Let me start by saying I’m a long-time admirer of Anthony Gregory’s writing, and I’m as surprised as he is that this has turned into a significant disagreement. Frankly, given our considerable areas of agreement, I’m having a hard time figuring out why my commentary piece (“Corporations are People? So Was Hitler”) set him off.
Gregory’s first objection, in “Contra Kevin Carson,” is to my assertion that the profits of large corporations are disproportionately the result of state-enforced unequal exchange (monopolies, artificial property rights, entry barriers, etc.).
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?
In most cases, though, I don’t think it’s a matter of “both sides” being worse off as a result of state intervention. When it comes to the dominant corporations in our economy, they are better off than an exchange in a free market economy would have made them. A rent, by definition, is the difference between the price that would have been sufficient incentive for the seller to bring a good to the market, and the price that the consumer is still willing to pay for the net utility of receiving the good. By definition, when it results from state-enforced scarcities or entry barriers, this rent is exploitative.
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?
I’m not sure what relevance such entrepreneurs have to my column. I don’t dispute for a minute that there are genuine entrepreneurs in the competitive sector of the economy. What they have to do with the management of giant corporations engaged in administered pricing, in oligopoly markets where two or three firms control half the market — and whose pattern is usually closer to enormous profits one year, big profits the next, and a tax writeoff the next — isn’t clear to me.
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.
Well, sure. Even the consumer who buys a product from a monopoly provider can be said — on the basis of demonstrated preference — to assign greater utility to engaging in the transaction than to refraining from it. But that’s the whole point of being in a monopoly position: you can set the price to a level at which the consumer just barely considers the choice to buy as preferable to not buying — rather than engaging in a competitive market in which the price will tend to gravitate toward the actual cost of providing a good or service. When someone buys a glass of water in the middle of the Sahara for $1000, she considers the transaction to be a net positive benefit compared to dying of thirst — so what? The question is which of the parties to the transaction is in the dominant position, and how that affects the terms of exchange — and the returns on it for the dominant party.
And if a party’s revealed preference for an exchange over no exchange is sufficient to demonstrate its non-exploitative nature, I submit that’s a very low hurdle to clear. But I deny that it is sufficient. Exploitation, or privilege — by definition — is the use of coercive power to restrict the range of alternatives available to disadvantaged party, so that she is forced to choose an alternative far inferior to what would have been available absent such restriction. When a consumer buys a CD or DVD at a 1000% copyright markup because it is illegal for a competitor to replicate the content for sale, the consumer may consider it a net positive to pay the enormous markup compared to not having access to the content at all. But it is clearly exploitative. A medieval peasant might consider it a net positive to pay the lord of the manor a third of his produce as rent in kind, in return for access to the land, rather than to starve. So what?
If the fact that the consumer receives greater utility from engaging in a transaction than from not doing so is proof that an exchange isn’t exploitative, then no monopoly in history has ever qualified as exploitative by this standard. The monopolist engages in price segmentation and dumping so as to target the price to the consumer’s ability to pay, and still receive a bare net utility over and above the price she pays. By the very nature of monopoly, the monopolist has to allow some net utility for buying over not buying in order to make any sales at all.
In order to profit from increases in productivity that result from technological progress, the monopolist must allow the consumer to receive a bit of it to make it worth paying for even under monopoly conditions. This means that the net productivity gain must be divided (say) 9-1 in favor of the monopolist instead of the monopolist taking the whole pie — but the whole gain would wind up going to the consumer if unfettered competition were allowed to socialize the benefits, under the conditions of a freed market.
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….
Gregory isn’t the first to raise this objection to my critique of state capitalism. It’s a very ingenious argument. Stephan Kinsella, for instance, has repeatedly argued that the American model of corporate capitalism must have a significant admixture of free market elements, because rather than becoming paralyzed by calculation problems it has resulted in the increased productivity and increased standards of living we witnessed in recent decades.
But as seemingly ingenious as it is, I don’t believe this argument can stand up in the face of analysis. If it proves anything, it proves too much. Even the feudal economy of the Middle Ages, even the planned economy of the old Soviet Union, achieved significant levels of technical progress. It seems even an extremely modest leavening of freedom, even in societies that are quite authoritarian or totalitarian, is sufficient to allow a significant amount of economic and technological progress despite the level of statism.
I would also argue that the conventional measures of standards of living in the United States should be taken with a grain of salt. The corporate economy produces cars, refrigerators, televisions, and computers that consumers certainly find preferable to those ten years ago, and the great majority of consumers prefer buying them on available terms to doing without. But the prices for which they sell are probably several times greater than they would be on a free market, because they are produced by heavily cartelized industries which can pass the cost of wasted inputs and bureaucratic overhead onto the consumer through administered pricing, and in which the internal culture of the dominant firms is overwhelmingly characterized by calculational chaos. The component hardware and software are proprietary, and thus marked up several hundred percent.
As is the case with the price of goods and services, so also measures of economic growth and GDP essentially define the consumption of inputs as the creation of value. So we have an economy in which the quality of goods and services seems to be improving significantly, and consumers prefer having them to not having them. But we also have an economy in which there is no way of determining whether the inputs wasted to create these things were worth it, or whether people would willingly buy them given the range of alternatives in a free market. There is use-value of a sort, even significant progress in the creation of use-value, but an overall atmosphere of calculational chaos — just as in the old USSR. And I submit that, to the extent that consumers accept a lesser degree of utility than they would in a free market, and that they pay a higher price for their utility in labor hours than they would in a free market, the deficit they experience is — in the words of Benjamin Tucker –matched by an equal deficit on the part of the dominant classes under state capitalism.
Gregory seems especially rankled by my use of Hitler.
…[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.
He responds:
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.
Here he misses the point. It wasn’t an “analogy” at all. It was — as he himself acknowledges just a paragraph earlier — a reductio ad absurdum. Those are two very different things. My intent was to point out the idiocy of Romney’s implication that a system isn’t exploitative if the beneficiaries are human beings. Every system of exploitation in human history, by definition, has benefited human beings. The ruling class in every single system of exploitation was composed of human beings. One can demolish Romney’s attempt to argue that corporations are good because “the money goes to people” by simply listing the worst people in history; if a system is non-exploitative because its beneficiaries are all people, no matter how rotten, then no system in human history has ever been exploitative.
As for the other stuff sandwiched in that quote, I’ve already challenged the significance Gregory attaches to the fact that consumers “freely” choose the least bad among a constricted range of alternatives.
And the glib assertion that a given corporation might suffer as well as benefit from state intervention is a remarkable bit of legerdemain to tuck into a throwaway line. An ant might whip an elephant. But I’m putting my money on the elephant.
I do agree that corporate personhood can pose problems and that only individuals have rights…. 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.
Actually, I took no position one way or the other on the corporate personhood issue — i.e., on the fact that the corporation is legally considered a person separate and distinct from the shareholders severally or collectively — in the column which Gregory is criticizing. Romney’s quip that “corporations are people,” despite all the significance attached to those words in the liberal/progressive blogosphere, had nothing to do with the corporate personhood issue. He was, rather, alluding to the thesis — popular in the nineties — of “people’s capitalism” or “pension fund socialism.” The money corporations make is good, Romney said, because it all goes to people. That — and only that — was the sense in which I attacked the statement that “corporations are people.”
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…. 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.
I believe the great majority of oligopoly corporations, in markets where a handful of firms controls more than half of market share, do in fact gain at the expense of workers and consumers.
Support from the state may not be necessary to profit as such. There would surely be entrepreneurial profit of the kind Gregory describes, accruing to those who receive greater than marginal returns by being the first to perceive and meet some unmet need, or who are first to market with some innovation. But such profits would be ephemeral, and would always be in a process of being driven to zero by new entrants to the market.
And to the extent that the market rate of return on capital and land is larger than its natural value as a result of artificial scarcities and artificial property rights enforced by the state, then every firm that enjoys the higher rate of return as a result of coercively-enforced privilege is objectively exploitative. To the extent that business firms in the dominant sectors of the economy are larger and fewer, and prices stickier, than they would otherwise be, the super-profits extracted from consumers through unequal exchange are objectively exploitative.
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.
Sure it does. If the range of alternatives is smaller than it would be in a free market and the most satisfactory alternatives from the standpoint of workers and consumers are taken off the table, and corporate profits and management salaries are larger than they would otherwise be as a result of this restricted range, then — regardless of whether some alternatives still exist — the reduced utility that results from workers and consumers choosing less than optimal alternatives is exploitative and oppressive.
A person can be better off from an exchange, and still be exploited. By its very nature, to repeat, monopoly pricing targets the price to the highest amount the consumer is able to pay and still get enough utility to make the exchange worthwhile.
Gregory makes a great deal of my defense (a defense I regarded as rather backhanded at the time) of public school teachers in the context of the Scott Walker controversy in Wisconsin.
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…. 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.
I see the alliance between big business and big government as structurally central, as the defining feature, of our political-economic system. The “Power Elite” running the nexus of state, finance capital and corporate management occupies the same position in the present system as landlords did seven hundred years ago. The public education system is very much a second-tier component of this system.
The difference is this: Public school teachers are performing a function — education — that, at least in some regards, would still exist in a free society. And they are doing it in a context in which the state has preempted the function to a great extent and crowded out alternatives. In a society where the biggest local tax most people pay is a property tax to fund the schools, most people will send their kids to the public schools as a default option. So those who wish to teach but would like to do so in a non-state framework find their range of alternatives greatly and artificially diminished, compared to the opportunities in the state-owned system. Although the diminution of alternatives is not as great in degree, it is the same in kind as that faced by workers in state enterprises in the old Soviet bloc.
I see teachers and firefighters, to a considerable extent, as people performing functions that would be legitimate in some form in a stateless society, and performing them in the face of a need to make the best of a statist system. Their position may be formally privileged, but it is a secondary, subordinate and instrumental position of privilege.
The rentiers and senior managers who live off corporate profits, on the other hand, are not making the best of a bad situation not of their making, or in a secondary position of privilege. They are at the heart of a corporate ruling class, and the corporate ruling class is in a position to make rather than take the range of alternatives. The public school system was created as a means to an end determined by the nature of the ruling class: from its earliest days, it was shaped primarily by employers’ needs for docile, obedient, trained labor.
Gregory might as well argue that the parish priest was equally as privileged as the nobleman living off the rents of entire provinces, because he was paid with tithes. But the privilege that the village clerk received, like that of the public schoolteacher, was secondary and instrumental. In both cases, the recipient receives some crumbs off the table in return for helping to promote the primary privileges of the first tier of the ruling class — the class for whose benefit the system exists.
I think Gregory is much more of a pluralist than I am when it comes to class analysis. Like David Friedman, he sees the ruling class as a fortuitous cluster of interests that just happened to latch onto the state, rather than a coherent coalition. As Friedman wrote in The Machinery of Freedom (PDF):
It seems more reasonable to suppose that there is no ruling class, that we are ruled, rather, by a myriad of quarreling gangs, constantly engaged in stealing from each other to the great impoverishment of their own members as well as the rest of us.
So we’re all victims of statism, peasant and landlord alike, and we should just let bygones be bygones. Or, as Homer Simpson might put it, “…we could sit here and try to figure out… who forgot to pick up who till the cows come home. But let’s just say we were both wrong, and that’ll be that. Now how ’bout a hug?”
Murray Rothbard, on the other hand, believed — as Roderick Long described it — that the ruling class was
a primary group that has achieved a position of structural hegemony, a group central to class consolidation and crisis in contemporary political economy. Rothbard’s approach to this problem is, in fact, highly dialectical in its comprehension of the historical, political, economic, and social dynamics of class.
Gregory also objects to this passage in my column.
….[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 exploiters 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.
He objects to that passage, first, on the grounds that it bears some resemblance to “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.
I don’t think it’s close at all, unless any suggestion that groups with common social experiences tend to filter reality in common ways is “polylogist.” This strikes me as something of a knee-jerk reaction, akin to reflexive appeals to “methodological individualism” evoked from some quarters when I engage in class analysis. I don’t think Gregory, or anyone else, applies monologism and methodological individualism as strictly across the board as he does in the cases he selects for negative attention. A thinking person simply couldn’t do so, without detaching herself completely from common sense thinking.
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.
Sure. That’s why I said “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 [emphasis added].” The same hegemonic ideology can perform different functions for different classes. I’ve quoted — many times — Stephen Biko’s dictum that the most powerful weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.
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.
Again, sure. It wouldn’t be much of a legitimizing ideology if it didn’t fool the ruled into accepting the interests of their rulers as legitimate, in addition to reassuring the rulers of their own legitimacy. That’s why you can see howling mobs of Tea Party members, drawn in considerable proportion from the ranks of the working poor, who sincerely believe they’re being exploited mainly by ACORN and its constituency of people who “don’t even pay any taxes.”
It wasn’t long ago that the divide-and-conquer system of racism, which served the primary purpose of making both poor blacks and poor whites easier to exploit, was enthusiastically supported by dirt poor crackers in the sincere belief that they had a shared interest in “racial purity” in common with the guy in a mansion on a hill who owned half the county. Meanwhile, the guy in the mansion and his friends from the local gentry sipped their mint juleps laughed themselves silly at the gullibility of the redneck in the wife-beater undershirt.
Translations for this article:
- Portuguese, Réplica de Carson a Gregory.
A very lucid explication of your original column. I like the way you tore apart the "revealed preference" -argument, and the idea that the single mother with her food stamps is just as much a parasite as the Goldman Sachs banker or that the convicted marijuana user is just as much a victim as the regulated coal mining company – I hear these responses from pro-capitalist libertarians all the time.
Btw, I have one question (which isn't directly related to this text). How do you conceive of the degrees of statism in terms of second order regulation (first order regulation enables privilege, second order regulation alleviates the effects of which)? In some of your columns you seem to argue that some public policies (health care public option, Greenbackism etc.) would actually constitute a net decrease in statism, because they would be less oppressive than the status quo and thus would approximate a truly free market regime better. Is this what you're saying, or do you actually mean that while they might not decrease statism, they would nevertheless be somewhat fairer policies? (Is it even coherent to quantify statism?) I'd like to hear a clarification.
Loving the dialog, hope to see more like this! Considering how influential the Austrians have become among libertarians, I believe that this sort of exchange is incredibly valuable for refining our ideas and winning over the public.
In addition to their silly ramblings about 100% reserve banking and the gold standard, I also think that the Austrians need a more fleshed out theory of value and free market exchange. I was reading Francis Tandy's "Voluntary Socialism" and I came across a pretty concise and complete explanation of the matter:
"If an article suddenly acquires an increased utility, people will be willing to give articles which embody a great amount of labor in order to obtain the more useful article. So the producers of that article, will be able to reap a greater reward for their labor than the other members of the community. This immediately causes a number of the producers of other commodities to leave their old occupations and engage in the one which promises higher remuneration. Thus the supply is increased to meet the demand, until the equilibrium is once more established. So likewise the converse holds good. If for any reason the demand for any commodity decreases, the wages of the producers of that commodity fall, and many of them will seek more lucrative positions. Thus an increase in the demand is met by an increase of the supply, and a decrease in the demand by a decrease of the supply. So while exchange values fluctuate considerably, they always trend to remain at the cost of acquisition. The operation of this law is often hindered by such artificial restrictions as trusts, etc., which, by limiting the supply, increase the margin of utility and consequently the price."
I like your metaphor, Kevin, that the cost of producing and distributing a good is the "gravity" around which price fluctuates. Entrepreneurs can, of course, through ingenuity and farsightedness (which is a form of labor itself), earn a "profit" through innovation or fulfilling an undersupplied demand, but competitors quickly copy this success and an influx of new market entrants causes these "profits" to diminish until there is a return to exchanges of equal value. And by "exchanges of equal value" I mean exchanges of equal amounts of labor (with the value of the labor being subjectively determined at the end of the production chain by the free market price mechanism).
I just went to a presentation the other day by the CrimethInc folks on their new book, "Work", and one of the points they were making is that the system couldn't fulfill our demands for justice _even if it wanted to_. Even the CEOs and rich folks are in many ways operating under the premises and logic of the capitalist system and are not at complete liberty to remove the yoke from their necks or ours, however more lightly it may lie on their necks. So Gregory's strongest critique — where he points out what might seem like a double standard in judging teachers relative to corporate owners / managers — might be legitimate even if I'm not predisposed to sympathize with it. Perhaps corporatists aren't making the best of a bad situation, but they're not exactly in control — if they took steps individually to bring things in a more just direction, the system would remove them.
The problem here, I believe, is that perhaps we need to internalize the notion that _privilege is not some personal moral failure_. The system doesn't persist because of "bad people" but rather because it is the most robust central planning mechanism yet devised — precisely because it has just enough second order market magic to adjust and adapt the first order corporate/state planning and control. So as much as I like to single out corporate types and blame them for the woes of the planet, maybe that's just not fair or actionable. Corporatists and statists need to be overthrown, not because the morality play says so, but because that's the only way to stop the system from continuing.
My recent post Do you love commerce?
“And I submit that, to the extent that consumers accept a lesser degree of utility than they would in a free market, and that they pay a higher price for their utility in labor hours than they would in a free market, the deficit they experience is — in the words of Benjamin Tucker –matched by an equal deficit on the part of the dominant classes under state capitalism.”
Shouldn’t the last phrase read “matched by an equal surplus?”
Love the Simpsons quote!
". . . and the idea that the single mother with her food stamps is just as much a parasite as the Goldman Sachs banker or that the convicted marijuana user is just as much a victim as the regulated coal mining company. . . "
Ah, yes. Because that's such an accurate representation of my view. And keep in mind that part of my critique of Kevin's views is that he seems to see public teachers as victims, ignoring the true victims of the system, some of the most powerless of all people—children.
Seems pretty vacuous to put up a counterfactual state-free market (a "mutualist" version with use-occupancy ownership and no IP too?) then argue over who can claim the title of "biggest victim" by virtue of it not currently existing. Seems especially unproductive to reintroduce 19th-century, person-demonizing, class warfare rhetoric based on this vacuous exercise.
So… any wholly voluntary exchange that you judge "less than optimal" by your idiosyncratic and vague ideal = "exploitation," "oppression," "privilege," etc. etc. Please. Take this anarchist newspeak elsewhere.
Anthony…I'd like to take you seriously on the charge of the children (though I can't either way) but all I hear is:
THE CHILDREN!11! WHY WON'T YOU THINK OF THE CHILDEN?!
Anyways, Kevin doesn't see teachers as victims per se' as much as he sees them *more* of victims compared to the people who are uptop the corporate ladder dictating how things are gonna be and getting state-privilege to knock out competitiers, etc.
I apologize for making it sound like that was your view, I definitely should have been clearer. It was a caricature of a view that I recognize all too often in libertarian/conservative circles, which is that the state really hurts us all, vagrant and CEO alike, and that in a truly free market the poor wouldn't be nearly as poor as today but the ivory towers of the rich would grow ever higher too! You know, the basic "bake more cakes" narrative. Perhaps it's true that everyone would in some sense be happier in a free market (a mutualist environment might encourage profit-seeking bosses into a more wholesome lifestyle, releasing them from the rat race), but the way I see it is that the rich really are rentiers who benefit from artificial property rights – remove them and they won't be that mega-rich anymore.
And just to be clear, I'm not especially grudgy that some people are insanely rich – if the "bake more cakes" -narrative were true and the only alternative to status quo, I would embrace it.
Mr. Gregory, what you're seeing is the difference between left libertarian class analysis and right libertarian class analysis. For the latter, the only thing that matters is whether you're directly involved with the state. For the former, much more nuanced is involved, as it's not just about the state as a synonym for the government but rather the entire interlocking pattern of interests that stabilize society in favor of certain outcomes and against other outcomes.
I don't think Kevin would disagree with you that children are victimized by forced industrial schooling; with as much Ivan Illich as he quotes, there's no way he can be rooting for that! But the issue is less that public school teachers are a special kind of victim and more that they serve as lagging indicators of a balance of power that has shifted from labor — public or private — to the state/capital employing alliance.
For another left libertarian analysis of the public sector workers issue, may I humbly suggest my essay on Class Struggle in the Civil Service? I'd be interested in your thoughts.
My recent post Do you love commerce?
I don't think it's solely that the exchange's outcome doesn't please Kevin; it's that given that state-capitalist forces intervene, centrally plan, and otherwise distort the market, we can't even begin to tell what an optimal distribution of power, wealth, etc. would be. That said, why is it vacuous to work towards a world that reflects one's values?
My recent post Do you love commerce?
Gregory is a capitalist, plain and simply. This is not anarchism.
Stop spouting anarchism, you're a capitalist!
Gregory is capitalist, plain and simply. This is not anarchism.
Stop spouting anarchism! You're a capitalist!
"Kevin doesn't see teachers as victims per se' as much as he sees them *more* of victims compared to the people who are uptop the corporate ladder dictating how things are gonna be and getting state-privilege to knock out competitiers, etc. "
But Gregory is so a pom-pom faggot for capitalism that he can't understand a simple concept like this!
This Center for a Stateless Society is here to build awareness of the market anarchist alternative. Don't be surprised by that, fucking capitalist faggot!
"ignoring the true victims of the system, some of the most powerless of all people—children. "
My kids begged me to let them go to the local public schools, I finally let them. That was probably the final blow to my blinkered ideology that constantly whined about "statism." The teachers were all great, and my kids love school so much that if I offer them a day off, they won't take it! Those poor, powerless "victims"!
Cal, please do NOT introduce reality into the discussion!
"Because that's such an accurate representation of my view."
Are you serious? I hope not because you would become a laughingstock even in "an"-cap circles.
"And keep in mind that part of my critique of Kevin's views is that he seems to see public teachers as victims, ignoring the true victims of the system, some of the most powerless of all people—children. "
Fair enough, Carson could (not necessarily "should) be more critical about this. But sorry, all your other arguments are fucking capitalistic insane.
Cal, how do you do with your many women obligated to give birth and your many fucking mexican immigrants to expell?
You do know that it's possible to criticize someone without using bigoted language that makes anarchists look bad, don't ya?
I wouldn't go that far at all, I think Gregory can recognize the concept fine and I respect a lot of the work he does.
Readers should check out this crap.
http://lewrockwell.com/gregory/gregory229.html
What a great hypocrit pseudo-anarchist you are, Gregory!
Or maybe he can, but he will not do that.
Fair enough, he made a lot of good work for all anti-State movments. But his capitalist ideologist isn't anarchism!
Fair enough, he made a lot of good work for all anti-State movments. But his capitalist ideology isn't anarchism!
Uh I really have no idea what you're asking…
What exactly are you looking to accomplish with all that name-calling?
This is supposed to be a productive conversation between a left-libertarian and a more conventional libertarian on some key economic and conceptual issues. Whether you like it or not, there exists a continuum of ideas and principles ranging from anarcho-communism to anarcho-capitalism (well, actually the continuum is way larger than that), divided into clusters by conceptual and empirical disagreements and ethical starting points. What Carson, Gregory and others are examining here is to what extent free markets and corporations are incompatible in theory and practice. What you're doing is drawing an arbitrary line in the sand between your ideas of anarchism and capitalism, without actually examining or explaining what is meant by either of them, and raising a middle finger at anyone on the other side of that line.
How is that going to help anything?
This is part of the reason I think libertarians ought to take a more balanced and dialectical approach to the true nature of the state, even if their ultimate goal is to get rid of it. I live in a country where the schools are completely government-run (although far more decentralized than in America) and yet our system is routinely ranked among the top 3 in the world in education standards. That doesn't mean stateless schooling couldn't work well in specific settings, but it does demolish the claim that the government simply cannot ever fail to fail miserably.
That said, it surely is the case that some children are victims of a statist school system, so a libertarian who isn't willing to accept "collateral damage" is in my opinion justified in opposing coerced education, even if she grants that the school system isn't a complete disaster for everyone, and that some children might indeed find it pleasant.
Gendron is a spammer, plain and simply. This is not commenting! x2
I ask you about some fucking Paulite Tea-Douchebags policies.
If you're an right libertarian capitalist, be a right libertarian capitalist.
Don't spout on anarchism!
Actually, I have no problem if he wants to introduce the reality. Introducing, not masturbating from it!
It helps some readers that think that Greogry is an anarchist. They discover that this is not the case.
Anarchist is about fighting against ALL hierarchies. Are you for or against hierarchies?
"What Carson, Gregory and others are examining here is to what extent free markets and corporations are incompatible in theory and practice. "
There's no such thing like corporations in a free-market, it's impossible!
We're here to discuss these ideas, not to slap labels on people and marginalize them.
My recent post Do you love commerce?
David, consider your comment above, combined with similar ad-hominem here, as a substantial down-payment against a permanent ban.
Well of course some state school systems rank highly when compared to other state school systems, but that doesn't tell you anything about whether state school systems are failing miserably or not. Even if all are failing miserably, some will fail less miserably than others.
Mr. Callahan, this is an understandable position for you to take, as you are a person who has renounced anarchism. I don't know why you are even in this discussion, given that. I disagree with you about public schools and much else, but I don't want to get sucked into arguing with someone who sends his kids to public schools and thinks it's wonderful.
"That said, it surely is the case that some children are victims of a statist school system, so a libertarian who isn't willing to accept 'collateral damage' is in my opinion justified in opposing coerced education, even if she grants that the school system isn't a complete disaster for everyone, and that some children might indeed find it pleasant."
A very fair point. After all, some people find the Army and even prison to be a rewarding time. I'm still an abolitionist.
Besides, keep in mind when you're talking about how great a country's schools are, they are being compared to other government schools, usually. I just recall that almost every boy I've met under five can name 20 kinds of dinosaurs, and only one out of a hundred graduating seniors can name the seven parts of speech.
I'm not against ALL hierarchies. And I agree that left-anarchists are more consistently against hierarchy than I am. But I also think it is an incoherent ideal, taken to the extreme. It is why some anarchists oppose language and math. Your very ranking of anti-hierarchical anarchists about anti-state capitalists shows you are not completely against hierarchies.
Also, this idea that teachers and students are on one side and administrators are on the other. . . . I wonder how many pro-teacher libertarians truly remember how kids regarded their teachers! Most of them were not always thrilled with most of their teachers. If you want to see the true class division, look in the faculty lounge. All the adults rubbing elbows. Not a second-class citizen — a child — to be found.
"Why won't you think of the children" should indeed be looked upon with suspicion when it's a cry for more state power. But when it comes to opposing state power, we should indeed think first of the children. When I think of how much I hate war, the thing about it I hate more than anything else is the murdered children. Children are the most vulnerable people in society. A destructive and oppressive system always hurts them the most.
"Believe it or not, there are a few things worse than the state. And an anarcho-syndicalist legal order [or Mutualism - GTK] would be one of them." – Daniel James Sanchez at http://mises.org/daily/5590
Historically, it was rarely that much; there usually just wasn’t that much surplus. One typical situation was that of the “Monday men”, who had to work on the lord‘s land on Mondays, and who also had to tithe a tenth of their own production to the priest (who also had the use of glebe land, i.e. land held in trust for the local church). These faced an economic burden of perhaps 20% of what they could have had for themselves, but only about 10% of what they directly produced for themselves.
Historically, no – because the church was much stronger and more independent, and was generally already in place by the time the particular mediaeval rulers came along. Even as late as the 18th century the Anglican Church won out against the Grosvenor family (later Dukes of Westminster) in gaining title to the land on which a church in Mayfair stood. It was just that the church took less gross because it didn’t have to net off the costly activities that the nobility had to perform to maintain the status quo.
But I'd argue this is because of the way schools are administered (sequestering children in classrooms for curricula-driven lectures), which from the beginning has tried to make education a factory where no real relationship can form between students (the products) and teachers (the workers). If you look at models of education before compulsory public schooling, they tend to feature much more intimacy between pupil and instructor. The problem with that is that you can't run an institution like that, and that's what matters to the establishment: the maintenance of the institution. Butler Shaffer's "Calculated Chaos" is quite instructive here.
My recent post Do you love commerce?
To the extent that it doesn't fit into rigid Austrian orthodoxy, I can totally see why it's worse. The question becomes, however, whether I want to live in a theory or a real world.
There are sectors of the Austrian movement that have turned themselves into the Marxists of the right. Everything is explained by the theory, and any challenge demonstrates ignorance of the theory and never a flaw in the theory.
My recent post Do you love commerce?
Right, but teachers go along with this. We can say cops are worse than they would be because of the drug war, but they choose to enforce drug laws, so they are enemies of liberty. Same with government school teachers, who voluntarily cooperate with a thoroughly evil system.
Granted, but the point of anarchism — please correct me if I'm mistaken about this — is not to sort the entire population into "good" and "evil" buckets. The point of anarchism is to address the problem of systemic privilege (if you want to focus on the state's role in this, I won't object here) in our social institutions. Personal moral failings and systemic, institutional supports for behavior are two related but ultimately separate matters.
Now, I'm ok with saying that many teachers morally compromise themselves with how they behave, although I think it expects to much of the any human to be able to extricate themselves from a dense culture of violence and exploitation (I'd extend that to corporate officers, too). But the political solution — the solution we come here to discuss — is to address the institutional dimension, not the personal moral, spiritual, or ethical dimension. Maybe that's not universally held by my fellow anarchists, but it's how I see the problem (see this article for a deeper explanation).
Evil individuals will exist in an anarchist society, I submit. That is not a failure of anarchism, and it is not a failure of statism, either. The point is not to single out people for being state collaborators, or racists, or whatever, but to make the kind of human connections that cause people to identify with a less authoritarian, less privileged, more just society.
My recent post Do you love commerce?
Gregory: 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.
This, however, assumes that the "deal" was entered into voluntarily by the parties and without special favors from government to limit competition (i.e. the third party observers are only artificially forced by government favoritism to be observers). Yet corporations profit handsomely from transactions in which one party is forced to participate or competing parties are involuntarily excluded by government from participation.
What about redistribution from the little guy to corporations by way of eminent domain, taxpayer bailouts, etc.? What about competition-stifling regulations that are made expensive enough to price real entrepreneurs out of the market while being affordable for megacorporations? What about juicy deals with government for natural resources that are not open to competition outside a select group of buyers? And so on…
These sorts of things make the speculation that all things might theoretically even out in the end sound much, much more unlikely than how Anthony Gregory tries to frame the situation.