What should we expect from The War Against Terror? Consider this:

Writers jailed in 2002 for political satire
After three years at Guantanamo, Afghan writers found to be no threat to United States

PESHAWAR, Pakistan — Badr Zaman Badr and his brother Abdurrahim Muslim Dost relish writing a good joke that jabs a corrupt politician or distills the sufferings of fellow Afghans. Badr admires the political satires in “The Canterbury Tales” and “Gulliver’s Travels,” and Dost wrote some wicked lampoons in the 1990s, accusing Afghan mullahs of growing rich while preaching and organizing jihad. So in 2002, when the U.S. military shackled the writers and flew them to Guantanamo among prisoners whom Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld declared “the worst of the worst” violent terrorists, the brothers found life imitating farce.

For months, grim interrogators grilled them over a satirical article Dost had written in 1998, when the Clinton administration offered a $5-million reward for Osama bin Laden. Dost responded that Afghans put up 5 million Afghanis — equivalent to $113 — for the arrest of President Bill Clinton.

Given this, and scores of similar items, given the demonstrated failure of central planning in general, how can this government be expected to conduct a War On Terror any better than it conducts any other affair? Supporters of the Terror War need to answer this, or ignore it, in order to proceed.

Nobody’s answered it yet. And why not?

Because the honest, rational answer is that there’s no reason at all to expect the government to handle the Terror War any better than it handles any other matter. That’s an awkward admission to make if you’re a supporter of the War On Terror:

“Yes, this government’s going to fuck the matter at hand up in a spectacular fashion, and likely enough will actually make whatever problem it supposedly started out to solve worse. Instead of fixing things, which it can’t do, it will create a self-perpetuating crisis managed by career bureaucrats whose primary motivations will be ensuring their continued employment and the steady growth of their mini-empires. Everything remotely connected with this will be deemed a national necessity and naysayers will be branded as unpatriotic. Dire pronouncements of doom will be forthcoming, based on rumors at best, at regular intervals or whenever the public starts to grow weary of the whole mess. Every election cycle, various candidates will make noises about “fixing” the matter, but their fixes will to a man involve increasing the budgets of the government agencies involved.

But you should support it anyway, because it’s all we’ve got.“

I could be describing support for AmTrack. In fact it’s a pretty fair comparison, since to make either of them work right, you need to do one thing:

Solve the socialist calculation problem.

Except, oops, you can’t. How does it get decided where trains run or who gets bombed? Not a price system, with near-instant feedback of market demand, but central planning overlaid with political patronage. Socialized trains don’t work any better than socialized Terror Wars, which is why you get what we have now: the Afghani Jonathan Smith in jail for three years, and a rail organization that loses money on three dollar hot dogs.

Thus the primary problem with the War On Terror: socialism.

As opposed to the doomed and vulgarly political “Free State Project”, this is a wonderful thing.

A commenter takes me to task over my previous remarks on the Free State Project:

I’m glad you have a better plan than those suckers, that is sit around and complain on a blog day after day.

In fact I do have a better plan that the FSP suckers: I plan to get on with my life. Just getting on with your life is a much better plan than marching forward in libertarian solidarity.

See, there are two outcomes: either a) the FSP is a stupid boondoggle and a waste of time at best (my judgement) or b) it will actually accomplish something positive. Let’s assume b) for argument.

Now what?

What rational proposition can the FSP offer anyone in particular? Will their chances of success be noticeably better with me on board, better enough that it’s worth my time to join them? Do they have anything to offer that I couldn’t get by, say, moving to NH and not joining them? Answers are none, no and no, respectively.

Fact is that political liberty is by and large a public good. You manufacture it, and everyone enjoys it. Thus everyone else has the incentive to get on with their lives while you slave away. Given that, it’s not surprising that libertarian movements (biased as they are towards individualists of various stripes) tend to quickly become self-parodies since the only people that stick around are the people who enjoy the movement for its own sake.

Now this isn’t all to say that voluntary collectivism and movements are all bad. For instance, you might say that a secretary for the local Catholic church is part of a collectivist organization (true) and that by stuffing envelopes with the church newsletter that she’s part of a movement (also true). But the difference is that the secretary has been offered a rational proposition: x$/hour for her services.

The FSP isn’t offering anyone anything I can see, except the ever-fading promise that they’ll somehow manufacture freedom. Except that me and everyone else that isn’t rushing to get on the bandwagon can just bide our time and wait for them to make liberty or not, and then move in next door to them. Or not.

How does the FSP intend to get around their public goods problem? Evidently by ignoring it.

The slow implosion of the Free State Project continues:

First of all, we have dropped our goal of reaching 20,000 signatures by the end of 2006.

…

We are not setting a new goal for reaching 20,000, but we expect to increase our recruitment rate (more on that below) and reach that goal within a reasonable time frame.

…

Third, we recognize that the success of the Free State Project really depends on actual movers, and we are now actively encouraging all participants to move as soon as they are able.

Things are going crappy, so make sure you get on board ASAP.

It’s rather ironic that the one unique thing that the FSP had going for them, the idea that if the project didn’t meet a deadline that it would fold, is the one thing that they’re tossing over the side.

And why the shifting priorities?

Jason Sorens, FSP founder, says it best (responding to Claire Wolfe):

We abolished our 2006 recruiting goal because we saw no other option. In a sense, your conclusion, “the FSP seems merely interested in continuing its own existence,” is obviously correct. We think continuing our existence is very important.

The original idea was to either have a viable movement or not. Now the idea is to have a movement, whether or not it’s viable. This was inevitable, because movements naturally self-select for movementarians. And their primary motivation is… being part of a movement.

So where does the market individualist fit into that? Outside the movement, of course:

Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed and in such desperate enterprises? If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.

– Thoreau.

Personal secession is the
answer. It’s a lot easier and I expect I’ll keep
my fluids in their original container using my
technique.

–jomama