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February 13, 2014
Debating the Anarcho-Capitalists
By Scott Baker
I don't normally reproduce comments and counter-arguments as articles, because they tend to be incoherent and hard to understand as standalone articles. But, in this case, this article in the anarcho-capitalist Daily Bell Blog, when they took on Ellen Brown and her run for Treasurer in California, turned into something that seemed article-worthy. I think it is instructive to see how the anarcho-capitalist mind-set works.
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I don't normally reproduce comments and counter-arguments as articles, because they tend to be incoherent and hard to understand as standalone articles. But, in this case, this article in the anarcho-capitalist Daily Bell Blog, when they took on her and her run for Treasurer in California, turned into something that seemed article-worthy.
By Staff Report - January 29, 2014
My comments and the Daily Bell's (DB) counter-responses follow. I think it is instructive to see how the anarcho-capitalist mind-set works. Progressives can't ignore these people, as they facilitate the very worst in corporate-grabbing fascism, though they would venomously deny that, and actually make the counter-argument that it is progressives, with their support of the State - sometimes called by them, the Leviathan - that leads to corporatism (the term Mussolini said should have been used instead of fascism to describe the paradigm he founded).
Credit goes to Ellen Brown for bringing attention to this article in the Public Banking Google group, which I and several hundred other PB advocates participate in. Some slight reformatting has been done to improve readability. Additional comments by me will be in parentheses and italics.
It's hard to know where to begin with this, as so many things are simply wrong. I'll try to list them:
1. Ellen Brown is not calling for money-printing by the State, at least not in advocating for STATE or municipal public banks (a number of us in the Public Banking Institute are advocating for large city or county level public banks too; hardly Big Government. See my presentation in Philadelphia for the PA chapter of PBI here: http://www.opednews.com/Diary/Using-Existing-Government-by-Scott-Baker-Banking-Crisis_Banks_Public-Banking_Public-Banks-140119-408.html. Only the Federal government has the power to "coin Money" constitutionally, a fact which Brown is well aware of.
2. The parties who have been profligate with money-creation and fraud are in the private sector, albeit abetted by both the Federal Reserve and the government - both of which, I, and more importantly, many economists and government watchdogs, have observed to be bought out and corrupted (I believe DB and Brown are in agreement that Corporate Personhood ought to be repealed ASAP). I have argued elsewhere that having a Public Option for Money would provide some balance to having nearly all money produced in the private sector, as would LETS and as did U.S. Notes under Lincoln during the Civil War, when the private NYC banks (them again!) wanted to bankrupt the North with 24-36% interest rates - hardly banks operating in the Public Interest (pun intended)!
3. DB's solution: "The solution is a simple one, however. People need to educate
themselves, take responsibility for their actions and also take "human
action" to support themselves, their families and their communities in
ways that provide self-sufficiency." would be laughably naive if it wasn't so dangerous. The fact is only a strong government with regulation that works (see Bill Black) can counter the oligopoly that is the current Big Banking system. It hasn't done so not because Government is too big and powerful, but because it is too small and weak, compared to the Banking-industrial complex. Brown is trying to provide a counterbalance to both the self-seeking private sector and ineffectual Washington Government (which she has said repeatedly cannot be counted on to pass anything meaningful in the present polarized environment - a fact with which Americans overwhelmingly agree, as indicated by persistent disapproval ratings of both executive and legislative branches). She is doing so by promoting Public Banking at the State, Regional and even, where it makes sense, city and town level (obviously, there is a point where economies of scale argue against Public Banking, but I just completed a preliminary analysis on little Luzerne County, PA for the Pennsylvania chapter of PBI, and haven't reached that point yet).
4. It's good to see that DB doesn't equate Ellen Brown with Hitler, or for that matter, the 40% of the world's banks that are Public Banks. How nice of you! But the fact is, Hitler gave up State-issuance of money (which anyway, is a different issue than Public Banking) after only a couple of years and went back to a more traditional gold standard and private banking model, plunging Germany back into debt.
5. It's clear to anyone but an inside-the-beltway economist that unemployment is too high, despite the rigged statistics (see John Williams' Shadowstats.com for a more honest reading). Public Works, which both Brown and the Green Party support, as well as a plurality, if not an outright majority, of Americans, depending on how the question is asked, would put people to work AND boost our crumbling infrastructure, education, and so many other things for which there is a crying need.
DB's solution seems to be "Hands off! Let the (mythical) Free Market decide!" Of course, wherever there is government, there is no such thing as a totally Free Market, and never will be. That's not a bad thing if freedom means freedom to steal, corrupt and deceive. If government is just another servant of the lender who is doing all of these things, than you get what we've got.
The Daily Bell Mod Scott Baker
"Ellen Brown is not calling for money-printing by the State."
It is absurd to argue that Ellen Brown's idea of public banking at the state level does not include considerable monetary expansion abetted by state resources. But when you people are exposed, you begin to parse -- parse and then desperately parse some more. Here are Ms. Brown's own words: "In North Dakota, the only state with its own "mini-Fed,' the state-owned Bank of North Dakota routes its public lending programs through community banks " Its deposit base is almost entirely composed of the revenue of the state and state agencies." The state generates revenue through monopoly force (if you don't pay you go to jail) and then provides these revenues to the state bank. This is the twisted system you advocate.
http://www.truthdig.com/eartotheground/item/debate_public_banks_are_key_to_capitalism_20131003
"The parties who have been profligate with money-creation and fraud are in the private sector."
For the millionth time, the Fed is not "private." It's really incredible that you people can claim it is private when its top man is chosen by the US government and its top people have to testify before Congress on a regular basis. It is a quasi-private/quasi-public institution -- a mercantilist entity that comprises the worst of both worlds.
"I believe DB and Brown are in agreement that Corporate Personhood ought to be repealed ASAP."
Really? We've interviewed her at least twice and have written numerous articles responding to her arguments are not aware of her concern on this issue. Ms. Brown is generally in favor of bigness and complexity from what we can tell, and we would be very surprised if this is high on her list of preoccupations.
"I have argued elsewhere that having a Public Option for Money would provide some balance to having nearly all money produced in the private sector, as would LETS."
Of course you are in favor of LETS as it demands that people keep a full ledger of every transaction, which conveniently can provide the same full record to government for taxing and audit purposes. Never enough of a paper trail, is there?
"DB's solution: "The solution is a simple one, however. People need to educate themselves, take responsibility for their actions and also take "human action" to support themselves, their families and their communities in ways that provide self-sufficiency.' would be laughably naive if it wasn't so dangerous. The fact is only a strong government with regulation that works (see Bill Black) can counter the oligopoly that is the current Big Banking system."
Yes, Bill Black " a man who is a big fan of FBI investigations who has made a career out of calling for Wall Street incarcerations and wants to create, from what we can tell, a new Pecora commission -- similar to the one that has proven such an abysmal failure. The idea that you want to pile agency on government agency and regulation on top of regulation when REALITY shows that these solutions are failures only reveals, again, your partiality to authoritarian solutions. Heaven forbid you would consider competition as a market regulator. Instead you want to FORCE people to act in certain ways, ones you approve of.
"Government is [not] too big and powerful, but " too small and weak, compared to the Banking-industrial complex."
Really? The banking-industrial complex USES government to fulfill its goals last we looked. You want to make government EVEN BIGGER under the guise of giving control to "the people" which is nonsensical. You are in other words advocating a solution that will make the problem worse. Why you argue this is between God and your conscience.
"It's good to see that DB doesn't equate Ellen Brown with Hitler."
But indeed these are NAZI solutions as we have argued elsewhere.
http://www.thedailybell.com/news-analysis/29292/Con-of-Public-Banking/
They are Dirigist, authoritarian and never work as advertised. Giving more power to governments to facilitate government force in order somehow to support prosperity and increased happiness among the populace is facile indeed. Easy to suggest but impossible to implement.
"DB's solution seems to be "Hands off! Let the (mythical) Free Market decide!"
Yes, there are no easy solutions. People will have to take human action on their own terms and enlighten themselves as they can. Markets work; communitarian and agrarian republican solutions have proven themselves over and over, mostly recently in Switzerland and in the pre-Civil War US; they will work again when the current Leviathan collapses. You and Ms. Brown and others will do everything you can to prop up the current Leviathan and retard its collapse, but eventually freedom will have its day, as in so many epochs before.
Once again, you say so many wrong things I have to make a list to go through them one by one:
1. Monetary expansion. Well, yes, if you mean that a Public Bank would practice creating money through what's quaintly known as "fractional reserve banking" (even though I once heard the 10+ year Senior VP of the Bank of North Dakota swear to a roomful of PB conventioneers that the BND did NOT practice Fractional Reserve Banking). But this is what private banks have and do practice for hundreds of years. Now, you can argue, I suppose, that private banks do it better, but the $29 trillion bailout (according to Prof. L. Randall Wray) argues otherwise, and the experiences of countries with their own State (as in "The State") Banks, like China, show you can have growth for years, decades even, without bankrupting the State. (Yes, I know about their "ghost cities" but a Land Value Tax on all that property would solve that in a year, by lowering prices, forcing sales, and increasing revenue to the local regions. I am also a Georgist (and president of Common Ground-NYC) and I have no problem with speculators and hoarders losing money for locational values they never created in the first place). China will soon eclipse the U.S. in size of economy, albeit not per capita for a bit longer. I could make a good case their banking system is less corrupt than ours, but Bill Black has made a better argument that I could...
2. Ah, Bill Black. He oversaw the prosecution of thousands of frauds during the S&L crisis. Would DB have preferred to have the same "Free Market" that gave us the fraud, and gave us an even bigger one now, continue to "met out punishment"? Even if the BANKS went bankrupt, as they should, the perpetrators of the fraud, would simply have lost their jobs and walked away with millions (today, tens or even hundreds, of millions). Most people would take that kind of "punishment." It's as one of my economics teachers always asks his classes at the beginning: "If you knew that you could make millions of dollars in just a couple of years by doing something wrong, but for which you would almost certainly not be punished, who would not do it?" Very few hands go up, I can assure you. Banks without regulations are like driving without traffic rules - exciting, high-speed, and ultimately lethal. The current system is, as Black has pointed out, criminogenic, in that fraud is not merely probable, but inevitable.
3. What's wrong with LETS? You want to move away from Big Government; this is a way to do it, by having alternate currencies, while still keeping a central one for paying taxes (which gives the currency legitimacy) and international trade. It also shows that the current economic system does not produce enough money to meet the productive capacity of the nation. People from E.F. Schumacher to Monetary Reformer Bill Still are in favor of them. I'm on Brown's PBI Google group and read all her articles too, and never heard her say anything negative about them, though she, perhaps wisely, chooses to focus on Public Banking, which is time-consuming enough.
4. Ah, Bill Still. Former Libertarian Party candidate for President and a Greenbacker (like me, Brown, and Stephen Zarlenga, though we all disagree on specific implementations of it - Zarlenga will barely speak to me anymore, despite my meeting him 4 times both privately and in public, and Still says Zarlenga's Monetary Authority is far too centralized a power body, to which I agree (which is why Zarlenga is mad at me, plus my support for Public Banking, which he regards like the DB, as none of the government's business). Anyway, Still favors "Decentralization to the maximum extent practical" a quote he has made repeatedly. Yet, he still found a way to weave Public Banking into his philosophy, and invited Brown to be his V.P. running mate on his campaign.
5. DB's "solution" is, shall we say, not well thought out. It is close to anarchy, which, despite your prognostications otherwise, is neither the natural state of Man: "freedom will have its day" in your words, nor desirable. I have a link too! http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/05/06/somalia-libertarian-parad_n_197763.html
It's kind of funny actually. I'm pretty sure DB and Brown would find places to agree - on the size and corrupting influence of the TBTF banks, for example, but DB likes to pick arguments, not agreements - part of the anarchist zeitgeist, as I understand it. As for me, I'll continue trying to synthesize POVs where I can. Still looking for something new from DB, however, instead of just nattering nabobs of negativity.
The Daily Bell Mod Scott Baker
"Monetary expansion. Well, yes, if you mean that a Public Bank would practice creating money through what's quaintly known as "fractional reserve banking.'"
You miss the point. These state banks receive their expandable assets basically at the point of a gun. The state forces people to provide the assets.
"Bill Black " oversaw the prosecution of thousands of frauds during the S&L crisis. Would DB have preferred to have the same "Free Market" that gave us the fraud, and gave us an even bigger one now, continue to "mete out punishment' "?
The S&L crisis was caused by GOVERNMENT regulation and reregulation. We never hear that the initial ground for such frauds is ALWAYS prepared by dysfunctional government regulation and legislation -- and of course central bank monetary stimulation. For us there is something repugnant about enthusiastically advocating the use of the US penitentiary-industrial complex with its six million incarcerated inmates, a good many of whom are either innocent or there as a result of "victimless" crimes. You don't understand that either.
"What's wrong with LETS?"
In its current incarnation, backed by the recently departed Margrit Kennedy and her United Nation's employers, it forces people to keep a full ledger of every single transaction. Great for government paper trails but not much else. You are shocked, by the way, that Ellen Brown has nothing negative to say about these systems? Ellen Brown, bless her heart, is basically a government apparatchik.
"BD's "solution' is, shall we say, not well thought out. It is close to anarchy, which, despite your prognostications otherwise, is neither the natural state of man, nor desirable."
Apparently, you don't understand that anarchy is merely the absence of government force. You believe in Leviathan -- the bigger and more complex the better -- as a social and economic solution. We believe in human action, local action and the "invisible hand" of market competition to discipline the fraud and corruption that inevitably occur in human activities. Every time your solutions fail, you call for more of them. "The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different outcome."
"It's kind of funny actually. I'm pretty sure DB and Brown would find places to agree."
The solution to most of what ails modern society is additional freedom not additional regulation. Ms. Brown wants to use Leviathan's force to create a cure for what Leviathan has caused. We find it " disingenuous. Your arguments too.
The point of a gun? Governments, when they work, provide us with roads, schools, R&D from everything from the internet to Apple and Tesla (who both received government money until they succeeded). The gun was apparently put away in favor of a handshake.
What regulations are you talking about that caused the S&L crisis? It was dysfunctional, to be sure, but dysfunctional as in weak and under-used, not overly strict. Please provide counter-examples, if there are any. BTW, we should bring back Glass-Steagall too - it's only a grade B solution, whereas Public Banking and Land Value Taxation are grade A solutions, but it's better than Gramm-Leach-Bliley (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass--Steagall_Act) that led to the wild west of banking we have today, and even bigger TBTF banks.
LETS are always voluntary arrangements, even counter-government arrangements. DB once again expresses its incoherence by opposing this Libertarian alternative that they ought to be embracing, if they were consistent. The record-keeping you criticize is something its participants require and want in order to make it work. You say you believe in "local action" but then when LETS comes along, you dismiss that too. Just what does DB actually propose?
Many in the reform movement see DB as offering no solutions, and as actually being government apparatchiks themselves, working to involve serious reformers in endless virtual time-sinks so they can't effectuate actual change.
Well, I see you have admitted to being anarchists. This has never been, and could never be, a workable arrangement for groups of people to interact under. Governments has naturally arisen from within the smallest tribes, to the largest nation-states, and, it's worth noting, we have a lot more people today living under the latter than the former, so the trend will only continue. Really, this argument, for or against government, as a pure yes/no choice is really silly. Now, if you want to make government more responsive to the People, I am all ears.
There are certainly too many people in prison, but it is closer to 2 million not 6 million as you said (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_incarceration_rate) an interesting fact you chose to exaggerate. We should indeed release all of the people locked up for mere drug offenses (about half the prison population), but then we'd need to treat drug addiction as a disease, and DB has no patience for that either, so the imprisonment will continue.
P.S. I am a blogger and Senior Editor for Opednews and I intend to gather up all these comments and publish them there at some point.
The Daily Bell Mod Scott Baker
Q: The point of a gun? Governments, when they work, provide us with roads, schools, R&D from everything from the internet to Apple and Tesla (who both received government money until they succeeded). The gun was apparently put away in favor of a handshake.
DB: Try not paying your federal taxes or housing taxes or building a private road or even sending your child to public school without a vaccine. Try growing a garden or building a housing addition without government approval. The government is even confiscating raw milk and trying to incarcerate its providers. Western governments shatter families and lives by putting thousands, perhaps millions in jail for marijuana infractions -- yet now there is talk of decriminalizing marijuana. What was the reason for the initial criminalization? Always if you refuse to obey, you will find yourself on the other side of a METAPHORICAL gun -- as modern government at its heart is force; this force inevitably involves the threat of jail. You don't obey laws -- no matter how irrational or unjustified -- and you will go to prisons as tens of millions have.
Q: What regulations are you talking about that caused the S&L crisis? It was dysfunctional, to be sure, but dysfunctional as in weak and under-used, not overly strict. Please provide counter-examples, if there are any.
DB: Why don't you just use a search engine? This is common knowledge. See this: "The S&L crisis, 10 years later: Government errors caused the problems and they still do." http://www.milkeninstitute.org/publications/publications.taf?function=detail&ID=204&cat=Arts
Q: BTW, we should bring back Glass-Steagall too - it's only a grade B solution, whereas Public Banking and Land Value Taxation are grade A solutions, but it's better than Gramm-Leach-Bliley (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gramm--Leach--Bliley_Act) that led to the wild west of banking we have today, and even bigger TBTF banks.
DB: You can't cure government created problems with more regulation and more government solutions. See this: "Let's shatter the myth on Glass-Steagall." http://www.washingtonpost.com/lets-shatter-the-myth-on-glass-steagall/2012/07/27/gJQASaOAGX_story.html
Q: LETS are always voluntary arrangements, even counter-government arrangements.
DB: If this is the case, why are LETS systems endorsed and promoted by the United Nations? See this: http://www.thedailybell.com/news-analysis/4224/Why-Is-the-UN-Installing-Mutual-CreditPure-Fiat-Systems-Around-the-World/. They are endorsed and promoted because they provide a paper trail that can be used by authorities for a variety of purposes.
Q: Many in the reform movement see DB as offering no solutions, and as actually being government apparatchiks themselves, working to involve serious reformers in endless virtual time-sinks so they can't effectuate actual change.
DB: We are not responsible for people in the "reform movement," if you are mostly talking about committed socialists/democrats like yourself who believe in the perfectibility of government and thus government solutions. Governments supposedly murdered some 150 million in the 20th century so far as we know and unfortunately could do it again in this century.
Q: Well, I see you have admitted to being anarchists. This has never been, and could never be, a workable arrangement for groups of people to interact under.
DB: What we actually wrote was, "Apparently, you don't understand that anarchy is merely the absence of government force." People need to live and relate in smaller communal groups if at all possible. Power needs to flow up, not down. One can exist in communal societies within an anarchical context as these societies are VOLUNTARY.
Q: Governments has naturally arisen from within the smallest tribes, to the largest nation-states, and " the trend will only continue.
DB: History shows us these trends are NOT inevitable and that Leviathan collapses under its weight sooner or later.
Q: There are certainly too many people in prison, but it is closer to 2 million not 6 million as you said (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_incarceration_rate) an interesting fact you chose to exaggerate.
DB: Here is the excerpt from Wikipedia to which you refer: "In total, 6,977,700 adults were under correctional supervision (probation, parole, jail, or prison) in 2011 -- about 2.9% of adults in the U.S. resident population. You want to maintain these people are NOT "incarcerated" go ahead. Try to tell that to someone under parole or probation (including home arrest).
Q: DB has no patience for [treating addiction as a disease] so the imprisonment will continue.
DB: Please cite the article wherein we wrote that we have no patience with treating addiction as a disease.
P.S. I am a blogger and Senior Editor for Opednews and I intend to gather up all these comments and publish them there at some point.
Q: To facilitate your labor we have gathered up your statements and our responses. By all means publish them without emendation and let people decide for themselves. You write from an incredibly narrow, pro-government knowledge base and are also difficult to communicate with because when your points are effectively rebutted you simply insist on repeating the same formulaic misinformation over again. No wonder Zarlenga finds you difficult.
Additional pro-Leviathan statements and our responses "
(At this point I have decided not to republish what is basically a rehash of the previous points, only reformatted into a Q&A style)
Leaving the Daily Bell Now
This exchange went on a bit longer, with other commenters jumping in. My point is not to reprint all the comments but to show the kinds of arguments, often incoherent and contradictory, that anarcho-capitalists make. I actually think it is a deficiency of that type of thinking that makes it difficult for them to commit to any kind of specific solution. I never did get a good answer as to why they would not support Local Exchange Traded Systems (LETS). The reactionary retreat to LETS being supported by "Leviathans" like the United Nations is both spurious and not completely true (there are several major member nations that have lately and specifically rejected virtual currencies like Bitcoin, for example, including Russia, India and China, though the U.S. has very tentatively permitted them).
The problem with "comment-based" articles is that they often never end, except by the eventual disinterest of one or both of the commenters -- in this case, mine.
One of the few links that Daily Bell provided which I thought worthy of a response was the Milken Paper, which argues that various and shifting government rules and regulations were responsible for the S&L crisis of the early 1990s. I don't profess to be an expert in this, but I trust Bill Black's thinking more seriously than someone who was convicted of fraud and spent 10 years in jail for it (this seems to be an impossibility in the current too-big-to-fail-or-even-prosecute era).
Bill Black's sort-of response re: the Milken Paper:
I have often written and spoken of my frustration that economists refuse to read George Akerlof and Paul Romer's classic 1993 article ("Looting: The Economic Underworld of Bankruptcy for Profit") and apply it to an analysis of the current financial crisis. Note that their title expresses the paradox they were reporting -- the best way to loot the bank is for its controlling officer to cause it to make extraordinary amounts of terrible loans that will typically cause the bank to fail".
You can read the rest here:
http://neweconomicperspectives.org/2014/02/finance-refuses-take-akerlof-romer-seriously-looting.html
The Daily Bell refers to government, by which they mean not just Big Government, but because they are anarcho-capitalists, ANY government, as the Leviathan -- a term which is simultaneously insulting and flattering, since our government can hardly could be said to function as a coordinated whole (like a singular "leviathan"). But it is not an uncommon term among those who write about government, both negatively as with the Daily Bell, or positively, as Dr. Yanis Varoufakis does here when writing of the parallel dystopian universe of the online multiplayer game Eve Online, where players can gain and lose real world money:
Unlike other multi-player games, Eve Online both tolerates and encourages players to loot, defraud, undermine, even to murder the avatars of other participants as long as such acts are carried out for "economic and material gain'. [1] This ultimate laissez faire universe, in the absence of a Leviathan to keep everyone "in awe", is what motivates players not only to be ruthless but to seek out alliances, to forge cartels, to pay protection money to powerful gangs of other players. It is what makes Eve Online fun to play. And what motivates players to spend large wads of money to purchase ISKs, the Eve Online in-game currency, so as to invest in the starships, the materials, the rights to mineral extraction from far-away asteroids, the bribes; on everything one needs to build up a respectable presence in a universe where "might is right'.
The recent spike of violence that ruined so much property, worth up to half a million dollars (according to some estimates) was due to the accidental de-stabilisation of an unstable truce. In that part of the Eve Online universe, some forgetful player merely neglected to make the usual, periodic payment to the cartel that protected his "assets' from other cartels. One thing led to another and an assault that was intended as a "lesson' to the forgetful subservient triggered off major warfare.
"The whole point about Eve Online is to corner markets, to forge cartels, to maximise one's power over price. And unlike Adam Smith's fiction, where such aspirations cancel each other out, leaving everyone with zero market power, and thus enabling the "invisible' hand to perform it magic, in Eve Online power rules OK. Which means that none of the orderly models of microeconomics are applicable -- at least not in a manner that is mathematically defensible.
Turning to Eve Online's macro-economy, here things are straightforward. Since there is no labour market (even though there is a great deal of labour and of sub-contracting) and there is no endogenous money supply, none of the macroeconomic features of offline capitalism apply to Eve Online's Hobbesian economy"a game that transports them to a world where no one can be trusted and where dangers lurks behind every smile, every handshake, every seemingly lucrative deal. The only real similarity with the offline world is that their macroeconomy, just like ours, benefits from destruction.
So, I return to my original point with Daily Bell. You can't have it both ways. If one allows for unlimited corporate power by limiting the government's ability to control it, we will get the sort of corporate state we have today. I think even Daily Bell agrees that is a bad thing, but they are so instinctively contrary, it is hard to tell for sure.
In proposing Public Banks on every practical level, Ellen Brown (and her friend and potential Libertarian Presidential candidate running mate, Bill Still), Brown is trying to decentralize the money power away from Washington and return it closer to the people. She is also a Greenbacker, in the rough model of Lincoln (not Hitler), but this too is seen as a way to divest power from the Big Banks and return power to the People. Daily Bell ought to embrace that, and not some armchair philosophy of anarcho-capitalism, which has never worked, could never work, and which is actually counter to the instinct of the most socially connected species on Earth - Human Beings.
Authors Website: http://newthinking.blogspot.com/
Authors Bio:
Scott Baker is a Managing Editor & The Economics Editor at Opednews, and a former blogger for Huffington Post, Daily Kos, and Global Economic Intersection.
His anthology of updated Opednews articles "America is Not Broke" was published by Tayen Lane Publishing (March, 2015) and may be found here:
http://www.americaisnotbroke.net/
Scott is a former and current President of Common Ground-NY (http://commongroundnyc.org/), a Geoist/Georgist activist group. He has written dozens of articles for Common Ground's national publication, GroundSwell, and has advocated for the Georgist Land Value Tax to public and political audiences.
He is also New York State Coordinator and Senior Advisor for the Public Banking Institute
Scott has appeared on TV/Radio and in in-person Presentations to explain the principles of Georgism, Greenbacking, and State Banking. These may also be found on his personal blog: http://newthinking.blogspot.com/
Scott has a dozen progressive petitions on Change.org which may be found here:
http://chn.ge/10nUAmJ
Scott was an I.T. Manager for a major New York university for over two decades where he earned a Certificate for Frontline Leadership.
He had a video game published in Compute! Magazine: Click Here
Scott is a graduate and adjunct faculty of the Henry George School of Social Science in New York City.
Scott is a modern-day Renaissance Man with interests in economics, science and all future-forward topics.
He has been called an "adept syncretist" by Kirkus Discoveries for his novel, NeitherWorld - a two-volume opus blending Native American myth, archaeological detail, government conspiracy, with a sci-fi flair http://amzn.to/10nUoDV
Scott grew up in New York City and Pennsylvania. He graduated with honors and a Bachelor's degree in Psychology from Pennsylvania State University and was a member of the Psychology honor society PSI CHI.
Today he is an avid bicyclist and ride co-leader in a prominent bike advocacy organization.
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