A Kraft foods moment: libertarian perspective.

The other day, shopping in my local supermarket (and there is a word loaded with semioticity worthy of some academic research) i came upon a Kraft food representative working the cereal section. Another patron was overheard saying something about the hypocrisy of those who advocate in favor of the president's veto of the stem cell bill. I muttered something about the views of the founding fathers, as expressed in the constitution, to leave open all manner of imagineable and unimagineable future possibilities with regard to rights and civil liberties. The Kraft woman spokeup and said that the "founding fathers were libertarians." I was somewhat taken aback, in that one of the areas i research is the libertarian agenda, in which the core of their own philosophical thinkers do not accept this piece of gravitas, mostly on the grounds that it is fundamentally important to hold the classic liberalism of the enlightenment as the a priori foundation of later manifestations of libertarianism. But she also said something to the affect that the founding fathers were not only libertarians, but also good christians helping to form the "new israel." Yikes, she was espousing the contradictory view that the founding fathers were libertarians bent on creating a theocracy.

Yet even that didn't really get my goat rammed up. NO. What got me was what she was doing. Given her expressed passion for libertarianism, i was shocked at her own blatant hypocrisy for abusing the shelf space of a competitor. In essence she was declaring her own eminent domain of the grocery shelf for her products, reducing the size of both her major competitor and hiding the generic brands. This was not only a violation of what she professed to be her own principles, but it is a type of fraud given how product placement contracts are written and manifest in stores. I may be one of the few people, outside of grocery stores, to know how the system works. It is expensive and complicated and requires honesty and trustworthiness of the corporate representatives. Clearly the Kraft woman was not about to honor the domain of a competitor, and was busy claiming space, not hers, for herself; eminent domain!! Her actions belied her expressed views, and demonstrated that the rights of others are not worth acknowledging in the pursuit of capital asset acquisition. That got me to thinking about another form of piracy.

One of the more common misconceptions, philosophically, in assessing political networks and representational interconnectedness, is that anarchists are directly linked to libertarians. This simply is not true, and the best illustration is piracy and pirates. Well there is that and there is the bizarre support that US libertarians show for Israel to use massive military force against whole populations as part of their right as a nation. I link these two because if ever there was a nation created by an act of piracy and eminent domain, it is Israel (the US is of course the master role model). Pirates use the ultimate threat of imminent death to lay claim to any and all material possessions they feel they desire, then divide up those items equally through a consensual democratic process (pretty far from libertarian ideals). There is no property that belongs to either the pirates or their prey, just the process of redistribution of matter, encouraging its flow in a multitude of forms, at the point of destructive weapons. Each pirate was/is his/her own master, free to engage or disengage from the collective, but once so engaged is responsible to the collective to maximize the efforts to appropriate matter to be distributed.

Now, one of the justifications that is too oft provided for the existence of the nation state of Israel, is a biblical history that is not without some very controversial facts. There is much evidence that the torah was created in and around 1000 BCE as a means of justifying military action to support the consolidation of tribal groups under a rigid theocratic feudal system. It need be noted that even the Torah lays this out as the result of military conquests (supported by some god) of peoples living in the region they wished to occupy. In essense Israel's own historical claims to its land rest on acquisition through violence and piracy. Couple that with the eminent domain actions of the US and UK post WW2 in taking Palestinian land (land upon which most of the Semetic peoples have lived for 3500 years or so) and giving it to a group of chosen jews, and you discover that at the very root of the ongoing strife is the use of military might to sustain control over land taken from others. The expansionism of the Israelis, taking more and more of the former Palestianian lands as well as those belonging to other nations, all supported by the claim that they are protecting their nation, is further acts of eminent domain for the sole purpose of improving the material wealth of its citizens at the expense and suffering of others. It is nothing but piracy. Taking the homes and possessions of the Palestinians, removing people from their farms, expanding their territorial boundaries through military might, and so forth, is just the behavior of thugs and bullies, not of revered nation builders.

But many libertarians, for the most part, love and support Israel. It must be their neo-con, Straussian, Randian, objectivist interrelatednesses. It just baffles me how they can fight so hard against eminent domain and then turn around and reward it.