But treating either the payment of taxes or receipt of government money as a proxy for where one stands on the Producer-Parasite spectrum is ridiculous. Commenter Kirsten Tynan points out the sheer absurdity of asserting that the bottom two-thirds of society literally produce nothing and live entirely on the output of the rest:

I’m still trying to understand if by “the bottom 2/3″ produces nothing, we mean that people like timber workers, truck drivers, miners, construction workers, warehouse employees, electronics assemblers, etc. could just disappear and the world would go on pretty much as normal. If all of those people suddenly disappeared, how would an Apple or Microsoft campus get built? How would its products get built? How would they get delivered? But they should if the bottom 2/3 really produces nothing, right?

It would be amusing indeed to see how a Galt’s Gulch society would organize all the logging, truck driving, mining, construction, etc., without that parasitic 67% holding back the geniuses on Wall Street and in the C-suites. The assertion that the 67% “produce nothing” is as pig-brained stupid as the claim three years ago that the 47% “pay no taxes.” As I wrote back then, the poor pay lots of taxes — they just take the form of payments to nominally private monopolists.

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Kinsella has had a love-hate relationship with left-libertarianism for some time now. And evidently one of the things about us that sticks in his craw — especially those of us at Center for a Stateless Society and Alliance of the Libertarian Left — is our predominant view of the rich as a parasitic class who derive most of their wealth from state intervention in the economy rather than productive activity. To counter this view of things, he cites a passage from a five-year-old US News article (Rick Newman, “How the Government is Swallowing the Economy,” Nov. 9, 2009):

Economist Gary Shilling has calculated that 58 percent of the population is dependent on the government for “major parts of their income,” including teachers, soldiers, bureaucrats, and other government employees; welfare and Social Security recipients; government pensioners; public housing beneficiaries; and people who work for government contractors. By 2018, Shilling estimates, an astounding 67 percent of Americans could be dependent on the government for their livelihood.

This means, Kinsella argues on his Facebook page, that the bottom 58% (or the extrapolated 67%) of the population are “parasites” who live off the wealth produced by some other segment of the population. Never mind that Shilling never actually specified the actual income levels of members of that 58% who get money from the government, so Kinsella has no reason for jumping to the conclusion that it’s the bottom 58% in income; we’ll just stipulate for the sake of argument that it really is the bottom 58%.

In the course of this diatribe Kinsella conflates, blurs or ignores so many distinctions that the result is a big hot mess. The original “53% vs. 47%” slogan, originally created by Erick Erickson of RedState.org in 2011 as a counter-meme to Occupy Wall Street’s “We are the 99%” and then inadvertently revived by Mitt Romney during his presidential campaign, conflated payment of taxes with economic productivity (I wrote about it here, here and here).

Kinsella, somewhat similarly, conflates the receipt of direct government spending as any portion of one’s income with being a net productive drain on society, and living entirely on the production of those who don’t receive direct monetary aid from the government. To emphasize the point, he telescopes the entire bottom 58% (or 67%) from Shilling’s statistics into a category of “lowlifes” living on “WIC cheese.” Further down in the comments below his original post he explicitly states that “[t]he dregs clearly do not produce [the wealth],” and that “the bottom 2/3 produce nothing.”

But treating either the payment of taxes or receipt of government money as a proxy for where one stands on the Producer-Parasite spectrum is ridiculous. Commenter Kirsten Tynan points out the sheer absurdity of asserting that the bottom two-thirds of society literally produce nothing and live entirely on the output of the rest:

I’m still trying to understand if by “the bottom 2/3″ produces nothing, we mean that people like timber workers, truck drivers, miners, construction workers, warehouse employees, electronics assemblers, etc. could just disappear and the world would go on pretty much as normal. If all of those people suddenly disappeared, how would an Apple or Microsoft campus get built? How would its products get built? How would they get delivered? But they should if the bottom 2/3 really produces nothing, right?

It would be amusing indeed to see how a Galt’s Gulch society would organize all the logging, truck driving, mining, construction, etc., without that parasitic 67% holding back the geniuses on Wall Street and in the C-suites. The assertion that the 67% “produce nothing” is as pig-brained stupid as the claim three years ago that the 47% “pay no taxes.” As I wrote back then, the poor pay lots of taxes — they just take the form of payments to nominally private monopolists.

…[D]on’t be fooled by the fact that some of us aren’t paying any income taxes. We pay lots of taxes — to rich takers who live off our largesse. The portion of your rent or mortgage that results from the enormous tracts of vacant and unimproved land held out of use through artificial property rights is a tax to the landlord. The 95% of the price of drugs under patent, or Bill Gates’s software, is a tax you pay to the owners of “intellectual property” monopolies. So is the portion of the price you pay for manufactured goods, over and above actual materials and labor, that results from embedded rents on patents and enormous brand-name markups on (for example) Nike sneakers over and above the few bucks a pair the sweatshops contract to make them for. So is the estimated 20% oligopoly price markup for industries where a few corporations control half or more of output.

The great bulk of state-enabled parasitism takes the form, not of checks paid directly out of the US Treasury, but of nominally “private” transactions: paychecks to that 67% of timber workers, truck drivers, miners, construction workers, warehouse employees and electronics assemblers that amount to less than the value they produce, or checks from customer for inflated prices far above the actual cost of providing the goods and services they’re purchasing, that result from corporations, landlords, etc. being put into a privileged monopoly position by the state. Most of the taxes that most of us pay aren’t in the form of checks made out to the IRS. They’re made out to nominally private businesses that are actually branches of the state.

And as C4SS Fellow Erick Vasconcelos mentioned:

In Soviet Russia, over 95% of citizens depended on the government for most of their income. I suppose they were just a bunch of parasites exploiting the hardworking Randian heroes in the Politburo.

But what we’ve discussed so far isn’t the only example of sloppy thinking in Kinsella’s post. Take another look at the composition of that “bottom 67%” in Kinsella’s US News quote:  …”teachers, soldiers, bureaucrats, and other government employees; welfare and Social Security recipients; government pensioners; public housing beneficiaries; and people who work for government contractors…”

Let’s break that down. First of all, welfare recipients are the category that at first glance looks most like a prima facie case of parasitically living off government largesse funded by others. But as above, it’s conflating the payment of taxes to the nominal state and the receipt of nominally public funds with the real degree of exploitation or parasitism.  I have repeatedly argued, in column after column at C4SS, that most of the upper class’s extraction of wealth from society comes not from direct government transfer payments, but from corporations’ and landlords’ “private” gouging of the public in their roles of worker, consumer and tenant. The privileged classes transfer wealth upward from the producing classes to themselves, through “private” taxation in the form of state-enabled monopoly rents, with a front-end loader. When the resulting polarization of wealth becomes too economically and politically destabilizing, the state transfers a tiny fraction of it back downwards with a teaspoon to the most destitute of the exploited, to increase aggregate demand somewhat and keep outright homelessness and starvation from reaching sufficient levels to bring the system down.

Programs like welfare and food stamps — which by themselves are a small minority of total human services spending — amount to the capitalists using their state to clean up a problem they themselves created, acting through their state, in the first place. By Kinsella’s standard, it’s “parasitism” when government buys crutches for people, even though it worked in tandem with business to break their legs in the first place — and then adds insult to injury by subsidizing the crutch industry in the process.

Second, including Social Security — which may well constitute a majority of total government payments to the “67%” — is especially disingenuous, because Social Security is an entitlement funded entirely by payroll taxes on the recipients’ own wage income over their working lifetime.

What’s more, under the terms of Reagan’s Social Security “reform,” the revenue from the payroll tax increase was used over a period of about twenty years to offset the lost revenue from tax cuts for the rich. And nothing remained of the actual increased payroll tax payments but a stack of government bonds in the “trust fund.” That means that, over a twenty year period — in the name of “keeping Social Security solvent” — a major part of the tax burden was shifted directly from the super-rich to payroll taxes on working people.

Third, a good many of the categories in that list are taxpayer-funded positive externalities to big business.These are all examples of the phenomenon James O’Connor described in The Fiscal Crisis of the State, of big business remaining artificially profitable only because it can externalize a growing share of its operating costs and inputs on the taxpayer. The state is being driven to larger deficits and a growing debt precisely because it takes an ever-increasing amount of direct and indirect subsidies to keep corporate capitalism profitable.

The main function of teachers is to impart the skills and attitudes that will transform their budding human raw material into useful, compliant “human resources” for their employers. The first state public school systems were created in the mid-19th century when factories needed workers who would show up on time, obey orders, and line up to eat and piss at the sound of a bell. The public educationist literature from the turn of the 20th century is full of explicit statements that the public schoolsl exist to fit children into their niche in the social hierarchy. If you don’t believe it, look at the role of Bill and Melinda Gates and other billionaires in promoting charter schools, Core Curriculum and the like.

Soldiers? Whose interests do you think are served by the wars they fight in? Remember the old Vietnam-era joke about General Mills, General Electric and General Motors? Have you noticed that every country defeated by the US gets a new government that rubber-stamps the latest so-called “Free Trade Agreement,” starts taking orders from the World Bank and IMF, and auctions off its economy to global corporations? How much of US security policy is dedicated to maintaining US access to the Persian Gulf and Caspian Sea oil basins, keeping the sea lanes open for oil tankers, and otherwise guaranteeing “clean, safe and abundant energy” to the American corporate economy?

And of course the government contractors building all those subsidized highways that make giant corporations with large market areas artificially profitable against smaller, more efficient producers serving local markets, or promote urban sprawl and real estate interests at the expense of poor people whose neighborhoods were destroyed by freeways.

Stephan Kinsella should be fully aware of what my positions, and those of other libertarian leftists, actually are. I suspect he is fully aware that we believe looting and exploitation by the rich takes the form of monopoly rents and other forms of nominally private exchange, and not direct government transfer of revenue from poor to rich. No doubt he disagrees with that. If so, he should argue against our actual position — not disingenuously pretend that some idiotic statistic about the “67%” is a response to what we actually believe.

After discussing Benjamin Tucker’s four big monopolies, the next big thing to discuss is that of contemporary mutualist/individualist anarchist – Kevin Carson. I already made use of some of his stuff, but I want to highlight the innovations of Kevin.

Kevin discusses how government subsidies to transportation help big corporate interests ship long distance. This leads to artificially big markets and centralized economic actors. The ensuing concentration of wealth leads to more inequality in the economy. As Kevin puts it:

Spending on transportation and communications networks from general revenues, rather than from taxes and user fees, allows big business to “externalize its costs” on the public, and conceal its true operating expenses.

He goes on to describe the centralizing effect of state built and funded infrastructure:

Every wave of concentration of capital in the United States has followed a publicly subsidized infrastructure system of some sort. The national railroad system, built largely on free or below-cost land donated by the government, was followed by concentration in heavy industry, petrochemicals, and finance.

He also engages in novel thinking about economic value theory. His notion is one of a subjective labor theory of value. An integration of the labor approach to value theory with the Austrian subjective approach. He states:

A producer will continue to bring his goods to market only if he receives a price necessary, in his subjective evaluation, to compensate him for the disutility involved in producing them. And he will be unable to charge a price greater than this necessary amount, for a very long time, if market entry is free and supply is elastic, because competitors will enter the field until price equals the disutility of producing the final increment of the commodity.

Other aspects of this approach to economics worth mentioning includes the effect of regulatory government or the state. The consequences of said regulations tend to involve the creation of oligopolies and monopolies. They remove areas of quality or safety from competition and thus produce standardized “markets” without dynamism. Roy Childs Jr. made use of the New Leftist historian, Gabriel Kolko’s work to drive home this point:

As Gabriel Kolko demonstrates in his masterly The Triumph of Conservatism and in Railroads and Regulation, the dominant trend in the last three decades of the nineteenth century and the first two of the twentieth was not towards increasing centralization, but rather, despite the growing number of mergers and the growth in the overall size of many corporations,

toward growing competition. Competition was unacceptable to many key business and financial leaders, and the merger movement was to a large extent a reflection of voluntary, unsuccessful business efforts to bring irresistible trends under control. … As new competitors sprang up, and as economic power was diffused throughout an expanding nation, it became apparent to many important businessmen that only the national government could [control and stabilize] the economy. … Ironically, contrary to the consensus of historians, it was not the existence of monopoly which caused the federal government to intervene in the economy, but the lack of it.1

Other types of economic interventionism that benefit corporate actors include direct taxpayer funded subsidies or corporate welfare. A report mentioned on Alternet discuses how the Fortune 100 companies have recently received 1.2 trillion dollars in corporate welfare. Economic interventionism also takes the form of the U.S. military forcibly opening up markets for U.S. businesses. This is mistakenly considered a part of “free trade”. It’s also worth mentioning the use of the police or military to break strikes as a form of pro-business interventionism. This was particularly true of the allegedly free market gilded age.

What does all the above say about the primary role of the state or government as an actor within the economy? It supports the idea that the state or the government is the executive committee of an economic ruling class to borrow a phrase from Karl Marx. It may also engage in secondary activities like the provision of social welfare for the poor and unemployed, but the level of support is far below that given to dominant corporate actors which often have a multinational reach. These actions don’t mean the state or government generally genuinely cares about the well-being of the least well off. The primary actions of the state or government serve to concentrate money in gthe hands of a ruling class. The secondary ones attempt to clean up the mess created by the drastic inequality created. That ends our analysis. Until next time!

But what kind of “civilization” are we paying for? At the federal level, if you include not only the nominal “Defense” [sic] budget, but Veterans’ Affairs, the military aspects of NASA and the Department of Energy, interest on the national debt from past wars, etc., military spending is nearly half the total budget.

The Obama administration  complains that sequestration has resulted in cuts to, among other things, law enforcement. But the US has the largest prison-industrial complex in the world, and militarized SWAT teams of black-uniformed Gestapo wannabes in virtually every town in the country, mainly because of government-declared “wars” on consensual activity like drug use and sex work.

But some government spending — infrastructure, education, welfare and so on — is “progressive,” right?

We know progressives love infrastructure. You can’t sit through an MSNBC commercial break without seeing Rachel Maddow equating the Hoover Dam with “big things” and national greatness.

But infrastructure projects like big dams and the Interstate Highway System were created to make the mid-20th century model of centralized, bureaucratic, mass-production capitalism profitable. You can thank the Interstate’s artificially cheap long-distance shipping costs, in large part, for driving local canneries and breweries out of business, making large-scale agribusiness competitive against local food production, and for the Walmart “warehouses on wheels” distribution model that’s destroyed Main Street retail. You can thank heavily subsidized irrigation water from the big dams for making giant plantations in California artificially profitable. The goods at Walmart or the lettuce in a bag at the supermarket may look cheap, but you pay the hidden cost on April 15.

Education? The first state public education systems were created in the 1830s and 1840s when factory employers needed workers trained to line up on command, eat and urinate at the sound of a bell, and cheerfully take direction from authority figures sitting behind desks. The main effects of federal aid to education have been to serve as a stick for imposing standardized testing and teaching-to-the-test on local systems, and keep the school-to-corporate-HR-department conveyer belt running smoothly. The main effect of the GI Bill and other federal higher education spending since WWII has been to drive up tuition costs, promote endless sprees of hiring more administrators and building more physical plant, and inflate unnecessary credentialing requirements for most forms of employment.

Even when programs like Social Security and safety net spending genuinely promote public welfare compared to the baseline — everything being the same except that government program — we should keep in mind, first, that it’s a side-effect of the state’s primary purpose of stabilizing capitalism, and second, that it was made necessary in the first place by problems resulting from the conditions of structural privilege and monopoly enforced by the state on behalf of capitalists.

The artificial scarcities, monopolies and artificial property rights enforced by the state result in enormous rents to the economic ruling class, at the expense of workers and consumers. The resulting increase in income for those with the highest propensity to save and invest, and reduction in income for those with the highest propensity to consume, leads to a built-in tendency toward overaccumulation and underconsumption, and a chronic boom-bust cycle.

To stabilize things, the state steps in and redistributes just enough of the stolen rents to augment aggregate demand and prevent the system from collapsing. And the state runs a permanent deficit to fund those big blockbuster infrastructure projects and the prison-industrial and military-industrial complexes, in order to utilize all that excess production capacity and lower the unemployment rate.

Even when the regulatory and welfare state makes corporate capitalism more bearable than it otherwise would be, it’s a case of the capitalists acting through their state to clean up their own mess at public expense.

The state, by its very nature, is the executive committee of a ruling class. It’s the mechanism by which landlords, usurers, bureaucrats and rentiers extract wealth from the majority of the population. That’s the “civilization” your taxes are paying for.

No, but the government sure does. Maybe that’s why the Koch Brothers put so much money into lobbying groups and think tanks like the American Legislative Exchange Council and the Heritage Foundation whose main purpose is to influence government policy.

“Oh,” but you say. “They’re not looking to make money through increased government coercion. Far from it! They’re just lobbying government to get out of the economy so they can take their chances competing on their merits in an unfettered market economy.”

Well … not quite.

The legislative agenda pursued by groups like ALEC, Heritage, the American Enterprise Institute and the Heartland Institute isn’t exactly libertarian. At least not if, by “libertarian,” you mean anything more principled than “whatever big business wants from government to make it profitable.”

As an example, consider so-called “Ag-Gag” bills  — written by ALEC — that  prohibit undercover journalists from exposing animal abuse within corporate agribusiness. This past year such bills were introduced in nine states and signed into law in three.

The Koch Brothers are also enthusiastic advocates (to say the least) of the Keystone XL pipeline, standing to make billions from the project if it’s completed. Needless to say, Keystone’s route depends heavily on the use of eminent domain to steal land from family farmers, and Keystone’s government backers have run roughshod over Indian lands (including sacred burial grounds) guaranteed by treaty. Last I heard, eminent domain is only possible through coercion — you know, that thing David Koch said he lacks the ability to do.

The Keystone project is also heavily dependent on regulatory state preemption of ordinary common law standards of civil liability for the air and groundwater pollution and health damage fracking causes to surrounding communities. And the Koch brothers are also prominent cheerleaders for “tort reform” — i.e., making it more difficult to hold corporations liable for their wrongdoing and make them pay for the harm they’ve caused.

So the actual pattern we see is the Koch brothers and their pet think tanks actively encouraging a near-totalitarian level of state intervention to suppress all the mechanisms of civil society — investigative journalism by a free and independent press, a vigorous system of civil liability, etc. — that would help keep business honest and hold it accountable. Hardly surprising, when you consider Koch Industries got its start building oil refineries for Joseph Stalin. Say, now — he had the power to coerce, didn’t he?

While we’re at it, ALEC has actively lobbied for the draconian drug laws and for detention of “illegal aliens” [sic] that are so profitable to its sponsors like CCOA, Wackenhut and other private prison corporations. That doesn’t sound too libertarian, does it?

And how about David Addington’s new No. 3 role at Heritage? Addington was Dick Cheney’s go-to guy for writing legal memos on stuff like indefinite detention, torture, and warrantless surveillance. You can see why a guy like that would be a perfect fit for a think tank that’s all about “limited government” and “restoring the Constitution.” All sarcasm aside, I think you can see that people like this have a very, um, skewed idea of what “freedom” means.

The role of people like Charles and David Koch, and of think tanks like ALEC, AEI and Heritage, in the larger free market libertarian movement is a lot like that of the Pharisees in the Judaism of Jesus’s time. “Whited sepulchres” and “generation of vipers” are some of the terms he used, I think.

The Pharisees, Jesus said, would cavil and split hairs for years on the finer points of the law, while utterly disregarding its spirit; they would tithe their very herbs, while putting their money into their day’s equivalent of tax-free nonprofit foundations to avoid taking care of their aged parents.

The corporate Pharisees of our day strain at a gnat using “free market” rhetoric to attack welfare for the poor, but swallow a camel when it comes to welfare for corporations. They claim to favor “economic freedom” and “free trade,” while putting the entire world under the totalitarian lockdown of draconian “intellectual property” law to guarantee their enormous monopoly rents. They complain that “taxation is theft,” while their mining and agribusiness corporations act in collusion with governments to kick the peoples of world off their land.

It’s time to scourge the money-changers from the temple.

Tom Knapp’s proposed World’s Smallest Political Platform:

The Libertarian Party supports reducing the size, scope and power of government at all levels and on all issues, and opposes increasing the size, scope or power of government at any level or for any purpose.

In addition to Wirkman’s objections, I have a sequencing objection. Figure the state as Annie Wilkes in Stephen King’s novel, Misery. She wants to help the patient so much she’ll never willingly let him go. To a libertarian, much of what the state does looks like providing crutches or shackles. To an anarchist, I suppose everything the state does looks like that. Crutches are actually important for the injured. If you’re to completely heal, though, you have to give them up at the right time. And some badly injured people are never going to be able to do without them – e.g. my mother with her walker.

But the crazy nurse wants you to keep your crutches whether you need them or not, and she’ll chain you to the bed, if necessary, to keep you in her “care.” If she has to, she’ll cut off your foot, for your own good. Radley Balko specializes in investigating how this kind of “caregiving” perverts the legal system. Robert De Niro’s repairman in Brazil tries to get around shackles the state in that movie has put on free exchange.

So we want to remove most or all crutches and shed most or all shackles, depending on how, for lack of a better term, anarchistic we are. But which shackles and which crutches when? The “liberal” “libertarian” answer is: first take the crutches from those best able to bear their own weight, and remove the shackles from the weak before the strong. So: corporate welfare before Social Security before Aid to Families with Dependent Children. Drug prohibition before marginal income tax rates.

Most libertarians would agree that it’s a messed-up state that:

• Creates a massive crime problem in poor minority neighborhoods with a futile, vicious and every more far-reaching attempt to prevent commerce in popular, highly portable intoxicants that leaves absurd numbers of young men with felony records, making them marginally employable.
• Fails to provide adequate policing for such neighborhoods.
• Fails to provide effective education in such neighborhoods after installing itself as the educator of first resort.
• Uses regulatory power to sharply curtail entry into lines of business from hair-care to ride provision, further limiting the employment options of people in such neighborhoods.
• Has in the past actively fostered the oppression of said minority, up to and including spending state money and time in keeping its members in bondage.
• To make up for all of the above, provides a nominal amount of tax-financed welfare for the afflicted.

But it’s a messed-up libertarianism that looks at that situation and says, “Man, first thing we gotta do is get rid of that welfare!”

People have diverse interests and priorities, and we don’t all have to work on my issue of the moment. But given finite political energy, we can for instance agitate to stop paying Big Sugar tax dollars to foul the Everglades with runoff or end the inheritance tax. We can pressure the government to curtail torture or Medicaid These are not close calls.

Libertarian institutions that walk this walk include Radley Balko (he’s an institution, as far as I’m concerned), the Institute for Justice and . . . well, help me out here.

Now, I’m pretty sure Tom Knapp wouldn’t disagree with me, and has said similar things himself. If I were to guess at a defense, it would be that, practically speaking, political temperaments differ. It’s better to have instinctive “right-wingers” agitating to curtail state power than to expand it. Even if they’re trying to remove shackles from the strong, that’s better than loading more on the weak. Better that “conservatives” oppose net neutrality than support war with Iran, as it were.

There may be something to that. The other big defense is that government action tends to crowd out private and communal action. On this theory, we may not be able to predict what will replace state schools or Medicare, but human ingenuity is vast and, like the song goes, “There’s no telling what we’ll do when we’re free.” This is an appealing, romantic vision. It even speaks to me. But I disagree that we can always be so sure that the short to medium-term results of ending a subsidy for the marginal will be benign. It seems to me that it might take us “millions of intricate moves” to live humanely without government, or with very little government, and kicking the props out from under the poor is more likely to be a late move than an early one.

NB: I realize that non-libertarians reject the simile of the State as crazy Annie Wilkes, and disagree that crutches-and-shackles fairly describes the whole of state action. Like Mortitia Addams, “I can respect that.”

… the director of the internal revenue agency, Beatriz Viana, declared that as part of a plan to fight the submerged economy, the Treasury would send tributary agents to small business (like restaurants, coffee shops, stores, etc.) to seize their cash if they have fiscal debts. She also said that this would be done during commercial hours and even if there were customers in the premises. This announcement coincides with data from the National Statistics Institute (INE) that reveal that small firms as a whole have lost a third of their sales since 2006. Since the beginning of the crisis, one of every three of these companies has disappeared from the map. 500,000 businesses (200,000 small firms and 300,000 autonomous workers), with a total annual sales of more than 600,000 million Euros have closed their doors. While this happens, INE–who points out in the same working paper that disposable income for Spanish households dropped 3.2% during the second quarter of this year and that 21.8% of the population is under the threshold of poverty risk–tells us that Spanish millionaires keep engrossing their fortunes.

According to the union of tax inspectors (GESTHA), 72% of fiscal fraud in Spain corresponds to large firms and large patrimonies, 17% to small firms, 9% to autonomous workers and 2% to the rest of the population, but the exemplary and rigorous measures are applied to the weakest group. Furthermore, according to the same civil servants (who ask for more human and material resources), 80% of the inspectors (one for almost 2,000 citizens) is dedicated to prosecuting small frauds and irregularities of small firms, autonomous workers and employed workers who forget a detail in their tax declaration instead of going after the “the business groups, the multinational corporations and the big fortunes.” This is one more data point to consider when evaluating why the country’s largest companies and fortunes evaded more than 40,000 million Euros in taxes last year with total impunity.

Regrettably, as it is typically the case, Méndez utterly fails to realize that this is THE fundamental problem of democracy, that the welfare state’s main function, is corporate welfare; and enthusiastically blames “total market freedom” for the whole mess.

Gracias a un amigo de Twitter, acabo de encontrarme con unos comentarios del año 2005 de Lee Scott, CEO de Walmart, pidiéndole al congreso que aprobara un aumento del sueldo mínimo:

“El sueldo mínimo de 5,15 dólares en los Estados Unidos no ha subido en casi una década y creemos que está fuera de sintonía con los tiempos que vivimos. En Wal-Mart podemos ver directamente como muchos de nuestros clientes tienen dificultades para llegar a fin de mes. Nuestros clientes simplemente no tienen el dinero para comprar artículos de primera necesidad”.

A primera vista estos comentarios parecen sumamente extraños, pues la fuente es el máximo ejecutivo de una empresa que, tal como usted sabrá si ha seguido las noticias durante el Viernes Negro, se caracteriza por mantener los sueldos de sus trabajadores tan bajos como sea humanamente posible.

Pero si lo piensa bien, en realidad no existe contradicción alguna. Existe un fundamental dilema del priosionero en el corazón mismo del capitalismo. A las grandes corporaciones les interesa garantizar colectivamente un nivel suficientemente alto de poder adquisitivo que permita que los camiones se sigan moviendo y que los inventarios sigan rotando.

Dicho de otra manera, el interés de un empleador individual es pagar solo lo necesario para mantener a los empleados en un nivel de subsistencia mientras trabajan, sin excedente suficiente para cubrir perídos de enfermedad o desempleo. Pero el interés colectivo de todos los empleadores es que se pague lo suficiente a los trabajadores para cubrir el costo de reproducción de la fuerza de trabajo.

El propósito fundamental del estado capitalista es resolver estos dilemas del prisionero. Cuando el estado impone un sueldo mínimo suficienemente alto para facilitar la reproducción de la fuerza de trabajo (aunque este no sea el objetivo explícito fuera del modelo socialdemócrata europeo), los costos recaen igualitariamente sobre todos los empleadores de una industria determinada. Y al contrario del caso de un cártel privado y voluntario, ningún empleador puede violar el acuerdo con sus competidores para obtener una ventaja cortoplacista. De esta manera, el financiamento del costo de reproducción de la fuerza de trabajo deja de ser un motivo de competencia de costos entre empleadores; se conveirte en un costo colectivo de la industria entera que puede ser pasado completamente a los consumidores como un recargo vía precios administrados.

Marx tuvo mucho que decir sobre este fenómeno, ilustrado por el Acta de las Diez Horas de Trabajo en Gran Bretaña (El Capital, vol. 1, cap. 10).

“Estas actas limitan la pasión del capital por un drenaje ilimitado de la fuerza de trabajo, limitando forzosamente la duración del día de trabajo a travez de regulaciones estatales, hechas por un estado regido por capitalista y latifundista. … La limitación impuesta sobre la mano de obra de las fábricas se debió a la misma necesidad que exparció el guano sobre los campos ingleses. El mismo entusiasmo ciego por el saqueo que en un caso drenó los suelos, en el otro arrancó de raíz la fuerza vital de la nación”.

Marx argumentaba que este interés común en prevenir “el drenaje de los suelos” era lo que explicaba el apoyo que muchos capitalistas (como por ejemplo el empleador Josiah Wedgwood) dieron al Acta de las Diez Horas.

El estado funciona de manera polifacética como el comité ejecutivo de la clase económica regente, llevando a cabo muchas funciones que a sus miembros no les interesa llevar a cabo individualmente.

Los salarios mínimos, la negociación colectiva y los esquemas de cobertura médica universal pueden ser percibidas individualmente por los capitalistas como restricciones o imposiciones. Pero en general son apoyadas por los capitalistas más iluminados, especialmente por aquellos en las industrias que más se benefician de estas medidas. Considérese, por ejemplo, el rol de Gerard Swope, CEO de General Electric, en la coalición empresarial que respaldó al New Deal.

El salario mínimo aumenta el poder adquisitivo agregado de la clase trabajadora, y ayuda a los empleadores a asegurarse una fuente confiable de fuerza de trabajo de manera sostenible. El estado del bienestar impide que el desempleo, el hambre y la damnificación lleguen a niveles políticamente desestabilizadores que derrumbarían al capitalismo desde abajo. La cobertura médica universal bajo el modelo británico o el canadiense externaliza los costos laborales que de otro modo serían sufragados por los empleadores (como se hace en países como Estados Unidos), que proveen seguro de salud como beneficio a sus empleados.

Cada vez que usted oiga retórica de ama de casa acerca de “nuestras familias trabajadoras”, o declaraciones auto-congratulatorias como “a los demócratas le importa”, trate de ir más allá de lo que dice la voz y échele un vistazo a lo que hacen las manos. En un mercado liberado (sin el estado para velar por los intereses de los capitalistas) el capitalismo corporativo se marchitaría como un caracol de jardín al que se le echa sal en la espalda. El estado trabaja para los capitalistas. No trabaja para usted.

Artículo oroginal publicado por Kevin Carson, el 26 de noviembre 2012.

Traducido del inglés por Alan Furth.

“The U.S. minimum wage of $5.15 an hour has not been raised in nearly a decade and we believe it is out of date with the times. We can see first-hand at Wal-Mart how many of our customers are struggling to get by. Our customers simply don’t have the money to buy basic necessities between pay checks.”

At first glance this seems decidedly odd, coming as it does from the CEO of a company which — as you know if you’ve been following the Black Friday news — is notorious for keeping its workers’ pay as low as humanly possible.

But if you think about it, there’s really no contradiction at all. There’s a fundamental prisoner’s dilemma at the heart of capitalism. It’s in the interest of large corporations collectively to guarantee sufficient purchasing power to keep the trucks moving and the inventories turning over. But it’s in the interest of individual large corporations to keep labor costs as low as possible.

Likewise, it’s in individual employers’ interests to pay only enough to maintain employees in subsistence while they’re actually working, without enough of a surplus to save against periods of sickness or unemployment. But it’s in the collective interest of employers to pay enough to cover the minimum reproduction cost of labor power.

Overcoming such prisoners’ dilemmas is the main purpose of the capitalists’ state. When the state mandates a minimum wage sufficient to facilitate the reproduction of the workforce (of course it doesn’t in practice, outside the European “social democratic” model of capitalism), the cost falls on all employers in a given industry equally. And unlike the case of a private, voluntary cartel, individual employers are unable to defect for the sake of a short-term advantage from double-crossing their competitors. So funding the minimum reproduction cost of labor-power is no longer an issue of cost competition among employers; it’s a collective cost of an entire industry that can be passed on to consumers as a cost-plus markup, via administered pricing.

Marx had a lot to say about this phenomenon, as illustrated by the Ten-Hours Act in Britain (Capital, vol. 1 ch. 10).

“These acts curb the passion of capital for a limitless draining of labour-power, by forcibly limiting the working-day by state regulations, made by a state that is ruled by capitalist-and landlord. … [T]he limiting of factory labour was dictated by the same necessity which spread guano over the English fields. The same blind eagerness for plunder that in the one case exhausted the soil, had, in the other, torn up by the roots the living force of the nation.”

This common interest in preventing “exhaustion of the soil,” Marx argued, explained the counterintuitive support of many capitalists — as exemplified by employer Josiah Wedgwood — for the Ten-Hours Bill.

The state, in many ways, functions as an executive committee of the economic ruling class, carrying out for them in common many necessary functions it’s not in their interest to carry out individually. The state, in short, cleans up the capitalists’ messes for them.

Things like the minimum wage, collective bargaining, and universal healthcare may be perceived by individual capitalists as a restraint or an imposition. But they’re supported by the smarter capitalists — especially those in the industries that benefit most from them. Just consider the role of General Electric CEO Gerard Swope in the business coalition behind the New Deal.

The minimum wage increases aggregate purchasing power among the working class at large, and helps secure employers a reliable pool of labor power on a sustainable basis. The welfare state keeps unemployment, hunger and homelessness from reaching politically destabilizing levels that — without the state cleaning up the capitalists’ mess at taxpayer expense — might result in capitalism being torn down from below. Universal healthcare, whether on the British or Canadian model, externalizes labor costs on the taxpayer which would otherwise be (and are, in countries like the U.S.) borne by employers who provide health insurance as a benefit.

Any time you hear soccer mom rhetoric about “our working families,” or self-congratulatory platitudes to the effect that “Democrats care,” look behind the voice and take a look at what the hands are actually doing. In a freed market — without the state to do the capitalists’ bidding — corporate capitalism would wither like a garden slug with salt on its back. The state works for the capitalists, not for you.

Translations for this article:

• Spanish, La Función Fundamental del Estado del Bienestar es el Bienestar Corporativo.
• Dutch, De Hoofdfunctie van de Verzorgingsstaat is het Verzorgen van Grote Bedrijven.