ATLANTICA WATCH:

Molly would like to direct her readers to a website devoted to the blocking of 'Atlantica', the proposed business friendly "free trade zone" encompassing the New England states and Atlantic Canada. Why should you oppose this project ? What can you do ? The answers are are here at Atlantica Watch. Molly would also like to take this opportunity to expand on her reply to a previous critic who asked her "what do you propose for Atlantic development ?". Molly essentially replied "nothing". Now Molly would like to expand this to "less than nothing".

Both the left and the right in our society are under the delusion that "doing something" is always the best course of action. In medicine, veterinary or human, this may actually be the worst way to proceed. The saving grace of so-called "alternative medicine" is that it is usually an effort expending and expensive way of doing exactly that -nothing. Homeopathic medicine is the ultimate. You can't do any harm with distilled water unless you are under the primitive illusion that dropping it into ears will make an ear infection "better" rather than the common sense observation that it makes it worse. Molly has had hundreds of occasions where she has advised animal owners to do exactly nothing because any attempt to fix a "problem" will result in a far worse problem. The term in medicine is called iatrogenic disease.

The problem is that both left wing and right wing ideologues have not the slightest clue that their efforts to "correct a problem" can either make the original problem worse or substitute a much more grievous problem for the original. thus, Molly proposed in her reply to the original critic that perhaps it is a good idea to not throw good money after bad by giving out more corporate subsidies. But molly is an anarchist, a mutualist by a more exact definition.

So therefore I'd like to propose doing less than the nothing that I originally said. Don't just refuse further taxpayer money to the latest pigs at the trough. Roll back the subsidies that are presently given to business not just in the Atlantic provinces but everywhere else. This is merely a "first step" in a necessary reform of how we agree to be robbed so that the rich may profit. It is hardly the full program of a mutualist way of reform, but it is a necessary first step. Many of the state programs involve "transfers" of money from one group to another. A gradual mutualist alternative would attack the transfers to the rich first while avoiding attacking transfers to less wealthy citizens. At the same time it would try and build upon cooperative alternatives to such "social justice" functions of the state. But such alternatives are the matter of yet another post.

For now all that I can say is that I advocate not just "nothing" in terms of government give-aways to business ala Atlantica. I advocate "less than nothing" in that I think previous market distorting free money should cease to flow.

More later,

Molly