Skhumbuzo Mhlongo publicly set himself on fire and then committed suicide last week after a government official tore up the ID papers he needed to start his new job at a bird seed factory. He had been trying to get those legally required papers for years.

The 22 year old committed suicide after being refused the identity documents he needed to start a job on Monday.

In his suicide note, Mr Mhlongo explained how an official had torn up his ID application, calling him a foreigner.

The minister said she suspected an official had expected a bribe.

The BBC’s Pumza Fihlani in Johannesburg says the Department of Home Affairs has come under heavy criticism over the years for its inefficiency in issuing ID documents, birth certificates and passports, with some people claiming to have waited up to four years.

She points out it would be even more difficult to obtain the documents if you have no parents to vouch for your identity.

Mr Mhlongo, who was buried in Hillcrest near Durban in Kwa-Zulu Natal Province, had been due to start the new job at a factory which manufactures bird food on Monday.

Mr Mamoepa said the Department of Social Development assisted the family with the burial arrangements. Mr Mhlongo had been raised by his mother, who disappeared in 2000, leaving him to care for his younger siblings.

He had apparently been trying to get an ID card for some time without any luck and had been told to bring someone who could vouch for his nationality.But the official did not believe that the man he brought along was his father, tore up Mr Mhlongo’s papers and called him a “kwere-kwere” - a derogatory term used for foreign nationals.

He apparently left the suicide note before hanging himself.

BBC News

Little, nagging, piecemeal government regulations and state bureaucracy quietly erode opportunity and slowly destroy lives. The world’s poor bear a heavy burden. It’s rare that the tragedy of this quiet tyranny is so vividly tangible. And we forget too often.

Leftism vs. Right-wingers, and the stupidity of every political “spectrum”

What plagues humanity is the staying power of bad ideas. Concepts that are logically irrational or nonsensical can stick around in popular thought indefinitely if the social psychological conditions remain in place. The “left” versus “right” dichotomy is one such concept – one that is both irrational and nonsensical, yet pervasive. It’s how many people talk about “politics” and it is completely stupid.

Consider the most basic point: what exactly is “left” and what exactly is “right?” Dictionaries tend to only offer for definition, for instance, that leftism means “the principles and views of the left” whereas rightism means “the principles and views of the right.” They do not usually specify what those “principles and views” are, and for good reason: there are no such ‘principles and views,’ there are none that are necessarily right-wing but not leftist or viceversa.

The terms are largely arbitrary. They can mean anything or nothing, and often do. What is “left” to you may be “right” to me, or to my grandpa, or to a person in another state or country or in a different language.

Adolf Hitler and his National Socialist German Workers’ Party (“Nazis”) are often cited as an example of the “extreme right-wing,” but they are also less often cited as an example of the “extreme leftism.” Self-identified leftists may refer to Josef Stalin and his Communist Party as “right-wing,” yet he is more usually put forward as an exemplar of “extreme leftism” by others. You can’t even get the extremes clearly defined…

At the root of this confusion is the very concept of an aggregated, one-dimensional left-right spectrum of positions itself. It is inanely childish, an oversimplification to the point of being worse than nothing. (Worse because it creates artificial division, confusion, groupthink, etc.) If it were an accurate representation of the differences between human positions on the sociopolitical world, imagine the epiphanic moment of its discovery: “My God! A line!”

Various political scientists have attempted to refine the concept into a form that actually means something. MIT political scientist David Nolan popularized the so-called Nolan Chart, where economic and civil liberty are the two axes and left-right is the diagonal:

This Nolan Chart is less stupid, but it’s still stupid because actual sociopolitical positions (statist, libertarian, socialist, etc.) exist on different levels of complexity and what all “political spectrum” visualizations miss, among other things, is importantly the matching of means to ends. Two people may want the same ends, but argue different means to those ends as logically optimal. A simple graphing of means to the same ends is not a question of personal position or identity, but one of communication, evidence, and logic. To adhere to some means to an end based on some attraction to the means other than its likelihood of bringing about the ends is irrational.

Furthermore, of course, people have differently prioritized ends, which are not aggregatable as Kenneth Arrow won a Nobel prize for demonstrating… and this is assuming “left” or “right” really even are positions, as opposed to

• geocultural background (I grew up a small town in the South, naturally I’m a conservative) or
• aspirations of social identity (I want to show people I’m a cultured urbanite so I’m man of the left) or 
• personal identity or emotive labeling (I care about people. I feel I’m of the left, it’s part of who I am) or
• a perceived general attitude about the world (I’m for America, I’m a patriot, I’m of the right)

or various other things unrelated to the actual substance of the positions. With regards to the substance of sociopolitical positions, political spectra in general and the “left” vs. “right” dichotomy in particular are non-concepts. They add absolutely nothing to the discussion. They distract and confuse everything, turning a means-ends discussion into a signalling battle of personal identities and group loyalties… and in a perfect world they would have been abandoned long ago.

Leftism and rightism are not positions at all and, even if they were, a one-dimensional line would not be a sensible way to compare them. Alas, “left vs. right” persists in popular thought and discourse to detriment of critical thinking.

(As I’ve said here before, “capitalism” is a broken word and I avoid it for that reason and think most everyone else should too. However I am not an anti-capitalist and I argue that what most people call anti-capitalism is irrational and counterproductive.)

So who is anti-capitalism?

Quick answer: people who are in favor of increasing state-forced redistribution of wealth.  …But what kind of people tend to be in favor this?

Well, the sociologist James Lindgren, currently professor at Northwestern University, has a forthcoming article that comprehensively reviews all the evidence on exactly that question: “What Drives Views on Government Redistribution and Anti-capitalism?”

Inter alia, people who are anti-capitalism and pro-government redistribution are:

• less educated
• less likely to give anything to charity
• less likely to engage in altruistic behavior
• less likely to support free speech
• more racist
• more intolerant of gays
• more intolerant of atheists
• more angry, revengeful, and pessimistic

To quote Lindgren’s conclusion [emphasis mine]:

Those who support capitalism and freer markets and oppose greater income redistribution tend to be better educated, to have higher family incomes, to be less traditionally racist, and to be less intolerant of unpopular groups. Those who oppose greater redistribution also tend to be more generous in donating to charities and more likely to engage in some other altruistic behavior.

These sociological statistics are not themselves arguments for free markets (“capitalism”) or against statist redistribution, however they do give plausible insight into the social psychological motivations of anti-capitalists. And they’re interesting!

The poor resist the wonderful plans we think up for them because they do not share our faith that those plans work, or work as well as we claim. We shouldn’t forget, too, that other things may be more important in their lives than food…

This could explain why they focus on the here and now, on living their lives as pleasantly as possible and celebrating when occasion demands it.

We asked [poor African man] Oucha Mbarbk what he would do if he had more money. He said he would buy more food. Then we asked him what he would do if he had even more money. He said he would buy better-tasting food. We were starting to feel very bad for him and his family, when we noticed the TV and other high-tech gadgets. Why had he bought all these things if he felt the family did not have enough to eat? He laughed, and said, “Oh, but television is more important than food!”

~ Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo (directors of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab at MIT). Read their whole article in Foreign Policy magazine here.

A Jewish settler vs. Israeli forces. Imagine if this whole Israel-Palestine issue had been less statist, and more private sales and voluntary, face-to-face bargaining … like Gandhi suggested:

A word to the Jews in Palestine. 

I have no doubt that they are going about it in the wrong way. The Israel of Biblical conception is not a geographical tract - it is in their hearts. But if they must look to the geography for their national home, it is wrong to enter it under the shadow of the British government’s guns. A religious act cannot be performed with the aid of bombs. They can settle in Palestine only by the goodwill of the Arabs living there. There are hundreds of ways of reasoning with the Arabs, if they will only discard the help of the bayonet. … Let the Jews prove their title by choosing the way of non-violence for vindicating their position on earth. Every country is their home, including Palestine, but not by aggression.

— Mahatma Gandhi

(via missdaisyvo-deactivated20110517)

America is nothing. Without its ideals, its commitment to the freedom of all men, America is a piece of trash. A nation is nothing. A flag is a mere piece of cloth.

~ Captain America, Marvel #44: What If? (1977)

I want to say something simple here. I am a libertarian anti-statist from New Zealand. I am opposed to nation-states, including the American one. Nation-state “governments” are unnecessary for and destructive to human well-being. However, three further points must be made.

1. Not all nation-states have been equally destructive
2. No nation-state is monolithically destructive
3. The nation-state “government” ≠ the people, or the idea, or the nation

People (like Noam Chomsky and many self-identified leftists and libertarians) are often positively anti-American. Anti-Americanism is not anti-statism. Anti-Americanism is a kind of fantasy, a narrative that presents the American nation-state as an especially and monolithically destructive force in international history. And often this becomes a moralizing attack on American ideals, the American nation, or the American people. This is wrongheaded.

The American government has not been a unique source of evil among nation-states. Unfortunately, much “anti-war” sentiment is based on this silly anti-American notion. That is why Christopher Hitchens was so effective in his debates against moralizing anti-war leftists (as opposed to economizing anti-war libertarians).

My final point is this: America is primarily an idea, and secondly a group of people with a national culture, and thirdly a geographic area. None of these things need be opposed and indeed there are beautiful things in the American idea. There is a stubborn notion of individual freedom going back to before the Declaration of Independence, to colonial and pre-colonial history. Rothbard explored America’s libertarian foundations in the 4-volume history Conceived in Liberty.

We should not confuse ourselves. The American government (like all nation-states) is obsolete. America is not.

Doesn’t matter what the politicians or the mobs say. Doesn’t matter if the whole country decides that something wrong is something right. This nation was founded on one principle above all else: the requirement that we stand up for what we believe, no matter the odds or the consequences. When the mob and the press and the whole world tell you to move, your job is to plant yourself like a tree beside the river of truth, and tell the whole world - “No, you move.”

~ Captain America, Marvel ASM #537 (1999)