A twitter conversation on Friday had a mention of the phrase "novacaine wore off" when when @SamWilson1 spoke about her dentist visit. Amusingly both myself and Leigh Andrews first read it as "novacaine werewolf". Me and Leigh agreed it would make a great horror story title and that we would accept the challenge of writing such stories. At first I was going to use it for the next Karen Anderson story, but then I came up with an idea that I liked more, and which I felt wouldn't fit into the mileu of those tales, so instead I wrote a short story on it's own. Here it is.

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Growing up in the small town of Balito our neighbor was a widower named mister Roger Kane. His wife lost her life in the birth of their youngest daughter and he doted on his three girls and spoiled them in a way that all the rest of the neighborhood kids envied.  The three girls were my childhood friends. Sally the youngest, was two years after me, Cheryl was a year younger and Nancy was my age. Their father had affectionately nicknamed them Sugar, Candy and Nova respectively and they had called each other by those nicknames so they had stuck. 

Time however, as is it's ancient habit, passed. I grew up and went to University and got a job and I hadn't seen the Kane sisters in many, many years. So there I was sitting in a pub in Johannesburg at the age of 28 when a strange woman walked up to me. "Didn't you grow up in Balito ?" she asked, I looked more closely and there was a certain familiarity. 

"I did yes, do I know you from there ?"

"Nancy Kane, everybody calls me Nova" she exclaimed and I realized this was my childhood friend back. With her and her sisters I had made the innocent and not-so-innocent memories of childhood. Played hide-and-seek and "show me yours I'll show you mine". It was a blast from the past. Of course we started drinking together and catching up on our lives so far. She told me how their nicknames had stuck so much that although Sugar and Candy were both married now with different surnames they were still known by nicknames that had only been funny with their maiden names. 

One thing led to another and we ended up in her apartment for a nightcap. She poured me a drink and then asked me to excuse her while she slipped into something more comfortable. As cliche as it was, I still smiled. I sat sipping my drink while she was busy and mulling over the events of the evening. In my wildest dreams I wouldn't have expected to ever see Nova Kane again, let alone that I'd be sitting in her apartment about to engage in dark and carnal delights with her nubile young body.

A moment later I saw what looked like a large husky come patting out of the room she'd gone into. It seemed quite a big dog for her small apartment, and sleeker than any husky I'd seen before, almost wolf-like I thought. Suddenly it growled and then it pounced, my hands reached up ineffectually trying to steer those jaws away. I may as well have tried to stop a jet from taking off. I felt those fangs sink into my throat, Everything went black.

Some photography projects take a long time. The inside-out series started nearly two months ago when I suggested to Caryn an idea I had for a shot. As we spoke about it, we came up with literally dozens of ideas for variations on the theme. The idea is simple – to show in each picture two completely different sides of the same person. Such projects had been done before – but I had added my own novel twist by combining them with the "transparent screen effect"  fad that was popular a while ago. In each picture I would have a model in some pose, showing some side of her through her costume. 

On the screen would be an image of her in the same pose, but with a radically different costume that would show the opposite side of her (or him). The two would be lined up so it gives the effect that the screen lets you see what's underneath the surface – which is what inspired the series title: inside-out (Caryn suggested the title).

It's a lot of work to do such pictures. Once you have the lighting just right, each pose must be taken twice – with different costumes and care taken to preserve the light settings and locations. Each pose must be positioned so they can line up properly – and then the arduous editing work of making them fit where they belong. 

Today we did the first shoot for the series. Speaking of the effort involved – we only did two pictures on our first day titled "Girl next door" and "Angel and Devil" respectively. Before I link the gallery I should mention that some pictures from this series will include nude and erotic art and indeed in this first part one of the pictures involves erotic art. So if you go to look – expect to see beauty but if you don't like seeing human sexuality then give this series a miss, or watch it on facebook which will only show the non-erotic images.

The gallery is here – I'll post updates as more of the series gets added.

In this conclusion to the series on the two major streams of libertarian thought I want to look at economics. Ivo Vegter has (repeatedly) said that the purpose of markets is: "to distribute scarce resources with the greatest level of efficiency". Now this almost sounds good, unless you recall from the first post in this series that capitalism defines efficiency rather differently than most people – applying that definition it translates as: "to ensure the rich get richer and the poor get poorer". But let's assume that in fact right libertarians in this context mean efficiency to mean something similar to the meaning of the word in engineering: with the least waste. As long as "waste" doesn't include pollution this almost makes sense (forget that a core part of engineering principle states that you achieve least waste by ruling out duplication of effort – while capitalism attempts it through exactly the opposite approach claiming that multiple producers of the same good is more efficient).

The basic theory goes something like this: competition drives prices down, profitability and cost drive them up. Combine these and the market automagically sets the price almost exactly where the law of supply and demand predicts it should be (at least, if you wait long enough). Most economists agree with this as a basic principle but right libertarians under influence of Austrian economics now go a step further – from this rule they conclude that *any* price for which something can be sold is by definition the correct and fair price. There can be no rip-offs, nobody can ever be cheated or  lied to and nothing can be sold for too much more than it's value because competition prevents it – because in fact "the right price is whatever the market will bear". If anybody is prepared to pay it, that makes it fair to charge.

This is a major leap of logic which practically nobody (economist or otherwise) agrees with – the major logical flaw is that the market mechanism takes time to set a price to where supply and demand predicts and then has to constantly adjust it. This means that "whatever you can get" is not in fact by definition the appropriate price point – and there is actually room for fairness and moral concern for others to influence price setting. Of course a corporation is forbidden by law from having such concerns and this is (one of the reasons) why left libertarians believe all businesses ought to be worker-owned-worker-managed democratically controlled cooperations instead.

The biggest problem however happens at the point where Ivo's statement of Von Mises's definition is found to be begging the question. What if the resource isn't scarce ? Some resources aren't, in fact for some resources the supply is in fact infinite. The law of supply and demand leads to a logical conclusion that a free market ought to set the price point of anything with infinite supply at zero. In fact zero is also the appropriate price-point whenever supply exceeds demand by a significant enough factor. 

Now this raises a question: how do you pay initial production when supply there-after is infinite ? In our age this is true of anything abstract – of all information and ideas and intellectual creation. The market did not respond by setting a 0 or even a near-0 price as the supply of these items became infinite. It did not respond by finding a new way to fund just that first step of creation either. Instead the market responded by buying laws to create artificial scarcity through the institution of a legally controlled monopoly on reproduction.  They call it copyright and patent laws. That the basis of these laws predate infinite supply is somewhat beside the point – the laws were radically altered as supply became infinite to allow single entities (interestingly never the actual creators but rather the publishers) to hold a legal monopoly on reproduction so that they can deliberately slow it down and create an artificial scarcity to price the results. 

This happened despite these industries having lots of companies healthily competing with each other. The very government interference in the market that right libertarians claim to despise is the only way these markets persist – yet the Ayn Rand institute actively campaigned against Lawrence Lessig during the supreme court case he fought to just prevent copyright from being extended yet again. Seems right libertarians are all for government interference in the market when it suits them.

Ironically in this very same market we have proof that you don't need profit-driven business to produce the goods and pay the producers. Both the free software and free culture movements have churned out high quality intellectual products – both practical software products and abstract artistic products by instead having the equivalent of an Amish barn-raising. A lot of people from the community show up, produce together, and get to share in the use of the result. Since a song or software program (unlike a barn) really is infinitely reusable, they have no qualm with everybody on earth using it for free. Many will ask for voluntary donations (the ultimate example of consumer-friendly pricing) –  and however much they get, they are happy with. Courtney Love described it as: "A singer is in a service industry, like a waitress. We have to stop imagining we're selling a product and realize we're working for tips."

But surely this is a bit of a niche area ? Actually, no, it's not. In the vast majority of industries – production today exceeds demand, which ought to see massive global deflation and prices dropping like stones. In fact price drops only seem to occur in luxury goods and take rather a long time even there. Compare the price of a flat-screen television today with that of three years ago, but now compare food prices over the same period. The difference is that flat-screen television makers haven't been able to establish an artificial scarcity, food production has. In fact – every year – the USA and EU burn enough food to feed every hungry person on the planet three times over. They will cite logistics and such as a reasons but the truth is much simpler: they pay the farmers to burn most of their crops because that keeps the price of food artificially high.

True this is market interference and in honest many right libertarians have spoken out against it as well – but this is not the end. While maintaining artificially inflated food prices back home, they pressure poor countries to open their markets then use anti-competitive practises to put local farmers out of business – and sell their food at these artificially inflated prices. And every hour, 4000 children die to pay for the preservation of America's farming heritage. The thing is though – when right libertarians do speak out against this – they blame the recipient countries (apparently they didn't open their markets ENOUGH – which will somehow magically let them compete and put their local farmers back in business), they complain about farm subsidies but they never speak out against copyright law: which is exactly  the same thing, and as the DMCA and SOPA shows encroaches more and more on individual liberty. 

The soviet union used to have an armed guard at every xerox machine to prevent unauthorized copying. They didn't care much about copyright but they cared about censorship. Today we have 12-year old girls being sued for millions and pressured into settling for sharing a song they like – over and over, we have the BSA invading premises and holding guns to people's heads (well in Nicaragua they wouldn't *quite* dare to do that in South Africa.. yet), we have music industry hired-thugs storming people's houses like swat teams – suing and criminalizing your own customers can surely not be good business. Why doesn't competition and the magic market fix this ? Because there is no market. Only an artificial scarcity with government enforcement. So now our free world approach to copying is identical to that of the soviet union…  the motives may differ but it's the results that matter (to paraphrase Richard Stallman once more – though this time exactly about the example he himself was talking about).

The left libertarian approach of cooperations bring the barn-raising methodology of production to any industry, preventing exploitation, market manipulation, monopolistic practises and all the other tricks by which wealthy capitalists attempt to subvert the market process (and constantly succeed).  And in those industries that are truly post-scarcity, barn-raising production sets the price at 0 without any negative consequences or reduction in initial production. So I suppose as I look at the tattered state of the economy I am forced to remark: we can rebuild him, we have the technology – but he shouldn't look like this.

The United States declaration of independence begins by informing the British Crown of the most fundamental reason why they sought to break away from monarchic rule: that all men are created equal before God. Over the years this would come to be extended to include Women and finally (and sadly only in the last 50 years) black people. 

This is progressiveness at it's core, the fact that over time it was recognized more and more that all people are born equal, regardless of which God (if any) they believe in. In 1948 in the aftermath of World War 2 more than 100 nations began a process that culminated on the 7th December of that year in the publication of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. A set of basic rights and freedoms which, it was agreed, all people had. Not granted by a government, not earned through effort – had simply by virtue of being human. Hillary Clinton in her speech to the United Nations on this past Human Rights Day spent several minutes hammering on the fact that these rights (including dignity, life and various civil freedoms) are not granted by governments and cannot be removed by them and the core of that document is that every government agreed to be a watchdog, agreed that where another government undermined these rights they would work towards re-establishing them – even to the point of military intervention.

In theory these things are libertarian ideals come to life. All libertarians claim to love freedom, claim to be opposed to oppression and the involvement of governments in the personal lives of people. Unfortunately our actions speak louder than our words and this is the most scathing inditement on right libertarians of all – their history shows the exact opposite. 

Capitalist or right libertarianism can in all honesty be called American Libertarianism it was founded in the USA primarily by Ayn Rand's objectivism, which itself is built upon the philosophies of Nietzsche (this is clear throughout a reading of her books and she herself stated it outright several times). But that itself immediately falsifies much of what right Libertarians claim – since Nietzsche utterly opposes the idea that people are born equal. Indeed his philosophy is built on the idea that some people are over-men, the greater pinnacles of humanity and naturally deserves to be more privileged and indeed more powerful and that the weaker subhumans don't deserve any true recognition at all.

While in America this inspired objectivism it's rather more effective inspiration was too a young artist called Adolf Hitler and it would come to be the basis of Nazism. Indeed Hitler believed that the Aryan race was the Ubermensch – above all others, the natural rulers and the only ones who had any rights at all (there's a lot more to Nietzsche's ideas than this and some of it is actually good but this part was horrible – and it's the only part that inspired both Nazism and Objectivism).

So right libertarians fundamentally do not believe in the equality of people – and if you don't believe in equal rights, then you have no reason to believe in equality in any other regard. In fact history bears this out. Right libertarians fought against the abolition of slavery in the USA. Claiming to support freedom, claiming to oppose slavery – yet they supported it when it was actively practiced. Their belief in the sacredness of property extended quite naturally (for them) to human beings as property. Considering how we frequently hear their present-day counterparts argue against any and all public property in the sincere belief that only private property can have any value (or as liberals see it: be exploited for the benefit of the few over the many) – it's not so surprising that the non-Ubermensch people's (in their view) fitted in the same category: it's best to own and farm them.

It didn't end there. Right libertarians and Left Libertarians have in common a professed claim to believe in social liberty. That rights like freedom of speech, personal views on morality, freedom of religion and the like are the most important things in society to protect. Indeed right libertarians claim their entire philosophy is about protecting those freedoms. 

But this has never been a priority for them. Throughout their existence in the only country where they have a measurable impact on politics they have trampled on and reduced these rights, while actively opposing measures to secure them. The libertarian party actively campaigned against the civil rights movement in the USA. Murray Rothbard (considered one of the great right libertarians of our time) wrote in 1994 that every libertarian (in his American view only right libertarians exist) should vote republican.

The thing is, right libertarians will tell you that they support the democrats on social issues but the republicans on economic issues. If freedom was indeed their highest priority then they would vote for the party where the social issues aligned with their values, but since it isn't and never really was they have consistently voted for (and had a massive influence on) the party that aligned with their economic ideals while actively undermining the social liberty ideals they claim to support. 

They have consistently chosen economic policy over human rights, greed over freedom. The only freedom they care about is the freedom to grab what they want, and deny it to others. 

There is another level, slightly less insidious but equally as false. Right libertarians in their claimed believes will usually declare that capitalism has consistently uplifted the poor. Ivo Vegter (probably the loudest right libertarian voice on the African continent) states openly that while the gap between rich and poor may have grown the level of poverty decreased and places the credit for this squarely on the shoulders of capitalism. Talking of how unregulated capitalism created this improvement in one sentence and then decrying the fact that unregulated capitalism doesn't exist in the next … with no apparent sense of irony.

Firstly the facts do not bear this out. IRS statistics indicate that under the most libertarian policies in America the share of total GDP earned by the top 1% doubled, while the share earned by the bottom 50% was cut virtually in half. Middle class salaries stagnated on paper, but when you factor in that working hours for the middle class is no roughly 60% more than it was 50 years ago, that works out to a massive decline (they are paid the same for a lot more work, meaning less per hour worked).

That's just the start however. The markets he cites where this amazing event is claimed to have happened all have this in common: in every single one of them there was a significant population of people who had no property rights at all, and thus their land and labor could be exploited with ease. In America they were slaves. In Europe they were the colonies – as soon as colonialization ended and the exploitation shifted to the voters (rather than people far away with no say in the government they lived under) these countries rapidly became socialist. People who had a say in the system, who had rights, refused to live in these ultra-capitalist societies, the only time they worked was when the suffering was exported to people who were denied the very rights libertarians claim to own. 

Even today this persists, corporations continue to pursue higher profits by relying on laborers who lack property rights and basic civil rights. Since they have no rights, they can be exploited in slavery conditions. The only difference is, now they rely on other governments to maintain that for them while professing to love freedom back home. So Chinese workers toil under conditions that are in fact much worse than slavery, so Nike can sell their shoes at the exact same premium they charged when they had local US workers – but with 20 times the markup.

The only people who benefit are the shareholders of Nike and the Chinese government. 

Capitalism has never worked in a society where all people had equal rights and liberty. The suggestion that capitalism rewards all who work hard and uplifts society as a whole is simply not true – it creates wealth for those with rights, by taking it from those without. Regulations on capitalism is meant to prevent this – but because nobody can regulate other countries it simply lead to capitalism outsourcing it's workforce. Creating unemployment back home, and suffering abroad. 

Right libertarians' answer to this ? Deregulate it locally. I almost want to support that, as European history shows the moment you bring the suffering home – onto people who can vote for the people who make the rules, they make sure those rules protect them. 

Left libertarians have a proud history of recognizing the equal liberty of all people going back several hundred years. At no point in history has left libertarians supported any kind of exploitation, any lack of rights for anybody, or any other form of inequality. Extending equality of people not just into law but into economics is the heart of left libertarianism and why I support it. Make no mistake – right libertarians believe themselves to be greater-than-thou, and thus deserving of not only ruling over others but exploiting and appropriating the fruits of their labors. 

This sense of self-aggrandizement shines through when they say things like "I worked hard to get where I am". Of course you did, we all do. The fact that you had massive privilege as a white male to help you had no role at all, right ? Those who lacked those privileges and worked hard without getting where you are ? Oh right, you declare they are just lazy, you cannot believe that working even harder may fail to pay off in a system designed to keep them down. Then they point to a few people from such poor backgrounds who did become rich – but miss out that this one in a million stories. A few people win the lottery as well, that doesn't mean encouraging people to play lotto is sound economic policy and frankly the odds of getting rich that way is marginally higher than of getting rich by working hard in China ( or for that matter in Thokoza).

So right libertarians will oppose any protection of rights that do no apply to the rich, any protection of societies most vulnerable – because it removes their ability to exploit that vulnerability, and their claims as to why are simply false. Right libertarians are vocally against minimum wage laws – declaring they reduce employment below where the market would have it by artificially inflating the price. But when South Africa introduced a minimum wage law for domestic workers a few years ago that minimum wage was less than the urban average pay for domestic workers already set by the market, all it did was force the minority who were paying well below market rates to at least pay a fair wage. Incidentally the number of domestic workers employed in South Africa today are still exactly the same as it was before the law was passed: roughly one per middle-class household.

In none of the previous two posts did I launch so much of an attack on right libertarians while saying so little about left libertarians and it's because these facts are so scathing and so utterly destroy their rhetoric. Suffice to say that in each of the cited cases above – left libertarians were fighting on the opposite side. It was left libertarians who gave their lives on May 5th 1895 to secure the 40-hour work-week, an act we still commemorate yearly on worker's day. Left libertarians were among the abholitionists who ended slavery in Europe well before it ended in the USA. Left libertarians have fought hard against oppression and censorship, have been a voice for the voiceless and fought for the freedom and equality of all people. Protection not just from the evils of governments at their worst, but from exploitation by theft and greed as well, in the genuine believe that the only authority with any legitimacy is the authority of government-by-consent. 

As we speak left libertarian values (even if only rarely called so) is guiding the occupy-wall-street movement. The reason there were no early soundbites or action plans were simple: they worked by consent, it takes time to get consent, but as consent is reached – plans can be made that all of society benefits from.

One of the biggest differences between left and right libertarians lie in their approach to authority and power structures. In fact it would be more correct to say that several of the biggest differences lie here. Right libertarians generally declare that government does in fact have a purpose and a role to play. That role is very simple however: to protect the rights of citizens, most importantly their property rights (from theft).

Left libertarians do no consider this sufficient. In fact the vast majority of left libertarians believe that a republic cannot meet the requirements of Thomas Jefferson that a government can only be legitimate if it's done by the consent of the governed. For left libertarians – the only government that can consistently and over the long term govern only by (and according to) the consent of the governed is no government at all. Left libertarians believe in a governance by consensus model – where the community as a whole take decisions together.

The biggest downside of a governance-by-consensus model is that it can be slower, since all in the community can vote on all decisions – propose ideas and rules and goals discussions and decisions take a while to reach that crucial majority consensus. For left libertarians however, only this model where every citizen can question a bad law and get it repealed by the simple expedient of convincing enough of his neighbours can provide equality before the law and justice for all without oppression or exception.

For right libertarians this model is abhorent and they declare it to be "tyranny by the majority" while gleefully forgetting that every other system has consistently turned into (and most left libertarians would say that it's a logical certainty that they would turn into) a tyranny by the minority – which is of course, if anything, worse. In the case of the capitalist republics that tyrant minority inevitably becomes the same minority: the wealthy. 

The result is a class system of privilege by birth in which equality before the law becomes impossible, equal opportunity unobtainable and corruption unavoidable. In short- an aristocracy arises, whether their "right to rule" is legally secured in so many words or not is quite irrelevant. To quote Richard Stallman: it's the results that concern us, not the motivations.

Left libertarians go a step further declaring equally unacceptable any authority other than consensus. This includes political and crucially economical power. For right libertarians there is no such thing as "economic power". Ivo Vegter has declared: "the suggestion that a wealthy person has power over a less wealthy one is false, he does not have the force of guns or the legal right to use them to enforce his will upon you, your interactions with him must be voluntary or they wouldn't happen."

This is a prime example of what you may call the Stallman law of philosophy in action. The truth is that wealth buys power. Firstly it lets one influence politicians, it lets one afford better lawyers (or bribe judges) and so shelters one from the consequences of breaking the law (which is, in practical terms no different from having a seperate law in the first place) it's the result that concerns us. Wealth buys indemnity from the protection of the law, and the right libertarian suggestion that the government (which they demand must not be strong or empowered in any way) will provide equal protection of property and other rights to the poor as to the wealthy is outright and fundementaly untrue in practice. Or as Terry Pratchett put it: Owning a street full of slum is not a crime but living in one is.

Presumably one may design a justice system that is immune to the influence of wealth. How may one do this ? For starters one would have to make it impossible for the rich to have better lawyers than the poor, the only way to do that would be to strictly limit lawyers to "one-per-customer" and set a requirement that lawyers all charge the same fixed-rate for their services. Thus the poor could afford the best lawyer just as easily as the rich could and crucially there would be no reason why the best lawyers would all be defense lawyers and the prosecution left with the worst.

Mind you, that kind of market regulation is exactly what right libertarians believe must never happen and this form is outright communistic. I doubt I'll be popular with them for suggesting that such a communist measure is a requirement for their proposed system of social structure to actually work (since – by their own philosophical claims) the entire system is fundamentally dependent on the absolute recognition of property rights for all. 

That is the practical result: you cannot have legal equality while there is economic inequality, at least not if that inequality is to wide. The suggestion of just removing inequality from lawyers will be but a first step – you would soon find another way the wealthy can buy privilege and avoid the consequences of violating the rights of others and have to reproduce the process. 

The simple truth is that right libertarian nations degenerate into either clasist oppression or totalitarian communism – they are simply not stable as right libertarian free markets. Severe inequality never is. By minimizing inequality to a "fair" and "small" level (without completely removing it) left libertarians propose an equitable society where all really do have equal rights, including to the fruits of their labor, and by recognizing that money buys power left libertarians avoid the resulting pitfalls in the first place. 

Right libertarians will use phrases like "dictatorship of the majority" and "populism" to shoot down and denigrate any truly democratic values in their societies and the reason is very simple: nothing scares them more than true democracy. True democracy means the people have the power , and the ideas and priorities of the majority of people are what shapes the nation. This is a right libertarian's greatest fear – because right libertarians know there is no smaller minority than the wealthy, their economic ideals ensure this will always be true. A society alligned with the needs of the bulk of it's members will by definition allow unions to strike, protect worker rights and institute environmental laws (and I have no doubt a society run by consensus would do all of the above – far moreso in fact) – because the wealthy is not the majority and cannot get their desires and profit margins rated above the needs of the society as a whole.

This may indeed be the single biggest rift between left and right libertarians: right libertarians for all that they decry strong government on social and economic issues demand nothing less than a totalitarian police state on right's issues. I've read articles by them declaring that private gunmen-for-hire would be the ideal replacement for the policeforce.

Well of course – it's not like POOR people need protection from crime after all. Only rich people need that. It's not like civil rights such as presumption-of-innocence, habeas corpus and due-process were instituted to protect people from unjust persecution, on the contrary we'd be more free with trigger-happy private gunmen shooting you dead on sight with nothing but their word that you had broken a law (even one as simple as entering private property). That is the right libertarian ideal: the freedom for the rich to remove all freedoms from the poor.

In the next line – I will look more intensely at that last sentence and it's true  meaning and consequences.

A cardinal difference between communism and capitalism can be found in their definitions of efficiency. One could summarize it thusly:

• Capitalism deems it inefficient if those who are more productive do not gain a larger share of wealth.
• Communism deems it inefficient if a nation produces enough for all it's citizens to have their basic needs met but this does not happen because a few have a disproportionately large share of that production.

There's a bit of a fundamental goal difference prevalent in those definitions. Communism believes the economy should serve the people and the people one another. Capitalism believes nothing and nobody should serve anybody else (nor any tangible purpose)  it should just exist. 

Usually when left and right libertarians debate there's a lot of circular arguing without any real progress – fundamentally because so many core definitions are at odds in their views – the above example is a good one.  In this series of posts I'll be looking at some of these definitional differences and how they lead to the difference in the views of left and right libertarians, and why I side with the left.

Property is theft

Contrary to popular opinion this quote is not communist or Marxist in origin but came from Proudhom in the paper that first gave us the word "libertarian". Right libertarianism wouldn't arise until several centuries later, primarily in the USA and mostly under the influence of Rand. To left libertarians this line promulgates the deep paradox inherent in modern property systems – all that is owned today is only owned because it was stolen. Right libertarians have a different view – that property was created, by setlers working the land and such.  

For this reason many left libertarians declare that only land "in use" is ownable and only as long as it remains so – when it is no longer used it should be accessible to the next potential user rather than laying in waste. Left libertarians decry the inefficiency of a society where so many children sleep on pavements besides buildings that have been standing empty for years.  Right libertarians write long articles about how this entire line of thinking is nothing more than an excuse to steal the hard-earned property of others. My personal opinion is that it would be better for social stability over-all to recognize private property when it refers to single dwellings but differentiate in the case of mass-dwellings.

So who is right ?

The answer comes from a rather odd next question: is right of conquest a valid right of property (it was held so in every culture in the world until very recently after all) ? 

If you say "yes":

Well then the take-over of unused land by the destitute is a legitimate form of conquest, at least as legitimate in practical terms as any other. 

If you say "no":

Well then the current "owners" of the land have no legitimate claim to it. 

I should back all this up. This is where right libertarians are simply and basically lying about the facts of history. Property was never, ever created by setllers working the land. Trace back all the property in the world from current owner to first title deed and you'll find that before that deed was issued it was obtained by conquest: that is it was taken by force from the previous owner. In many cases those previous owners did not have deeds or paperwork, they were often collectivist societies. These traces are hard to do in Europe since in some cases you're tracing back to the ancient Roman conquests, but in the USA and the entire developing world it's quite easy: the land that people "own" was stolen by violent force from it's previous owners within the last three centuries.  This is why the ANC has a land-reform program – and it's out of trying to preserve the economy that they choose to do it on a voluntary-seller basis, they are giving the land back to the descendents of those it was stolen from.  That works in the rural areas, it doesn't work so well in major urban centers – even if those urban centers were built on such land.

The tricky bit is proving who did own the land before.  Right libertarians avoid the question by stating that property was "created" when the land was (recently) worked, if you carefully limit your definition of "property" to the modern title-deeds that almost works but if you have any kind of a respect for justice and indeed the property rights held so sacred by right libertarians you must accept the premise that people who have lived on a piece of land for many generations (perhaps thousands of years) are the only legitimate owners of that land you could recognize. 

So when left libertarians decry the fact that 5% of the world population own 95% of the wealth a big part of why we decry it is because that wealth is generated using land of which the ownership is morally incredibly dubious if not outright illegitimate. When we declare it should be more evenly distributed this is not "mooching" as Rand would put it but a demand for justice. The land was stolen, and then sold on. In any other aspect of human life buying stolen property remains a crime and the ownership remains illegitimate no matter how many times it was sold – if found it is still returned to the true owner. Land should be no different. The USA belongs to Native Americans, South Africa belongs to it's various tribes (not just black but also San and Khoi-Khoin), the fact that these people did not have systems of land ownership when the west got here does not in any way, shape or form justify the suggestion that those who implemented such systems could therefore appropriate the land right out from under them. 

The only land in this country legitimately owned by white people in fact is a particular section of Kwa-Zulu Natal because that was not taken from the Zulu people by force but bought in a mutually agreed contract by the voortrekker's for labour. The violence and warfare that happened after the fact are beside the point – here alone in all of Africa did white people who wanted to live on land where black people had lived for thousands of years recognize their living there as a legitimate property right and tried to BUY the land rather than simply take it by force.

Essentially I'm afraid left libertarians have the right coming and going. The right has to recognize right-of-conquest as valid to claim any legitimacy in the current ownership of land, and then it logically follows that the poor have every right to obtain (or rather: recover) land and property through the same means.  Alternatively if they somehow try to deny it – they must then accept that current ownership is illegitimate and we should enter a long period of mandated land redistribution to return the land to those who own it by rights.

As my photography gets more involved, the amount of pictures I wish to display get bigger and relying mostly on flickr becomes less and less feasible. As a result I made the decision to store the ones I particularly want to highlight on this site itself in my own gallery, after quite a bit of choosing I found one that met my needs particularly with regard to full wordpress integration, simple and non-time-consuming administration and rapid deployment.

The result is a fairly big overhaul of the photography page, but I think over-all a worthwhile one – faster loading, entirely under my own control and easy wot work with. It may not have quite as many display options as flickr does but it's better than facebook and unlike either doesn't have censorship rules that I am expected to comply with (I'm an artist who believes the naked human form is the greatest and most inspirational artwork of all and some of my art does display it as such – and here at least, I can show that art freely).

So with the new gallery up, that's one less thing to stand between my lens and your eyes.

Okay, so I couldn't resist a horrible pun in the title – but well, I had something to write about and it almost fitted !  On Saturday me and Caryn went to Nadine Larter's booklaunch in Cape Town. As most people begun to leave we were chatting with her and another girl who had also hung around later. At some point as my name was mentioned she said "Wait, you're A.J. Venter ?", I confirmed this and then she said: "I read your blog all the time and I love your stories" (I am paraphrasing, i may not have the words exactly right but the meaning is essentially right).

We spent the next long while chatting about stories and blogging and what we're working on and her discussing what she loved about the female lead in erotic story "The fallen lamb". It was quite a moving experience. When, as a writer, you spend most of your time working on a blog that doesn't get many comments and writing stories that few people talk about reading unless they are already close friends, you sometimes find yourself wondering if anybody ever reads the things you type out there. If you're actually making any difference, if anybody notices your work – and if maybe you're just a pathetic hack who needs to get a life.

But occasionally you meet somebody who does value your work, who appreciates what you're trying to say. On those days you realize that what you do is meaningful, and has meaning for others – even if you often don't hear from them. I must honestly confess there is nothing more inspiring to a writer, than the knowledge that you are read. 

So thanks Amanda for that fortuitous meeting, I thought it deserved a mention here.

Okay, so you may have noticed a fair absence of posts not related to the Anderson files. This is because we're on a very tight deadline at work and frankly I have very little time to write anything, the bit I do have is going into stories at the moment. And here is part 3, the early readers generally have agreed it's the best so far so please do enjoy it.

The Anderson Files number 3: Heavy Metal

Continuing the story series I began in "Uniondale" I am happy to announce the now public availability of "Thief in the night". This second story in the episodic Anderson Files series pits our heroes against a monster that makes their last ghostly encounter seem like a picnic while we also get to learn quite a bit about Karen's past.

I really enjoyed this story – more than the first actually – as I had the basic introductions out of the way and could really start to work on character development. This time I focused that development primarily on Karen but in the next story  the focus will shift a bit to Pieter's past and what makes him tick. 

I've already begun research for File 3 which will be titled "Heavy Metal" – and I'm not giving away anything else yet. Once again – my grateful thanks to the early readers who helped me with editorial advice, comments and suggestions. The stories would be far worse without your contributions.

In the meantime – I hope you all enjoy "Thief in the night" and as always I welcome all comments, reviews and suggestions. Ready to read it ? Well here is the link.