He writes in reference to my defining of capitalism:

Pretty good, but.. to my mind, private property is a danger in itself because it creates disparities in economic power that could provide opportunities to demand rent, creating a feedback loop between power and wealth and power, allowing the private property owner to recreate capitalist-like structures.

Legitimate points, Jiminykrix. A way of approaching this particular analysis is to invoke the tried and true left-anarchist distinction between possession and property. If my memory serves me correctly, this demarcation pertains to what one personally uses as opposed to what one owns absentee under capitalist norms of legal ownership. A reliance on possession in the form of occupation and use would go a long ways towards remedying the problems raised by the commentator above.

Without absentee control or ownership, a massive disparity in wealth and power wouldn’t exist because they couldn’t exercise external control over you and extract rent. It was perhaps careless of me not to use the term, private possession, as opposed to private property. Lockean property rights wouldn’t of necessity lead to the conditions described above either. If there were widespread ownership due to more egalitarian freed market forces, the recreation of capitalist structures would be difficult to impossible. The difficulty would leave only a small minority of ardent seekers to push for it. Not exactly a powerful political, economic, and cultural force.

His final commentary relevant to this post is below:

It could be that the understanding of “ownership” in play in this definition is intended to be sufficiently strong to ward off this possibility, but I think it’s worth bearing in mind that legal ownership of something isn’t the only way someone ever extracts rent from someone else.

E.g., in politics under bourgeois democracy, if my fortune allows me to merely *threaten* to fund the opponent of a political candidate, I have power over politics even without spending money. It seems unlikely to me that someone with a hoard of gold (or bitcoin?) in, say, a mutualist society wouldn’t be able to extract rent from someone, somewhere.

The definition used was not intended to be strong enough to ward off this possibility, but it certainly is worth understanding in that manner. Not sure how a person extracts rent from someone else without legal ownership of something, so the commentator is kindly asked to provide further examples or explain the one given beter. The example provided is not understandable as one to me.

The author is correct to note that hoarding wealth in a mutualist society most likely wouldn’t allow one to extract rent. This is possibly due to the lack of absentee control over others, and what they actually use, but you happen to legally own under capitalism. Let’s work to put an end to said exploitation.

Vulgar libertarian apologists for capitalism use the term “free market” in an equivocal sense: They seem to have trouble remembering, from one moment to the next, whether they’re defending actually existing capitalism or free market principles. So we get the standard boilerplate article arguing that the rich can’t get rich at the expense of the poor, because “that’s not how the free market works” — implicitly assuming that this is a free market. When prodded, they’ll grudgingly admit the present system isn’t a free market, and includes a lot of state intervention on behalf of the rich. But as soon as they think they can get away with it, they go right back to defending the wealth of existing corporations in terms of “free market principles.”

Stossel’s piece does that in spades. He begins by conceding Thomas Piketty’s claim, in Capital in the 21st Century, that the concentration of wealth in the hands of the super-rich is at an all-time high. It’s true, he says, that “the wealth gap has grown. Now the top 1 percent own more assets than the bottom 90 percent!” But not to worry!

Stossel begins by arguing that what matters is not the relative shares of wealth between various percentiles of the population, but the mobility between those percentiles. And moving up is just as easy as ever. Just look at Oprah Winfrey (once on welfare)! And Sam Walton (a former fieldhand)!

Actually this is a load of buncombe. First of all, Stossel in my opinion unjustifiably minimizes path dependency. For example, there are persistent structural differences between the economic security and well-being of black families generations later, depending on whether they lived in areas where the U.S. army granted land to former slaves during Reconstruction — not to mention ongoing structural injustices like black sharecroppers being tractored off their land after WWII, or bank redlining.

But even leaving that aside, there’s been a significant amount of social mobility in most class societies in history. Without such mobility, they would ossify into caste systems incapable of adapting to change. That’s why Orwell’s Inner Party in 1984 is a complete meritocracy that recruits talent from the Outer Party and Proles in each new generation. The Soviet class system was probably more mobile than the American; most of the Party apparatus and the state economy’s managerial establishment, in the mid-20th century, were populated by the millions of workers and peasants (and their children) who swarmed into the Party in the ’20s and ’30s and got sent to vocational schools. Even under Roman chattel slavery, there were more enterprising or cunning slaves than average who bought their freedom and eventually became slave-owners themselves. Does this mobility mean that the dominance of the Ingsoc Party in 1984, or the dominance of the Soviet apparatchik over the average citizen, or the Roman slave-owner over the slave, was legitimate? It’s just an amazingly stupid argument.

But the real vulgar libertarianism comes in when Stossel dismisses considerations of justice or injustice in the distribution of wealth: “Also, the rich don’t get rich at the expense of the poor (unless they steal or collude with government).”

Um, that’s a big “unless.” Stossel writes as if the legitimacy of the super-rich’s fortunes were the rule, and collusion with the government were some sort of rare exception. To be sure, Stossel occasionally writes about some government boondoggle for the rich (like subsidized insurance for their beach homes) or corporate welfare. But his instinctive reaction, when someone attacks the polarization of wealth or the power of big business, is to interpret it as a leftist attack on the “free market,” and to circle the wagons in defense of the rich and powerful.

But in fact corporate capitalism as we know it is defined by statism to its very core, and the overwhelming majority of the income of the super-rich consists of rents on artificial property rights and artificial scarcities enforced by the state. I doubt it would be possible to accumulate a fortune of 100 million on the free market — let alone 100 billion. The Fortune 500 corporations, without any exception I can think of, owe their profits and market shares to government-subsidized inputs, government-enforced monopolies, entry barriers and regulatory cartels.

Stossel isn’t defending against government intervention. He’s defending a system based on it.

The Gnu’s Room: a non-profit bookstore and community art space has been the cornerstone of our independent arts community in Auburn, AL.

Due to the difficulties of high urban rent and waning financial support, The Gnu’s Room is struggling to make ends meet and fulfill its mission of promoting literacy and the arts in Southeast Alabama. Our community is heavily marginalized in the predominant culture of today… and those who love books, independent films, and local music have got to come together and show their support!

We are trying to raise the seed money to move The Gnu’s Room into a huge, low-cost warehouse space in the new Arts District of Opelika (supported by the Alabama Arts Council, The Railyard independent venue, and the future Cotton Seed Studios)

But we need help to make this move possible!

Pledges of varying amounts can earn you rewards like free books, tickets to our benefit concert, local artwork, and genuine ivory scrimshaw bookmarks…. Plus the added reward of keeping our artistic community strong and well…

Don’t let our favorite meeting place for all things artistic, inspirational, and happily weird disappear! The Gnu’s Room plays a vital role in serving the area with rare volumes of nearly-forgotten wisdom and creating more arts through their publishing house, Solomon & George Publishers. We want to use the freedom of the Opelika Arts District space to expand community services to include e-publication archiving of these rare works, i.e. the Gnu Library, in-house printing services, art galleries, and a scrap exchange program for resident artists. . . . The biggest challenge facing our organization is pursuing often non-existent arts funding in our state and region. We hope to overcome that difficulty by providing useful services in a retail format. For example: We re-sell donated books in our bookstore. The Scrap Exchange will sort and recycle materials to bring low cost arts-and-crafts, packaging, and garden supplies to our proactive community members. . . . The new location will create not just more opportunities for our mission, but continue our ability to provide a common meeting place for the forum of artistic and creative solutions.

— Kickstarter: Save the Gnu’s Room!

The campaign has until June 15, 2013 to reach their fundraising goal. As of press time, there’s about $2,500 left to go in order to meet it. I just backed the project myself; if you can, please consider backing it with me, and help us save this precious community space, one of the long-time strongest supporters and most open forums for the arts, culture and philosophy in the Auburn-Opelika community.^[1]

Also.

• GT 2011-11-28: Markets Not Capitalism in the Gnu’s
• GT 2009-10-11: Gnu’s to me

^[1] The Gnu’s Room has been very supportive of local authors, and among other things they have been very kind and helpful to us for Markets Not Capitalism, which they generously hosted the world’s first book-talk / reading for, back in November 2011, and which they continue to sell on their shelves. ↩