Market Anarchy: A Proposition

[Aphex_Twin]

"Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the other forms that have been tried from time to time."
-Winston Churchill

I think we can do better than that.

Without further ado, these are my starting assumptions:

1. Only individuals act, think and reason. No other entity can be said to, independently. All collective action, to make sense, must be reduced to actions of individuals. If it cannot, we cannot speak of action.

Spoiler :

From this, we can deduce that people can only have individual purposes. Desires also come from individuals. Action is meant to satisfy desire and that desire cannot reside inside a collective, independently. And so, individuals act toward their own purposes, aim to safisfy their personal desires. This doesn't mean that complementary or joint purposes are not possible, quite the contrary.

2. People tend to act rationally (acknowledging and acting according to the reality around them). They reason and make sense, generally, but not always and not perfectly. However, this is a dominant feature of behavior.

Spoiler :

To say the contrary would mean to say that people are generally disconnected from the world around them, acting aimlessly or randomly. Purpose is a certain fact about human action and purpose makes no sense without a rational actor. A being unable to fulfill its purposes, consistently, could not survive, even if it wanted to; or at least that must be a dominant feature of the beings surrounding it.

From (1) and (2), there is no such thing as a "common good." Since only individuals act and they act rationally, they alone can judge what is good for them, individually. So any idea of a common good (assigned to a group) that assumes the opposite for even one member of the group must be rejected as false. The necessary "bad" inflicted on one in exchange for the "good" of many is an idea that cannot stand scrutiny.

OK, tell me what you think so far. I will add more, but I want to have the premises firmly established first.

 

[Aphex_Twin]

I understand Market Anarchy (MA) as follows:

A society in which the dominant ideology and practice is that of voluntary interaction.

In short, a stateless society based on free exchange (and implicitly property rights).

As this thread progresses, I will expose my arguments for my case (and synthetizing them at the top of the thread).

I aim to prove that this system is wholly ethical, stable (won't degenerate into chaos) and also possible.

 

[Aphex_Twin]

Operational definitions:

Reason: the capacity to connect causes and effects.
Rational person: an entity capable of reason.

 

[GinandTonic]

Check out the BBC Dawkins Documentary called Nice Guys Finish First or similar, in the thread of the same name.

Doesnt work, aparently. Dawkins could be wrong and you could be right, but yo'll have to pitch me better.

 

[brennan]

Or read 'The Selfish Gene'.

 

[Souron]

So are you saying it's bad to build an aquaduct, because it would put the well worker out of a job, even though it benifits everyone else?

 

[brennan]

3) definition of 'the common good': anything that a number of people can see is both in their own interests and easier to achieve while working in a group.

Choose your group so that no-one who loses out is in it and the people can safely ignore this thread.

 

[JerichoHill]

Public goods do exist.

It's called externalities.

Sorry.

darn, brennan got it

 

[Aphex_Twin]

JericoHill, I'm saying that there is no such thing as a living, breathing collective. All purposes are individual, all action is performed by individuals.

The only coherent manner of saying: "We must promote the public good" is to allow individuals to express their own values, the "good" for them, as they see it.

I'll get into ethics in a bit.

 

[Chandrasekhar]

Tag. I'd like to see where this goes.

 

[ParkCungHee]

Market Anarchy always runs into one problem over and over again, and fails to get it.

People are a bigger threat to property rights then the state. Anyone who likes Market economics needs to love the state, and state intervention. Without the state, you can't own land or really anything you can't carry with you, if that. Without the state, you can't enforce contracts, including loans. Without the state, there is no market.

 

[Aphex_Twin]

Don't get carried away there. Property rights are an issue worth discussing. I'm just wondering if you have some objectives so far.

I'm picking this route because there are a lot of topics involved and the discussion can quickly degenerate into parallels.

 

[ParkCungHee]

very well

1. Only individuals act, think and reason. No other entity can be said to, independently. All collective action, to make sense, must be reduced to actions of individuals. If it cannot, we cannot speak of action.

But you forget that individual rationality translates to collective irrationality. Look at the Prisoners Dilemma. Look at banks during a recession, at an individual level, it makes sense to take your money out of a bank before it collapses, at the collective level, this guarantees the banks collapse, and therefor the most rational thing is for no one to withdraw their money.

 

[Dzzo]

omfg you guys belong in college! DANG!

 

[amadeus]

A limited degree of interventionism is necessary if you are trying to run a stable and modern state.

Hong Kong, if you exclude the authoritarian tendencies of their new CCP masters, is a good demonstration of how private enterprise can co-exist with a fiscally libertarian government.

 

[ParkCungHee]

omfg you guys belong in college! DANG!

That is so going in my sig.

 

[JerichoHill]

JericoHill, I'm saying that there is no such thing as a living, breathing collective. All purposes are individual, all action is performed by individuals.

The only coherent manner of saying: "We must promote the public good" is to allow individuals to express their own values, the "good" for them, as they see it.

I'll get into ethics in a bit.

I'm sorry, your argument fails when it comes to public goods. The purpose of a public good is to provide a good that, when left to individual decision making, is not provided in the correct amount.

And I'm a raving libertarian telling ya this buddy!

 

[WillJ]

Okay Aphex, I agree with your premises, but only in the sense that I describe below.

1. Yes, only individual human beings make decisions and actions. Groups of humans are biologically unable to act as an organic whole; instead they cooperate through communication, all the while still acting as individual human beings. All human action, including the history of the Soviet Union, can be interpreted as the actions of different individual human beings, nothing more or less. It should also be noted that cats and dogs (and all other living organisms) also act as individuals, not as groups. This premise applies to all life forms, not just humans.

2. Yes, human beings are "connected with reality," just like a potato is connected with reality. They are able to "fulfill their purposes," just like a dog is able to fulfill its purposes. So yes, you have established that human beings are like potatoes and dogs. (I'm hinting at the fact that you probably should offer a more precise definition of "rational" if you hope to build a grand sociopolitical theory on a couple little axioms as flawlessly as a mathematician builds mathematics.)

 

[JerichoHill]

Market Anarchy always runs into one problem over and over again, and fails to get it.

People are a bigger threat to property rights then the state. Anyone who likes Market economics needs to love the state, and state intervention. Without the state, you can't own land or really anything you can't carry with you, if that. Without the state, you can't enforce contracts, including loans. Without the state, there is no market.

Incorrect. People love markets realize that the state is a necessary evil, and fear it becoming more than that.

 

[ParkCungHee]

But every facet of the Market Economy is dependent on the state. You may not like certain interventions, but if the state never intervened, you would never have loans and lending institutions because there would no way to use force to get collateral, stock exchange would be impossible because there would be no mechanism to enforce even the simplest regulation (startup capital? What startup capital?), contracts would be impossible because of no mechanism to enforce it, there would be no motivation to inovate and advance because patents and copyrights would not be enforced and of course, because private property in itself is a form of government intervention, you would have no garuantees on that.
If you throw all these things, you've basically thrown capitalism out the window. If you throw out the state, you've thrown out capitalism.