The Isocracy Network

A Tibetan teacher, Chokyi Lodro, allegedly sanctioned harsh physical punishment for misbehaving monks. The original question was straightforward: if a figure regarded as enlightened engaged in behavior that appears immoral, how should Buddhists reconcile that? A discussion that followed, however, was anything but straightforward. Rather than engaging the question within a Buddhist framework, several participants pivoted to a familiar modern argument. They suggested that judging such behavior as "wrong" imposes Western moral standards onto a different culture. According to this line of thinking, moral judgments are culturally relative, and applying contemporary ethical standards to historical or non-Western contexts is a form of colonialism. One commenter explicitly framed criticism of Chokyi Lodro’s conduct as "Eurocentric chauvinism", arguing that we have no grounds to judge actions outside our own "lifeworld".

The following is heavily derived from two interviews on the podcast "Economics Explored" hosted by Gene Tully; namely "Rethinking Property and Taxation" and "The Pirate Party's Economic Platform". In those podcasts and in this article, the ideas of 19th-century economist Henry George are explored and elaborated, including his advocacy for a taxation on land values and an early version of Universal Basic Income. This is supplemented with a more contemporary concern with digital rights, which Henry George also explored through his concerns on patents and copyright. All of these ideas have contributed significantly in my roles in the Pirate Party Australia, the Secular Party, and the Fusion Party, which was established as a merger of the Science Party, Pirate Party, Secular Party, Vote Planet, and Climate Change Justice Party. In 2025, I stood as the candidate for the Fusion in the Federal seat of Bennelong.

Henry George, and the economics of Georgism, is a classical economic approach. Rather than just looking at money and growth rates, he also looked at economic classes, at political economy, like one finds with Adam Smith, David Ricardo, John Stuart Mill, and Karl Marx. His best-selling book from 1879, "Progress and Poverty", was concerned that with such technological progress, there was still so much poverty. George, following a position shared by other classical economists, placed much of the blame on the landlord class, broadly defined as those who derive income from rents without adding to production. This is different to the common term of "landlord" which means a person who rents out a house and land. For George and others, it meant the land value only. Henry George had a big influence in Australia and visited gaining many adherents to his message which still has relevance today with the many problems relating to our natural resources, whether we talk about capital gains tax discounts, negative gearing, mining royalties, and so forth; however you cut it, Georgists emphasise land value taxation (LVT). Another thing the Georgists make a very contribution to in Australia is pointing our our over-investment in land and the resulting property bubbles. George's influence can still be found in state-based land taxes, local councils that assess rates on unimproved site value, and even the building of Canberra.

On January 3, the United States launched a military strike in Venezuela and abducted incumbent Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, transporting them to New York to face "narcoterrorism" charges. However, Trump and his administration have made it very clear that the action was undertaken to secure access to Venezuelan oil; after all, the United States government has a long history of its own illicit supply of narcotics. The abduction followed a series of airstrikes against Venezuelan vessels in the Caribbean Sea and Eastern Pacific Ocean, seizure of oil tankers, and imposing sanctions on eight Venezuelan economic and security officials for their role in the "suppression and subversion of democracy"; this from the very President who pardoned the participants who stormed Capitol Hill on January 6, 2024.

Such behaviour is quite normal for the United States against Central and South America and the Caribbean. The United States engaged in a number of military interventions (Cuba, Panama, Honduras, Nicaragua, Mexico, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic) in the early 20th century to secure power for is businesses, actions known as "the Banana Wars" (Guerras bananeras), as nicknames by historian Lester D. Langley (e.g., "The United States and the Caribbean, 1900–1970" and "The Banana Wars: An Inner History of American Empire, 1900–1934"). This in turn would be followed by the United States Objectives and Programs for National Security, by Truman in 1950, and then Operation Condor, a horrific series of intelligence operations, coups, and assassinations of left-wings in South America that included the installation of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, and involved agents Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay. An expected 400,000 political prisoners resulted from the actions, along with approximately 80,000 people killed. A prime supporter and organiser of Operation Condor was Henry Kissinger:

"Kissinger helped to prolong the Vietnam War and expand that conflict into neutral Cambodia; facilitated genocides in Cambodia, East Timor, and Bangladesh; accelerated civil wars in southern Africa; and supported coups and death squads throughout Latin America. He had the blood of at least 3 million people on his hands, according to his biographer Greg Grandin."
-- Henry Kissinger Dies At 100

Libertarian social democracy and democratic socialism share a humane destination: a society where no one is crushed by poverty, concentrated power, or arbitrary domination. We diverge, however, on how to get there, what counts as freedom along the way, and where the journey ultimately ends.

Libertarian social democracy grows out of dialectical libertarianism. We judge institutions by whether they reduce domination and expand real freedom in the world we actually inhabit, not by whether they look “formally libertarian” on paper. This makes libertarian social democracy quite different from conventional libertarianism. That dialectical libertarian stance lets us back transitional, strategic government interventions when they loosen monopolies and dependencies. The aim is not a larger state; it’s a freer people. At most, the state is scaffolding, a temporary structure that can be used to dismantle hierarchy and make room for a voluntary, polycentric order.

Aaron Bastani’s Fully Automated Luxury Communism envisions a world in which technology liberates humanity from scarcity, with the state guaranteeing the basic material and social preconditions of a dignified life. At the core of this vision is Universal Basic Services (UBS) — the collective provision of essentials in the realm of housing, transport, education, healthcare, and information — offered free at the point of use. UBS, as Ian Gough argues, reflects the idea that human beings share universal needs which cannot be met solely through markets, and that certain foundational sectors — the “foundational economy” — must be organized around collective provision, not commodification.

While UBS addresses the distribution of life’s essentials, Modern Money Theory (MMT) and its policy instrument, the Federal Job Guarantee (FJG), focus on stabilizing employment and demand. The FJG, as outlined by Paul, Darity, and Hamilton, would establish a National Investment Employment Corps offering work to all adults at non-poverty wages, with full benefits and inflation-indexed pay. The program would act as a buffer stock of employed workers, expanding automatically during recessions and contracting during expansions — a macroeconomic stabilizer built on employment rather than unemployment.

The synthesis of UBS and FJG represents a natural and powerful convergence between two progressive frameworks: UBS secures the means of dignified living while FJG ensures the right to contribute meaningfully to society. Together, they form the backbone of a counter-cyclical and human-centered economic policy.

Kropotkin’s Vision
Peter Kropotkin, in The Conquest of Bread, argued that the products of nature and the accumulated knowledge of humanity rightly belong to everyone in common. He insisted that land, mines, and tools are not the creation of individuals but the products of nature or the result of collective labor over generations. Every invention, discovery, or machine embodies the combined genius of past and present humanity; “there is not even a thought, or an invention, which is not common property, born of the past and the present.” From this, Kropotkin concluded that “all belongs to all. All things are for all men, since all men have need of them.” His communist anarchism therefore rejected wages entirely, advocating instead a system of in-kind distribution to guarantee “the right to well-being: well-being for all.” Kropotkin’s critique of wages was direct: any system of remuneration by hours or labor notes perpetuates injustice and inequality. He insisted that services rendered to society “cannot be valued in money.” In his framework, true justice could only arise when access to necessities was guaranteed to all, without mediation by the wage system.

My philosophy of liberal-anarchism (or libertarian social democracy) consists of three insights: (1) communalist market-anarchism, the insight that social-anarchism and market-anarchism together are better than either of them are on their own — and this is particularly so with regard to the provision of law and law enforcement, (2) social-democratic anarchism, the insight that real-world anarchist municipalities (communes) are likely to develop liberal or social-democratic type institutions rather than communistic or capitalistic ones, and (3) dialectical libertarianism, the insight that what matters most in analyzing any policy is not whether or not it is formally libertarian but whether, within the context of the existing system, it tends to increase or decrease liberty — and, following from that insight, that policies that create within the existing system certain desirable features that resemble those that would arise naturally in a free society are to be preferred to “formally libertarian” policies that effectively take us further away from the ideal free (anarchist) society of our dreams.

Australia's former ambassador to China (2007-2011), APEC (2003-2005), and the World Trade Organisation (1998-2001), Geoff Raby, provides an entertaining and scholarly combination of personal stories, historical fact, and informed opinion on the dynamics of international relations in his book "Great Game On: The Contest for Central Asia and Global Supremacy". The title references the old "Great Game" between Russia and the UK over Central Asia in the 19th century, including the Russian invasion of some republics, the British invasion of Tibet, and the decline of the Qing dynasty in China. The basic question being addressed is whether China or Russia will become dominant in the Central Asian republics, sometimes referred to as "the 'stans", a reference to Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Turkmenistan (all former Soviet Republics), plus Afghanistan and the Chinese province of Xinjiang.

The subtitle of the books seems challenging: the idea that the contest between China and Russia over these republics could be a major part of a global contest for supremacy. But the opening chapters argue the case that the outcome in the 'stans will be a significant contribution to the outcome in the wider Eurasian context and all that follows, and for context, Rabey makes a significant point of outlining the fall of the US-supported regime in Afghanistan with similarities with their loss in the Vietnam War. As has been quipped (attributed to Norman Finklestein): "If you ever feel useless, remember it took 20 years, trillions of dollars and 4 US Presidents to replace the Taliban with the Taliban". Still, it even with Afghanistan in consideration, it is difficult to see how relative dominance in the central Asian republics will necessarily translate to Eurasian, let alone global, supremacy. Raby's argument hinges on opportunity costs: "Having achieved security in Eurasia, China can turn to project its prodigious power globally".

The historical divergence between the social anarchist (democratic confederalist) and the market-anarchist traditions has left a seemingly unbridgable chasm between two approaches to organizing a stateless society. The one side — represented by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Mikhail Bakunin, Peter Kropotkin, Murray Bookchin, and Abdullah Öcalan — emphasizes local autonomy and direct democracy. It proposes “to replace the police and the professional army with a popular militia — more specifically, a civic guard, composed of rotating patrols for police purposes and well-trained citizen military contingents for dealing with external dangers to freedom.”(Murray Bookchin, Libertarian Municipalism: The New Municipal Agenda) On the other side stand market-anarchists such as Gustave de Molinari, Benjamin Tucker, Murray Rothbard, David Friedman, and Morris and Linda Tannehill. These market-anarchists propose that a system of competitive private police could replace the government. While these schools of thought have often viewed one another with suspicion, I would like to propose a synthesis that I believe to be stronger than the position of either side on its own.

It is commonly held by right-libertarians that taxation is theft. In his book Why? The Purpose of the Universe, Philip Goff makes an interesting argument to the contrary. Goff asks whether taxation ought to be morally or legally considered theft. He ultimately concludes that right-libertarians are, in fact, incorrect in their assertion that taxation is theft.

The argument begins by distinguishing between legal and moral definitions of theft. While taxation is clearly legal, the moral argument hinges on whether individuals have a rightful moral claim to their gross (pre-tax) income.

“In addressing the question of whether taxation is theft, it is important to distinguish two senses of ‘theft’: legal and moral. In 18th-century North America, it was possible to ‘own’ a slave, in the legal sense of ownership. If someone deprived me of my slave in order to give that slave liberty, then this constituted ‘theft’ in the legal sense. But, of course, the laws underpinning slavery were morally abhorrent, and hence few these days would class liberating a slave as ‘theft’ in any moral sense. Conversely, we can have cases of moral theft that are not legal theft. The laws of Nazi Germany enabled the authorities to seize the property of Jews who had been deported; although strictly speaking legal, such actions constituted ‘theft’ in a moral sense.”(Philip Goff, Why? The Purpose of the Universe)