Discussion of Anarchism

[Integral]

Helicopter Ben? Just please. Don't go there. Just don't.

You're adorable.

I have not seen any arguments about the economic dangers of monopoly. There are political dangers of monopoly, however, if a monopoly chooses social control over profits and harms others. This is a real danger. But monopolies are just as subject to market forces as firms in competitive markets: the market sets the price, and in the end the maximum consumer and producer equilibrium is reached. This is Carl Menger in action and as much as I bag on Austrian economics, I can't argue with this one. Maybe Integral will show me up.

I see your substantive issue and sidestep it until I've had a chance to read the thread.

[briefly, and I don't even know yet if I'm addressing the conversation-] We know monopolies are economically inefficient, for a variety of reasons. Yes, the market sets the price in a monopolistic industry; but quantity is chosen by the monopolist, and chosen to an inefficiently low level. As a result prices are higher than they would be in a competitive industry.

All of the above assumes there are sufficiently high barriers to entry to keep out potential competitors, and an absence of government interference, but those extensions can be handled quite naturally and without difficulty.

 

[Hygro]

But quantity isn't chosen by the monopolist, so long as he's a rational actor seeking to maximize profit.

 

[ParkCungHee]

Well, I suppose it's here that it becomes clear that economic problems of monopolies, and social problems of monopolies are not unrelated. Leveraging social control can often maximize profits.

 

[Integral]

But quantity isn't chosen by the monopolist, so long as he's a rational actor seeking to maximize profit.

?

Let's start with theory then work back to something resembling the real world. I'm confused now.

The monopolist's problem is to maximize profit. He does that when MR = MC. Now MR and MC are functions of quantity, so the firm chooses quantity optimally to satisfy his problem (dependent in part on the characteristics of the market esp. demand elasticity), the price is determined by the market (given the optimal quantity), and profits are determined jointly by the cost structure, optimal quantity, and optimal price.

And there is some evidence that firms do indeed choose quantity, sometimes. The Japanese self-imposed quotas on car imports in the 80s, for example. OPEC chooses quantities.

More broadly, the firm has to choose either price or quantity. Both can't be given to him - otherwise there is no problem for the firm to solve!

 

[Hygro]

but "maximum profit" is given to them, according to the calculus, the same as in competition. And if they aren't sufficiently maximizing profit (or have the government to protect them to keep price down) they are at risk of other firms entering the market anyway. Barriers to entry are real, but only up to a point before they really aren't economic in nature. And that point can be broken by innovation, which is how you break into a saturated competitive market, too.

@Park, that's true, which is why the dangers of monopoly come outside of economics.

 

[ParkCungHee]

I thought economics was supposed to be the study of the production, distribution and consumption of goods and services.
How can any action undertaken to maximize your access to goods and services be outside of economics?

 

[Hygro]

I thought economics was supposed to be the study of the production, distribution and consumption of goods and services.
How can any action undertaken to maximize your access to goods and services be outside of economics?

All realms of human activity can relate to these things, so all human things can be measured economically. But that doesn't mean economics is the appropriate discipline for their study or classification. If a firm uses its great wealth to influence social control to stifle future competition, buys legislators, engages in government corruption, starts shooting its organizing workers, etc, those all have measurable economic effects, sometimes critically so. But they are actions outside of economics. You can very reasonably disagree but I think it's a useful distinction.

 

[ParkCungHee]

I don't think so. I think it's an entirely artificial, ideological distinction.

It makes me so angry that I want to put in a decade of study, get my degrees, and branch out to do economic studies of piracy, cattle rustling, extortion rackets and machine politics because damnit, people have been making their money that way a lot longer then LLCs.

 

[Hygro]

I don't think so. I think it's an entirely artificial, ideological distinction.

It makes me so angry that I want to put in a decade of study, get my degrees, and branch out to do economic studies of piracy, cattle rustling, extortion rackets and machine politics because damnit, people have been making their money that way a lot longer then LLCs.

Look I don't disagree with your newfound academic dream, and there's nothing un-economic about oil companies using paramilitaries to root out resistance to their drilling and making sure they hire the grimmest thugs to do it, the kind that will cut off villagers' hands to make a point.

But there is something un-economic about using those tactics to secure power and social domination outside of profit. So rather, I was talking about the reverse order of things: using your profit for ill ends, rather than ill means for profit. Even if they can play into each other.

And what do you mean the distinction was "ideological"?

 

[ParkCungHee]

And what do you mean the distinction was "ideological"?

Well mainly that it seems to draw a distinction between "legitimate" and "illegitimate" violence when considering if something is a topic for economics or not. Economics largely works on the assumption of property which already is a statement of violence, and feels totally free to consider the actions of state violence (Taxation Policy, etc.) but the moment when other forms of violence come up, it's treated as foreign to economics.

It seems to largely consider certain forms of action to be within the "normal" range of procuring goods, and certain activities to be outside them, and the ones "within" economics largely conforms to behavior expected of us by the state.

 

[Ayn Rand]

Well mainly that it seems to draw a distinction between "legitimate" and "illegitimate" violence when considering if something is a topic for economics or not. Economics largely works on the assumption of property which already is a statement of violence, and feels totally free to consider the actions of state violence (Taxation Policy, etc.) but the moment when other forms of violence come up, it's treated as foreign to economics.

It seems to largely consider certain forms of action to be within the "normal" range of procuring goods, and certain activities to be outside them, and the ones "within" economics largely conforms to behavior expected of us by the state.

This is one reason why many people have no respect for economics - it simply doesn't deal with the real World, as you say.

 

[Hygro]

Well mainly that it seems to draw a distinction between "legitimate" and "illegitimate" violence when considering if something is a topic for economics or not. Economics largely works on the assumption of property which already is a statement of violence, and feels totally free to consider the actions of state violence (Taxation Policy, etc.) but the moment when other forms of violence come up, it's treated as foreign to economics.

It seems to largely consider certain forms of action to be within the "normal" range of procuring goods, and certain activities to be outside them, and the ones "within" economics largely conforms to behavior expected of us by the state.

I agree with this criticism, but I'm not sure how this is particularly ideological. It just means we're trying to work with different interpretive categories to communicate things.

So for example, my original argument was that monopolies can pose a political and social threat, but as a profit-maximizing agent--implicitly I meant respecting the rule of law (and not much law needed)--it poses no "economic threat" by charging prices above marginal cost, or by being profitable.

So that's not a particular ideologically driven set of distinctions. Instead it is a set of distinctions to help us understand something in relation to other things.

This is one reason why many people have no respect for economics - it simply doesn't deal with the real World, as you say.

And why most of my classes are critiques of economics. I'm taking a class taught by Christina and David Romer. Top macro economists in the world. They regard the shocks, the "black swans" as we know them, as "random". They are outside macroeconomics. But they are the single most important agent of economic change in the macroeconomy! Sure, the discipline is good at knowing how to react to them, but if the most important part of your study is outside the scope of your study..... awful.

 

[Traitorfish]

Depends on what secession. The problem with individual secession is that they want to retain the benefits but not the responsibilities. The problem with regional secession is that they want to take with them many people that they don't have a right to take, and, in the case of the ACW, they refused to do it in a way that was acceptable to all parties.

Now a secession could be legitimate in some instances. But the way it is done and the motive for doing so count. Saying "We aren't going to follow your rules, because we want to oppress our people more than you would allow us to" isn't a very good motive for secession. Saying " We have little in common and are only part of the same country because some defunct empire forced us together" is a whole different story.

So what's your criteria (in terms however broad) for a legitimate secession?

I said the biggest, not the only. And it is. While it is true that businesses get many benefits from government (the US economy has been a public-private partnership from day one), the biggest thing businesses ask for is to be left alone to do any damned thing they please.

Businesses have funded think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute and CATO, and funded university programs like the Chicago School, for decades to build an intellectual foundation for laissez faire. Vast fortunes and decades of efforts have gone into justifying deregulation. And that doesn't even count the costs of lobbyists and campaign contributions. Deregulation is a major industry in the US.

Businesses have fought to get out from under regulations for as long as there has been regulations. A lot of the "right-libertarian" ideology as a whole was developed for no reason other than to fight to set businesses free. Not to mention the Austrian and Chicago schools of economics.

Given that the effort and cost that goes into the concept, far more than is even spent on tax breaks and lobbying for defense contracts, how is it not what they want the most?

I think that your taking an overly reductionist approach to this issue. By reducing "government intervention" to a single form of activity, which a given party may want more or less of, you lose sight of the distinctions between different forms of government activity. Business wants less of certain kinds of government activity- enforcing union contracts, collecting taxes, etc.- but they are perfectly happy with other kinds of government activity, and, indeed, would like to see plenty more- suppressing protests, protecting private property, etc. Amadeus, in declaring the authority of the state illegitimate in both regards, that it has no more right to hold a head to the gun of the striking worker than to the CEO, makes a fundamental break with laissez faire statism.

What free contracts? Seems to me the anarcho-capitalists are going to prevent free contracts, by force if necessary. They cannot get what they want except by preventing others from making free choices.

I don't really follow. Anarcho-capitalists regard free and voluntary contracts as the only legitimate basis of collective activity, and so regard the unfree and coerced contract established between the state and the individual as illegitimate. What in that implies that they are opposed to free contracts?

How are they better than any other aristocracy?

In what sense do anarcho-capitalists represent an "aristocracy"? I know that Americans are quite loose of the word compared to Europeans, but I've honestly never heard it used to describe a disparate political tendency.

So you are saying that in order to not have a state, people not only have to keep their heads down and not be noticed, but they also have to be either in a location where no one else wants what they have, can take what they have, or they the military force to protect themselves from any likely aggressor.

I'm simply observing the historical circumstances in which such societies existed. Any stateless society today would have to be quite different.

But what was their form of government internally? Did they really have none? Or is it instead just a microstate?

They certainly had government in the sense of social organisation, it simply did not take the form of state government. That's an historically specific form of social organisation- again, for purposes of discussion we can assume a Weberian definition of "an entity claiming a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence"- not one inherent to social organisation as such. If that was the case, then every hunter-gatherer band would be a "state", which would strech the concept so much as to render it entirely meaningless.

Is it coherent? Seems to me it's more based on a bunch of failed comprehension of the real world.

How so? Unless I'm misunderstanding, your primary objections to it are analytical and ethical, rather than empirical; not a disagreement about what happens, but how we understand it, and whether it is legitimate or illegitimate.

Yes. It is a moral obligation to make a serious attempt to resolve disputes within a mutually acceptable framework before going outside of it.

How do we determine if a framework is indeed "mutually acceptable"? That's a subjective judgement, so it's not something that can be prescribed (let alone retrospectively).

 

[Hygro]

Side note, I have a 5 page paper due on Weber.

Anyway, yeah, Traitorfish is correct, Cutlass, on the stark division between the anarcho-capitalist idea articulated by amadeus and the liberalist statism articulated by those you hold in poor regard. Not that it doesn't have its own, often similar, problems. But there's a real hard wall between them.

Maybe you should try to remember. And try to defend your claim. It is basic.

Yeah it was basic, hence why I stopped reading the book. I remembered one, which is that "supply is demand". Rofl. An intelligent postulate when invented, thankfully abandoned when the resulting logic didn't hold to the real world. Demand for the medium of exchange, or money, is enough to debunk it let alone that it is demand that generates supply, not supply that is its own demand.

 

[Cutlass]

There is no such thing as a monopoly which is not backed by state force. It doesn't exist and never has. Stateless monopolies are an oxymoron.

Since government is the only force that can prevent or break up a monopoly, that statement is nonsensical.

What would they have been otherwise? Lol we don't know, but we do know your two most "egregious" examples correlate to the greatest growth, so postulating how much better it could have been is a bit silly, don't you think? Maybe they would have been like other times of economic growth without the equal-ish income distribution gains? I dunno, the two times are pretty different from each other, anyway.

You still haven't said why profits are bad. This is very important. Because if profits are bad, then all business should be regulated. If they are good, what's the problem?

I never claimed profits were bad. Only profits above what can be earned in a competitive market. (And I am excluding profits to patents from other monopolies) Why is that? You get a suboptimal distribution of resources. Consumers get less for their money, and are notably worse off. Producers are essentially confiscating something that they could not earn on their own.

So it is unjust, but it also encourages a lack of innovation and slower economic growth. Consumers have less disposable income, so businesses will invest less to earn that income. Businesses will innovate less, the monopolist because it is profit maximizing to sell the same thing for as long as possible, the other industries simply because there is less money to be made.

Monopoly is the enemy of Schumpeter. There is less creation of the new to challenge the old. So the sum total creation of wealth over time will be restricted.

But quantity isn't chosen by the monopolist, so long as he's a rational actor seeking to maximize profit.

Quantity is always chosen by the firm. That's what firms do. It can't really be otherwise. Aggregate quantity is chosen by the aggregate of firms. So that is out of the control of any one firm in a competitive market. But in a non-competitive market controlling output is the way to go.

Now in some cases firms also control quality of output. In the US auto industry, quality sucked, despite the Big 3 being the biggest, best capitalized, and in many respects most innovative firms. But the Big 3 from WWII until the 1980s did not compete on quality or price. One of the Big 3 would make a public announcement every year "We are raising our prices across the board 4-5-6 or whatever percent" and the other 2 would match that percentage increase within 1 or 2 points shortly thereafter. And the market shares of the Big 3 remained essentially unchanged for half a century.

but "maximum profit" is given to them, according to the calculus, the same as in competition. And if they aren't sufficiently maximizing profit (or have the government to protect them to keep price down) they are at risk of other firms entering the market anyway. Barriers to entry are real, but only up to a point before they really aren't economic in nature. And that point can be broken by innovation, which is how you break into a saturated competitive market, too.

@Park, that's true, which is why the dangers of monopoly come outside of economics.

I don't think you have a very realistic view of barriers to entry. You seem to be assuming that capital markets are efficient to the good of the whole rather than the good of the stockholders. But if the goal is to maximize the return to the stockholder, well the monopoly is what does that. So why would the capital markets fund something that by its very nature reduces total return to stockholders?

And while innovation may break in to a non-competitive market, that does not mean that it will happen. You just can't count on it, and you have to look at each market situation individually. And even if it does happen, it can take decades where the sum total of the economy is made worse off.

Further, what's to stop firms from using those "extra market" actions and treats if government is not doing so?

What you don't seem to understand about barriers to entry is that if the threat is real, then most of the time the threat is sufficient, and so there are no monetary costs to maintaining the barrier.

Look I don't disagree with your newfound academic dream, and there's nothing un-economic about oil companies using paramilitaries to root out resistance to their drilling and making sure they hire the grimmest thugs to do it, the kind that will cut off villagers' hands to make a point.

But there is something un-economic about using those tactics to secure power and social domination outside of profit. So rather, I was talking about the reverse order of things: using your profit for ill ends, rather than ill means for profit. Even if they can play into each other.

And what do you mean the distinction was "ideological"?

If you are securing power and social domination, you are securing profit.



Essentially you have a Chicago School "the free market will solve anything" viewpoint, and the past decade really should have cured you of that.

 

[Cutlass]

So what's your criteria (in terms however broad) for a legitimate secession?

There would have to be referendum of some form to make certain that the majority of the people really did want it. There would have to be every reasonable attempt made within the existing legal framework to reconcile the grievances short of violence. There would have to be some sort of compensation agreement so that those who are harmed get redress. There may have to be relocation assistance to those who do not want to be part of the break away area. The reasoning would have to be for the benefit of the populace, not to gain the ability to oppress them further. Things along those lines.

I would still be generally reluctant to go along with it, but would not oppose it in all cases. It becomes situational, not a general principle.

I think that your taking an overly reductionist approach to this issue. By reducing "government intervention" to a single form of activity, which a given party may want more or less of, you lose sight of the distinctions between different forms of government activity. Business wants less of certain kinds of government activity- enforcing union contracts, collecting taxes, etc.- but they are perfectly happy with other kinds of government activity, and, indeed, would like to see plenty more- suppressing protests, protecting private property, etc. Amadeus, in declaring the authority of the state illegitimate in both regards, that it has no more right to hold a head to the gun of the striking worker than to the CEO, makes a fundamental break with laissez faire statism.

Well if that is true than Ama takes a more extreme view than many people I have read and interacted with in the past. That, however, I don't see as invalidating the other parts of my point.

I don't really follow. Anarcho-capitalists regard free and voluntary contracts as the only legitimate basis of collective activity, and so regard the unfree and coerced contract established between the state and the individual as illegitimate. What in that implies that they are opposed to free contracts?

Quite a few times I have managed to piss off amadeus by suggesting that he or his views are much more authoritarian than anything I am willing to accept.

Here's the irony: He may think of himself as an anarchist, but his positions really are more authoritarian than I am willing to accept.

How does that work? It works because you are not defending free and voluntary contracts. You are defending the most aggressive of coercion. For the vast majority of people under the system you are describing the choices are to do exactly what they are told to do or be subject to crushing punishment. No third options are being presented. No freedom of choice is being presented. No liberty is being presented.

You make the case that with government, it is inherited generation to generation, and so there was no informed consent going in for each additional individual. How much more so is that true when under this Anarcho-capitalists model there isn't, not just no way to opt out of it, but no way to redress grievances within it. If you are born in a liberal democracy, you can at least make an effort to change the laws. If you are born in Anarcho-capitalism, you don't even have that much right to consent to how others control your life.

You frame it as a choice between consent and non-consent, when the real choice is between a system in which you can at least try to change it and one in which you are utterly and completely powerless to do anything other than exactly what you are told to do, or resort to armed insurrection.

This Anarcho-capitalism that you describe doesn't have even a small fraction of the personal liberty that the US has right now.

And it doesn't even have a small fraction of the choosing to consent to it.

If I want public schools, under Anarcho-capitalism I can't have it. If I want public libraries, under Anarcho-capitalism I can't have it. If I want public roads, under Anarcho-capitalism I can't have it. If I want public law enforcement and courts, under Anarcho-capitalism I can't have it. Even if the majority of the people agree with me. These options are simply off the table.

By fiat, not by consent.

I never got an answer to THIS POST in that old tread. What is the answer? It is fine to believe in these things, but how do you enforce them without a government?

Or here's a differing libertarian view on it from a blog that Integral linked one day:

A Libertarian Rehabilitation of Hobbes
By Kevin Vallier On February 21, 2012

I think that libertarian hostility to Hobbes has blinded them to one of his deepest insights, an insight that in many ways makes him less authoritarian than many of the libertarians I know.
...

Let’s begin with some review. Hobbes believes that all people are naturally free and equal.* That is, no one was born with natural authority over others. Political authority can only come from agreement. Yes, Hobbes has a notion of tacit consent and yes, Hobbes believed in a limited set of natural laws that prescribe some natural duties. But he nonetheless recognized that in a great many circumstances, for John to have a duty to obey Reba, John must have agreed to that duty.

...

Traditional libertarians criticize Hobbes for thinking that disagreement is a disaster. Through the market, private property and limited government, we can go our separate ways and live together well. I agree with that criticism. Libertarians also recognize that some property claims will be the subject of dispute and so arbiters are needed (at least in the form of protection agencies or a minimal state). I agree with that too.

However, the problem with traditional libertarians is that they confine the range of reasonable disagreement to disputes about how to make libertarian property rights more determinate and resolve disputes among legitimate property holders. In other words, they think the range of disagreement is rather small and so arbiters have limited authority.

But let’s confront traditional libertarians with an undeniable truth: reasonable people disagree about way more political and moral matters than the scope of libertarian property rights. In fact, the large majority of reasonable people find libertarian conceptions of property rights deeply objectionable. And many of those reasonable disagreements remain after they become familiar with libertarian arguments.

So let me pose a question to traditional libertarians (related to one of my previous posts): you want to set up a libertarian society because you think it is required by justice and to serve the common good. But your free and equal fellows reasonably reject your conception of property rights. As a result, the coercion you are prepared to use to defend your property against their encroachments will be coercion that they have strong reason to reject.

Libertarians avoid the problem of private judgment by implicitly assuming that libertarian property rights are the default no-coercion point. A society without coercion is a society with property rights. But that’s false. Property rights are coercive. That does not mean that property rights cannot be justified. It just means that the coercion involved in defending property rights must be justified to all persons.

I suspect most libertarians will respond that they can use coercion to protect their justly acquired property no matter what other reasonable people think. After all, libertarianism is true and statism is false. But that means that you, libertarian, are prepared to coerce your equal to do what you demand even though she has not agreed and will likely not agree were you to explain your reasoning to her. That is, you are prepared to subordinate your non-libertarian fellows to your will.

...

http://bleedingheartlibertarians.com/2012/02/a-libertarian-rehabilitation-of-hobbes/


There's the trick, you see. Everything is boiled down to what the handful of property owners tell you it is all boiled down to. There is no freedom, no liberty, other than the very narrow definition which gives the few absolute power over the many.

Which is the answer to your next point:

In what sense do anarcho-capitalists represent an "aristocracy"? I know that Americans are quite loose of the word compared to Europeans, but I've honestly never heard it used to describe a disparate political tendency.

The few control everything. The many have no say. How is that not broadly similar to the worst of what aristocracy has to offer? And, btw, is more or less what the Confederates wanted as well.

I'm simply observing the historical circumstances in which such societies existed. Any stateless society today would have to be quite different.

In other words, not really relevant to anything.

They certainly had government in the sense of social organisation, it simply did not take the form of state government. That's an historically specific form of social organisation- again, for purposes of discussion we can assume a Weberian definition of "an entity claiming a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence"- not one inherent to social organisation as such. If that was the case, then every hunter-gatherer band would be a "state", which would strech the concept so much as to render it entirely meaningless.

How so? Unless I'm misunderstanding, your primary objections to it are analytical and ethical, rather than empirical; not a disagreement about what happens, but how we understand it, and whether it is legitimate or illegitimate.

(This discussion is too fragmented, I'm losing track of which points we are on and it's taking me more time to retrieve the direction of the discussion than it is to frame an answer )

These "anti-statist" people, as you describe them, are imagining a world with no actual reason to assume the world will be like that, other than that want it to be.

"I really like X, and I really want Y, therefor X must lead to Y". What empirical evidence connects X to Y?

How do we determine if a framework is indeed "mutually acceptable"? That's a subjective judgement, so it's not something that can be prescribed (let alone retrospectively).

With any given process, not everyone can get everything that they want. But is the process one that can be agreed to as the best available one to pursue what each wants?

Whether it be democracy, or courts of law, or the battlefield, both sides want something. One side will get it. Or a compromise will be achieved somewhere in the middle.

 

[Traitorfish]

There would have to be referendum of some form to make certain that the majority of the people really did want it. There would have to be every reasonable attempt made within the existing legal framework to reconcile the grievances short of violence. There would have to be some sort of compensation agreement so that those who are harmed get redress. There may have to be relocation assistance to those who do not want to be part of the break away area. The reasoning would have to be for the benefit of the populace, not to gain the ability to oppress them further. Things along those lines.

I would still be generally reluctant to go along with it, but would not oppose it in all cases. It becomes situational, not a general principle.

This all seems to assume that the existing government can be understood as a legitiamte one. What you say about situations in which the existing government was not legitimate; are the secessionist party obliged to work within terms imposed by an illegitimate regime? To take an historical example, the British state in Ireland in 1798 (at that point taking the form of the semi-autonomous Kingdom of Ireland) was an undemocratic racial-supremacist state which repressed political opposition through state terror. By any reasonable measure, it was wholly illegitimate. Were the nationalists still obliged to pursue its goals to the fullest extent permitted within the framework of the illegitimate British state, or would it have been acceptable for them to reject the framework out of hand and pursue unilateral revolutionary separation, as the United Irishmen attempted in that year?

Well if that is true than Ama takes a more extreme view than many people I have read and interacted with in the past. That, however, I don't see as invalidating the other parts of my point.

That's what I was criticising, though: the idea that government activity is all of an essentially homogeneous kind, and that individualist anarchism is simply the slider set to zero. As I've said, it's not: different kinds of government activity are qualitatively distinct, so Amadeus, in rejecting all government activity, establishes a qualitative merely than quantitative distinction between himself and laissez faire statists who only reject government activities of a certain kind.

Quite a few times I have managed to piss off amadeus by suggesting that he or his views are much more authoritarian than anything I am willing to accept.

Here's the irony: He may think of himself as an anarchist, but his positions really are more authoritarian than I am willing to accept.

How does that work? It works because you are not defending free and voluntary contracts. You are defending the most aggressive of coercion. For the vast majority of people under the system you are describing the choices are to do exactly what they are told to do or be subject to crushing punishment. No third options are being presented. No freedom of choice is being presented. No liberty is being presented.

You make the case that with government, it is inherited generation to generation, and so there was no informed consent going in for each additional individual. How much more so is that true when under this Anarcho-capitalists model there isn't, not just no way to opt out of it, but no way to redress grievances within it. If you are born in a liberal democracy, you can at least make an effort to change the laws. If you are born in Anarcho-capitalism, you don't even have that much right to consent to how others control your life.

You frame it as a choice between consent and non-consent, when the real choice is between a system in which you can at least try to change it and one in which you are utterly and completely powerless to do anything other than exactly what you are told to do, or resort to armed insurrection.

This Anarcho-capitalism that you describe doesn't have even a small fraction of the personal liberty that the US has right now.

And it doesn't even have a small fraction of the choosing to consent to it.

If I want public schools, under Anarcho-capitalism I can't have it. If I want public libraries, under Anarcho-capitalism I can't have it. If I want public roads, under Anarcho-capitalism I can't have it. If I want public law enforcement and courts, under Anarcho-capitalism I can't have it. Even if the majority of the people agree with me. These options are simply off the table.

By fiat, not by consent.

I never got an answer to THIS POST in that old tread. What is the answer? It is fine to believe in these things, but how do you enforce them without a government?

Or here's a differing libertarian view on it from a blog that Integral linked one day:


http://bleedingheartlibertarians.com/2012/02/a-libertarian-rehabilitation-of-hobbes/


There's the trick, you see. Everything is boiled down to what the handful of property owners tell you it is all boiled down to. There is no freedom, no liberty, other than the very narrow definition which gives the few absolute power over the many.

Which is the answer to your next point:

What this seems to amount to is a criticism of the natural rights theory of property, so I have to wonder: is this the best line to take, given that you, as a liberal, hold to a stronger version of the same theory? Rothbard et al. may regard property rights as sacrosanct, but in rejecting any state capable of enforcing them, it amounts to no more than a series of ethical claims; in practice, property rights are founded in goodwill and are thus constantly renegotiable. (A lot of market anarchists, accepting a Proudhonian critique of private property, prefer to start from here in the first place.) In contrast, while you may hold to a "softer" theory of property rights in that you accept certain infringements upon them by the state, you also accept the right of the state to use violence in defence of those rights.
And, frankly, if we're going to accuse somebody of being "authoritarian", I'd have to say that it's the person who thinks that the state should physically obliterate people who don't do what they're told.

The few control everything. The many have no say. How is that not broadly similar to the worst of what aristocracy has to offer? And, btw, is more or less what the Confederates wanted as well.

How does a given program producing a certain result imply that the advocates if that program are the result? It's like claiming that Thomas Jefferson was a bicameral federal republic.

In other words, not really relevant to anything.

Not really, just answering a question.

(This discussion is too fragmented, I'm losing track of which points we are on and it's taking me more time to retrieve the direction of the discussion than it is to frame an answer )

These "anti-statist" people, as you describe them, are imagining a world with no actual reason to assume the world will be like that, other than that want it to be.

"I really like X, and I really want Y, therefor X must lead to Y". What empirical evidence connects X to Y?

I'm not really sure I follow. Unless I'm missing something, we've been discussing anti-statism as a body of criticism (specifically, we began with Amadeus' rejection of the legitimacy of the use of coercion to prevent political disassociation), not as any particular program, so I don't really know which individuals or what ideals you're talking about.

With any given process, not everyone can get everything that they want. But is the process one that can be agreed to as the best available one to pursue what each wants?

Whether it be democracy, or courts of law, or the battlefield, both sides want something. One side will get it. Or a compromise will be achieved somewhere in the middle.

What happens if neither party can agree on such a process?

 

[Cutlass]

This all seems to assume that the existing government can be understood as a legitiamte one. What you say about situations in which the existing government was not legitimate; are the secessionist party obliged to work within terms imposed by an illegitimate regime? To take an historical example, the British state in Ireland in 1798 (at that point taking the form of the semi-autonomous Kingdom of Ireland) was an undemocratic racial-supremacist state which repressed political opposition through state terror. By any reasonable measure, it was wholly illegitimate. Were the nationalists still obliged to pursue its goals to the fullest extent permitted within the framework of the illegitimate British state, or would it have been acceptable for them to reject the framework out of hand and pursue unilateral revolutionary separation, as the United Irishmen attempted in that year?

And, as I said, "every reasonable effort". Sometimes there may not be a reasonable effort other than war. But that's a last resort, not a first one.

A defining characteristic of the ACW was not that the South chose war, but that they chose war before exploring other alternatives. And they chose war where there was overall no other reason for violence. There was no harm done to the South by the North that would justify resorting to violence first.

That's what I was criticising, though: the idea that government activity is all of an essentially homogeneous kind, and that individualist anarchism is simply the slider set to zero. As I've said, it's not: different kinds of government activity are qualitatively distinct, so Amadeus, in rejecting all government activity, establishes a qualitative merely than quantitative distinction between himself and laissez faire statists who only reject government activities of a certain kind.

Fair enough.

What this seems to amount to is a criticism of the natural rights theory of property, so I have to wonder: is this the best line to take, given that you, as a liberal, hold to a stronger version of the same theory? Rothbard et al. may regard property rights as sacrosanct, but in rejecting any state capable of enforcing them, it amounts to no more than a series of ethical claims; in practice, property rights are founded in goodwill and are thus constantly renegotiable. (A lot of market anarchists, accepting a Proudhonian critique of private property, prefer to start from here in the first place.) In contrast, while you may hold to a "softer" theory of property rights in that you accept certain infringements upon them by the state, you also accept the right of the state to use violence in defence of those rights.
And, frankly, if we're going to accuse somebody of being "authoritarian", I'd have to say that it's the person who thinks that the state should physically obliterate people who don't do what they're told.

I don't know the philosophy behind some of those positions, and quite frankly have minimal interest. But how is it more authoritarian to have a government that I can petition and work with in regards to obliterating people, and a individuals who can do the same for no reason whatsoever?

You are not making a distinction between these anarchists and the worst of all governments and aristocrats. All you are telling me is that they are the same as far as the average person is concerned.

How does a given program producing a certain result imply that the advocates if that program are the result? It's like claiming that Thomas Jefferson was a bicameral federal republic.

Not really, just answering a question.

k

I'm not really sure I follow. Unless I'm missing something, we've been discussing anti-statism as a body of criticism (specifically, we began with Amadeus' rejection of the legitimacy of the use of coercion to prevent political disassociation), not as any particular program, so I don't really know which individuals or what ideals you're talking about.

What I am trying to say is that, as best as I can understand it from what is being said, these "anti-statists", as you label them, have as the core of their criticism a group of beliefs that are in and of themselves irrational.

They are not seeing the same world that I am seeing. And so there's no way to have a constructive discussion without shocking them into seeing the world objectively.

When not speaking the same language one could at least attempt to translate. When looking at black and white and seeing stinky and smooth instead, there isn't even a common frame of reference by which to have a productive discussion.

What happens if neither party can agree on such a process?

edit: misread that last part. .


If you can't even agree on a process, then I guess you're stuck with violence. Which is why it makes sense for a state to have a legitimate monopoly on that.

 

[Hygro]

Since government is the only force that can prevent or break up a monopoly, that statement is nonsensical.





I never claimed profits were bad. Only profits above what can be earned in a competitive market. (And I am excluding profits to patents from other monopolies) Why is that? You get a suboptimal distribution of resources. Consumers get less for their money, and are notably worse off. Producers are essentially confiscating something that they could not earn on their own.

So it is unjust, but it also encourages a lack of innovation and slower economic growth. Consumers have less disposable income, so businesses will invest less to earn that income. Businesses will innovate less, the monopolist because it is profit maximizing to sell the same thing for as long as possible, the other industries simply because there is less money to be made.

Monopoly is the enemy of Schumpeter. There is less creation of the new to challenge the old. So the sum total creation of wealth over time will be restricted.






Quantity is always chosen by the firm. That's what firms do. It can't really be otherwise. Aggregate quantity is chosen by the aggregate of firms. So that is out of the control of any one firm in a competitive market. But in a non-competitive market controlling output is the way to go.

Now in some cases firms also control quality of output. In the US auto industry, quality sucked, despite the Big 3 being the biggest, best capitalized, and in many respects most innovative firms. But the Big 3 from WWII until the 1980s did not compete on quality or price. One of the Big 3 would make a public announcement every year "We are raising our prices across the board 4-5-6 or whatever percent" and the other 2 would match that percentage increase within 1 or 2 points shortly thereafter. And the market shares of the Big 3 remained essentially unchanged for half a century.






I don't think you have a very realistic view of barriers to entry. You seem to be assuming that capital markets are efficient to the good of the whole rather than the good of the stockholders. But if the goal is to maximize the return to the stockholder, well the monopoly is what does that. So why would the capital markets fund something that by its very nature reduces total return to stockholders?

And while innovation may break in to a non-competitive market, that does not mean that it will happen. You just can't count on it, and you have to look at each market situation individually. And even if it does happen, it can take decades where the sum total of the economy is made worse off.

Further, what's to stop firms from using those "extra market" actions and treats if government is not doing so?

What you don't seem to understand about barriers to entry is that if the threat is real, then most of the time the threat is sufficient, and so there are no monetary costs to maintaining the barrier.





If you are securing power and social domination, you are securing profit.



Essentially you have a Chicago School "the free market will solve anything" viewpoint, and the past decade really should have cured you of that.

Cutlass you're overreaching what you think I think, and forgetting some of the things I already addressed. Furthermore, It's hard to address "efficiency" because that means different things in different contexts. Is efficient resource distribution with present resources the most efficient, or is reinvestment more efficient? I never said monopoly shouldn't be regulated, but rather that we should reexamine why.

Additionally, any product with product differentiation is in monopolistic competition at least, making for the same above-competition profit levels. If we wanted to prevent undue monopoly we need to regulate advertising and branding. And profitability corresponds pretty directly with economic growth so we need to think carefully about the role of profits now or utility now.

I would like to address all the points in your post but everytime I think to try I get fatigued at the thought. I agree with some of it and disagree with other parts. Yes U of C economic thinking is affecting my logic. Gary Becker makes a similar case. No, I don't come to the same conclusions that he or any of them do.

 

[Traitorfish]

And, as I said, "every reasonable effort". Sometimes there may not be a reasonable effort other than war. But that's a last resort, not a first one.

A defining characteristic of the ACW was not that the South chose war, but that they chose war before exploring other alternatives. And they chose war where there was overall no other reason for violence. There was no harm done to the South by the North that would justify resorting to violence first.

How does "reasonableness" relate to the legitimacy of the state? To go back to the Irish example, the United Irishmen had far from exhausted the legal means available to them; a number of progressive political reforms had in fact been enacted in the 1780s under the influence of the parliamentary Irish Patriot Party, and the failure of the radical insurrection would in fact be a major justification given by the Repealers for their thoroughgoing constitutionalism. But, as I said, the British state in Ireland at that time was a racist, terroristic oligarchy; not merely an illegitimate state, but the very state in regards to which the modern theory of popular legitimacy was constructed, and which was found wanting. So was this a case of reasonable or unreasonable violence?

I don't know the philosophy behind some of those positions, and quite frankly have minimal interest. But how is it more authoritarian to have a government that I can petition and work with in regards to obliterating people, and a individuals who can do the same for no reason whatsoever?

You are not making a distinction between these anarchists and the worst of all governments and aristocrats. All you are telling me is that they are the same as far as the average person is concerned.

I'm afraid I don't really understand this bit. Who can obliterate who? Do you think that Amadeus is actually arguing that private individuals and entities are entitled to coerce each other, or simply that you don't think a stateless society would be able to prevent this from happening?

You describe anarcho-capitalists as an "aristocracy", because their program would, you claim, produce a social elite indistinguishable from an aristocracy. But that doesn't imply that anarcho-capitalists are themselves an aristocracy; in fact, as far as I know, the overlap between this potential and proponents of anarcho-capitalism is precisely nil. (This would seem to validate my earlier comments about the fundamental authoritarianism of laissez faire statists.)

What I am trying to say is that, as best as I can understand it from what is being said, these "anti-statists", as you label them, have as the core of their criticism a group of beliefs that are in and of themselves irrational.

They are not seeing the same world that I am seeing. And so there's no way to have a constructive discussion without shocking them into seeing the world objectively.

When not speaking the same language one could at least attempt to translate. When looking at black and white and seeing stinky and smooth instead, there isn't even a common frame of reference by which to have a productive discussion.

At the risk of sounding dense, but: how so? As far as I can tell, both of you and them are working in the same basic framework of natural rights liberalism, you just draw different conclusions about the necessity of the state, the legitimacy of coercion and the inalienability of property. It amounts to an argument about which bits of Locke you like, and which bits you don't.

If you can't even agree on a process, then I guess you're stuck with violence. Which is why it makes sense for a state to have a legitimate monopoly on that.

But what about conflicts with the state? It seems highly unreasonable, to me, to expect the state to remain the neutral arbiter that it is purported to be in conflicts which it is actually involved. It's like setting up a peace conference and then asking one of the belligerent parties to moderate. (The separation of powers is the obvious answer, but that would only seem to satisfy in regards to conflicts with parts of the state, not with the state as such.)