A peer is not an equal — for there are no equals — the peer is the one who appears in the public square, and by virtue of the public square, be it the polis of the streets or of the nets, and who appears as one who contributes, contests, collaborates, has a stake in the shared and made world precisely in her difference from others who also appear and associate in company. The ethos of politics, peer-to-peer, which is one and the same as the ethos of democratization, is always the interminable dynamic of equity-in-diversity*.

A treasure trove of political clarity to seriously think about:

“I. Wherever government is meant to be of by and for the people, to be anti-government always means to be against the people.

II. Whenever a right wing politician declares all government wasteful, criminal, and corrupt you should pay close attention, because he is announcing his plans.

III. Anti-tax zealots are the ones who think that civilization is the only free lunch.

IV. To declare that money is speech is to ensure that only money talks.

V. To declare that corporations are persons is to ensure that actual persons are serfs.

VI. One will never go far wrong when confronted by a self-described libertarian in America simply to assume that by this term they mean to say they are a Republican who wants to smoke pot or chew some hooker’s foot without fear of arrest.

VII. Gay Republicans are white guys for whom homophobia is experienced primarily as their heartbreaking exclusion from white-racist patriarchal capitalist privileges to which they feel themselves otherwise perfectly entitled.

VIII. “Free Market” ideologues always begin as a criminal conspiracy and always end as a suicide pact.

IX. Any “big-tent” organization big enough to accommodate right-wing ideology will soon be a big tent empty of almost anybody but right-wing zealots. Any conversational space that actively solicits contributions from right-wing voices will soon be a conversational space in which few but right-wing voices are heard.

X. However much they insist on their difference from conventional conservative politicians no American-style market libertarian argument will ever have any life in the actual world except to the extent that it is appropriated by conservatives for conservative ends.

XI. Staunchly “anti-war” market libertarians tend to be sublimely indifferent to the extent to which modern war-making is an essentially entrepreneurial activity.

XII. The only way to end modern wars is to make war-making unprofitable. It would be curious indeed to mistake free marketeers for allies in such a struggle.

XIII. Nobody who believes society to be a war of all against all will ever truly collaborate in the work to end all war.

XIV. Freedom is not a matter of making a selection from a menu provided by others.

XV. The difference between investment and speculation is the difference between a promise and a scheme.

XVI. Wherever the prose of pricing prevails the poetry of meaning is menaced.

XVII. It is curious the number of Republicans who claim to disdain vast corrupt soulless bureaucracies but who celebrate multinational corporations.

XVIII. The wealthiest one per cent of the world population seem to imagine themselves indispensable. One wishes they would test this article of faith by going away.

XIX. There is no such thing as a natural market.

XX. “Homo Economicus” is an altogether mythical being, and given that he would be a dangerous sociopath were he to exist this is a good thing, too. One need only turn one’s attention to the damage done by those entities in reality that come closest to incarnating the fiction of “Homo Economicus” — that is to say limited-liability corporations — to see the proof of this.

XXI. Those who begin in a declared belief in “spontaneous order” end in declaring orders they believe should be obeyed spontaneously — and immediately.

XXII. Those who would dismantle all democratic government and those who would demand good democratic government will point to many of the same instances of government abuse, corruption, malfeasance, and violence in making their separate cases, but it is only a fool who in noticing this would mistake them for allies.

XXIII. In a world in which we are all of us beholden to accomplishments and problems we are heir to but unequal to, as well as implicated in the facilitative and frustrating efforts of the diversity of peers with whom we share the world, it is delusive in the extreme to imagine oneself the singular author of one’s fortunes, whether good or ill. And so, only in a world in which the precarious are first insulated from the catastrophic consequences of ill-fortune in which we all play our parts can we then celebrate or even tolerate the spectacle in which the successful indulge in the copious consequences of good fortune in which we all, too, have played our parts.

XXIV. It is always magical thinking to declare an outcome need only be profitable for it to be possible.

XXV. Pre-emptive war adventuring is to legitimate defense as hyperbolic financial speculation is to substantial production. It is no accident that pre-emptive war would suffuse public discourse in an epoch of bubble-economics. War hysteria and irrational exuberance are kindred pathologies.

XXVI. Those who declare taxes to be theft either forget or fail to grasp that it is taxes that pay for the maintenance of those institutions on which legitimate claims of ownership or theft depend for their intelligibility and force in the first place.

XXVII. Taxes are not, however annoying they may seem, violations of our freedom so much as indispensable enablers of freedom — and hence they are a precondition for the constitution of the very experience of the “voluntary” on which notions of the involuntary depend in the first place.

XXVIII. Taxes properly pay for the administration of basic needs that ensures the scene of consent is non-duressed by deprivation, inequity, or insecurity. Those “libertarians” who declare whatever passes as a market outcome voluntary and nonviolent by definitional fiat — whatever the conditions of relative deprivation, inequity, insecurity, ignorance, or misinformation that duress its terms in fact — reveal themselves to be poor champions of an impoverished and profoundly uncivilized notion of “liberty.”

XXIX. Ours is a world so sensibly arranged that it is only the ones who could afford to pay for everything who are assured escape from paying for anything.

XXX. The pace at which the tidal forces of “supply and demand” and the “education via unprofitability of ignorance or error” and the “rationalization via capital flight of panics and bubbles” and comparable “market mechanisms” manage to compensate for disruptive events and bad information is too different from the pace at which metabolism is maintained in human bodies and life is lived in human history for these mechanisms to sustain those lives and that history in a human way, however wholesome they may be in their own inhuman term. Meanwhile, the assumption of infinite growth without which “market orders” could not be mobilized toward their indefinite ends in the first place is altogether too perilous to the actually-existing limits of ecosystems to sustain the planetary biosphere on which we all ultimately depend for our survival let alone flourishing. The life of the market is not curtailed by the end of your life, its pulse is not diminished in the cessation of your pulse, its time is unfolding at a pace aloof from your time, its ends are no more your ends than would be a glacier’s, it is indifferent to the differences that are your all.

XXXI. To those who say they would shrink government without end, who say they would deregulate enterprise without end, who say they would cut taxes without end, it must forcefully be said, in the end, that you cannot have a civilization and eat it too.

XXXII. “The free market” has no existence of its own, it has no substance, it has no historical, actual, or even logically-possible reference. Utterances offered up on its behalf have no more coherence than do utterances on behalf of godhead. And as with godliness whatever flesh, whatever reality market-fundamentalist assumptions and aspirations assume are carved into the broken bodies and invested in the distressed spirits of the ones made to bear the worldly weight of the lies of the faithful.

XXXIII. So long as Congress is filled with millionaires it will never represent the interests of an America filled with non-millionaires.

XXXIV. It should go without saying that it is perfectly possible to be a member of the Republican Party without being an idiot, a bigot, a hypocrite, and an asshole. But it must also be said that it is unfortunately no longer possible at all to be a member of the Republican Party without being at least one of these.

XXXV. Market fundamentalists are pickpockets who like to decry taxes as theft to distract you when their hands are in your pocket.

XXXVI. The Ayn Randian “objectivists” and the would-be Darwinian/Utilitarian market-rationalizers often like to fancy themselves atheists rather than the passionate wish-fulfillment fantasists they palpably are, just as social conservatives and theocratic Christianists often like to fancy themselves anti-materialist as they jockey ferociously for the biggest slices of material pie at hand. These ostensibly opposed factions are, of course, always only engaging in sectarian skirmishes within Movement Conservatism more generally over just which self-appointed priestly elite gets to rule the worldly toypile in the name of just which imaginary deity.

XXXVII. There has never once been an outcome attributed to the Invisible Hand of the Market in which the Heavy Hand of the State did not play an indispensable part, and in which some are not sure plausibly to discern the Hidden Hand of Conspiracy. “