Anthony Gregory — Contra Kevin Carson on the Humanity of Corporations and Government Teachers
Posted by Kevin Carson on Aug 25, 2011 in Feature Articles, Mutual Exchange • 32 commentsMUTUAL EXCHANGE
Mutual exchange is the Center’s goal in two senses—we favor a society rooted in peaceful, voluntary cooperation, and we seek to foster understanding through ongoing dialogue.
That’s why we’re inaugurating this new feature of our site. Mutual Exchange will provide opportunites for conversation about issues that matter to the Center’s various publics. A lead essay, deliberately provocative, will be followed by responses from inside and outside C4SS. Contributions and comments from readers are enthusiastically encouraged.
We begin with Anthony Gregory’s essay, “Contra Kevin Carson on the Humanity of Corporations and Government Teachers,” which raises some critical questions about aspects of Kevin Carson’s project. Responses from Carson, Gary Chartier, and others will follow.
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Not in a million years would I have expected to agree with Mitt Romney and disagree with Kevin Carson. Although I am not a mutualist, I acknowledge that Carson is a radical anarchist, and I regard Romney as a fascist. I have appreciated much of Carson’s critique of state capitalism as a welcome corrective to a libertarian movement too often enamored of the corporatist status quo and economic conservatism. And yet I disagree so much with what seems the main thrust of his recent article, “Corporations Are People? So Was Hitler,” that I am moved to respond in partial defense of what was uttered by Romney, a man I have criticized in many writings and do not in any way see as an ally in the struggle for anything I value whatsoever.
Carson’s main point is that Romney’s assertion that “corporations are people” is trivial and hides the institutional evil involved. The fact that corporations comprise people is “technically true, of course. The money a corporation makes at the expense of consumers and workers through state-enforced unequal exchange is all distributed to people.”
Right away, Carson assumes the premise that corporate profits generally result from “state-enforced unequal exchange.” Surely workers and consumers often face state-imposed burdens that reduce their chances for optimally beneficial exchange. But does this mean that corporate profit makers benefit at their expense? Isn’t it possible for both sides even of an “unequal” transaction to be worse off, at the margin, because of the state involvement, and yet be better off for having made the trade? What about the many entrepreneurs who profit one year only to lose plenty the next? Was it at their expense that consumers and workers profited?
Here I must agree with the Austrian insight that if two parties come to make a deal, especially if they both walk away satisfied, their demonstrated preference is that the deal was not at their expense but at the overall improvement of their situation, and this should not be undermined by third-party observers. Typically, it is true, workers’ and consumers’ exchange would have been even more fruitful for them if not for the state. Sometimes the state even creates captive labor and consumer markets for corporations. But the sheer productivity in even the hampered market economy, whereby workers and consumers have in many ways improved their lot over the years, even if not as much as they should have, would seem to indicate that not all their interactions with corporations come at their net expense. They may benefit much less than they should, due to the state, but surely the typical experience of consumers or workers engaged even in a corporatist system is not one of overall victimization, as Carson implies here:
[E]very system of class exploitation in human history has served the interests of some group of human beings. In every society in history, no matter how brutally exploitative, of course the ill-gotten gain was consumed by “people.” Roman patricians who lived off the sweat of slaves were people, and so were feudal landlords who gouged rents from the peasantry. I suspect it was “people” — evil people — who profited from the gold teeth extracted at Auschwitz.
Now, I for one always enjoy a good comparison to the Nazis, and am on record in opposing Godwin’s Law. But this comparison appears very unreasonable. If the idea is that there is a fair parallel to be drawn between those who profit off corporations and those who thrive on slave states and concentration camps, I find much to protest here. I know this is a reductio ad absurdam argument, but it seems fatally flawed even in its fundamental conception. A consumer walking into a Wal-Mart and buying a new stereo and CD might have been much better off if the state didn’t impose protectionist barriers to foreign electronics producers, increase the cost of recorded music through copyright, and impose a hundred other costs on the buyer. Yet he is hardly a victim of the exchange itself. He can choose not to buy these goods at all, and still get along fine in the world. He really is choosing to give his money to corporations, however flawed the underlying structure of the economy. Moreover, although any given corporation may benefit from state intervention, it might suffer as well.
To apply Carson’s analogy, if the Wal-Mart customer is the man whose gold teeth are being extracted at Auschwitz, Wal-Mart isn’t the Nazi sadist doing the extracting – it’s the merchant who sold him the teeth. Maybe the inmate was disadvantaged unfairly, perhaps because of state intervention, in that he needed to buy the teeth in the first place. But the real parallel in our mixed economy is not someone losing what he has to enrich a corporate profit seeker. It is, more often, someone not gaining as much as he should, due to regulations.
I do agree that corporate personhood can pose problems and that only individuals have rights. Ron Paul, himself not an anarchist, has also made this point in response to Romney’s choice of words. But Carson seems to be going much further in his critique, not simply questioning the categorization of corporate fictions as “people,” but in fact agreeing that they constitute people while harshly judging the ethical status and productive role of these people being discussed.
Do corporate profits often rely on state intervention? Of course. But they are not necessarily exploitative. They are certainly not always at the expense of consumers and workers. We actors in the marketplace, even one tainted by state involvement, do not always fall neatly into these categories of being consumers and workers or corporate beneficiaries. And many people who profit from corporate enterprises do so at great risk, putting everything they have on the line, without which entrepreneurship and thus economic growth and therefore civilization itself would be impossible. Surely big business has thrived on the state. I have made this point many times myself [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9]. But support from the state is not a necessary element to corporate profits, nor are all corporations even in our world on balance predatory institutions whose gains always come at the expense of workers or consumers. In the end, people who choose to buy from corporations or work for them, when in fact there are alternatives out there, do so because they stand to benefit themselves. In a truly free market, certainly many more good alternatives would be available. But this doesn’t mean the economic choices people actually make in our flawed world are themselves exploitative or oppressive.
Although hostile toward corporate profiteers, Carson is much more nuanced in discussing other people who thrive on institutions of privilege and state-supported exploitation — ones who, in my opinion, tend to be at least as disrespectful of human rights in practice. He wrote on the labor controversy in Wisconsin this March:
Education would no doubt be different in many ways in a free society — no compulsory attendance laws, and no processing of human resources for the corporate state. But teaching children is an important function in any society, and much that public school teachers do now would probably carry over without much change.
In my own view, corporate profits would exist in abundance in a free market, so long as there is inefficiency for entrepreneurs to identify and address, thereby benefiting society as a whole. I believe this will always be the case. Maybe this is part of the reason why I’m a capitalist and Carson is not. But regardless of the question of corporations in a free society, I strongly disagree that much of what public school teachers do would “carry over without much change” in a free society. Within a generation or so in a stateless world, I very much doubt that the majority of children would be subjected to something resembling conventional school at all. Homeschooling, lecture programs where teachers truly serve students and parents, online learning coupled with freer, more humane social interactions, would more likely dominate, I would think and hope. Our Prussian, imperialist public school system is an outrage, and the private schools are near carbon copies of the state model, due to accreditation laws and statist cultural inertia. Most jobs at corporations are in fact paragons of humane treatment compared to what many pupils in public schools suffer. If anyone should be able to appreciate this, I would think a left-leaning market anarchist would.
But even without knowing exactly what a free society would look like, it is hard for me to see on what libertarian grounds Carson is more willing to humanize public school teachers than corporate beneficiaries. After all, in actual fact, public school teachers regularly conspire with administrators (their supposed class enemies) and police to enforce attendance. Carson does point out that attendance laws are a problem, but surely they poison the entire system as much as state interventions tarnish corporate life. Most teachers also happily engage in state-sanctioned civic brainwashing. They even impose homework, further burdening young people who are already forced to endure nine or so long hours sitting in torturous chairs staring at mind-destroying blackboards, such that they go home not to a reprieve or a chance for individual flourishing, but rather additional, mind-numbing abuse. Public teachers tend to be better paid than their counterparts in the private sector, and tend to whine louder every year for higher pay and better benefits at the expense of the taxpayer.
The amount of state privilege involved in propping up the child indoctrination racket is surely comparable to, if not far exceeding, what is entailed for the average corporation. Yet public school teachers tend to be more directly involved in coercively enforcing the destructive program of government brainwashing, abuse, and humiliation of the most vulnerable members of society, than are most corporate beneficiaries directly involved in serving the state where the coercion meets the individual. Sure, we should humanize the public school teachers, recognize their job in some cases somewhat resembles something that might exist on a free market, realize that many of them are good people who resent the system as much as we do, and not view them all as the equivalent of Nazi war criminals. Yet this is even truer of entrepreneurs reaping corporate profits.
It would seem that Carson is using a proxy to determine who deserves animus and who warrants sympathy, and that proxy is based on a rough conception of leftist class analysis, rather than classical liberal class analysis. It is true that conservative-leaning libertarians often oversimplify matters by finding all “private sector” parties to be victims and all “tax consumers” to be parasites. Yet a proxy that tends toward vilification of the capitalist class and empathy for the proletarian class—which is what Carson seems to be doing—is at least as flawed. Not that he is defending government cops, but Carson even makes sure to note: “Even some of what police do, like stopping violent crime and apprehending aggressors, would still be necessary” in a free society. Sure enough. But in practice, I’ll take almost any corporate beneficiary over almost any police officer, regardless of the worker-capitalist class division that seems to serve Carson in his decision on whether to humanize an individual working in our flawed system, or compare him to a Nazi.
I admit some of my resistance to the Carsonian conception of corporations as people stems from personal experience. For years in Berkeley, I myself began saying, “corporations are people,” when arguing with lefties of all types – from social democrats to social anarchists – who spent significant time attacking corporations for all their evils, but had much less hatred for the state. Some of these people, even the so-called radicals, would sometimes respond to my anti-state fundamentalism with the point, “governments are people,” and I would argue back much as Carson has done in response to Romney, deconstructing what exactly that meant. Yet I found that most people who railed against corporations didn’t give one whit about liberty or even peace, when it came down to it.
Now I concede there is something approaching a logical fallacy in my sentiment, if not the pure reasoning I use, in these arguments involving the phrase “corporations are people”—I admit part of my reaction is emotionally charged, a revulsion at those who would take some of the positions Carson takes—and yet Carson would seem to be going even further down this line of judging someone’s position based on where they’re coming from. Carson writes in “Corporations Are People?”:
[J]ust before I heard about Romney’s latest blooper, I was reading about a study by psychologist Dacher Keltner. The life experience of the rich, he says, makes them less empathetic and more selfish than ordinary people. Part of this is willful obtuseness; legitimizing ideologies not only inure the exploited to getting the shaft, but enable the expoiters to sleep at night by reassuring themselves that the poor really deserve it.
The rich justify their relations with other social classes with the help of the Americanist ideology, whereby they exaggerate their own perceived rugged individualism and see their wealth as the result of character: “They think that economic success and political outcomes, and personal outcomes, have to do with individual behavior, a good work ethic …”
In other words, fake “free market” ideology — as opposed to the real thing — is the opiate of the elites.
Aside from the shaky psycho-analysis, this comes too close for my taste to resembling the Marxist polylogism that Ludwig von Mises roundly refutes in his brilliant works including Human Action. “Americanist ideology,” Carson argues, resonates with people based on class, rather than on philosophical principles of potentially universal appeal. He is not saying that class determines one’s philosophical reasoning, but it comes close.
For one thing, I think Carson is off the mark if not simply wrong. Plenty of poorer Americans buy into vulgar, fake free-market ideology, and plenty of rich people denounce the free market—whether the real thing or its counterfeit—all the time. Poor people vote Republican to protect themselves from “socialism.” And there are those, including me, who oppose corporatism vehemently and yet still prefer it to the state socialism often advocated by most factions of the left. Meanwhile, there are about half a dozen lavishly wealthy anarchists who come to mind whose market radicalism is pretty damn genuine. Then there are the rich socialists, and the poor socialists, and everything in between. Moreover, Romney, if we are going to try to read his thoughts as Carson appears to be doing, probably doesn’t believe any of his own rhetoric. He isn’t defending “fake ‘free market’ ideology” to sleep better at night—but rather to win votes.
But most important, it is a mistake to take this route in critiquing someone’s point. If Romney is wrong to humanize corporations in the way he did, and I don’t think his point was nearly as trivial as Carson does, it is not necessarily a reflection of Romney’s class. This Marxian way of looking at the world is poor theoretical analysis. I’ve heard people from all across the economic spectrum sound like Romney talking about corporations.
Corporations are people too. And yes, governments are as well. Do all people who make profits off big business deserve what they make? No. Do all government workers deserve our hatred? No. Yet a balanced approach based on respect for the individual’s dignity and liberty in a society too often regimented by the brutal machinery of institutional coercion will yield a much more nuanced view than Carson has given in condemning corporate profit makers, and probably a much more critical view of public teachers as a class. Most corporate beneficiaries are not as bad as Nazis. Many of them are heroic benefactors of humanity. And most of them are at least as defensible and admirable as the average public teacher taking a government paycheck, even if this person appears to be a member of the “working class.”
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Anthony Gregory is research editor at the Independent Institute. Visit him at AnthonyGregory.com.
C4SS (c4ss.org) Research Associate Kevin Carson is a contemporary mutualist author and individualist anarchist whose written work includes Studies in Mutualist Political Economy, Organization Theory: A Libertarian Perspective, and The Homebrew Industrial Revolution: A Low-Overhead Manifesto, all of which are freely available online. Carson has also written for such print publications as The Freeman: Ideas on Liberty and a variety of internet-based journals and blogs, including Just Things, The Art of the Possible, the P2P Foundation and his own Mutualist Blog.
I think a more interesting question to be answered is this:
Assume we get rid of the governmental preferences that Kevin talks about — we get rid of affirmative regulation (or, “regulatory capture” as some like to call it) and have a totally free market.
What would prevent a corporation from wielding excessive leverage over these groups:
1) the consumers who buy its products — absent commerce regulation, what prevents combines from arising, dominating a market, and fixing prices?
2) the people who live in the area where the corporation operates — absent environmental regulation, what prevents a corporation from spewing pollutants into the air, water and land to the ecological detriment of the locale in which it operates?
3) the possible competitor business entities — similar to (1), absent commerce regulation, what prevents combines from arising, dominating a market, and making it financially impossible to compete?
My chief criticism of Kevin’s position on corporations is the naivete inherent in assuming that absent regulation (or other oversight), corporations will behave as model citizens. Kevin seems to assume that corporations mis-behave because of affirmative regulation. My experience as a regulatory attorney in an area where businesses are mostly state-regulated and not fed-regulated (insurance) suggests that it’s not regulation that makes a corporation mis-behave, but greed, power-lust, acquisitiveness, and negative selfishness (no concern for impacts outside the self).
I am no fan of the State, I see it as oppressive as presently operating (Fed Govt in 2011), but I don’t see how abolishing the State or its regulatory mechanisms will automatically cause corporations to behave in a more benevolent, humane, community-minded fashion.
Mr Gregory’s long-winded essay is merely a defense of corporations, one that’s been offered by plenty of people for well over 100 years in American business and jurisprudential settings. It brings nothing new to the discussion.
I think a more interesting question to be answered is this:
Assume we get rid of the governmental preferences that Kevin talks about — we get rid of affirmative regulation (or, “regulatory capture” as some like to call it) and have a totally free market.
What would prevent a corporation from wielding excessive leverage over these groups:
1) the consumers who buy its products — absent commerce regulation, what prevents combines from arising, dominating a market, and fixing prices?
2) the people who live in the area where the corporation operates — absent environmental regulation, what prevents a corporation from spewing pollutants into the air, water and land to the ecological detriment of the locale in which it operates?
3) the possible competitor business entities — similar to (1), absent commerce regulation, what prevents combines from arising, dominating a market, and making it financially impossible to compete?
My chief criticism of Kevin’s position on corporations is the naivete inherent in assuming that absent regulation (or other oversight), corporations will behave as model citizens. Kevin seems to assume that corporations mis-behave because of affirmative regulation. My experience as a regulatory attorney in an area where businesses are mostly state-regulated and not fed-regulated (insurance) suggests that it’s not regulation that makes a corporation mis-behave, but greed, power-lust, acquisitiveness, and negative selfishness (no concern for impacts outside the self).
I am no fan of the State, I see it as oppressive as presently operating (Fed Govt in 2011), but I don’t see how abolishing the State or its regulatory mechanisms will automatically cause corporations to behave in a more benevolent, humane, community-minded fashion.
Mr Gregory’s long-winded essay is merely a defense of corporations, one that’s been offered by plenty of people for well over 100 years in American business and jurisprudential settings. It brings nothing new to the discussion.
"Kevin seems to assume that corporations mis-behave because of affirmative regulation. My experience as a regulatory attorney in an area where businesses are mostly state-regulated and not fed-regulated (insurance) suggests that it's not regulation that makes a corporation mis-behave, but greed, power-lust, acquisitiveness, and negative selfishness (no concern for impacts outside the self)."
This way of putting your disagreement with Kevin is a bit odd. After all, Kevin obviously agrees with you that corporations misbehave because of "greed, power-lust, acquisitiveness, and negative selfishness." His argument is that the background regulatory structure enables corporations to get away with bad actions.
Re your 3 questions, Kevin and others have already addressed them many times in a fair bit of detail. But quickly:
(1) "absent commerce regulation, what prevents combines from arising, dominating a market, and fixing prices?"
Competition. Historically combines haven't managed to maintain a monopoly without running to the government for commercial regulation to help them.
(2) "absent environmental regulation, what prevents a corporation from spewing pollutants into the air, water and land to the ecological detriment of the locale in which it operates?"
Well, harmful pollution would still be illegal under market anarchism, no?
Your (3) just repeats (1).
Roderick, “competition” means nothing. It’s a vague phrase. And please don’t go running off on the idea that assumes I hate competition. I do not. I am simply more familiar with un-regulated, un-favored businesses combining to stifle and oppress their erstwhile competition — through mere financial leverage, not through the quality of their work or the sanction of a favored politician or regulatory entity.
What you say about “historically” happening with combines must be restricted to only those things you have determined, in your narrow view, to be “combines.” Throughout human history, wealthy people have used their wealth to limit others’ access to wealth, and it hasn’t always required a governmental authority, a regulatory entity practicing affirmative regulation, or any other special favor from the government.
Unless you are limiting “history” to the history of the USA, and only to certain business sectors.
I’ve watched law firms — which are totally unregulated — combine to oppress and stifle would-be competitors. They don’t do this via governmental sanction.
I don’t see the notion of “competition” being a fail-safe assurance of level playing fields and equal opportunity. I don’t see it squashing man’s most nefarious urges. Rather, competition tends to make humans more self-protecting, more aggressive.
Athletic competition requires rules for this very reason. And that’s just sport, Roderick. No money involved. No power involved.
Maybe you could help me understand where you’re coming from here.
Karl: corporate status being a legal classification (that is, itself a regulation), to end governmental preferences would include ending the existence of corporations.
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"I've watched law firms — which are totally unregulated — combine to oppress and stifle would-be competitors. They don't do this via governmental sanction." – Karl
Most unintentionally funny comment I've heard in a while…
Instead of snark, c-of-c, tell me how they’re regulated. You mean Bar organizations? Or do you mean some strange de facto regulation that you’re not willing to discuss?
I find your comment without substance but full of belief in superiority, which is redundant on the “without substance” character.
b-psycho, what would you say about large entities that are not corporations.
And to other critics: how will the transition to no corporate status be managed? Who will enforce the abolition of corporations? What will prevent non-corporate combines?
I’ve been suggesting ending the corporate status for at least 20 years. Apparently you two commenters assume I want corporations to continue. I guess that makes your criticisms easier to offer, but it doesn’t answer the question of how those who presently hold power in corporate entities will be required to give up that power.
They’re not going to yield power without a fight. If you think they will, you must not have spent any time working in and for any of the larger corporate entities doing business today.
All this discussion of what you’d like in an idyllic world means nothing if you don’t know the road map for getting to that ideal. So, to you two critics of my posts (or 3 if we add Roderick),
how are we going to get there?
Karl– You might start by reading "Triumph of Conservatism" by Gabriel Kolko. This leftist writer has explained in detail how laissez faire worked in the late nineteenth century to the advantage of consumers.
Aside from the fact that law firms by their nature are tied to government privilege, as the commenter stated, the facts are evident that regulations act to stifle competition and keep markets obtuse and frozen from innovation.
Perhaps you are also believing that, on the other hand, competition in and of itself, promoted by the state, is the most important value. In fact, every market is different. The key element is lack of legal barriers to entry into a market. If significant legal barriers exist, then the market is stifled. However, if no real legal barriers exist, then the consumers, and they alone, should decide if there is enough competition. For example, the DOJ antitrust vendettas against IBM and Microsoft over trivial matters that the consumers should have decided on their own.
The largeness, and competitive practices of a firm against its competitors is of little import, if there are no significant barriers to entry. If profits become attractive enough, a way will be found for competition to form to try to siphon some of those profits, and prices will come down.
And don't forget, competition can come from OUTSIDE the market itself, as cars, trucks and planes arose to compete against the railroads.
"Instead of snark, c-of-c, tell me how they're regulated." – Karl
I'm not trying to be "snarky". I just thought it was funny (and it was) that in your analysis of de jure regulation surrounding law firms you've managed to miss the de facto governmental sanction granted to lawyers more generally – whose purpose (ostensibly) is precisely to navigate government sanction. You're making the claim, it seems, that the state need not be involved in a cornering of power or wealth…..by pointing to a group that (at least in its current form) operates almost entirely on the underlying predication of the state's existence. It's not completely unlike asking how we'd go about regulating tax accountants if the state didn't exist….
Dear Karl:
Read Mises, Rothbard, Hayek, Schiff, Hoppe, Woods, DiLorenzo, Block, Higgs, and Armentano, and then get back to me. Your tiresome objections are easily refuted and have repeatedly been thoroughly dismantled by real economists and historians. That you would ignorantly raise such long-discredited objections illustrates your lack of real education.
@Karl –
"how are we going to get there?"
By ending welfare from the top down and deregulating from the bottom up.
We buttress bloated corporate juggernauts by:
- Direct and indirect subsidies
- Public-supported infrastructure that creates artificial economies of scale
- Public education
- Artificial monopolies and rents
…and many other ways
We also regulate the little guy out of the ability to compete by:
- Zoning and code restrictions
- Licensing fees
- Health and safety regs that are crafted to cartelize industry and commerce
…and many other ways
If and when the big guys are forced to compete BOTH for customers AND for workers, we won't have to rely on "good faith" to keep them in line. Along with that, take away limited liability and we'll be a lot closer to a level playing field.
Anyway, along with the other suggested readings, if you haven't read "The Iron Fist Behind the Invisible Hand," it's a good primer.
We don't need to "fight the power," just make it irrelevant.
I'd say that minus the various subsidies and legal perks that distinguish a corporate entity, the likelihood of a large entity post-corporate status that continued to behave like one with corporate status not collapsing approaches zero. The size of the type of entities being discussed isn't a natural occurrence, remove the supports and they either break up into way more manageable pieces or fail completely.
The issue is less one of fighting to get them to give up power than it is of voiding the source of it. Point out and explain that source to enough people and you render the legal and social machinery necessary to keep it going inoperable, because it still needs people to run it. Without proxy violence by their side, what can they do?
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"Well, harmful pollution would still be illegal under market anarchism, no? "
First off all you have to been able to detect it and act on it.
I don't care about the future of humanity on earth. I am simply not going to have children. I am interested in what both sides has to say in the climate debate just for the science of it. Guess what? Corporations have lined up on one side. Max Planck Institute, Niels Bohr institute, Space Agencies etc. etc. (non-market entities pulling in the other direction). I value knowledge production and discussions outside the cash-nexus. I value watching and listening to public national television and public national radio featuring hour long debates with cutting edge climate scientists debating without commercial breaks from the market.
Karl: Government currently *enables* corporations to be bad actors. It actively subsidizes their operating costs in order to overcome the diseconomies of large scale, erects regulatory cartels that reduce price and quality competition between them, erects entry barriers that enable monopoly rents, and preempts common law standards of liability through dumbed-down least-common-denominator regulations that serve as de facto ceilings rather than floors and create "safe harbors" against liability for any corporation that meets the regulatory state's minimum standards.
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Anthony's comments about schools and teachers are bang-on and deserve to be expanded in their own essay. My intuition is that education, teaching and teachers would be unrecognisably different in a stateless society. State school teachers have convinced themselves that they are virtuous, but they couldn't be more wrong.
"n my own view, corporate profits would exist in abundance in a free market, so long as there is inefficiency for entrepreneurs to identify and address, thereby benefiting society as a whole. I believe this will always be the case. Maybe this is part of the reason why I’m a capitalist and Carson is not."
HAHAHAHAHA!
This crap is unbelievable!
Stop calling yourself an anarchist, Gregory
Hypocrite!
I agree that Carson could (and I don't say "should") be more critical against teachers. However, Gregory's defense of corporate fat cats is so ridiculous than the Carson's omission is insignificant.
Even neo-classical capitalist economists recognize that your assertion is utterly false.
"Do corporate profits often rely on state intervention? Of course. But they are not necessarily exploitative. They are certainly not always at the expense of consumers and workers."
HAHAHAHAHAHA! Non-exploitative profit? What the fuck of anarchist is that?
" that public school teachers do now would probably carry over without much change."
I disagree with Carson on this, but yeah, there will be teachers in a free-market environment, and a lot less of fucking corporate fat cats!
"Our Prussian, imperialist public school system is an outrage, and the private schools are near carbon copies of the state model, due to accreditation laws and statist cultural inertia."
I agree, but look at the following sentence:
"Most jobs at corporations are in fact paragons of humane treatment compared to what many pupils in public schools suffer. If anyone should be able to appreciate this, I would think a left-leaning market anarchist would."
Are you fucking insane, Gregory?
"My intuition is that education, teaching and teachers would be unrecognisably different in a stateless society. State school teachers have convinced themselves that they are virtuous, but they couldn't be more wrong. "
I agree, but Gregory's views about corporate fat cats are fucking insane.
As usual, or at least all to often in libertarian, this seems a case of misunderstanding and exaggeration.
"Right away, Carson assumes the premise that corporate profits generally result from “state-enforced unequal exchange"
That's not his assumption. His assumption is that a huge and disproportionate concentrations of wealth is almost always the result of market distortions or monopolies and really it's not so much of an assumption than it is a well-researched conclusion. (There are though tens of thousands of corporations or LLC's that serve as little more than a tax and liability shield, that do not lobby for or particularly benefit from distortions and monopolies, but I don't think this is what Carson is particularly criticizing)
Opportunity costs ought always be part of a catholic economic analysis. So yes certain corporate profits genuinely come at the expense of foregoing certain opportunities for consumers and workers. (Costs that are imposed regardless of weather I actually use the services of any one of these corporations) Not all, but certainly some, and those that do can't be sanitized by claiming some of the profits are distributed back to 401K's or by saying they didn't steal their profit outright.
As for the teacher analogy, we can recognize the value of indirect management where there are many people with ownership claims, while condemning the form of much the current embodiment and use of such institutions.
As a final note corporations are not people. They are legal fictions designed to be rid of the consequences of facts. Governments are just a type of corporation. However the abstraction can be useful (so you don't have a lawsuit with a thousand plaintiffs and ten thousand defendants.) so there is no reason not to condemn those corporation that exist because of market distortion or monopoly.
We need to focus on institutions, not "good guys" and "bad guys". People will always be somewhat assholes and somewhat angels, but it is institutions that distort the population into bad or good directions. Those institutions can be identified and fought, and that fight should be something that people like Gregory and people like Carson can work together on at least part of the time.
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Neo-classical capitalist economists are awful. Read some Mises.
No, I'm not insane. Children have to get permission to go to the bathroom. They have absolutely no privacy. They are deprived of lunch time when they act up. During PE, it is like training to be in jail. They are forced to engage in physical activities and judged for it. They are forced to stand in front of the class and show how much they know about math and history. This is a disgusting system of constant humiliation, and children, unlike adult workers, aren't simply free to get up and leave. It is a form of child labor, extended into the home life in a totalitarian ritual known as homework. The only difference with most forms of child labor? The children don't get paid.
Depending on the level of analysis being carried out, this is either trivially and tautologously true, and so not very meaningful, or false by omission of things needed for deeper insight. For instance, if someone sets a fire and then buys a burned out business at fire sale prices, the seller is certainly better off than simply staying in a wrecked business, but would have been better off still without the fire. That also applies when someone else lights the fire to gain other benefits from the sale, even when the buyer isn’t culpable; demonstrated preference is still drawn from a rigged deck.
Carson wasn’t assuming, merely describing a background that had been observed and substantiated on other occasions. But, applying that sort of test, that “real parallel” is making far more of an assumption; in fact, while it would have been arguable a generation or so ago, it is apparent that large numbers have actually been going backwards in more recent times. Getting ever less does not square with merely not gaining as much as would otherwise have happened.
In my own view, such corporate structures would not even exist in a free market, as corporate businesses require an enabling state framework (special cases like monasteries could still exist, as they have particular internal dynamics of their own to hold them together, but those are not relevant here).
For the above reasons, this simply isn’t true. No entrepreneurs reaping corporate profits resemble something that might exist on a free market. While many do resent the system, their very presence necessarily involves them in activity that furthers it; they don’t even have the argument of the socialist millionaire, that they are helping to bring socialism about (that works because socialism still contains their activities even once they are nationalised). Think of someone struggling to free a stuck punt pole, not realising that the simple geometry of the positions of the punt, the pole, and himself mean that all the while he is averaging out as pushing on the pole because his weight is leaning on it from his spanning the gap.
But it isn’t about animus and sympathy, it’s about recognising what is going on and which things are inconsistent with replacing the system. So the whole critique is misguided, since the original article being critiqued wasn’t about placing praise or blame but about clearing up the confusion arising from using those as guides.
Karl wrote:-
As a regulatory attorney, have you ever seen a corporation that existed without a regulatory framework to define and maintain it? Your “I am simply more familiar with un-regulated, un-favored businesses combining to stifle and oppress their erstwhile competition — through mere financial leverage, not through the quality of their work or the sanction of a favored politician or regulatory entity” here is you deceiving yourself; those are not “un-regulated, un-favored businesses”, those are making use of corporate law to exist and function at all. “Throughout human history, wealthy people have used their wealth to limit others’ access to wealth, and it hasn’t always required a governmental authority, a regulatory entity practicing affirmative regulation, or any other special favor from the government” is true enough – and it simply shows that other forms of misbehaviour happen, but has nothing to do with corporate forms. “I’ve watched law firms — which are totally unregulated — combine to oppress and stifle would-be competitors” simply can’t happen in any endemic way when internal constraints prevent large firms; small firms can only have limited effects. Absent regulation (or other oversight), corporations of that sort would not behave as model citizens or as evil doers; they would not exist. So the “naive” view is your extrapolation building in your own assumption that the alternative is really an enabling regulatory framework, rather than no regulatory framework.
But I see that Karl noticed other, similar comments here:-
First off, those weren’t the questions at issue; you are adding further requirements. Up to here, the material was addressing the nature of the alternatives, not how to get there – like a mathematical existence proof rather than a proof by construction. These objections would only be an effective counter if they showed that it was not possible to get there from here (like, e.g., a mathematical proof by contradiction using invariants).
Secondly, these latest remarks build in the assumption that it would be necessary to prevent corporations, i.e. that they do not actually need state support. Only those with an internal dynamic of cohesion do that, and even those don’t gain limited liability from it.
The most likely result of ceasing to support corporations is that individuals who were suitably placed would take over what they could, whether as a going concern or not, and then act as partners as far and as long – but only as far and as long – as practical and convenient (so it isn’t about “yield[ing] power without a fight”). Elsewhere I have given the example of how, when the Reformation took away the raison d’etre of the Teutonic Order of Knights, its commanders set up for themselves as petty princelings over the broken up holdings. Nothing would positively prevent non-corporate combines arising from smaller things like those break downs, any more than anything prevented the eventual rise of Prussia from among those princelings, but a suitable background would erode those faster than they could build up. Now whether that is possible is a very good question that is much broader than mere questions about corporations, one touching the fundamental viability (as opposed to justification) of anarchism; and I frankly do not yet know whether there are indeed any solutions to that problem. But it equally doesn’t seem inherently impossible on the basis of what we know so far.
I agree, the fact that corporations comprise people is “technically true. The most likely result of ceasing to support corporations is that individuals who were suitably placed would take over what they could, whether as a going concern or not.
I think free speech is free speech. Even if it was paid for by a particular group/business that pooled their funds together. As to their power beyond that is left to question. I always refer back to this video: http://www.thenorthwestreport.com/the-philosophy-…
Head's up: there's a discussion on the corporation at The Agitator. http://www.theagitator.com/2011/10/23/sunday-disc…