I got back today from Manhattan, where I met up with my good friend and colleague Professor Mohammad Abul Ahrar Ramizpoor, director of the Afghanistan Economic and Legal Studies Organization, for his first visit to the US. We had some very good meetings. He’s off to visit the Acton Institute and the Mackinac Center (with a weekend in Colorado), and then to Washington for more meetings with libertarian think tankers and researchers. I’m leaving in a few hours for Guatemala, to observe the Antigua Forum, which brings together practitioners of classical liberal reforms, then from there to Pakistan (not, unfortunately, a direct flight) for lectures and meetings sponsored by the Economic Freedom Network in Lahore, Islamabad, and Karachi, then by car to India to take part in the Freedom Caravan.

Brought to you by the good folks at Libertarianism.org

My opening remarks from the debate at Freedom Fest, Las Vegas, July 8, 2010: http://tomgpalmer.com/wp-content/uploads/FreedomFest-debate-on-the-state1.pdf

This question was posed by PolicyMic.com:

“I’m an American underwater in debt and with a stagnant income. Which group should I support: the Tea Party or Occupy Wall Street?”

I took one side, Peter Rothberg of The Nation the other. You can see the discussion here.

An excerpt from my talk to the John Locke Foundation in Raleigh, North Carolina. (Full presentation is available through the preceding link.)

Leonid Nikonov is a contributor to The Morality of Capitalism.

More information on the book and the associated project here.

In the course of reading to understand better the differences and the dispute between Voltaire and Rousseau, I read a truly wonderful book, The Philosophers’ Quarrel: Rousseau, Hume, and the Limits of Human Understanding. I cannot recommend this book too highly to those who are interested in intellectual history, not merely as the history of books, but as the history of intellects. It’s a great read and very, very rewarding.

Featuring Kim Chung Ho of the Korean Center for Free Enterprise:

Vasily Grossman in 1945

–Vasily Grossman, from his great novel Life and Fate

More on freedom:

“I used to think freedom was freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of conscience. But freedom is the whole life of everyone. Here is what it amounts to: you have to have the right to sow what you wish to, to make shoes or coats, to bake into bread the flour ground from the grain you have sown, and to sell it or not sell it as you wish; for the lathe operator, the steelworker, and the artist it’s a matter of being able to live as you wish and work as you wish and not as they order you to. And in our country there is no freedom – not for those who write books nor for those who sow grain nor for those who make shoes.” (Grossman, p. 99) He noted that “In people’s day-to-day struggle to live, in the extreme efforts workers put forth to earn an extra ruble through moonlighting, in the collective farmers’ battle for bread and potatoes as the one and only fruit of their labor, he [Ivan Grigoryevich] could sense more than the desire to live better, to fill one’s children’s stomachs and to clothe them. In the battle for the right to make shoes, to knit sweaters, in the struggle to plant what one wished, was manifested the natural, indestructible striving toward freedom inherent in human nature. He had seen this very same struggle in the people in camp. Freedom, it seemed, was immortal on both sides of the barbed wire.” (Grossman, p. 110)
– Vasily Grossman, Forever Flowing, trans. by Thomas P. Whitney (New York: Harper & Row, 1986)

A somewhat oddly disjointed “debate” on the morality of profits and state entitlements…..The Morality of Entitlements

Pass it on, friends!

“The Structure of the Libertarian Argument and Liberty as a Worldwide Phenomenon” with Tom Palmer, 05/04/2011 from Students For Liberty on Vimeo.

The first short introduction of the speaker, Gurcharan Das from India, is in Arabic, but the rest is in English, with Arabic translation. Gurcharan Das is the former CEO of Procter and Gamble India, chairman of the libertarian Centre for Civil Society, and author of the outstanding books India Unbound and The Difficulty of Being Good: On the Subtle Art of Dharma. Dr. Nouh El Harmouzi (who introduces him and translates) is director and editor of Minbaralhurriyya.org and author of the just released book Le sous-développement dans le monde arabo-musulman: Quel est le rôle des institutions informelles?

From the good folks at the Institute for Justice.

A. Barton Hinkle asks some very smart questions in his newspaper column “Debates of 2010 Raised More Questions.”

Treating the failure to take someone’s money away from him as if it were the same as giving money to him is a very funny way to talk. By contrast, we would never say that a childless couple had “given a child” to a family of four, simply because the childless couple did not kidnap one of the children from the other family. The liberal Democratic penchant for describing tax cuts as giveaways discloses an assumption: that people, especially rich people, have no right to their money to begin with. In fact, it is not really theirs. After all, you cannot give something to someone who already owns it.

I wish more newspaper columnists could write so clearly.

I address some of the issues and questions he raises in my essay “Saving Rights Theory from Its Friends,”* which is downloadable here and is also reprinted in Realizing Freedom: Libertarian Theory, History, and Practice.

*Reprinted from Individual Rights Reconsidered: Are the Truths of the U.S. Declaration of Independence Lasting?, edited by Tibor R. Machan, with the permission of the publisher, Hoover Institution Press. Copyright 2001 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University.

Some countries don’t allow it internally; almost no country allows true freedom of movement externally (passports are required). Most people don’t think about it, but the US has essentially required the internal passport over the past few years, as you can now be required to provide identification whenever it is demanded by a state official and in order to get on an airplane or a train you are now required to show, or be prepared to show, a “government-issued ID.” A good book to read to understand the positive benefits and the overuse of identification is Identity Crisis: How Identification is Overused and Misunderstood, by James Harper.

The Central Asian Free Market Institute, based in Bishkek, but active throughout Central Asia, has called for elimination of the propiska, or internal passport and residency permit. (China still has the same system, known as the hukou system, and Chinese libertarians are working to eliminate that, as well. It has been described as “China’s own apartheid system.”)

Text follows: link to English text here.

Elimination of Propiska for freedom of movement in Kyrgyzstan

Central Asian Free Market Institute offers its recommendations on reforming Kyrgyztan’s policy on internal migration. The current article is part of “Kyrgyzstan’s Reform Program” that was prepared by CAFMI. For all questions on this chapter and the reform program please contact the Institute.

VISION: Right of a person to free movement and choice of place of residence within a country is defined not only in natural rights of person, but also in the Constitution of Kyrgyz Republic.

PROBLEM: The registration regime, known as propiska in Kyrgyzstan and other post-Soviet countries, exposes Kyrgyzstan’s population, in particular the poor segment, to myriad difficulties. The propiska was introduced in the USSR in 1932 for the following reasons, “Accounting for population of cities, worker settlements and new buildings and unloading cities from persons not engaged in socially useful labor, as well as removal of kulaks, criminals and other antisocial elements in order to strengthen dictatorship of proletariat”.

Although Kyrgyzstan has been an independent country for 19 years now, the propiska still exists, and the political leadership seems uninterested in revisiting one of the sorest problems facing the country. According to propiska’s requirements a citizen who changed his place of residence, shall, within 10 working days from date of arrival to a new residence register with government authorities. For this purpose, one has to present:

1. passport or equivalent document proving one’s identity;
2. accommodation document, which is the basis for accommodation of a citizen (such as an order, rent contract or a statement of landlord or other document), or a certified copy of the document;
3. reference from chairman of local housing district, confirming place of residence with a street and house number;
4. proof of change of residence, in case of prior disposal of registration;
5. certificate, proving release from prison;
6. for male youth- military card (certificate of registration in draft office) with a note about removal from military account

Losses from propiska are hard to calculate in monetary terms, however, they are high and can be grouped in the following two categories:

I. Visible costs of citizen

1.1. Fiscal losses. Costs from state budget for the administration and enforcement of the propiska. These costs also includes expenses for police conducting raids named “illegal” with the aim of detention of people without a local propiska.

1.2. Individual losses. To change place of propiska one must incur real costs- the cost of a trip to home village / town and back and the time and cost of un-registering and then re-registering. This entire process requires up to six documents and.

II. Invisible costs of a citizen

2.1. Missed opportunities for citizens for a better life by making public services inaccessible without a propiska: legal system, education, health care, opportunities to register a company and to acquire and dispose of real estate.

2.2. Losses from detention:. Each detained person for lack of a local propiska incurred the following types of losses- the loss of time during the detention, the amount of fines or bribes one had to pay in order to be released, and other associated risks, such as beating and harassment.

2.3. Propiska has become a hotbed of corruption, which thrives on the despair of the poorest of the poor. According to research 56% of those arrested, get away with bribes. At the same time, 26% of those arrested, were physically attacked. According to research by Social Research Center at the American University of Central Asia, migrants with lower income are also more likely to have their documents checked and detained.

2.4. Not everyone is ready to pay the expenses to obtain a propiska and those without it experience lower quality of life, social stability and increased illiteracy, thus, pushing them to criminal activities.

SOLUTION

The system of registration like that in Kyrgyzstan is not only outdated but not used anywhere, except in some post-communist and communist states. In countries such as England, France, Germany, Italy, USA and Brazil propiska does not exist. Russia and China do have a propiska but are looking at abolishing it. Georgia, Latvia and Estonia have long ago understood the economic and moral benefits of free movement of citizens and eliminated propiska.

In some countries utility bills are used for confirming people’s residence. In Greece residence is determined by the workplace, while in Italy according to the individual’s own will. In Brazil, the state is interested in the citizens place of residence only at the time of tax collection or at the point of opening of their business. The United States operates an electronic system of registration of citizens, where each citizen has the right to receive information stored on him/her and has the right to correct it.

Kyrgyzstan should not repeat the mistakes of Russia and Belarus, in which registration system was replaced with a bit more simplified registration system but the problems arising from root cause remain intact. It is necessary to follow in the footsteps of developed countries, which remain true to the cause of freedom of movement and abolish propiska.

RESULT

By abolishing the propiska, Kyrgyzstan’s government would ensure:

* => Fulfillment of all international and constitutional norms that call for respect of the rights of citizens to freedom of movement within the country;
* => Labor mobility, which is an essential tool of modern economics;
* => Stopping discrimination of immigrants in regards to private and public services;
* => Maximum integration of citizens across regions;

Save citizens’ time and money that can be directed to other activities that bring concrete value to their living standard.

Author: Central Asian Free Market Institute