Andrea Castillo's blog

      If you ever get the chance to browse through some of my other musings that are hosted on this website, you may find yourself detecting the slightest tinge of anti-corporatist zest peppered amongst my various appeals to free market consistency. This particular quirk of mine is no happy coincidence; I humbly align myself with the elusive but growing left libertarian movement. As such, I find that my views are as often the target of mainstream political belittlement as they are the cheap accessory of whichever political party happens to be in the minority for this election cycle. The public discourse concerning no other political issue has been so bastardized by the shameless opportunists who routinely brandish and parry the so-called “libertarian stance” than that of the corporate form and its relation to free markets.

     As some of my readers may know, I consider participating in online forum discussions to be a bit of a hobby of mine. When I first started to indulge this guilty pleasure, I decided to seek out message boards where I knew that my opinion would be in the minority instead of frequenting message boards where I was sure to fit in and receive a hearty amount of pats on the back. I relish the sometimes hilarious attention that my “black sheep” comments routinely generate and the renegade reputation that I have earned during my stay on "left"-leaning websites, but the biggest reason that I purposefully position myself to be the lone voice of dissent is because it presents me with an opportunity to strengthen my debating capabilities while becoming more familiar with different perspectives at the same time.

A certain geurilla journalist had the fortune to become intimately familiar with a certain member of the U.S. Congress earlier this week. In a viral video posted to YouTube 4  days ago, Rep. Bob Etheridge (D-N.C.) is approached by two unidentified "reporters", describing themselves only as "students" that were "working on a project", after leaving a swanky D.C. fundraiser for Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Etheridge appears to muster up the bare minimum in pleasantries ("Hello, how are you?") for his potential constituents as he walks towards the camera but things quickly turn sour after the homegrown cub reporter lobs a hardball at him. The "student" holding the first camera, we'll call him Heckler #1, asks Rep. Etheridge if he "supports the Obama Agenda™". Etheridge at once becomes aggressive and decidedly less cordial; he repeated asks the boys "who are you? ... I have a right to know who you are", he  wildly grabs Heckler #1's hand and takes his camera, and at one point he even grabs Heckler #1 by the scruff of his neck before noticing the second video camera, held by Heckler #2, and adjusting his grip into a more innocent (yet more awkward) sideways bear hug. After the confrontation, Etheridge can be seen walking away, stolen camera in tow. Yesterday, Rep. Etheridge's office issued a pseudo-apology for the event and will most likely try to lay low for the next few weeks.

     A recent online conversation I had with a libertarian of the Georgist persuasion prompted me to reconsider some of the implications of my already-vacillating acceptance of a strict metaphysical justification for private property, namely, the strength of a "natural rights" perspective on ethics and property. Georgists, for those who are unfamiliar with their principles, believe that the economic rent, or the profit that is gained from the value of a property, of land should be commonly shared by society since there exists a fixed amount of land and no one man can rightfully claim to have created that land. Though I will not delve into the finer points of the anonymous Georgist and I's particular dispute, I was moved to write about the broader source of our disagreement: which method of allocating scarce goods among a heterogeneous population with diverse needs and skills is the morally supreme choice? Of course, the inherent "is-ought" issue with making any moral argument grounded in subjective preferences will be obvious and familiar to anyone who has previously entertained the notion. This conversation between the Georgist and myself would have been otherwise  unremarkable if not for the fact that in response to his appeals to supposedly self-evident claims and values (for example, the claim that public ownership of land is in itself a desirable or necessary condition) I defended private property from an amoral position grounded in reciprocity and mutual respect systems.

 I’ve always found it curious that the same group of people who praise the virtues and benefits of the free market from the mountaintops for all to hear are usually the first to contradict that premise when concerning what is arguably the most valuable and necessary service – national defense and protection of property. I say this comfortably as I was once among the ranks of the great self-styled patriots; I accepted, without question, the assertion that since national defense was a desirable service it necessarily followed that the State must be the entity to provide it. Moments after ranting about the inherent inefficiencies in the United States Postal Office, the Department of Motor Vehicles, and public schools in general, I would then marvel about the dedication and effectiveness of our U.S. military and would forcibly rebuke any criticisms of its soldiers or missions. It took me a while to break free from this reinforcing cycle of obligation and nationalism, most likely because I had never had the (dis)pleasure of experiencing either any of the benefits or detriments that the existence of our military excursions supposedly insured. In this article, I will highlight the most blatant inconsistencies that I see in the modern right-wing stance on markets and national defense and I will attempt to present a compelling case in favor of decentralized law and defense.

         A funny thing happened on the way to financial regulation and populist justice. I, like many other bemused Austrians-in-the-making, watched this week's congressional hearings grilling the executives of Goldman Sachs with the mixed sensations of entertainment and considerable aggravation. On the one hand, it was kind of fun to see America's highest caste of businessmen being heckled by some crotchety old politicians who berated them for their "shitty deals" and bookie-like tendencies. On the other, more exasperating hand, the majority of those same crotchety old politicians were at least as culpable, if not more so, for the undoing of the façade of the U.S. economy in 2008. You can see how these conflicting emotions might lead a girl to marked indecisiveness on a general opinion.

    Arizona’s enactment of its controversial immigration enforcement bill will be undoubtedly met with equal doses of criticism and praise. The people who support a strict-border policy will applaud the state’s attempt to crack down on illegal or undocumented migration within its jurisdiction and will likely dismiss the necessary civil rights violations, both for legal and illegal citizens, as a necessary evil for a greater good. Critics will most likely take one of two approaches: they will either claim that the state of Arizona has its heart in the right place in its zeal to accurately document immigrants but are approaching the implementation with too heavy of a hand, much like President Obama has recently done, or will, as I do, claim that the government, whether state or federal, has no place in regulating or barring the free association of people. I rarely see the discussion of immigration reform stem from a defense of property rights, so I will attempt to do so now.

  The debate on the government’s role and competency in providing a public education system is fraught with time-tested talking points and passionate allegiances, but I have always been left unsatisfied by the paltry breadth of discussion. The two opposing forces in this contentious tug-of-war spend so much time ensuring that the specific aspects of the status quo that they personally favor do not budge that neither has even noticed that we haven’t gotten anywhere in decades. It’s as if we were attempting to hammer out discrepancies in the footnotes before even bothering to agree on a title. Perhaps due to my distaste for the inane, I find myself to be a perpetual sucker for the “big picture”, so to speak, and there is one particularly compelling piece that I feel is vastly underrated.

     As you have probably heard, today marks the 15^th year since the passing of the attack on the Oklahoma City federal building.  Although I personally was only a child at the time, I can detect vestiges of the gravity and repercussions of that unimaginable tragedy today through the snippets of memorials that I will occasionally see mentioned in passing on the evening news and the obligatory public “reflection discussions” that coincide with every major milestone as we as a nation march forward through time. Until very recently, I had been under the impression (or perhaps I simply lazily assumed) that Timothy McVeigh, the assertively self-indicted sole aggressor in the attack, was a generic pro-life radical who had channeled his frustrations with government policy into an ironic and unconscionable act of domestic terrorism. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that I was only half-right.

           Before libertarians are able to take a definitive stance on their support for or opposition to “capitalism”, I feel that we must first consider what the word “capitalism” even means. I have heard such a vast multitude of praises and criticisms directed towards the same concept that were so diverse, intricate, and even contradictory that it would give one grounds to wonder if the competing choruses of opinion were even singing about the same thing. The unfortunate contentiousness of this ongoing debate should not surprise the impartial observer who notices that neither party had even provided a precursory definition of the topic upon which they had so belligerently disagreed.