A Critique of Kevin Carson's Contract Feudalism
Paul Marks's A Critique of a Critique: An Examination of Kevin Carson's Contract Feudalism, published in the Libertarian Alliance's Economic Notes No. 108, is, to my mind, a brilliant, solid, and interesting analysis of Kevin Carson's Contract Feudalism: A Critique of Employer Power over Employees.
Comments (80)
I've read Carson's "Studies in Mutualist Political Economy", and his arguments are much better paid out there.
In a nutshell:
Land - Land is "artificially scarce" because governmental authorities have given vast land grants, mining rights, timber rights, etc. to members of the political elite. If that land wasn't illegally expropriated by the government in the first place, more land would be available for homesteading.
Capital - Capital is "artificially scarce" because the government controls the money supply. Capital is dangerously misallocated towards the well-connected, often into unproductive or less productive venues. If there was true "free market money", capital would be spread out much more evenly.
Labor - Labor is "artifically abundant" because of the artificial scarcities in the other two categories: artificially-scarce land caused would-be rurual people to flood the cities, driving down the cost of wages. the artifically-scarce capital has prevented members of the lower and middle classes from having enough access to capital to start their own enterprises or co-ops.
According to Carson, Government policies have artifically expanded the industrial labor pool so dramatically that employers have undue leverage on their employees.
Reading his work, I tried to pick apart pieces of his logic, and it's pretty sound. The only flaw I found was his opposition to "absentee landlordism" in classic Tickerite fashion.
Published: June 21, 2007 11:11 AM
In addition, I thought Paul Marks' critique was overly simplistic.
For instance, Marks claimed that interest rates are determined by time preference, and time preference alone. While time preference is a major factor going in to what interest rates are, it is not the only factor. The supply of available capital also plays a factor -- the smaller it is, the higher the rate would be (plus time preference).
Published: June 21, 2007 11:19 AM
Nick_Bradley: Kevin_Carson has forced me to better refine my position. But there are serious problems I have with the reasoning you've posted (and is a good summary of Kevin_Carson):
Land: Let's assume for a moment, he's right, and land is kept artificially scarce. Now, assume we remove these artificial scarcities and fast-foward 500 years (or whatever) in terms of population growth. Because more land has been made available, but there are more people, land -- on this free market -- still appears just as scarce it does today. Can he still blame artificial scarcity for labor's woes? No, even though it's a free market. His claim amounts to "Land is kept as scarce today as it would be in a free market in 500 years".
(Incidentally, this is why I don't attribute problems fundamentally to land being held out of use. It's far more important that free market exist to make use of whatever land exist, whatever the reason its current quantity exists.)
Capital: This complaint I've always found truly bizarre, for one reason: *look at the interest rates that actually prevail*!! If you look at the interest rate you get on risk-free, tax-free loans, it's about 1% (4% before inflation). I can't say much more: it strains credulity to claim that labor is poor because it has to pay 1% real for access to capital.
Of course, labor actually pays a lot more: but this isn't an issue of capital scarcity, it's because they pose higher default risk than government bonds. Contrary to what Carson says, you're free to form co-ops that make loans.
I also dispute the impact: why is cheap capital good for labor? It seems that the higher you get from loaning your money, the earlier you can retire, and the more bargaining power you have.
Published: June 21, 2007 11:27 AM
Good Comments Person.
On land - How would you go about correcting the artificial land scarcities? Is it even possible? How do you "undo" the Enclosure Movement of Land in England? If it was possible, with (1) all government -owned land is returned back to the commons where it can be privatized by the first user and(2) ill-gotten land holdings are returned to their rightful owner, labor's leverage would greatly increase.
On Capital - I don't think its necessarily the interest rates, but access to capital. I don't think you can deny that our current monetary system funnels money to those already connected, to those already at the top. If such capital wasn't being allocated to the connected, it would flow elsewhere. Furthermore, I don't think anybody can get a 4% loan in the US. Loans are much higher than savings. Interest rates are a result of time preference and the availability of capital, not one or the other.
** In Carson's other writings, co-ops and free communities could make their own money, non-inflationary money.
Don't get me wrong, I don't think Carson's completely "on the money". I think he's closer to the truth on Land and other forms of capital subsidization than on banking.
One point not mentioned is the subsidization of energy and capital-intensive industry. Clearly, mechanization reduces the demand for labor. What do you call it when the gov't subsidizes capital-intensive activities, but taxes labor-intensive activities with payroll taxes?
Published: June 21, 2007 12:53 PM
Since I haven't read much of Carson, I am curious, what does he believe is "free market" or ideal money?
Published: June 21, 2007 1:26 PM
Dennis,
Anything from scrip to gold. He's also brought up the idea of labor-hour credits issued by the union, but I think that's lame.
Basically, he believes that any money system that is 100% voluntary is free-market.
Check out his blog at mutualist.blogspot.com
Published: June 21, 2007 2:58 PM
It seems rather anachronistic to be so focused on land (Arnold Kling is not exactly talking about that but close enough here). Not every country had enclosure movements (the United States, for example, had a wide frontier and homesteading acts), but hundreds of farmers still flocked to the cities in the 19th and 20th centuries (it is only recently this has begun to reverse) because they preferred it (the industrial revolution meant that's where the money was) rather than because they were driven out. There is still a lot of cheap land in the United States (in the big empty states), but people don't move there because the location of the land is important. Land in cities is worth a lot because of all the economic activity there. There is a lot of opportunity cost to letting some old retiree take up space there.
One thing I agree with him Tucker didn't put as much emphasis on. The real money today in America is not in agriculture, mining, lumber or other natural-resources. It is in fields with intellectual property.
I heavily disagree with Carson on how credit would be if government were not privileging some. Thomas Sowell's study of middlemen minorities (a chapter of which I have hosted here) shows that the familiar phenomenon emerges again and again, even among allied prisoners in German camps during WW2. Even there people who benefited from credit providers viewed them as parasites who couldn't understand how they could obtain so much wealth (in the form of cigarettes, jam, candy bars and other stuff the Geneva Conventions allowed to be sent to them) legitimately. If classical economics says interest or profits should go to zero, that doesn't necessarily mean it is government preventing that from happening.
Carson claims small enterprises and co-ops are far more efficient, but that doesn't seem very credible to me. If they were, greedy capitalists who are already privileged due to stolen wealth and the "subsidy of history", could create co-ops and simply make their employees contractually agree to give them a share of the profits, but to organize and run their business as they see fit. We don't see this happening for the obvious reason that they aren't more profitable. Carson has argued that government provision of roads is a subsidy to distant producers that harms small local firms, but The Myth of Natural Monopoly states that there were already private roads before government horned in, and others like Walter Block have documented what a poor job the government does in providing them. Roads clearly provide a benefit so I would expect them to pop up eventually. Diminishing transportation costs and decreasing relevance of physical distance (just think of advances in communication) are how things are going.
Published: June 21, 2007 4:30 PM
Although I wrote the article people here may have the advantage on me (as I wrote it six months ago and have been too lazy to read it again carefully).
As for what has been said here.
Land - sounds a bit like Henry George (although George might not have been fond of the homesteading bit).
Actually the Feds were rather supportive of homesteading - for example the Act that President Lincoln supported.
It led to small farms in areas that were not really suited for them (grass to dust via the farmer).
However, even if you do split the land up do you prevent people selling these "homesteads"? If you do (as some governments have) does that not make them "private property" in name only? And if you do not then the evil "concentration of land ownership" appears again (because people vary - they do not all the act the same way).
Various Latin American countries have tried the land reform game again and again (with different rules in different countries and at different times), it is a mess.
People do not tend to invest in or look after land (forests, rivers and so on) that they either do not own or may well be taken away from them in the next land reform. As for the small plots handed out to individual peasants or to peasant communities (like those of the Mirs in Russia in the late 19th century or those in Mexico after the 1917 Revolution) I think what the record on them is clear enough.
Actually I would rather like a "land reform" of my own (not really of my own of course - lots of other people have suggested it). The Feds to sell off the one third of the United States they claim to own (plus the interstate road network), that would provide some money to try and soften what is going to hit the old and the sick when such things as Social Security and Medicare (and Medicaid and the rest of the Welfare State) finally have to be rolled back a bit (unless they just collapse).
Capital.
Is this "we need more money at lower interest rates" line?
If it is we are in boom-bust land (where we all are anyway). Actually governments are wildly friendly to trying to increast the amount of money lent out at lower interest rates. Of course Mr Carson could say "they do it via the capitalist banks" (and other such) rather than just printing money and handing it out (as Major D. wanted), but printing money and handing it out would not have good long term results either.
Interest Rates.
I hope I said that interest rates should be a matter of time preference (not that they always were). Of course, in reality, lots of really clever people find lots of clever ways to try and reduce interest rates (my generation of Englishman does not use the word "clever" as a complement).
Labor.
Life is a bitch (you can translate that into technical langauage about scarce resources and other such if you wish), I know that as well as Mr Carson does (we can swap stories about how we and our families have suffered in X, Y, Z, ways). The difference between us is that Mr Carson thinks that life would be less of a bitch if the employers were hit in various ways and I think it would be even more of a bitch if they were.
Indeed I think life would be a bit less of a bitch if the various existing taxes and regulations on people (whether they are employers or employees - or both, as some people are) were removed.
Perhaps Mr Carson is correct and if the various taxes (and the government spending that goes with them) and the various regulations were removed a lot more of us would be self employed. But this is not quite how his argument is always presented.
Published: June 21, 2007 8:16 PM
I've got to take the time to digest the articles before I really comment, but so I don't miss the boat I'll just reply to some of the earlier points raised above.
Person, for your main point to apply, two conditions have to be met. There must be a Malthusian logic, so that constraints really would develop. And, other things would have to remain equal, i.e. there may not be institutions put in to head off land shortages developing - that is, you cannot stop the problem coming back.
Some people don't really believe that Malthusian constraints can come up, because they think we can always improve productivity faster than we constrain resources. Me, I don't believe that. But on the second issue, I do believe that we can put in soft-landing institutions. So, while I agree that reform would only buy time and not be a real solution, I think that that time really could be put to good use and - as part of a package - get rid of a problem area, engineer it out. (Archaic and classical Greek history is very relevant here. One of the islands off Sicily headed off the land problem indefinitely by making land distribution continue. Or look at the Old Testament law on holding land and passing it down the generations, or google Meir Kohn's research on mediaeval financing.)
Nick Bradley, I don't think you have to use the buying of time for an all-or-nothing fix. You can do enough incrementally, over time, to head off trouble. And I think you may be oversimplifying Carson too. But I'll hold off on these matters until I've digested the original stuff.
TGGP, the USA did have some enclosure (privatising of commons). Henry George actually mentions some in New York, though I don't have a reference to hand. And farmers did have outside pressures forcing them off the land, though these were not always directly in the form of losing land. Even so, that did happen, largely because they were conned into taking up small and underfunded packets of land in the first place, then ended up too heavily mortgaged to continue over generations. Most flight from the land was thus in the form of not taking on land from one's ancestors, attrition not abandoning land as such. Sovereign risk drove out people who put together viably large landholdings with adequate finance, since these people nearly always had to be foreigners. See the career of Sir Horace Plunkett (KC, you should read up on him), Trollope on North America, or indeed the range war back story of Billy the Kid.
Oh, and while handling land separately from capital is indeed archaic, that's only because we are now in an environment where all land has indeed been taken up and made into a transaction commodity as well as a resource. If we are not simply analysing how things work now but comparing and contrasting with the past and with other possible environments, we shouldn't subsume land under capital. If we do, we build in the answer that today's range of options is the only possible range.
Published: June 21, 2007 11:54 PM
Paul Marks - sorry, but I didn't have that post of yours in time to address it in my post just there. I'll fold it into my later feedback.
Published: June 21, 2007 11:57 PM
P.M.Lawrence wrote: "Oh, and while handling land separately from capital is indeed archaic, that's only because we are now in an environment where all land has indeed been taken up and made into a transaction commodity as well as a resource. If we are not simply analysing how things work now but comparing and contrasting with the past and with other possible environments, we shouldn't subsume land under capital. If we do, we build in the answer that today's range of options is the only possible range."
Mr. Lawrence, this is a most excellent observation. Thank you.
Published: June 22, 2007 9:12 AM
I feel the Austrian view is that time preference
is what determines the available capital.Someone correct me if Im wrong.
Published: June 22, 2007 11:18 AM
The word "mutualism" reminds me of some of the 19th century French anarchists (no doubt Mr Carson has read them).
I have no objection to such communal activity as long as it is voluntary. Although the record of such coperatives is often poor (and not just in farming - cooperative marketing and other such among private farmers is one thing, cooperative farming itself is very different).
Oddly enough Kettering Northamptonshire (my home town - where I am typing this) used to have a strong cooperative (retail) movement. There is still a coop store - but the local coop department store and some of the local branch coops are gone.
However, this is not as bad as the small town of Desborough (a couple of miles from Kettering) the retail market was dominated by the cooperative movement there and then the stores just closed (in spite of rising population), the local people were really hit by the "caring, shareing coop" there was some sort of political dispute within the structure of the movement (which is quite likely in an organization of this type).
One can only hope that some other stores move into the market.
Still the bottom line is that I have no objection to either retail or production coops - as long as they are voluntary and operate under the same rules as everyone else.
Published: June 22, 2007 12:35 PM
It is quite an interesting coincidence that this blog entry appears just above the one discussing the Amish.
Published: June 22, 2007 12:49 PM
Paul Marks wrote:
"I have no objection to such communal activity as long as it is voluntary. Although the record of such coperatives is often poor."
Carson's point is that without privilege, capital would no longer be able to command labor as labor would get it's full product.
Under that type of system, where labor would own the means of production and put it to use with their own labor - people would act cooperatively for their mutual benefit based on reciprocity.
Published: June 23, 2007 5:42 AM
Hi BG, you like to post here too, do you?!
What do you mean by "command"? Issue orders? If so, why would the fact that "labour gets its full product" make any difference? And what is labour's "full product" anyway? I worked in Burger King, once, making three or four burgers a minute, but I'll be damned if I want a pile of hundreds of burgers at the end of my working day!
Why would labour universally own the means of production? What if a labour force in a particular factory couldn't generate enough capital to run an enterprise? Would they have to admit other workers just to increase the capital stock? That would mean an over supply of labour, and lower returns to all of them. Surely they would just borrow capital or try to encourage people to invest in their enterprise.
Arrr Geee
Published: June 23, 2007 6:31 AM
Paul Marks is incredibly ignorant. Just one example: he states that the position on land sounds like Henry George, but then questions whether he would have supported the homesteading aspect. Anybody who has honestly read and understood the three primary libertarian philisophies on land - the Lockeans, the Georgists and the Mutualist- know that they all largely agree on the homesteading principle but start to diverge (to varying extents) on transfer, absenteeism, unused but still owned land,... ect.
Before you critque a postion, at least understand it as much as possible...Instead of attacking it ad hoc because you "don't like it."
Published: June 23, 2007 3:18 PM
Bob: "Anybody who has honestly read and understood the three primary libertarian philisophies on land - the Lockeans, the Georgists and the Mutualist- know that they all largely agree on the homesteading principle but start to diverge (to varying extents) on transfer, absenteeism, unused but still owned land,... ect."
I do not believe Georgism--or mutualism, if I understand it--is a type of libertarian view on land. In fact, it is just another socialist-statist view of property rights. What's new here?
Published: June 23, 2007 5:33 PM
Stephan Kinsella wrote:
"I do not believe Georgism--or mutualism, if I understand it--is a type of libertarian view on land. In fact, it is just another socialist-statist view of property rights. What's new here?"
were Nock and Chodorov "socialist-statists"?
Published: June 23, 2007 11:39 PM
The mutualists, like Carson, correctly see that the state provide various privileges to different classes of people. In this, they have much in common with Libertarians.
Where the groups clearly differ is in the view of property rights. In the case of land, they seem to hold the view that land should be held in common, and the rent from it should be shared with every individual. To my mind, this much resembles the situation in the United States. No one really owns land, we all pay property taxes, so I think true ownership of land does not exist- we pay rent to the state, and by extension, to all other citizens. However, the mutualists take it a step further. If I were to build two houses and live in one, then I will not be allowed to rent the other out. In other words, my property is not my property if I am not using it. My second house, which I funded and built, can be homesteaded if I am not using it. The same applies to ownership of other capital. It is the user of the capital that owns it. For example, I work, save, and invest these savings in the formation of a car factory. However, if I don't then work in that factory, then I am not entitled to any return from my investment, and if I don't reclaim my capital and use it, it, too, can be homesteaded.
This is my understanding of mutualism based on discussions I have had with those that claim to mutualists, and based on my reading of mutualist literature.
Published: June 24, 2007 12:32 AM
Stephan,
"I do not believe Georgism--or mutualism, if I understand it--is a type of libertarian view on land. In fact, it is just another socialist-statist view of property rights. What's new here?"
Aren't you kind of begging the question? Georgists and mutualists can, of course, be statists to the extent that they support state action to eradicate activity they do not like.(By state action, I mean initiate force, obviously). Then, on the other hand, so can Lockeans! Accusing somebody of being a statist does not make them statist- you need to prove it.
Kevin Carson, and many other mutualists, is not a statist by any reasonable definition; nor are many Georgists...
As for the socialist "boo" word, well thats all it is in this context: a boo word that really has no meaning. What exactly does socialist mean if an idealogy is not statist? It kind of takes the bite out of the accusation, doesn't it?
Yancy,
Interesting points, but I disagree somewhat...It's late, if I have time, I'll address them tomorrow.
Until then, good-night everybody, take care, and may Liberty some day be victorious!
Bob
Published: June 24, 2007 2:13 AM
I should point out that historically, socialists where not statists, until the statist socialists took over the term. Kevin Carson has many excellent discusions on the meaning of "socialism".
I'd better quit now, I'm sleepy and I don't know how much sense I'm making....
Published: June 24, 2007 2:21 AM
Bah, a Rothbardian silly string party thread. Contract feudalism is like government investment. But holy crap, I was like the #1 critiq in that Elizabeth Anderson citation blog LtR a ways back when it first started. (For those seeking employment on the historical evolution of mee 'idea'r\z.) Small world. M Go Blow. Lol, philosophy "people" coining such phrases as "contract feudalism". Lol, yeah, whatever ... M Go Blow Me (Tier 3).
We already *proved* government funding of education by definition increases the {"real"} price/cost of education? Lemme know if I can add a nu nu *proof* of that to my collection.
But that brings me to my statistical point that the vast majority of Tier "so-called" academic research is conducted upon statistical "principles". From a long-term historical perspective, it's the same old smug refuted "law". "Data", lol. And you thought I was pompous claiming Nobel Prizes ...
Published: June 24, 2007 3:32 AM
Yancey wrote:
"In the case of land, they (mutualists) seem to hold the view that land should be held in common, and the rent from it should be shared with every individual."
actually that is the view of georgists...
mutualists believe in usufruct rights to land ownership (based on occupancy and use).
Yancey wrote:
"No one really owns land, we all pay property taxes, so I think true ownership of land does not exist- we pay rent to the state, and by extension, to all other citizens."
land ownership is a bundle of rights not one single right, any of which can be alienated from the others.
if the economic rent is not shared directly and equally between neighbors in a community then the economic rent is owned collectively, not in common.
a "state" according to Nock is set-up specifically to allow one class of men to exploit the labor-based wealth of those being excluded via privileges without any obligations.
whereas local governance as legitimate agency is narrowly constituted to require the privilege of exclusive use to be accompanied by an obligation to those being excluded inorder to uphold the excluded's absolute right of self-ownership.
this requirement does not violate the absolute rights of the landowner because they contribute zero labor to the production of land nor to the economic rent...it is by definition "unimproved land value".
Published: June 24, 2007 8:08 AM
Bee Gee,
Fair enough on the differenes between Georgists and Mutualists. I really don't see much difference other than that the Georgists go through contortions attempting to assign rents to land absent a market for it in their system.
I do have a question, however. You did not address the rest of my comment. Do I mostly have it right or wrong? If I accumulate more capital than I can employ myself, with my own hands and brains, then is it illegitimate in the Mutualist world for me to make a contract with someone to employ it on my behalf and pay me a small return? And do I have property rights to this excess, accumulated capital that I do not use?
Published: June 24, 2007 11:55 AM
"Paul Marks is incredibly ignorant" - I love you to Bob.
By the way I first read John Locke and Henry George decades ago. Indeed I wrote a very long bit of work on the areas I did not agree with John Locke - do not fear I will not try and dig it up (even I find the piece very boring, for example there is a long bit about why I think Locke was wrong to go along with Samual Pufendorf's interpretation of Genesis as regards land, I was a rather serious young man).
Now BeeGee.
"Capital" does not "command" "labor" Bee Gee.
An employer hires the services of an employee (who may also be an employer him or her self).
As for the "full product of labor" or some other subMarxist stuff:
The full price of labor is the wage the employee agrees to. If he can not find anyone who will pay him more than a Dollar a day (and can not go into business for himself and make a higher income) perhaps he ought to reconsider the idea that "a day of my labor alone produces a product worth X thousand Dollars a day - it would not be produced without me, and nothing and noone else contributes to it".
It is possible that he is mistaken.
"That quote was phony, that is not what we are saying at all".
But you are saying your labor is worth more than you can find anyone to pay you.
Of course if there was much lower government taxes (and lower government spending) and there was not a vast web of government regulations, and a credit bubble financial system (with all the distortions of the capital structure that this leads to) the real income of most people would be vastly higher (most likely including Mr Carson and his supporters).
But this is not really what you are attacking. What you are attacking is the "wage system".
Published: June 24, 2007 3:41 PM
BeeGee said "land ownership is a bundle of rights not one single right, any of which can be alienated from the others."
That can be read either way, but I think you intend it to be interpreted as "land ownership is a bundle of rights that can't be separated" (rather than "a bundle of rights that can"; there seems to be no point in saying it if you mean the latter). But that makes no sense. If there are a bundle of rights, call them A, B and C, such that splitting off A would not leave B and C intact, then the combination of A, B and C is really only a single right; and otherwise there's no reason why they can't be separated. The concept of "bundle of rights" doesn't make any kind of sense.
Published: June 24, 2007 8:36 PM
Yancey wrote:
"If I accumulate more capital than I can employ myself, with my own hands and brains, then is it illegitimate in the Mutualist world for me to make a contract with someone to employ it on my behalf and pay me a small return?"
how are you going to accumulate capital when price is driven to costs?
how are you going to get paid a "small return" when other owners of capital are willing to work cooperatively in mutual aid based on reciprocity WITH their capital along with me and my capital and labor?
btw - this system is called "laborism"
Published: June 24, 2007 8:47 PM
"Bob":
"I do not believe Georgism--or mutualism, if I understand it--is a type of libertarian view on land. In fact, it is just another socialist-statist view of property rights. What's new here?"
Aren't you kind of begging the question? Georgists and mutualists can, of course, be statists to the extent that they support state action to eradicate activity they do not like.(By state action, I mean initiate force, obviously). Then, on the other hand, so can Lockeans! Accusing somebody of being a statist does not make them statist- you need to prove it.
Kevin Carson, and many other mutualists, is not a statist by any reasonable definition; nor are many Georgists...
As for the socialist "boo" word, well thats all it is in this context: a boo word that really has no meaning. What exactly does socialist mean if an idealogy is not statist? It kind of takes the bite out of the accusation, doesn't it?
Briefly, "Bob": I am using socialism in the essential sense as defined by Hoppe--a system of institutionalized aggression against private property. I.e., any form of statism is a form of socialism. To the extent someone denies rights in a given scarce resource, e.g. land, what they really do is favor the state as owner, since no one things that a given useful, contested resource should have no owner.
Published: June 24, 2007 11:54 PM
"BeeGee":
were Nock and Chodorov "socialist-statists"?
yes, to the extent they advocated any tax, including the stupid, crankish "single tax"; to the extent they opposed private property rights in the scarce resource known as land.
Next question.
Published: June 25, 2007 12:03 AM
What is the definition of a 'scarce resource'? It sounds as though it refers to something fixed, limited and with not enough to go around. Therefore it has to be somehow rationed with some sort of priority system where those who get the goods are the ones with the most reason to use it.
Published: June 25, 2007 1:17 AM
Peter, it has to be possible to unbundle bundles of rights in certain circumstances; if nothing else, you couldn't use them otherwise. How could you ever rent out a house if the tenant couldn't acquire a tenancy, or how could you work for hire if your employer couldn't acquire some portion of what is bundled up in "you"?
Stephan Kinsella, a lot of what you are doing here is asserting your own usage of terminology. That runs the risk of degenerating into logomachy if it gets out of hand - arguing over who is "really" a Libertarian or whatever rather than analysing just what people are presenting when they say "Mutualist". On those lines, I had trouble with a US-centric editor at Wikipedia who wouldn't accept that you could have property unless the bundle of rights included the right to dispose of it - yet European precedent is full of such "entailments".
This is also the reason that people can "own" land yet have title subject to "eminent domain" (or "compulsory purchase" as it ought to be called, ha ha). The people who "sold" the land were abusing language. Here, I am doing more than saying they were using language differently than I do; abuse is where you try to force something to fit. Language is a tool, and with that abuse you risk breaking it, making it useless for anything else. For a Libertarian who formulates things as self-ownership, that broken usage means "yes - you own yourself, which means you can do what you want until eminent domain grabs you body and soul". It's not that you aren't using "own" the same way but that - as Orwell realised - you no longer have the tool for the ownership job, since it's broken. (Hear that, gays? That's the non-homophobic reason for not wanting the word to be used as it now is - you lose the old usage. But I digress, and perhaps I betray my UK background in preferring descriptive to prescriptive usage.)
TLWP Sam, you just asked a question and followed it with two sentences bridged with a "therefore" to outline what you thought was the area the answer would be in. Break the "therefore" down into small pieces - you should find that you don't get from the first sentence to the second sentence without feeding in a whole load of assumptions. It is those assumptions that are the largest area of disagreement.
Published: June 25, 2007 4:41 AM
tephan Kinsella wrote:
"to the extent they opposed private property rights in the scarce resource known as land."
georgists don't oppose private property rights in the scarce resource known as land, they just believe that the right to law-based property (land) has to be subordinated to labor-based property otherwise the absolute right of self-ownership of those being excluded are violated.
whereas, by requiring the sharing of economic rent (directly and equally with one's neighbors in a community) in exchange for the privilege of exclusive use backed by force, the absolute right of self-ownership of the landowner remanins intact because they contribute no labor towards the economic rent's creation.
in anarchy, where all lands are either legally or physically occupied - exclusive use compells those who are being excluded to labor for what defines their very existence, violating the right of self-ownership to the excluded.
Published: June 25, 2007 5:40 AM
"What is the definition of a 'scarce resource'? It sounds as though it refers to something fixed, limited and with not enough to go around. Therefore it has to be somehow rationed with some sort of priority system where those who get the goods are the ones with the most reason to use it."
There is such a thing - it's called the price mechanism. Fantastic, no?
Published: June 25, 2007 6:18 AM
BeeGee,
Lets say they you and your mutualist friends wish to start a automobile factory. How do you get started?
Published: June 25, 2007 8:35 AM
Well I am not BeeGee, but perhaps they get started by investing the union pension fund.
I have no objection to cooperative (or mutualism, or laborism or whatever) - as long as such people do not mess employers and employees about.
Just do your own thing, and leave other folk alone. Perhaps you will be a successful as communalists were in Israel where (at the peak) some 5% of the Jewish population lived in communal thing (of one sort or another).
As for land.
If we hold that God gave the world to mankind as whole (i.e. it comes already owned) then we get into a big mess (Lockian proviso and what not).
Even people lost their religious faith still kept this idea that the world in a sense belongs to everybody and individual ownership of land has to be justified (at least the idea was in the backs of their minds), Herbert Spencer is a good example.
In Henry George's case this may have been one of things that led to the "single tax" and so on.
As Murry Rothbard said "Henry George was great about everything but land, but he talked about land most of the time".
Man, Economy and State (or was it Power and Market - it is years ago that I read these works) also deals with Henry George.
Published: June 25, 2007 12:30 PM
Paul Marks,
And how much would each individual actually invest? Would it not have to be equal amounts? What if BeeGee saves more for the investment, but can only operate a part of his investment? Are other workers now working for him if he receives an income that reflects the amount he invested rather than the capital that he, himself, employs? And what about the divsion of labor within the factory itself? How do you determine how much of the output that the door installer gets and how much the painter gets?
Published: June 25, 2007 1:56 PM
I will try to reply to Yancy Ward without so many typing errors (as some of you will have noticed, I am rather letter/word blind - i.e. what I think I am typing can sometimes bare only a vague relationship to what I am actually doing).
I guess it could work either way Yancy. The workers could invest equal amounts or they could invest different amounts - and still have one vote each.
After all (as Bee Gee might be quick to point out) the various communal things in Israel (there were/are different types and they had/have different names) attracted some people who gave lots of stuff to the community - but did not ask for more than one vote.
Ture most of these communities got a lot less egalitarian over time (starting with getting rid of the communal bringing up of children - it does not "take a village" Mrs Clinton, in fact if a whole community tries to bring up the kids together they tend to make a mess of it). And only a small minority of Jews opted for these communities (in spite of all the subsidies and prestige), but there we go.
I remember reading in Sharon's autobiography how frustrated he was trying to work in one of these communities (with long [very long] discussion and then stupid judgements being made). So in the end he left and (after some hardship) managed to make it as a private farmer - now the family (horror of horrors) employ people.
Still (on the other hand) John Lewis stores ("the partners") have a good reputation in Britain even though John Lewis has been dead for many years and he gave the stores to the employees - hence the nickname.
I say again I have nothing against people setting up "laborism" enterprises (or other such). As long as they not mess the employers or employees of other enterprises about.
Published: June 26, 2007 10:10 AM
Wonderful, true got transmuted into "ture" (and so on).
Perhaps I should be put down like a sick dog.
Published: June 26, 2007 10:12 AM
Paul Marks,
As for the typing, don't sweat it. You are always perfectly understandable.
I guess the thing I am getting at is the assumption that Mutualists make that their system would prevail but for the state that "forces" some people to work using the capital accumulated by others. However, people are not the same, and they are not the same is an infinite number of ways. Some people will always be more frugal than others, will save more, and will accumulate more capital- they will accumulate more capital than they can actually utilize themselves, and the ability to utilize capital will differ from person to person. Do the Mutualists accept that some people who do not wish to save will choose to work the capital accumulated by others for a wage? I asked BeeGee this question earlier and his reply was the following:
Now, this seems like nonsense to me. In the first part he claimed that I could not accumulate capital, then in the second part claimed other owners of capital (where did this capital come from if it cannot be accumulated in the first place) would work together cooperatively. This is why I asked the questions about how it gets started in the first place, and why I questioned how the income is distributed, is it based on capital input, is it based on some system of labor input, or is it based on some arbitrary voluntary agreement?
I have no problems with such communes as long as they are strictly voluntary, but based on my understanding of their understanding of how capital comes into existence, then I don't think they mean it to be voluntary. In short, I don't think they have a clue what capital actually is, and, when faced with the consequences of this misunderstanding, the response is to be the homesteading of property you are not utilizing, as they already seem to believe in the case of land.
I would be grateful to any mutualist who wishes to comment on this.
Published: June 26, 2007 10:47 AM
As I basically agree with Yancey I am not going to argue with you.
As for any "mutualist" reply. Please let me know if they do reply.
Published: June 27, 2007 11:23 AM
BeeGee,
“were Nock and Chodorov "socialist-statists"?”
To the extent that anyone subscribes to socialistic and egalitarian programs of expropriation of private homesteaders and voluntary contractors by late-comers with delusions that they have a right to initiate coercion to enforce them, yes people are socialist-statists. This doesn’t mean they don’t have something good and libertarian to say about other aspects of the free market.
Published: June 27, 2007 8:13 PM
If you want to see some stuff on how to accumulate capital other than through primitive accumulation or through current state-sponsored corporate structures, see my recent post at http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2007/06/draft-chapter-three.html#comments where I mention: non-state corporations like monasteries; fleet leasing of equipment made, maintained and/or acquired by municipalities (and/or mutual societies, by implication) that can fund it through selling annuities; and Lloyd's syndicates. There is also the point that the levels of capital concentration that we are now accustomed to are actually larger than optimal, because of state-sponsored distortions - the real need is not as large as it might look. It would have been a digression for me to post that much here when I am concentrating on researching the original post so I can reply to that.
Published: June 27, 2007 9:25 PM
From P.M. Lawrence,
First, thank you for the reply, but I see some serious problems with this kind of approach. First, where is the municipality going to get the capital to lease in the first place? To give a concrete example, let's say you and I decide to create a mutualist earth moving company and require a bulldozer. So we go to the municipality and lease the dozer. So where did the municipality get this dozer? You seemed to write that they would create it using other capital, such as a bulldozer factory, but then, again, the question arises, where did the factory come from? And we can carry this analysis all the way back to the food that is consumed by the person that makes the very first capital good in the chain. Fundamentally, at the end, the capital to manufacture anything must come from the abstention from consumption of a producer. In other words, the municipality must, at the very least, buy the food that feeds these lowest order capital goods producers, or grow it it itself, and then, where does it get the farmworkers. If the municipality buys the food on the private market, what does the municipality buy with? It must buy with taxes and/or the rent proceeds it charges for all the capital it has leased out, but it can only buy with the rent proceeds if the leases have positive returns. If it borrows the funds, who does it borrow from? And where did those people get the funds to loan in the first place? And why would they loan them out if not for a positive return? And if they receive the return, then are they not the ultimate capitalists, receiving the returns for not working? Exactly what makes this state of affairs better than the present one? It seems to me that everyone is actually working for the state in the ideal mutualist world.
Published: June 28, 2007 10:51 AM
Yancey Ward, I am not going to be able to give you a full and satisfactory answer here and now for reasons of time and space. But I can make a beginning, which should at least show you there is no cop out.
"First, where is the municipality going to get the capital to lease in the first place?" If you really only want to know about the first place, the answer is simple. The funds don't go to making capital stock, only to acquiring a starter stock from whatever is around from before; the rearrangement at the beginning is what I described, selling annuities or whatever (google Meir Kohn's work on mediaeval capital markets to see the sort of thing that is achievable without the systems in use now - it's surprisingly sophisticated and powerful). Similarly, the first capital can - that is, can if justifiable - be raised from current owners of capital.
But the thrust of the rest of your query seems to drive at how subsequent capital stock appears. Let's look at your concrete case of a bulldozer. You do not need a factory to make a bulldozer. Today, yes, you do - but all that is strictly necessary is that you assemble one. It is in fact more cost effective to assemble one than to take one off a production line, if all you want is one. Factory production only pays off with mass production, so that formulation implicitly builds in all the stuff we are used to in how things are done now.
To anticipate your next question, certain of the components are themselves so sophisticated that is unreasonable to make them as one-offs, like the power unit, hydraulics, transmission, suspension and tracks to name but a few. Yes - but you should see where this is heading: horizontal integration rather than vertical integration. Some firm or other - not one of today's corporations, but within the mutual/municipal pattern - can easily supply power units competitively, given the larger market than just bulldozers.
Getting back to the financial rather than physical aspect, look at your follow up points in this light. What are your questions but the necessary things of any production? However they do not imply any separation into distinct groups of capitalist haves and worker have nots. The thing is, there is no need for any state-sponsored structures to gather later capital, and the providers of that capital are individuals who are the same as the people doing the work. Only, where now we have capital supplied (say) through pension funds under the pretence that we own things but still obtaining it coercively, people actually would have their own control of their own funds. With today's funding we have the same pretence that communism made that "the people" owned things. Essentially the later funding works out as a sort of generalised distributism, but the ownership would be real precisely because the owners - as individuals - don't have to play if they don't want to. (Oh, this sort of municipality would be a mutual arrangement organised around a geographical locality, not a state writ small; it wouldn't have taxing powers, only rents on its own assets - which would often include prime land, of course.)
That in turn flows through to the reality that, by and large, most things bulldozers are "needed" for aren't necessary in the first place. No more state-sponsored road subsidies means simpler and smaller earth moving, for instance.
It would have been intellectually dishonest just to point that out, though, just to say that we wouldn't need bulldozers so much. But the kind of question you are asking is a bit like asking a 19th century aviation pioneer how he would get an engine light enough and powerful enough for an aeroplane, once he had factored in the weight of the boilers and condensers. So I am trying to answer the question in its own terms, burdensome assumptions and all, just the way someone perversely managed to build a steam aeroplane in the 1930s (it used flash boilers and burned kerosene, and embedded the condensers in the wings in a way that shared the overhead of the structural weight).
Published: June 29, 2007 7:19 AM
P.M Lawrence,
When you write "raised from current owners of capital", I can only take this to mean expropriated. It cannot mean "bought" since the funds themselves can be reconverted into capital of equal value, unless you then foreclose this possibility by law, in which case we are back to expropriation, but hidden by the facade of a voluntary transaction.
However, the deeper issue I am trying to get at is this: how does one come to "own" capital in the mutualist world? Capital only arises in the first place from underconsumption of final product by final product producers, it is this residual that funds the very first capital goods producers. What no mutualist has yet to address is how is it that owners of capital match their capital accumulation to their own needs. What is to prevent a more frugal person from accumulating the funds that exceed his own ability to implement them? What is to prevent a less frugal person from agreeing to implement this excess accumulation for a wage that is less than the value of the output? An earlier commmenter (BeeGee) just evaded the question by asserting that no one would work for a wage using someone else's accumulated capital because the cost of capital would be driven to zero, but this presupposes that capital itself is like manna from heaven, which is most assuredly is not, or do you disagree?
Published: June 29, 2007 8:51 AM
Yancey Ward, if you can only read this as "expropriated", you are reading in your own assumptions. Why on earth should that be the only possible form of transition? It seems blindingly obvious that, if a mutual environment existed alongside today's structures in some small area - geographical or market sector - then, like a siphon, wealth would transfer back and forth as one or the other grew and shrank. For instance, imagine someone cashing out his pension and buying annuities from a mutualist municipality, then moving there. Or imagine such a system coming into being with grandfathering, so that old-style holdings remained but new savings couldn't be directed there, or whatever. (I have noticed that US thinking doesn't go for slow transitions, e.g. in discussing freeing of slaves; is this your situation?)
As for someone attempting to save more than matches his own needs, nothing would stop him (in this variant), any more than anything stops you trying to exceed the speed of light by simply accelerating. However, just as you find that you do not succeed in going faster than light, neither do you find that you have gained leverage over others, putting them into wage slavery or whatever. You will find that more and more of your personal time and trouble - underconsumption - go into managing your possessions rather than enjoying them, since you do not have artificial structures to help you do it, just as further and further force applied to an object causes its mass to increase.
That is what BeeGee's comment implies. It does not presuppose that capital itself is like manna from heaven, rather it points out that someone attempting this would ipso facto drive it down to zero, analogously with the mass of an object tending to infinity with increasing speed. Of course, without someone trying that, it would not be zero or tend towards it at all.
You might find David Gerrold and Larry Niven's book "The Flying Sorcerers" interesting, particularly the part where someone tries to buy up all the magic credit tokens issued by his competitor so that only his own circulate. He ends up supporting their price, so that in the end he cannot buy back 100% of them.
Published: June 29, 2007 6:28 PM
Just curious P M Lawrence, are you an Austrian/libertarian?
Published: June 30, 2007 5:20 AM
P.M. Lawrence,
Like I wrote earlier, I have no problem with voluntary communes of mutualists, but what is preventing them from extinguishing the order of today? Every mutualist I have engaged in discussion basically claims that their system simply precludes others by virtue of it's freeing of people from wage slavery. So why hasn't it? Exactly what chains are people wearing that they are not doing voluntarily today in a country like the United States or Great Britain? You seemed to imply in an earlier comment that people consume more than they need and, as a result, need larger capital structures than is "necessary". What is forcing people to consume goods and services to such an extent that they are forced to work with the capital others accumulate? I am having a difficult time figuring out why more people have not formed mutualist societies that drain members of the present order if it is, indeed, superior.
In summary, I am forced to conclude that mutualists are really proposing that people live a more primitive type of existence in which capital structures are much less and, as a result, the surfeit of goods and services is much less. This is why I am always a little suspicious of mutualists since it appears to me that they will have few voluntary takers for their system.
Published: June 30, 2007 7:08 PM
Anthony, you asked if I was an "Austrian/libertarian". I wouldn't know, not knowing precisely what criteria for membership you have in mind. I do know that the Mises lot appear to me to have placed some intermediate working notions like self-ownership on a plateau as axioms in their own right, rather than as working tests obtained as lemmas, which leads them into contortions of Jesuistical casuistry for some cases (like claiming to justify the Pennsylvanians cheating Penn as "homesteading"). They also get narrow minded in supposing that market imperfections can only ever arise from government intervention, though that is of course the usual cause these days.
Perhaps it would help to say that I find my views often echoed by - not obtained from - the individualist anarchists and the real historical concepts of the feudal system, as opposed to its later outworkings and what the 18th century called feudal, along with some matches between my views and those of the distributists in certain areas. I even found some of my own work - on externalities driving up unemployment - paralleled by someone who later became a Georgist, one Dr. Gavin Putland.
Does that help? In any case, if I don't fit some category, so much the worse for the category.
Published: July 1, 2007 5:58 AM
Blah. lack of epistemology. A "plateau" of EITHER/OR. Good for U, and your C - minus reply grade. Yeah, that does help, from a 'tool' perspective. Hehe, "Menger" who? "F". Doctor. Dr. Doc. I guess I don't blame you you for wishing. Do you realize what this means?
Yeah, (lol), Menger >>>> rtr, epistemological revolution, a diamond can be more valuable than a glass of water, ****how?**** If oinly you too could have been born later looking back upon "D.U*.M.B." Does that help? /slap
Published: July 1, 2007 6:18 AM
P.M.Lawrence: "They also get narrow minded in supposing that market imperfections can only ever arise from government intervention"
Demonstrate the first instance otherwise, MORON.
Published: July 1, 2007 6:25 AM
Yancey Ward, you ask "what is preventing them [voluntary communes of mutualists] from extinguishing the order of today?"
Simple. It's not a level playing field, fair deck, or whatever other mixed metaphor you care to use. Now, before you dismiss this as a load of sour grapes - metaphors coming thick and fast now - take a look at some real cases all around. For instance, Lloyd's syndicates are going corporate to obtain the legal protections offered and the financial leverage from larger pools of capital, building societies are demutualising to realise liquid value, and so on. But this is no more real value adding than any other tapping into subsidies and externalities, like people cashing out the equity in their homes as prices rise - there is no matching production that flows from it, merely a distorting effect at the expense of others. You can - and should - go and check this out for yourself, both to satisfy yourself in person and to stop me from going all Old Father William on you (I think that may be why BeeGee gave up on you).
Or you can look at historical cases and see how and why colonialists never could get enough locals to work for them - until the colonialists had constrained the locals. That does not require clumsy overt force the way the Portuguese ran Angola. Rather, you can do what the British did with hut taxes, poll taxes and land allocation, or the Dutch with "printing money" (actually debasing coinage) as part of acquiring economic levers and access to revenue streams for their "Culture System" (the French were somewhere in that spectrum, too, with "peaceful penetration").
You see, as Phillip of Macedon observed, he took over Greece with "fraud before force, but force at the last". Overt force is not the sole alternative to a true free choice. If you fall into the trap of thinking it is, you end up embracing your chains and internalising your prison guards, rather like the process described in the lizard theory of democracy.
By the way, if you infer that I have in mind that people consume more than they need, you are reading too much into what is going on here. Rather, people are deprived of doing things in other ways, just as Microsoft actively works to make it impossible to function without its products. Why, just this afternoon I had to use a library computer for a job application because the job search service only works with Microsoft browsing, and on top of that the employer systems refused to accept any applications except in Microsoft Word format. I'm not getting any more, just running to stay in the same place - unless you define Microsoft products as "more" simply because everybody is heading that way and paying more. But to do that is a circular definition, and embracing the chains to boot.
In sum, the difficulty you face is of the same sort as in your last query - a result of building in faulty assumptions, like someone taught to believe in a flat earth who is "forced" to believe that the earth's surface must be infinite because he cannot imagine what stops the oceans falling off the edges. The problem is that he hasn't thought it through, hasn't realised that he is building up evidence against the whole flat earth idea that he was taught to believe in in the first place.
To turn your own words back on you, who is "forc[ing you] to conclude that mutualists are really proposing that people live a more primitive type of existence in which capital structures are much less and, as a result, the surfeit of goods and services is much less"? The mutualist approach allows people to use much less, if they so choose - until recently I used a DOS based browser - but does not compel them to do so (equating "can" with "must" is a hidden tyranny), since - unlike certain ultra-rigid forms of anarchism - it does countenance organisation, although only mutually convenient forms without hidden constraints like assists to joint stock limited liability corporations and such. In many cases, the ability to do things in other ways is not apparent since we are so used to the only examples being the current ways; that is called learned helplessness, and part of a cure is to see that other ways have been followed in other times and places. I'm not talking huge activities as now, but rather smaller things that we would still not be able to imagine done that way - unless we looked at history, as Meir Kohn did for us.
P.S., does anybody know why this rtr - who is not posting in a civilised way - thinks I have to provide a non-government externality, when I pointed out that the Mises lot assert that only governments cause externalities? I don't have to prove that there are any to show that Mises types think there aren't any. This rtr him or herself just proved that there are some people narrow minded enough to think that governments are the only possible culprit. It's the people who don't want to keep an open mind on the point who have something to prove. I shall not confuse rtr with any facts.
Published: July 1, 2007 6:51 AM
P.M.Lawrence: "there is no matching production that flows from it, merely a distorting effect at the expense of others."
[Yawn.} And so is sleeping. Mark it zero. But, really, is that an M.A. degree B.S. conclusion? I'm impressed, at least at the long replies pretending to ignore ME. Allow the label 'stoic' upon your scholarship.
Meh, too long, eenie-meeanie-miny-pick a sentence.
P.M.Lawrence: "Or you can look at historical cases and see how and why colonialists never could get enough locals to work for them - until the colonialists had constrained the locals."
That's why I can never get enough /Praise, for the repetitive /slap definition of trade. Philosophical axioms that hold throughout history! It's almost funny to watch them make fewls of themselves otherwise.
P.M.Lawrence: "Rather, you can do what the British did with hut taxes, poll taxes and land allocation, or the Dutch with "printing money" (actually debasing coinage)"
A distinctly British stinky pile of B.S. ...
P.M.Lawrence: "You see, as Phillip of Macedon observed,"
B1tch, please.
P.M.Lawrence: "Overt force is not the sole alternative to a true free choice."
Uh-huh? What is it $19.95 plus shipping and previous handling of a female that may have caught your present fancy? EITHER/OR b1tch.
P.M.Lawrence: "Rather, people are deprived of doing things in other ways, just as Microsoft actively works to make it impossible to function without its products."
Rather than U suk? In fact you know less than nothing. If you even knew that you you knew nothing, that would be smething. But you don't.
P.M.Lawrence: "In sum, the difficulty you face is of the same sort as in your last query - a result of building in faulty assumptions, like someone taught to believe in a flat earth who is "forced" to believe that the earth's surface must be infinite because he cannot imagine what stops the oceans falling off the edges."
In sum, welcome home, young "H"olmes! What crap school of thought forces you to add?
P.M.Lawrence: "The mutualist approach"
Mmmm-hmmm?
P.M.Lawrence: ":In many cases, the ability to do things in other ways is not apparent since we are so used to the only examples being the current ways;"
STFU coppycat wannabee.
P.M.Lawrence: "P.S., does anybody know why this rtr - who is not posting in a civilised way - thinks I have to provide a non-government externality, when I pointed out that the Mises lot assert that only governments cause externalities?"
Nope. /Dunno why. Positive or negative? "This rtr". b1tch please. I'm aiming for my picture along with the greatest on the Austrian School poster. Some personZ are just slower than otherZ. I mop the epistemological floor with punk wannabees like yerself. Define "civilized" in a way that does not correspond to free trade. Insight. Me. Yeah, I almost fell for the "does anybody know why ..."
P.M.Lawrence: "This rtr him or herself just proved that there are some people narrow minded enough to think that governments are the only possible culprit"
Even on the second rate Rothbardian article cutZ, I point out that which is received is subjectively valued *more* than than that which is given away in voluntary free trade exchange, WITHOUT EXCEPTION, dumba$$. That's why they invent awardZ for the advancement of Knowledge.
P.M.Lawrence: "It's the people who don't want to keep an open mind on the point who have something to prove. I shall not confuse rtr with any facts."
Well that's a two-step, acknowledging the epistemological definitionZ of various wordZ. Since when did any single instance *EVER* of free trtade occur that did not *by definition* increase subjective material wealth for both parties to the exchange occur? Yeah, that's rtr > S0kr8ts sh1t.
That kinda caliber. But b1tch please, allow yourself to be humiliated in the cause of the sake of knowledge, something you weren't aware that existed until now.
Published: July 1, 2007 7:46 AM
Roflmafo! You definitely are fun to read rtr! :P
Published: July 1, 2007 9:02 AM
^^ What's ever more more fun to contemplate, is the massive epistemological approach to economics my "blasphemy" has engendered. Some day, we'll do the article on how Copernicus was so "quickly" accepted. I don't got time for "generational" upbraiding. Yee-haw!
Published: July 1, 2007 9:21 AM
P.M. Lawrence,
Thanks again for the time you have taken to reply to me.
I guess we are just at an impasse. I still have no answer to the question of why it would never happen that two people would agree to enter a contract in which one works with the accumulated capital of the other for a fee, even if all the barriers to mutualism were lifted and removed.
Published: July 1, 2007 12:02 PM
And, I would just ignore rtr. I have yet to really understand any comment he has written.
But maybe I just don't function on that high a level of intellect.
Published: July 1, 2007 12:04 PM
Well, if it's a definite maybe of a level, maybe it exists? Never mind that's where all the latest economic advances have emerged ...
Lot's of 200 proof-0logy posters in the wings ... efficiency of epistemology ... I still got 70 some N.P. demonstrations between #twenty something and #ninety something ...
N/M that your strategy of "just ignoring rtr" is str8 outta the antithesis playbook of truth.
But that I ignore y'all, that you may ignore me, discerns nothing. But isn't it lovely to pretend anyone will forget to check another economic theorem against the law of trade, that which is received is valued more than that which is given away in exchange. Did you understand that? How else do you come to conclusions other than ghosts tapped your finger reply? Capiche, MORON?
Ban me from posting here then ...
Did you get *that*? Ante up b1tch.
Published: July 1, 2007 12:18 PM
rtr states...Since when did any single instance *EVER* of free trtade(do you mean trade?) occur that did not *by definition* increase subjective material wealth for both parties to the exchange occur?
i dunno...say i buy a screwdiriver from a tool seller. the merchant gets cash (or whatever) and i get a screwdriver. i am not a screwdriver collector...i just cant twist bolts with my fingernails. my expectations are that the screwdriver will be useful to me. on my first twist (not enough to extract the bolt), the handle breaks and the screwdriver isnt much use to me now (until i get a new handle). isnt my subjective material wealth now reduced?
Published: July 1, 2007 3:19 PM
"intermediate working notions like self-ownership on a plateau as axioms in their own right, rather than as working tests obtained as lemmas"
How on earth can you test something like self-ownership?
Rtr, I wish you made sense, I really do.
Published: July 1, 2007 3:40 PM
Yancey Ward, you ask "why it would never happen that two people would agree to enter a contract in which one works with the accumulated capital of the other for a fee, even if all the barriers to mutualism were lifted and removed".
But that is overstating the case, reading too much into it. It's not "never", it's "so rarely that that way of doing things wouldn't be viable".
And, you're again asking unsuitable questions. It's easier to answer "why" once we have "whether". We don't have to answer whether by simple reasoning, we only have to look at the historical record. After that, we can look at particular cases, research them, and see what commonality there is in the particular cases. Let's look at the usual historical pattern.
First, you can't get enough people to work hard enough, because they only want money for luxuries; they still have enough independent resources for survival and some degree of comfort (in general). Result: high leisure/non-cash activity, high cash wages, low employment, low unemployment.
Second, these independent resources start to dry up, whether through Malthusian pressure or artificial state-sponsored constraints of the sort I mentioned earlier (e.g. the Dutch compelled East Indies villages to put a proportion of their land into cash crop production, as well as setting up an industry to acquire the production). People need cash income, not as a living wage but as a top up wage. The "Iron Law of Wages" begins to drive wage levels down to that minimum and forces people into paid work. Result: low leisure/non-cash activity, low cash wages, high employment, low unemployment.
In the last stage, where we are now, independent resources have practically vanished. People have to hold out for a living wage, or resort to informal activities or living off the state and/or charity or die; these activities show up as Social Security costs in countries that have it, and as Vagrancy Costs in the others (charity isn't enough, since government burdens have crowded it out in richer countries, and the poorer ones are, well, too poor). Market clearing wage levels do not allow for full employment. Result: low leisure/non-cash activity, high cash wages, low employment, high unemployment.
I've been using high and low as relative terms between these stages, and ignoring the effects of all the other economic things going on at the same time, things like booms and busts which superpose other variations on the overall pattern.
The last stage can be assisted by addressing the externalities, right up until we hit Malthusian limits. I address a lot of this at my publications page; that is a Pigovian quick fix, applying an opposite distortion to what is there now. But the undistorted pattern corresponds to the first stage.
We have lots of historical examples of this first stage. I am going to point to just one, Lord Lever's attempt at setting up fish processing at Leverburgh. It didn't work; too many locals just stayed away since they had crofting activities available, and they preferred them. A few generations earlier that wouldn't have been true, because of the Highland Clearances; what Kevin Carson calls "Vulgar Libertarians" would be saying that that proved that factory work was desirable. The thing is, there were only the survivors left by Lord Lever's time, the rest having died or emigrated greater or lesser distances.
Getting back to where we came in, since that case came up in modern times and was accessible, it got studied and we can look at the findings. If we want a broader comparison, we can compare it to what happened in, say, Prince Edward Island with the (wooden) ship-building industry, in the presence of a need to acquire cash for rents. With similar geography, ethnicity and culture, we get a good control. So there's your answer to "why", though it doesn't cover 100% of people (after all, there were still some willing workers in the fish factory when it closed).
By the way, a lot of people who attempt to justify today's globalisation by comparing outcomes are simply going by their prejudices, not the actual historical record. You might want to look at The Best of All Possible Worlds, or The Only Game in
Town?, a critique of John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge's encomium of globalisation in the Spectator, based on a forthcoming book of theirs.
Published: July 1, 2007 10:48 PM
It should be noted Carson uses the LTV, which has been thoroughly discredited and refuted.
Published: July 2, 2007 7:06 AM
P.M. Lawrence - '. . . people being forced into growing cash crops . . .'.
That reminds me of the test that the piece of metal you're holding is a magnet, namely it'll repel a magnet you already have. Similarly, the final proof of a free market is not people having the ability to trade but rather have the ability to refuse to trade if they see fit.
It could be considered that people going from subsistence farming to cash crop farming for some as being a case of greater specialisation that's supposed to increase wealth because the land is being used more efficiently. Yet those people who are being forced to do so are really being forced to give up their freedom/independence. Sure they could make more money and have a higher standard of living but they now they have no choice but to trade with others to live rather than choose to do so at their convenience.
Published: July 2, 2007 9:06 AM
I think TWLP Sam is pretty close to the target here. You have one of two choices, you either give up the ability to survive on your own, to feed, cloth, or house yourself, or you accept an increased division of labor which is the only way to have the goods and riches we enjoy today, and become dependent on the extensive capital structure it requires. There is no third way- there is no way to have both; and the branching off point comes early in the process. The baker, the shoemaker, and the clothier lost their true individual independence when they gave up the work of providing their own food, their own clothing, and their own housing.
The mutualists appear to think there is a third way or, at the very least, that their system will really be different in some fundamental way from the present order. They seem to hold that no one should make a living by virtue of accumulating the productive capital on which to live. Now, in the United States, you do have the ability to become a capital owner, you just have to save from your income to do so- it really is that simple. I am unmoved by those who claim the system is rigged to prevent this.
Published: July 2, 2007 10:31 AM
Yancey Ward, you assert that "...There is no third way- there is no way to have both...", but you don't back that up. As far as I can tell, the only thing you can't have without mammoth concentration of productive efforts on a matching scale is the set of things that don't actually line up with individual aspirations, things like pyramid building or East German swimming teams. I am open to persuasion otherwise, but not to mere assertion. The point about mutual arrangements is precisely that they allow efforts to be concentrated when there is something to be gained at that level, but do not come about for larger but unwanted efforts. A larger real need could call forth a larger arrangement, unless I am missing something.
It also appears to me that "They seem to hold that no one should make a living by virtue of accumulating the productive capital on which to live" is confusing "ought" with "is"; did I not mention that capital could be concentrated by sale of financial instruments? Doesn't that allow just such things, for those who want to make the effort? Doesn't it merely fail to produce material concentrations only in the expected usual cases, in which most people can't be bothered to put in so much work simply to avoid work? I am reminded of a cartoon sequence by Sempé in which he shows an industrialist remonstrating on the virtues of thrift with a fisherman, pointing out that if he saves enough to fund his leisure instead of going fishing, then he can go fishing. The fisherman points out that he already is fishing. Carpe diem, freely translated as "catch a carp"? (An oldie but a goody.)
You may come back and point out that the fisherman cannot spend as much time in leisure fishing unless he accumulates first. True enough, though irrelevant for someone who is comfortable with and able to pursue a mixed pattern of activities, but then we come back to your statement - also unsubstantiated - that "I am unmoved by those who claim the system is rigged to prevent this". You shouldn't be moved by the people, but by what they point you to; the evidence is all around us that the present system suffers from a fallacy of composition. Individual exceptions do not refute this objection. There aren't enough winners possible under present arrangements, although some are, so the more people try, the more the goal posts shift. People can't pursue mixed activities now, which is itself evidence of a rigged system, and they cannot save their way out of the predicament - not all of them. It's like the old saying "we'll never get rich taking in each others' washing".
Do not let me move you to believe this let me move you to go and look. A good place to start is the introductory background Keynes supplies to his "The Economic Consequences of the Peace", in which he shows that in his time and place small ambitions were realistic for all who chose (thanks to not everybody choosing) - but it was dependent on not drawing down all the gains, and trouble was looming even before 1914. Fast forward to today, and a good place to look is at the sort of evidence Paul Craig Roberts provides in a recent Counterpunch article. Strip away his lefty value judgments and avoid bias of your own; ask if what he reports is accurate and not if he is a lefty, and follow that up by researching more widely. Likewise do not ask if the mutualist recommendations fit your current beliefs, question both your beliefs and these new (to you) propositions.
In sum, is it not your own position that rests on nothing?
Published: July 3, 2007 11:46 PM
I didn't answer Mr. Marks' comments on this thread because most of the comments were tangential to his original argument, and are in any case being addressed very well as it is. I figured my time would be better spent preparing a direct reply in pamphlet form.
But I couldn't resist responding to Anthony's comment that the "LTV" has been "thoroughly refuted." Generally when someone makes a comment like that, I consider it an automatic surrender of the debate akin to Godwin's Law.
Bohm-Bawerk himself acknowledged that the debate was not over, and that he welcomed any constructive responses labor theory defenders might come up with. But he also called for pro-LTV arguments that were not simple appeals to authority, without any attempt to elaborate a causal mechanism.
Now the irony is that I have, following a detailed and careful reading of Bohm-Bawerk's, Mises' and Rothbard's critiques of the classical political economists, attempted to answer their critiques and formulate a version of the LTV that takes those critiques into account. And it is the defenders of subjective theory who resort to appeals to the authority of Bohm-Bawerk and Mises: "The LTV has been thoroughly refuted." ("We have invented value theory," says the Last Economist, and blinks.)
When someone asserts that the LTV was "refuted," I generally find that they base that claim on dumbed-down, third-hand encapsulations of both the LTV and the thought of Bohm-Bawerk and Mises, and have little real notion either of what the proponents of those ideas actually said, or of what the substantive differences between them really are.
BTW, did rtr get his prose style from reading the labels on Dr. Bronner's Castille Soap?
Published: July 5, 2007 4:34 PM
Just to remind people who came in late, LTV means Labour Theory of Value, which in turn is the idea that the value of goods and services is a measure of - or caused by - the work that went into them. You can modify the simple version by acknowledging the work that went into the tools and other capital that were also employed, and applying discounting factors for Marshall's famous "...and waiting", a bit like adding epicycles to Ptolemaic astronomy to get better empirical results (and remember, the refined final version of Ptolemaic astronomy was more accurate than Copernicus's early results). That still leaves scarcity value from land etc., to which the answer - right or wrong - is, without artificial constraints that should tend to zero, and the only discrepancies come from thumbs on the scale like that.
We can come at this from a couple of other directions. One is an analogy I found useful for wrapping my head around things (i.e. for illustration not proof), the way a car engine's inlet manifold pressure is a good proxy for the power being developed, and so it can be used to help control automatic transmission gear changes. It's not that the pressure causes power to be developed in proportion, or even that power will intrinsically cause a proportional pressure. It's that, if the engineers have got the design right and the engine is running in a sweet spot, then the fuel is being burned at maximum efficiency, so the amount of air being supplied per unit time is a good proxy for the power because that is in turn proportional to the energy released per unit time, i.e. power.
The analogy is, if everything is running properly in an economy, then labour is being used efficiently and so value must be proportional to labour - although not all labour is of the same value in a commodity-like fashion. Even then, an extreme position is that the value of all labour tends to a mean if there is no obstruction like barriers to entry for getting into professional work like accountancy; IT worker "value" is dropping that way right now just the way clerical skills did a century ago (the claim usually is, that the barriers are for quality control; you can see whether they are or not if there is continual education and monitoring in a professional career, or only at the start). This kind of LVT analysis is saying, "of course hard work digging holes and filling them in again is valueless; the point is that the hard work in an efficient economy isn't going into pointless things like that anyway". This isn't ignoring the psychological elements that go to make effective demand, it's saying they already worked in choosing the kind of work so now we can make a measure without allowing for them - they are already factored in. And, of course, only allowing for psychological feelings in all this has to be wrong; it's why we are so careful to say effective demand, to factor in physical constraints of the sort that Leontiev matrices bring out.
The other source of insight was very simple, looking at what happens with fiat currencies that are backed through taxes. For working purposes, the values that prevail in these economies - our economies - are hooked up to people's work efforts via taxes. An easy way to track this is to see how tax worked in certain colonial systems, introducing cash economies to areas that had not had them before. Typically, men in the prime of life had to do a set annual amount of forced labour at a low cash wage, say on the roads, or commute (compound for) it by paying a poll tax; road workers could buy government food when they worked, but did not have to. (There was a cash wage rather than just forced labour so as to introduce the fiat cash nexus; low nominal tax levels - but linked to high work obligations - were best for the government so as to generate better terms of trade with the home country.) The immediate effect was that everybody had to work, since there wasn't yet any cash around, but in very short order roadside villages started selling food to road workers and those men with more constructive activities had enough money to pay the tax instead of working. The labour content was determining things, even though that was only because that was the point at which the harness was fastened onto the workforce. (It gets subtler and harder to trace with hut taxes, which worked far better for governments because they were easier to police - the Byzantine Kapnikon was a wonderful example that continued under the Turks, even affecting Albanian compound living that lasted in Kosovo until modern times. A hybrid approach had hut taxes that replaced poll taxes for urban and roadside residents.)
Anyhow, LTV has pragmatic usefulness and brings out conceptual aspects concerning physical resource constraints that are missing from psychological, demand-oriented approaches. Unfortunately you have to calibrate it empirically, so it can't be used as a foundation from which to work, not in itself anyway.
Published: July 5, 2007 5:56 PM
scott,
There is a saying in marketing: "People don't want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want quarter-inch hole."
rtr is correct in that at the point of transaction in free trade there is a perceived increase in subjective valuation for both parties, else they wouldn't trade.
Your purchase of the screwdriver, like the drill, was an investment, with a certain amount of risk of failure. Whether or not your investment pays off or not (malinvestment, rtr!) does not change the fact that you were once more satisfied with your purchase. You just happened to be blissfully ignorant.
It is important to keep in mind that the value of all property at every moment is subjective.
Published: July 5, 2007 7:35 PM
"It is important to keep in mind that the value of all property at every moment is subjective."
This is either wrong or a tautology of limited scope, rather like the truism "Man is the measure of all things".
Take food, for instance. It has a subjective value, in that we feel - subjectively - hungry if we do not get it. Yet equally clearly that subjective hunger is merely a mechanism that gives shape to something deeper, a physical deficiency of nourishment.
Just as the truism above means that man is the only measuring device we have available, so also is it true that the only thing that counts at the point of sale is what people subjectively feel to be true value.
Yet it is also true, at a deeper level, that there are physical constraints; someone who sincerely believed that water was better value than petrol as fuel for his car would soon be disillusioned or lose the use of his car. Either way, the pool of fuel buyers would adjust to contain only those with realistic perceptions - but still, there is an underlying reality, and it is the subjective side that adjusts. The subjective side is not the determinant of value, it is the measure of it. (The fact that needing a car is only important because of value just moves things back; we can take any point as the point at which to stop the circularity, and certainly physical reality always obtrudes - hence Leontiev's work.)
It is best to work with subjective valuation for certain purposes, since it can be applied in nearly all cases, but that doesn't mean that there are no underlying issues - only that they are not uniform and accessible enough to be used directly. Subjective valuation is a process rather than a thing as such, and "value" in this sense is a construct of the order of a verbal noun, a useful handle rather than an objective reality.
Published: July 5, 2007 8:14 PM
Mr Carson, I will read your works before commenting any further on your posts to see what precisely you have discovered in reading their works.
Mr Lawrence, the value of a good is subjective in that it is directly linked to what specific ends an actor is pursuing. If the actor wants an item of luxury, a diamond will have infinitely higher value than water. If the same man is dying of thirst, water's value will rise infinitely as well. Value is subjective because it is in the eyes of the beholder. Building a pyramid might well be a wondrous task, but means absolutely nothing to the person who thinks the structure is a waste of space. Its value is precisely zero. Price, on the other hand, is an aggregated measure of value.
Published: July 5, 2007 9:41 PM
P.M. Lawrence,
Talk about assertions! What is this "unwanted effort" that draws forth the deep capital structures of our societies? It appears that this assertion (repeated many times in this thread and in other mutualist writings) is the entire underpinning of the mutualist complaint- that we desire and work towards the things we do not need, that are not mutually beneficial. Again, nothing that I can see in the United States prevents mutualist societies from being implemented, first on a small scale, then on a larger one if they can successfully draw adherents. You simply don't have to participate in present society if you don't wish to. It really is that simple. The way to prove me wrong is to form such societies and have them grow through accretion. It is a cop out to claim that the deck is stacked against you by the rules of the present order. It may be that you have to start at the very bottom of affluence to free yourself, but that is not a valid complaint against the world as it is.
Published: July 5, 2007 11:52 PM
Yancey Ward, you are - no doubt inadvertently - misrepresenting my position.
I made no mere assertion about unwanted effort. In fact, I pointed out a recent example in my own life, the need to submit a job application in Microsft format despite my wishing to avoid Microsoft products. By and large, my comments in this area are not assertions but observations, accompanied by an invitation to people to go and look for themselves and not take my word for it (that's why it's hard for me to back things up directly - some people dismiss anything like that as "assertion").
It is a thorough misstatement to assert that "the mutualist complaint [is] that we desire and work towards the things we do not need". It is that we are trapped and forced into taking what we do not need or want, merely to obtain what we do need or want.
As for there being nothing that you can see by way of obstacle, I fear you are right; my comments in this area are really for other people who are willing and able to go and look. None so blind, and that. Your mistake is to suppose that one can opt out. Even my own attempt at avoiding Microsoft is hard, because I cannot opt out. At a deeper level, I require paid employment, in this world as it is. The fallacy is that we can get at resources just like that, that we are not imposed on by willing compradores. The catch with being forced to go Microsoft is that BG has woven negative network externalities around those who slept through the warnings of the rest, who now suffer from the sleepers' complicity.
That means that the way to prove you wrong - if we had the resources - would not be "to form such societies and have them grow through accretion", it would be to form such societies and have them fail as described, from being ringbarked. But I don't need to form anything like that, I only have to point at (say) what happened to the Mormons over the last couple of centuries, when they tried it. Now the last holdouts are down to "bleeding the beast" and being accused of needing the beast.
Published: July 6, 2007 2:03 AM
Anthony, I know what you are driving at, and indeed I have come across much that before. But do you see any inconsistency between that and what I stated? It is merely that when we look harder we find that there truly are things going on for which personal standards of valuation are not enough. The only problem with what you wrote is that some people stop there, thinking nothing else is involved at any deeper level.
Published: July 6, 2007 6:31 AM
Hey, People! I love your site. The layout is very pretty. The colors work so well together. Everything is good!
Published: July 25, 2007 10:21 PM
Stephen Kinsella wrote: "I do not believe Georgism--or mutualism, if I understand it--is a type of libertarian view on land. In fact, it is just another socialist-statist view of property rights. What's new here?"
Stephen, I think you do not understand mutualism, anarchism, or perhaps even the austrolibertarian view of property rights.
The word "property" itself derives from the word "proper", as in who "properly" controls a thing.
In persons, proper control is self-control. This view is shared by austrolibertarians, mutualists, and all other strains of anarchism, as it is the very core principle of anarchism. Anarchy derives from the Greek words "an", meaning "without", and "arkhos", meaning "rulers"; the very word anarchy implies an adherence to the principle of self-ownership.
In resources external to self, if there is no natural scarcity, there is no contention over control, and so the question of property is moot. Such things are non-property.
If there is natural scarcity in a resource external to self, contention over control arises upon the attempt to use something which is already being used. By the principle of first appropriation, proper control lies with the first user. Thus we get the homesteading of both naturally scarce resources and the "homesteading of easements" in defense of existing usage for first appropriators (see Rothbard's writings on air pollution and property rights for details). By mixing one's labor with something that is both naturally scarce (e.g. land) and unused, it becomes one's property.
Austrolibertarians hold to this view. Mutualists hold to this view. Even genuine anarchosyndicalists hold to this view, though (as collectivist anarchists) they prefer to organize collectively for the homesteading and subsequent management of their own property; genuinely anarchist worker's syndicates such as theirs are, from an austrolibertarian perspective, simply employee-owned non-profit (as per their adherence to the LTV) enterprises. Employee take-over of existing state and corporate "property" was actually defended by Rothbard himself based on austrolibertarian principles in "Confiscation and the Homestead Principle", so in that too there lies no serious contention in views on property rights between the major strains of anarchism. The only serious deviation from free market and traditional anarchist views on property comes with so-called "anarcho"-communism, and even then if the communes are only internally communist, essentially taking on the outside form of large worker syndicates, no serious contention arises.
What about when property falls into disuse? Austrolibertarian, mutualist, and genuine anarchosyndicalist alike all recognize abandonment, as returning things from an owned state to an unowned state.
The only matters over which any major contention might arise between austrolibertarianism and the other propertarian strains of anarchism are what constitutes use and what constitutes disuse (abandonment), yet these are already matters of debate and dispute among austrolibertarians.
To accuse other propertarian anarchists of being statists for not agreeing with your views on these matters, instead of rationally defending your own views on what constitutes use and disuse, proper control and improper control, is both unfair and needlessly divisive. We don't even have a "grand unified theory" of rational ethics to use as a common starting point, so it's a little early to start a witchhunt to root out the heretics. We've got at least half a dozen different published "proofs" of rational ethics (including yours, though I'll admit I've only skimmed it, not to mention my own and all the other unpublished "proofs" I'm sure are floating around) and, though I've only seen holes punched through some of them, I doubt any of those presently existing is THE final bulletproof argument for libertarian ethics.
Note to any mutualists or anarchosyndicalists reading this: I apologize if I got anything significantly wrong about mutualism or anarchosyndicalism in the above. Feel free to point out any errors (please, no semantics games, though). I'm an agorist myself, so I'll admit I may be ignorant of or confused on some aspects of mutualism and anarchosyndicalism.
Published: April 4, 2008 11:00 PM
I agree with Mr Baumann,
Published: April 5, 2008 7:20 AM
Rich Baumann: not a bad summary. It's mostly compatible with what i have written--see, e.g., How We Come To Own Ourselves.
You are right that I do not have a deep understanding of mutualism or anarcho-syndicalism; they do not interest me that much. As for austro-libertarianism, I disagree with your deprecation of my understanding of that.
You wrote:
So far, I agree w/ most of what you say.
I could go with this.This seems fair. Disuse is not abandonment, in my view, simply because there is a distinction between possession, and ownership. To equate disuse with abandonment is to abandon the distinction between possession and ownership, and thus to obliterate the concept of ownership itself.
I have rationally defended it. I don't care if it's divisive, i only care if it's true. I do believe that the fallacious reasoning of non-austrolibertarian anarchists (as you term it) would in fact lead to statism.
Besides, I stated that I was not completely familiar with "mutualism"; and the main thrust of my comment was an attack on Georgists and their statist, crankish "single tax." I note you did not attempt to rehabilitate their views or defend them. Good for you.
My view is that the term "agorism" it itself crankish.Published: April 5, 2008 9:05 AM
Rich Baumann: not a bad summary. It's mostly compatible with what i have written--see, e.g., How We Come To Own Ourselves.
You are right that I do not have a deep understanding of mutualism or anarcho-syndicalism; they do not interest me that much. As for austro-libertarianism, I disagree with your deprecation of my understanding of that.
You wrote: