In the US, voluntary participation in the world, as opposed to the local, economy essentially expanded in lock step with access to the world economy. That is, as roads and canals, and later railroads, opened up the possibility of trade people took advantage of that fact.
There was an ideal of independent yeoman farmers each self sufficient on their own land. But that only lasted so long as people where physically isolated. To transport a wagon load of grain 50 miles by horse or ox on primitive roads doubled the cost of that grain. But once roads were good, canals were common, and then railroads started to expand, the costs of transport fell so much that it became a far more practical alternative.
Then, given that that wider economic participation was available, people took advantage of it. And that is consistent with one of the core economic theories, comparative advantage. People trade because it is directly beneficial to them to do so. But the circumstances do have to allow them to do it. Transportation costs for people away from harbors and navigable rivers is very high before the age of steam. Prohibitively high in the cases of many of them.
Given that American history entirely post-dates the sort of peasant society that I'm talking about, I don't know what that has to do with anything. American farmers were always petty proprietors, specialised agricultural producers, not self-sufficient peasants with communal property forms. All you're observing is that local capitalism gives way to global capitalism, which is true, but also irrelevant.
Are you factoring in the death rates of the cities? People went to the cities looking for opportunities and usually finding disease instead. The cities did not grow vast because the demographics were entirely different. The life expectancy was dramatically lower. For cities of the era generally constant immigration was the necessary condition for the city not being entirely depopulated by disease.
That's a caricature. Cities could be vulnerable to epidemics, yes, but they weren't all festering hell-holes. Especially given that it was only relatively recently that they developed the attendant underclass that would actually live in such squalid conditions; for most of history, they were the preserve of skilled artisans, merchants, various professionals, and nobles, which weren't exactly the sort of people to live in their own filth. (Which, incidentally, raises the question of what good a constant stream of unskilled peasants would actually be to a city?) If anything, their relative insulation from the risks of crop-failures meant that they were a
better place to live than in the country. You're basically taking Paris c.1750 and imposing it backwards onto all pre-modern urbanism.
Further, you seem to be looking for universal rules, where I am looking for aggregate rules. I don't really care what all people did, because all people never did any one thing. I'm concerned with what the bulk of the people did.
I'm not asking for rules of any sort, I'm asking for you to defend your anthropology. You have a hypothesis, that human society is self-destructive in the absence of mediatory authorities, so now you have to see if its actually born out by the historical evidence.
Did it really last 10,000 years in harmony? That's pretty unbelievable. In that time there were vast numbers of peasant revolts. There were great areas and eras when the peasants were left to their own devices, only so long as they did nothing that inconvenienced their overlords. There were religions that preached obedience to the rightful masters and rightful place of people in society. And when those broke down there were massacres brutal repression.
I didn't suggest that it was ten thousand years of harmony, I said that it was ten thousands years of basic functionality. That stateless communality worked, and lasted, and generally didn't tear themselves apart. This seems to be the case.
Add that to having the troublemakers leave, rather voluntarily or not...
I'm not actually sure how common this was, actually. It doesn't figure largely in the studies of peasant society that I've read. Vagrancy tends to be an Early Modern phenomenon, associated with the disintegration of peasant societies more than anything else.
...and no access to any other kind of economy, and often laws which restricted if not outright preventing labor mobility. I don't think you can look at 10,000 years of peasant history and say that it was stable because people knew of and had access to alternatives and yet chose to live that way.
I don't think that I am saying that. I'm not even sure why it's relevant. Why would the existence of alternatives have any effect on whether or not these communities were internally stable.
It's not self-evident to the dicks. In fact it is often personally beneficial to a high degree. If you want to make the claim that it is evidently self-destructive to the society, as opposed to the individual, then you have to make the claim that people, essentially all people, were acting for the community and not for themselves. And, as I have been trying to say, that condition does not hold. And even to the extent that it holds for many, it only takes a small percentage of people to ruin it for everyone else.
I don't have to make that claim at all. That demands the presumption that self-interest and collective interest is necessarily opposed, which I would not only reject, but I would say is quite demonstrably false. What I'm suggesting is that, for most people, for most of history, self-interest and cooperation have been strongly aligned with each other, and that your "small percentage", for all they are touted as the inevitable harbingers of doom, seemed to be absent from the equation. Which leads me to suspect that it's something to do with capitalism, rather than humanity itself, which produces the sort of behaviour that so concerns you.
Your system requires universality. And you don't have it. Mine does not. Mine only requires an understand that universality breaks down, and some concept of where and under what circumstances that happens.
I didn't realise that I had "a system", and I'm not sure how it would be relevant if I did. This isn't about political "systems", this is about the anthropological basis for the criticisms of right-libertarians that have been voiced in this thread.
It requires a police. It does not require stormtroopers.
I don't mean to be facetious when I say that's a question of degrees. State violence, however limited it may be in any given instance, always carries the implicit threat of lethal force. And it has to- what good would a security force be if it just gave up and went home when things got too hairy?
But "I won't bother with complex counters when a simple one suffices" is.
No, see, my thing was a derisive paraphrase of your comment, while this is just you saying what you think of my posts. So it doesn't really work as a retort.
When the 10 % making the difference are a lunatic conception of humanity, then no it's not silly.
You're trying far too hard to be the Devil's Advocate.
When someone ask if a broken engine can work, you can just point at the melted part of it, you don't need to spend five hours on a lesson about how engines works, what fuel they use and the whole factory process.
If it only takes 10% to turn your conception of humanity "lunatic", then I think you need to examine it more critically. Kind of like how an engine that very easily breaks might need a bit of a re-design.
