:
>But who was it who taught him to hold his life in such low esteem…?
I’m curious about this myself. Obviously people come up through the system and hold themselves to a higher standard or reject the values that they see around them. This happens all the time. How is this? What triggers this response and not that response to everything they’ve seen and been taught?
November 1, 2011 — 4:20 pm
Greg Swann says:
> This happens all the time. How is this? What triggers this response and not that response to everything they’ve seen and been taught?
I look for a rebellion event, a betrayal or being turned on by the mob or something like that, a palpable and inexplicable injustice. People who can stand to talk to me — a funny way of judging people, but it works well for me! — separated themselves from the herd in a decisive way when they were very young. As young as four years old? Plausibly. How much later it can happen, I’m waiting to find out. But people who govern their own ethical behavior, keeping their own counsel, do so because, for some reason, they have concluded that keeping someone else’s counsel is not to their self-interest. That’s a very courageous stand to take, not an easy thing to do. I can’t imagine that it ever happens casually.
November 1, 2011 — 11:44 pm
Jim Klein says:
Here’s my answer, Teri: their nature. So many preachers are preaching that which leads to death, even in the other threads here. But still we seek to live, with an instinct of what it takes to do that. Or call it “common sense,” since that’s what it is.
Thank goodness, because that’s the only thing that can save us now. The Leaders and the Teachers aren’t about to change anytime soon. But the regular Joes and Janes don’t think about it so much; they’re too busy living.
Greg is very special because he offers the tough insights about egoism and ego-adoration and all that. But what really makes him special is that he makes the simplest observation of all, that being alive as a person is good. Every one of us teaches young children that this is the case, but by the time we grow up and get “educated,” it all gets switched around. Call it a con, call it whatever, but that’s what happens.
Your life is the best thing on Earth, to you. The only thing that makes Greg really different, is that he’s been screaming it forever now. Everyone else, though it’s changing slowly, calls it heresy.
November 1, 2011 — 7:23 pm
Greg Swann says:
> Your life is the best thing on Earth, to you. The only thing that makes Greg really different, is that he’s been screaming it forever now. Everyone else, though it’s changing slowly, calls it heresy.
Thanks for that. I’m boundlessly grateful to you, but one of the best gifts I have had from you is simple visibility.
November 1, 2011 — 11:35 pm