Feed 44
End Government Spying Now on Feed 44

C4SS Feed 44 presents James C. Wilson‘s “End Government Spying Now” read by Joey Clark and edited by Nick Ford.

Secretive state agencies are not to be trusted, nor are the politicians that have ties to them. It is highly unlikely the state is going to voluntarily end its unethical spying programs without massive pressure from the public. The state is a largely unaccountable entity with a monopoly on coercive violence that entitles it to violate the rights it claims to protect. While the state itself should ultimately be rolled back, its surveillance wing is a good place to start. In the meantime mechanisms such as encryption can protect our data from unwelcome eyes, and open expressions of opposition will keep the state surveillance programs to busy for their own good.

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Books and Reviews
Political Authority with a Good Sense of Huemer (Part 1 of 2)

The Problem of Political Authority: An Examination of the Right to Coerce and the Duty to Obey, by Michael Huemer (Palgrave McMillan – 2012)

Introduction

The Problem of Political Authority, by Michael Huemer (2012) was collecting dust on my bookshelf until a month ago. I received it from a friend around a year ago, and like most of my books, decided to keep it for later. If there’s any benefit to working at my new job, it’s that there are a lot of quiet moments. So I decided to start taking advantage of those moments and read it. I chose Huemer’s book partly because I was already familiar with some of his work. I enjoyed his “Common Sense” defense of libertarianism when I first saw him at Porcfest. But even before that, I knew about him through his work on ethical intuitionism and moral knowledge.

Now, not being an anarcho-capitalist, I was interested to see his basis for it. Part of the case he makes seemed shaky, and led me to not give this book perfect scores. Overall though, I’d heartily recommend it to just about anyone who wants to understand some core arguments against the state.

The way Huemer has divided his book is superb. So in an effort to give a little order and sense to this review I’m going to somewhat mimic Huemer’s style. I’ll have this, Part One of the review, with Part Two to follow — just as the book itself is divided. And like Huemer, I’ll divide each part into numbered sections which correspond roughly with his chapters and sub-chapters, though not precisely. For example, there’s two chapters in part one that deal with different ideas of social contract theory to justify the state. In an attempt to bring them together, I’ll try to put them under a single decimal pointed section. In this case it’d be 1.2 instead of two different sections, as in Huemer’s book. Either way, if you haven’t noticed by now, this is going to be a long review and I’m not going to sugar coat that fact. Stay tuned for the second part sometime this later month.

Part of the reason for this comprehensiveness is because I love the book enough to write at length about it. The other reason is that it deserves more attention within the libertarian community than it’s received. Maybe being overly-comprehensive will backfire on that effort, I’m not sure. Regardless, it’s worth going over at length just for the elucidation that Huemer provides us.

In the end reading these two articles is going to be at least a little less than the book itself — a book which comes is  over four hundred pages. So there’s that.

Part I

1.1 Political Authority: Who Gets Served?

Huemer outlines his radical goal very clearly in the preface: Fundamentally rethink the political questions of the day.

Huemer says he has tried to lessen the amount of “academic jargon.” He hopes it’ll benefit both his fellow philosophers as well as the person who has only a casual interest in political theory. As someone who has much more than a casual interest but is not a “professional,” I found the book very accessible. The book centers around two fundamental questions:

Why should 535 people in Washington be entitled to issue commands to 300 million others? And why should the others obey? (p. 26)

In other words, the book deals with the concept of political authority and Huemer proposes the radical idea that there is no satisfactory answer to those two questions. Huemer, however, is a fan (as am I) of what he calls “reasonable extremism.” That is, he has extreme conclusions but he argues that his premises and reasoning are fairly intuitive. He doesn’t rely on abstract philosophical principles, a priori reasoning, or the non-aggression principle (he only mentions the NAP on one page and uses the term a total of five times).

Huemer works through his easy to understand premises to discover why political authority doesn’t work. He does this in large part by showing us how the state violates commonly shared values — acts we’d normally consider wrong if an individual committed them. This inequality of rights and privileges is at the heart of what makes the state supposedly “legitimate.”  It’s what gives  “authority” to the state and its tax collectors, police forces, military, domestic spies, drug enforcement agents, and practically everything else it does.

Huemer also, as one of his reviewers says, engages in the downright unfair tactic of not only reasonably engaging with the biggest arguments for state authority, he also typically reconstructs those arguments more charitably than they currently exist. At other times he’ll even add his own problems that he sees as much more likely than the ones offered by his interlocutor.

Psh. Cheater.

Moving on from the Preface, Part One begins with a parable:

You live in a small village with a crime problem. … No one seems to be doing anything about it. So one day, you and your family decide to put a stop to it. … Periodically, you catch one, take him back to your house at gunpoint, and lock him in the basement. You provide the prisoners with food so they don’t starve, but you plan to keep them locked in the basement for a few years to teach them a lesson.

After operating in this way for a few weeks, you decide to make the rounds of the neighborhood, starting with your next door neighbor. As he answers the door, you ask, ‘Have you noticed the reduction in crime in the last few weeks?’ He nods. ‘Well, that is thanks to me.’ You explain your anticrime program. Noting the wary look on your neighbor’s face, you continue. ‘Anyway, I’m here because it’s time to collect you contribution to the crime prevention fund. Your bill for the month is $100.’

As your neighbor stares at you, making no apparent move to hand over the money, you patiently explain that, should he refuse to make the required payment, you will unfortunately have to label him a criminal, at which point he will be subject to long-term confinement in your basement, along with the aforementioned vandals. Indicating the pistol at your hip, you note that you are prepared to take him by force if necessary.

Supposing you take this tack with all of your neighbors, what sort of reception could you expect? Would most cheerfully give over their assigned share of the costs of crime prevention? (p. 29)

Anyone who did this today in their local community would be called a vigilante at best and probably a loose cannon more accurately. People who lock others in their basements for perceived wrongs are generally seen as doing something wrong themselves. So what’s the difference between the vigilante who takes justice into his own hands and demands payment for his act, and the state?

Huemer concludes it’s the concept of political authority which he defines as:

…the hypothesized moral property in virtue of which governments may coerce people in certain ways not permitted to anyone else and in virtue of which citizens must obey governments in situations in which they would not be obligated to obey anyone else.  (p. 30)

Political authority has an air of legitimacy under which the government can rightfully obligate you in ways most people couldn’t. The so-called right of government to enforce these obligations in ways that others normally wouldn’t be able to is part of that supposed legitimacy. As Huemer points out though, this belief in political authority can vary and doesn’t condone all governments. Huemer also states throughout the book that just as being an anarchist doesn’t mean anarchists have to defend any and all experiments that seem anarchic, advocates of government authority don’t need to justify, for example, Nazi Germany’s regime in order to justify government itself.

Going back to the parable, defenders of government might say there’s a lot of things you could do to modify it. You could have the vigilantes conduct a “fair trial.” But implementing an involuntary jury would only add to the unjustifiable coercion already taking place. And for Huemer, coercion is what’s key here. He defines it differently than the standard dictionary version though. Huemer defines coercion as the use or of threat of physical force. This is one of the biggest things anarcho-capitalists object to about the state. So it’s no surprise that Huemer defines it this way.

Behind every government law is the threat of violence. If you refuse to comply with a law you may get fined and if you refuse to pay the fine you may get a bigger fine. Fail to pay the bigger fine and you might start to get notices sent to your house from the relevant authorities. What if you decide to ignore those notices? The relevant authorities can decide not to spend the time, energy or money needed to capture and put you in jail. But if the fine is big enough (which it most likely is at this point) then you’re likely going to get a knock on the door from the police. But what if you resist the police? I probably don’t need to explain, but good luck.

Because the authorities involved are probably  state institutions or at least closely interrelated with the state, the costs of their following up are likely minor. Of course, the police themselves are funded by “the public,” a.k.a. taxation, which would normally be theft if anyone else did it. The state primarily relies on the use or threat of force to get others to listen to its edicts as well as to pay for its enforcement.

Questions then arise: What do we make of this? Is the state justified in doing this? Are there alternative ways of organizing? Is this necessary to prevent some greater violation of our rights? Are the costs of doing it some other way simply higher? We’ll get into Huemer’s answers to these questions as we look through the book.

Before we do, let’s look at my summary of the five principles Huemer thinks political authority rests on:

  1. Generality – Most people are under the state’s authority and have obligations to obey;
  2. Particularity – The state is specifically designed to rule over the citizens within its own borders. Doing so outside of its borders is generally frowned upon without some cause. Likewise, citizens within a border of one state listening to one outside of that border is frowned upon unless they happen to coincide;
  3. Content-Independence – A law, whether good or bad, should be obeyed and citizens have an obligation to do so;
  4. Comprehensiveness – The state is not limited in its reach and can rule over a broad spectrum of human activities; and
  5. Supremacy – The state is the “law of the land” and no organization may properly overrule it.

In order for the defenders of the state to continue justifying political authority, they need to “accommodate and explain these five principles.” (p. 36) If they cannot, they’ll have trouble justifying everything from the war on drugs (which many statists disagree with) to taxation (which almost all statists agree with).

1.2 Two Kinds of Social Contract Theory

One prominent theory that tries to justify the state’s legitimacy is called the social contract theory. There are many versions of it. There are also many different premises for why the state is legitimate and has political authority to coerce us into obligations we wouldn’t otherwise have. But Huemer can’t reasonably be expected to tackle them all in one book so he decides to tackle some of the biggest he’s encountered.

It’s also worth noting that Huemer has said that his publisher had a word limit for the book so he literally couldn’t have included any more even if he wanted to. With that said, Huemer examines the traditional social contract theory first:

The theory holds that, at least in some countries, there is a contractual relationship between the government and its citizens. The contract requires the government to provide certain services for the population, notably protection from private criminals and hostile foreign governments. In return, citizens agree to pay their taxes and obey the laws. (p. 43)

This theory is taken from John Locke but it doesn’t seem to actually make much sense in practice. Did you sign an explicit contract with the state when you were born? Locke seemed to think you did. Even if that were true, how could this contract apply to non-signatories born later on? Locke seemed to think anyone who lived on that general territory after such an explicit social contract was entered into was implicitly agreeing to it.

Without going too much further with this line of thought it suffices for now to say that the history of the state is conquest. Take the United States, for example. The colonists, the European settlers, and many of the people who pushed west in search of gold all ejected the Natives from their homes and land. They killed, infected and drove out millions of people (most famously in the Trail of Tears) away from their families and property. This doesn’t sound like an explicit social contract to me.

The conquest-centric theory that this relies on is called conflict theory and is popular among not only anarchists like Harold Barclay and David Graeber, but even Marxists like Engels. Engels relied on an involuntary history of the state that depended on class antagonism developing beforehand. The idea that the social contract was ever explicit seems far-fetched. Even if one could find such an explicit contract at one point in time, it’s irrelevant to the present-day populace who entered into no such contract.

So maybe we didn’t explicitly agree to the social contract. Perhaps we implicitly agreed to it. This may sound ridiculous but consider going into a store and leaving with something without paying. It’d seem like you were undermining the implicit agreement that if you go into a store and want to buy something you have to pay for it. This is called “consent through acceptance of benefits.” There are exceptions to the general rule, however. For example, firefighters get free hot chocolates in my store. Sometimes one of them will come in around 10:30 PM and raise his cup before he leaves to let me know. But even in that case he still couldn’t take something else without paying. We have an implicit agreement about the chocolate but that’s an exception to the general implicit agreement of all other items requiring payment.

There are other sorts of implicit consent:

  • Consenting passively by not explicitly saying otherwise when asked (sometimes);
  • Consenting actively by engaging in a process that marks consent; and
  • Consenting by presence, i.e., remaining within the confines of X space.

I’m most resistant to the idea that one can passively consent. As a proponent of affirmative consent I’m weary of justifying passive consent in any situation. Sometimes employees will “agree” to a given proposal or not raise protest over it. That doesn’t mean they like the proposal or actually want to participate. They might be too low on the totem poll to be able to meaningfully challenge it. As Robert Anton Wilson said, “communication only exists between equals.” If the power gap between two individuals is wide (such as between a citizen and a police officer, for example) then it becomes farcical to use “passive consent” as a guide to what the weaker party wanted in the transaction. This is likewise true for someone who fears for their life but doesn’t expressly refuse X because of that fear. How about the fact that we all get benefits from the government and accept them? We all stay in the United States, don’t we? And many folks still vote and some even campaign for people to rule over them! Doesn’t this imply consent?

Some of the only people who have explicitly rejected the government are anarchists and they’re hardly in the majority. Even the most hardened of anarchists would call the cops in an emergency. And the ones I know in the US have almost universally stayed put. Though many anarchists don’t vote, some do and many others still pay their taxes. So maybe the theory of implicit consent with the state isn’t ridiculous. To decide if that’s true or not let’s look at how Huemer defines what constitutes a valid agreement.

For Huemer it must consist of (at least) four parts: (p. 46-48)

  1. A reasonable way out;
  2. Explicit dissent is considered more important than implicit consent;
  3. Your opinion should hold some weight; and
  4. The agreement should be mutual and conditional.

None of these things really applies to the implicit social contract:

  1. It’s difficult to opt out of any given government let alone government altogether. That is, unless you’re going to move to the woods or Antarctica. And that hardly seems like a reasonable alternative. Opting out of a given state also creates significant financial burdens due to tax laws, immigration restrictions and agreements you may have made within the territory, not to mention the emotional costs of leaving loved ones and fondly remembered places behind. Then there’s the added hardship of assimilating into the new culture to which you emmigrate.
  2. Well, we anarchists are a minority but doesn’t our opinion still count? Huemer rightfully points out that the taxes and laws are imposed on anarchists regardless of our explicit dissent against the government. There are also plenty of tax resisters and war resisters that have been sent to jail because of their explicit dissent from certain policies. And more to the point: Has the state ever offered you a way out of this supposed social contract? Probably not.
  3. This one is even simpler than 2. because, as implied by 2., your opinion doesn’t hold much weight. Consider telling the IRS that you refuse to pay taxes. Not even because you consider taxation theft or because you’re an anarchist. Maybe you send them a letter because you object to what they’re funding, such as war or “liberal propaganda” in the schools. Whatever the case, the government is unlikely to value your opinion. See, for instance, Karl Hess and his tax resistance, if you still think your opinion is worth much.
  4. Is there mutual obligation for citizen and state? Based on court cases like Hartzler v. City of San Jose (1975), DeShaney v. Winnebago County Department of Social Services (1989) and more famously (trigger warning for rape and sexual assault) Warren v. District of Columbia (1981) it doesn’t seem there is. In all three of these cases where horrible things happened to individuals, the court decided that the police have no duty to protect and that has been upheld consistently. So if they have no obligation to protect us, why do we have an obligation to pay them for said protection? This is just one example, but it’s a big hole in the argument for the legitimacy of the state.

Huemer’s arguments against the social contract are simple but effective. They aren’t based on controversial premises or conclusions that seem distant from their premises. In the end, the explicit social contract could, at best, be seen as a historical relic no longer relevant to the current discourse. The implicit social contract, though more plausible doesn’t hold water either, for a variety of reasons. As Huemer stipulates, society ought to be based on purely voluntary interrelations. The state routinely denies us this opportunity though, making its costs artificially high and its likelihood all but illegal.  Instead, it continues to enforce its dictates regardless of its citizens’ opinions.

1.3 “Yeah, but hypothetically…”

Another argument that Huemer addresses is the hypothetical social contract. See, you didn’t explicitly or implicitly agree to the social contract. But if it were offered to you, you would. This also seems ridiculous. Even if there are some hypothetical situations under which we’d consent to political authority, what does that have to do with our current, non-hypothetical, reality? But even so, the hypothetical argument seems appealing on its face, in certain scenarios, as Huemer points out:

Suppose that an unconscious patient has been brought to a hospital, in need of surgery to save his life.

Under ordinary circumstances, physicians must obtain the patient’s informed consent before operating. In this situation, insistence on this principle would preclude the application of lifesaving medical care, as the patient is unable to either consent to or dissent from the treatment.

In such a case, it is generally acknowledged that the doctors should proceed despite the lack of consent. (p. 55)

Huemer disposes of this argument with ease since none of us can reasonably be inferred to be unconscious as in the example. Though one could justify coercion on the basis that wanting to live (as the patient presumably does) is a fundamental value, it seems nearly impossible to apply this doctor-patient hypothetical to a widespread as a social contract.

There are other attempts to justify the hypothetical social agreement. Some of them use a reasonableness or fairness standard, and some use a Rawlsian “veil of ignorance”. The main problem with these justifications is that none of them account for the fact that no system based on hypothetical consent could get everyone to agree to it. Or perhaps the interest is to get everyone who is “reasonable” (whatever that means) to agree to have a government. Huemer and I both agree that anarchists, on the whole, don’t seem less reasonable than most other people do. So how does this theory account for anarchists?

Even if all “reasonable” people agreed to the hypothetical social contract it still wouldn’t establish political authority. For how could the social contract be enforced on the multitude of still-existing “unreasonable,” unwilling people? Could you justify performing surgery on someone who had deeply held beliefs about the procedure’s wrongness by calling those beliefs “unreasonable”? Imagine a doctor and treating a devout Christian. Would it be moral for the doctor to perform a procedure on his Christian patient that he or she objects to based on religious beliefs?

There’s also Rawls’s veil of ignorance: If everyone was “equally rational” it is said that they’d agree on a standard. But similar problems appear. How would everyone agree? Is it a given simply because they’re all “equally rationally”? “Original position” or not, it is unlikely that everyone would come to the same result. In spite of the many commonsense institutions we share, we also sometimes reach different conclusions or we have very different reasons for supporting the same conclusions. And sometimes we just don’t agree on these intuitions at all.

In summary, Huemer shows that the hypothetical social contract is probably too far removed from reality to consider; but even if it isn’t too far removed to consider, it still fails to show how political authority could be applied across the board to each and every individual.

1.4 The (Lack of) Authority Invested in Democracy

Okay, maybe political authority doesn’t arrive out of unanimous consent. But what about appealing to the majority, as is the case with the democratic justification for the state? Although it seems like a more practical and realistic justification, democracy has yet to be ethically justified, despite many attempts.

Let’s say you’ve undertaken the all-important task of buying pizza. You want plain cheese (or extra cheese, if you have to have toppings) but the rest of your (disgusting) friends want something else. Say that they decide to buy a large pizza with anchovies and tomatoes despite what you’ve expressed. This by itself would be rude but it wouldn’t necessarily be unethical. However, what if they then said you were responsible for paying for it? And if you don’t pay your share they’ll take your money by physical force? Obviously pizza is serious business, so we might consider this a less egregious offense. In any case though it’d still be unethical.

Yet, this scenario is roughly equivalent to democracy (majoritarian state-democracy to be exact). So the burden is now on them, as Huemer says, to make the case for the utilization of violence. What makes the state so special that it can use violent means to accomplish its ends, while forbidding individuals from doing the same? Perhaps the process is fair and equitable as Joshua Cohen tries to establish. Or perhaps, as Thomas Christiano says, the democratic process is the best way to treat everyone as equals. Huemer examines both of these claims and concludes they are dissatisfying.

First, Cohen sees the ideal democratic process that’d legitimize the state as follows:

  1. Participants take their deliberation to be capable of determining action and to be unconstrained by any prior norms.
  2. Participants offer reasons for their proposals, with the (correct) expectation that those reasons alone will determine the fate of their proposals.
  3. Each participant has an equal voice.
  4. The deliberation aims at consensus. However, if consensus cannot be achieved, the deliberation ends with voting. (p. 74)

Much like other hypothetical situations Huemer has evaluated, he’s right to point out that this has nothing to do with actual reality. For example, what deliberation could be “unconstrained” by the prior ideas of the ones deliberating? Since when do the participants’ reasons alone decide a democratic process? We’re all aware of lobbyists and the enormous influence money has on democratic institutions. And the deliberation, at least in the United States, has never, to my knowledge, aimed at consensus. Even a more decentralized and intentional community like Occupy Wall Street, which had a lot of consensus-based decisions, wouldn’t be able to attain 1. or 2.. In fact it would only fulfill 3. in a more approximate sense and 4. perhaps the best.

Cohen suggests that perhaps it’s a goal for actual democracies to aspire to. But given that no democracies even come close (let alone much more voluntary, decentralized and intentional, consensus-based communities) it still doesn’t seem relevant to our present situation. But even if this aspirational democracy did exist, it would need to justify its coercive element, as Huemer explains:

Your colleagues and students have voted, over your objections, to have you pay for everyone’s drinks.

Now add the following stipulations to the example: before taking the vote, the group deliberated.

Everyone, including you, had an equal opportunity to offer reasons for or against forcing you to pay for everyone’s drinks.

The others advanced arguments that it would be in the best interests of the group as a whole to force you to pay.

They attempted to reach a consensus.

In the end, they were unable to convince you that you should pay, but everyone else agreed that you should pay.

Are you now obligated to pay for everyone? Are the other members of the group entitled to compel you to pay through threats of violence?

Clearly not.

You have rights – in this case, a right to choose whether and how to spend your money and a right to be free from harmful coercion – which are not negated or overridden by the mere fact that a decision to violate your rights was preceded by a fair and reasoned deliberative process. The fairness of the process does not enable it to somehow sidestep all preexisting ethical entitlements and restrictions. Likewise, it is obscure how the sort of deliberation Cohen describes, even if it were to actually occur, would confer political legitimacy on the state. Individuals have a preexisting prima facie right not to be subjected to coercion. Deliberation, however fair and reasoned, does not by itself eliminate that right. Reasons for overriding individuals’ prima facie rights can of course be offered, and the offering of such reasons may be part of a deliberative process.

But the deliberative process does not constitute a reason in itself for suspending
individuals’ prima facie rights. (p.77)

But what if the only way to show people their due respect is through democratic laws? This is the argument that Thomas Christiano puts forth. As Huemer points out, it fails. And Huemer believes it fails even after granting the concession that, “we have a state whose laws are genuinely authorized by the people, whatever that may amount to.” (p. 78)

Huemer explains that treating each other equally under Christiano’s definition means not putting our own individual judgments over those of others. And part of that is treating everyone’s interests equally and hence obeying democratic laws. For example, if someone is disobeying a democratic law, they are treating their neighbors as below them. It’s unclear how this justifies political authority. If we should treat everyone equally and not place our judgements above those of others, then there seems to be everyday situations where we’d be acting immorally. And if I have a general obligation not to put my judgements over those of others, as Christiano states, what exempts the state from that obligation?

For example, most people would agree that I have the right to spend my money on bubblegum instead of donating that money to charity.  But if I don’t have an obligation to donate to the charity instead of buying the gum then why do I have an obligation to pay taxes instead of buying gum? Where is the difference, exactly, in placing myself above society in the one case and not in the other?

There are also compelling reasons for not obeying laws. Were protesters in the 1960s acting immorally by disobeying Jim Crow laws? They obviously did see some people’s value judgments as below their own. It seems odd to claim that this alone made their actions immoral. Huemer has other reasons why putting one’s own values ahead of others’ may not be immoral. One may simply have better values, or they may know more than the majority of other people in society who crafted the law, etc. Still, this seems presumptive as a general rule. For example, if you tried to use this as an excuse for violating Huemer’s earlier example of not paying for a meal you should’ve paid for it wouldn’t work out so well. You might also think a given rule or policy is unjustified but you might suffer from a false presumption of knowledge.

More fundamentally, the state’s use of coercion doesn’t result in more equality. In fact, that way of seeing others as epistemologically inferior seems worse than what Christiano criticizes.

As Huemer points out:

Christiano argues that one fails to show proper respect for the judgment of other members of one’s society when one refuses to go along with democratic laws. These laws normally come with threats to impose punishment on those who do not follow the law, backed up by credible threats of violence against those who attempt to avoid punishment.

On the face of it, the disrespect for persons and the violation of equality involved in issuing and carrying out such threats are far more palpable than the supposed disrespect shown by those who do not comply with the laws. A majority that votes for a given law is authorizing this kind of coercion. Prima facie, therefore, it is this majority that is guilty of violating the requirement to treat other persons as equals. (p. 84, emphasis added)

If Christiano wants to use democracy to legitimize political authority, he’ll need to justify the use of democracy’s inherent coercion. He never makes the case for why unwilling people should be subjected to laws they find unjust or acknowledges how such force plays into political authority. As Huemer states, “In the end, democratic authorization can account for neither the obligation to obey the law nor the right to impose the law on unwilling persons by force.” (p. 87)

1.5 The (Minimal) Power Invested in Consequentialism

An even simpler defense of government, Huemer argues, is found in consequentialism. Consequentialism is the ethical theory that claims the consequences of an action are central to determining the justness of the action. Here, the statist appears to have a case, as government (just or unjust at its base) gives us many benefits. These benefits are not only good (and sometimes necessary), they also could only be expected to be provided by government (or so the statist argues). The benefits argument typically relies on three state-provided services for its primary support, according to Huemer:

  1. Protection from criminals through agencies like the police;
  2. A centralized and precise set of social rules applied to everyone; and
  3. The military.

Huemer gives another generous concession to the benefits argument by agreeing with its premise and still concludes there’s no case for political authority. Huemer also takes on the argument that says refusing to obey the state will have a negative influence on society. Maybe chaos will reign or social morale will be damaged due to the lack of faith in the democratic process. Consider the destructive consequences of citizens disobeying laws en masse, they say.

Certainly, some laws disobeyed would lead to unrest and a breakdown in overall morale. But simply disobeying petty laws like jay-walking hardly seems capable of bringing down government. Ditto for disobeying drug laws. Other criminal laws like robbery and assault are immoral irrespective of whether they’re codified as such under the law. Failure to abide by those laws is part of a larger moral failure regardless of the laws on the books. And it’s unlikely that my selective disobedience does much beyond possibly influencing one or two others to do the same. But, you might suggest, what if everyone disobeyed? Then we’d be in trouble, right? Maybe, but it doesn’t prove that doing it individually is wrong. Let’s use an example via Huemer:

Suppose I decide to become a professional philosopher. This seems permissible. But what if everybody did this? Everyone would philosophize all day, and we would all starve. Presumably this does not show that it is morally wrong to be a professional philosopher. We will not in fact starve, because the farmers are not all going to become philosophers merely because I decide to become one. (p. 93)

On a personal note, I didn’t find the prospects of becoming a professional philosopher very good. So I think we can all breathe a little easier. Perhaps though, it’s unfair to others if I disobey the state. We’re all paying taxes, right? What makes me so special and important that I can refuse to pay taxes? Doesn’t that money go to schools, roads and other valuable services that others utilize? Huemer says this “unfairness” argument only holds up in certain cases.

Taxes may be a good case for political obligation because defense and security services might not exist in their current form without everyone paying for them via taxation. But that doesn’t establish the need for general political authority. Charity and the social safety net wouldn’t disappear with the dissolution of the state. The sense of obligation might still arise to help provide for the defense of the community even without taxation, be it through voluntary payments or even through charitable donations to those unable to defend themselves. This example, like others Huemer points out, highlights the distinction between political and moral obligations. The absence of political authority wouldn’t result in the disappearance of moral obligations. As Huemer points out, the edicts the state don’t solely determine our shared morality.

Another problem with the claim that failure to obey laws results in unfairness to those who remain obedient has to do with dissenters. Dissenters aren’t only anarchists. They may include anti-war advocates, tax resistors, social hermits and even people who simply want a different government. The number of different types of dissenters is large enough that the statist must address the topic in order to legitimize political authority.

The problem is that there are situations where reasonable disagreement arises on complex topics such as war, immigration, etc. Someone might refuse to support a given policy by refusing to help pay for it. That doesn’t mean the person seeks a free ride. In the case of the dissenter, it has nothing to do with cost, and everything to do with that person making a political statement. Forcing the dissenter to pay just because the service benefits others in the community seems equally, if not more unfair, than the non-paying dissenter.

Perhaps the coercion is justifiable if we claim that an emergency would occur without it. Maybe, as some statists (and philosophers) have claimed, we’d have chaos if people just followed their own moral compasses and ignored laws they considered unjust. Coercion might minimize the risk of full-scale chaos. Huemer points out that individual scenarios in which coercion is justified are context-dependent. Putting the onus on the state to justify the coercion in each context is hardly as burdensome as most statists claim.

Take the example of an ill person needing medical attention who will soon die without it. The ill person has no means of transportation to the hospital other than to steal his neighbor’s car. As Huemer argues, theft seems acceptable here so long as there is no other better way for the person to get to a hospital. Putting such a burden of proof on the state would restrict their coercive activity to emergency situations. As Huemer concludes:

…the state may coerce individuals only in the minimal way necessary to implement a correct (or at least well justified) plan for protecting society from the sorts of disasters that allegedly would result from anarchy. The state may not coerce people into cooperating with harmful or useless measures or measures we lack good reason to consider effective. Nor may the state extend the exercise of coercion to pursue just any goal that seems desirable. The state may take the minimal amount of money from its citizens necessary to provide the “indispensible goods” that justify its existence. (p. 100)

According to Heumer, the state is justified, at best, in such limited activities as to amount to minarchist government. Minarchism is certainly not what most current defenders of the state are aiming for. And keep in mind that the minarchism conceded by Huemer is granted only when one accepts the premise the state must provide these essential services. Both Huemer and I disagree with that premise, and I will revisit that topic in Part 2.

Finally, to the extent the state is justified in its coercion under certain “emergency” situations, will defenders of the state also permit individuals to coerce under like scenarios? If so, then what claim to supremacy does the state have in this case? I agree with Huemer that the consequentialist argument comes closest to successfully defending the state’s political authority. I also agree with Huemer that individuals ought to have the same level of authority as the state (if we’re going to have a state at all). But the version of the state that Huemer so generously grants seems like a pretty toothless one when you consider that individuals would have the moral authority to carry out the state’s functions as they see fit.

So the end result (or consequence you could say) would likely be anarchism.

1.6 What has Authority Done to Our Brains?

At this point, Huemer has concluded his investigation of what theories may or may not justify political authority. He now investigates what our belief in authority has done to us, historically. To do this, he cites historical examples like the My Lai Massacre, in which over 300 unarmed and innocent civilians were killed, purely based on the orders of higher ups.

The massacre was initially covered up and only when it went public was anyone get charged with crimes. The soldiers who participated claimed they were “only following orders,” a defense one would think would be illegitimate after Nuremberg. Even so, only one person was ever held legally accountable.  His punishment: Three years of house arrest. Meanwhile, the three people who tried to protect the innocent villagers were initially vilified and only decades later got any sort of positive recognition. By that time, one of the individuals was already dead.

The main lesson to take away from the My Lai Massacre is that the belief in authority and in-group bias can result in a dangerous lack of accountability. There were even reports that some soldiers who knew the massacre was going to happen moved away from it so as not to be involved. This is not to pretend that these soldiers had an easy decision to make. To have acted rightly, they’d have had to disobey their superiors and faced the personal consequences for doing so. The point is not to lambaste the soldiers who decided not to get involved. After all, there were plenty of good reasons for them not to do so. And that’s the point. The existence of authority with the addition of in-group bias perpetuated the murder of hundreds of innocent people, a cover-up, and misplaced hate, a gross miscarriage of justice for the murderers.

Of course events like these don’t in and of themselves don’t delegitimize political authority, let alone a case for anarchism. As Huemer says in this chapter “…is it not more likely that I and the handful of other anarchists have made a mistake than that almost everyone else in the world has?” (p. 107)

Thankfully, there are reasons to not conclude as much. I shall highlight some of the strongest ones I found in this chapter:

  1. Stockholm Syndrome;
  2. Social Proof and Status Quo Bias; and
  3. Cognitive Dissonance.

At first, saying that the majority of the populace has a case of Stockholm Syndrome goes against common sense. But the main aspects of Stockholm Syndrome seem amply fulfilled by the presence of the state in a given society:

  1. The state is a credible threat;
  2. Escape from it seems costly to the point of impracticality;
  3. It’s nigh impossible for individuals to defend themselves against the government;
  4. There is much kindness perceived on the part of the government even when it does objectively awful things;
  5. While citizens aren’t isolated from the outside world, most of their information comes from within the nation-state they live in. Those in other nation-states are in similarly situated.

So maybe Stockholm Syndrome leading to obedience of political authority isn’t all that far-fetched after all.

Huemer talks at length about social proof and status quo bias. They are similar concepts but have subtle differences. “Social proof” happens when you believe something because a lot of other people believe in it. People assume that the right thing to believe must be what most people believe. Otherwise, why would so many believe in it? Huemer gives plenty of good reasons why appealing to the most commonly held opinions isn’t necessarily a bad idea (and indeed may often be prudent), but there’s definitely still problems with uncritically adopting common positions. Especially if the main reason for doing so is because most others hold that position.

Status quo bias, while similar, is more about action than theory. Whereas social proof mostly revolves around personal belief influenced from the outside, status quo bias has more to do with what we as a society tend to do. For instance, if most people show deference to police officers, which in turn causes others to do so who might not agree with such deference, status quo bias has kicked in. This might happen because those other people will shame them, or because the police might assault them for not following their orders, etc. Whatever the reason for engaging in status quo bias, there’s always a certain amount of it present when someone gets beat up by the police for “resisting”. People ask, “Why weren’t they calmer?” and “Why did they resist?” All of which just ends up further entrenching the status quo view that people ought to show deference to authority.

Finally, cognitive dissonance is the conflict between two simultaneously held values. This conflict may make us reflect on our self-image as opposed to how we actually act, or vice versa. As an example, someone who says they care about the poor but then supports things like zoning laws, engages in cognitive dissonance. Many times, the person continues to hold both of these values, even after being shown how much harm zoning laws can do to the poor. As Huemer writes:

This psychological principle generates a bias in favor of recognizing political authority. Almost all members of modern societies have frequently submitted to the demands of their governments, even when those demands required actions that they would otherwise be strongly disinclined to perform.

For example, most have paid very large amounts of money to the state in satisfaction of its taxation demands. How do we explain to ourselves why we obey? We could explain our behavior by citing fear of punishment, habit, the drive toward social conformity, or a general emotional drive to obey whoever holds power. But none of those explanations is emotionally satisfying. Much more pleasing is the explanation that we obey because we are conscientious and caring citizens, and we thus make great sacrifices to do our duty and serve our society.

Philosophical accounts of political authority seem designed to bolster just that image. (p. 114)

There are many other case studies and reasons why someone might obey authority but those were the three I found most compelling.

1.7 …But What if There’s No State?

Well, now hold on now!

What about the state’s policies?

What about their agents?

What about individuals who are outside the state’s service?

What will happen if the state’s political authority is considered illegitimate and illusory?

Not to worry, says Huemer.

First off, even if we all recognized no authority in the state, this doesn’t necessarily mean we have to abolish it. It just means that individuals aren’t obligated to obey any of the state’s edicts simply because they are edicts. They could still obey certain state laws. But they would not be doing so because they are state laws, but instead because the laws mesh with their own moral code. They’d therefore be following their own commands, not the state’s. It may even result that the bulk of their actions still coincide with the state’s edicts.

So Huemer reveals a distinction in two kinds of anarchism — the philosophical and the political (which I agree with Huemer, is a misnomer). The former advocates a lack of obligation to the state. The latter claims not only do we have no obligation to the state, but we should also strive towards statelessness. The latter is not only a rejection of political authority, it’s also an argument to replace it with a system lacking political authority. So what implications would this have for some of the state’s larger undertakings?

I’ll mention the ones I found most important:

  • Immigration;
  • Protection of Individual Rights; and
  • Taxation and Government Finance.

Huemer’s goal in this section is to show prominent examples of unjust laws that fail to justify the use of coercion. First, immigration — the use of violence to prevent people from crossing imaginary boundaries some refer to as “borders”. Justifications for state borders are generally twofold. 1) Negative economic consequences resulting from a new immigrant population; and 2) Cultural erosion brought about by new ways of life being introduced into one’s existing society. As understandable as these concerns may be they don’t justify the use of violence by the state. Violence isn’t warranted because some residents might suffer competition from the new immigrant class. Nor is violence justified because your way of life might be influenced (for better or worse) the new immigrant class.

To be clear, you could tell the immigrant to leave your property for any reason. But no one owns the borders in a given country. Claiming that the government owns them would be asserting political authority, and as we have seen, that claim hasn’t yet been justified. Even within a voluntary community it would be difficult to justify most borders beyond those of your own personal property. To keep immigrants from crossing borders within your community, you would have to somehow show that community-owned property, or property wholly unowned, is also off limits to them. This seems analogous to asserting political authority.

It should be pointed out that there’s a difference between land no one owns and common resources. If a group of people own a particular house or a particular plot of land (think of a community or collective’s garden) then I think it could be justifiable to turn someone away if the given participants decide.

On the other hand, even in such limited contexts with personal property there are most likely side-constrains on exclusion. Consider a malnourished entrant in your community who only wants some food before he returns home. For some reason perhaps, you don’t want him on your property. That seems objectionable on a moral level but not from a property standpoint. But if they try to interact with your neighbor who is willing to nourish them and give them food, are you justified in using violence against them to stop the exchange?

As Huemer says,

If a person is starving, and you refuse to give him food, then you allow him to starve. But if you take the extra step of coercively interfering with his obtaining food from someone else, then you do not merely allow him to starve; you starve him. The same point applies to lesser harms: if, for example, Marvin merely suffers malnutrition as a result of being unable to reach the marketplace, Sam will have inflicted this harm upon him. (p. 139, emphasis in original)

I believe Huemer would argue that the harm would have to be demonstrably great or the cultural impact would have to be dire to justify the use of coercion. I agree. And just like Huemer, I think those situations are so minimal as to be almost practically irrelevant.

When it comes to “the protection of individual rights” Huemer actually suggests that if governments could justify the use of violence for something it would be this. One thing that strikes me about his argument (that I disagree with) is this:

Sam’s behavior in this last story is analogous to that of a government that pursues murderers, gives them fair and public trials, and imprisons them. There is nothing objectionable in such a practice. (p.140)

Being a prison abolitionist, I just can’t agree. Incarceration in our current prison system, for starters, is objectionable to me. Even imprisonment for those who violate the rights of others by such heinous acts as robbery, murder, or other cruel and violent means would be suffering disproportionately to the harm they caused. That’s because prisons are often places where rape, sexual assault and abuse by prison guards often happen and are hard to prosecute. Prison abuse is enabled by psychological authority, a concept Huemer illustrates using examples like the Stanford Prison Experiment. It involved 24 male students who were given the roles of either prisoner or prison guard. After only six days it was stopped because of the abuse that happened.

Now consider what that sort of power will do to someone when it’s their full-time job. Granted, the Standford Prison Experiment is hardly the best example to draw upon for Huemer. The “experiment,” if it could even be called that, was heavily biased and could hardly be reproduced without risking similar unethical results. Using a heavily-criticized social experiment as one’s basis for skepticism of authority seems dubious.

While an inadequate basis for delegitimizing political authority, the Stanford Prison Experiment is nevertheless instructive as a means of showing that people tend to identify with the roles they’re assigned. And sometimes those roles change them. Earlier, I linked an article about abusive Attica Prison Guards. One of those prison guard’s ex-wives remarked at the end of the article: “He was a very calm, laid back, easy going, fun person to be around. There is right and wrong, and I think he forgot that.” It’s easy to forget what’s right and wrong when you’re drunk on power. And that’s one of the many things that prison system can easily facilitate.

But even if all of that weren’t true the idea that somehow imprisoning people in cages is going to teach them what is wrong seems wrong itself. Punishment, as a concept, seems to put unwarranted faith in the idea that causing more harm to criminals will force them to stop their criminal behavior. This rarely seems to work. Often, there is even public outcry for the death penalty. The blood lust among the public for criminals who commit particularly brutal acts never ceases. Their quest for “justice” doesn’t end with the person being locked away, it continues on until the person is buried in the ground. So even if we had a much smaller prison system that only included violent offenders I would still have issues with it.

As an institution, prison thrives on criminals being defined as the “other”. They are something that doesn’t need to be treated, rehabilitated or even seen as human. Instead, they are “monsters,” things to be crushed, confined and killed if necessary. And there is no regard for the fact that they’re exposed to extreme violence from their fellow inmates. Additionally, prisons are often a breeding ground for better criminals, as opposed to reformed criminals. Why should we presume this would change just because it’s much smaller prison population?

With all of that said, let’s move on to taxation. How do we justify the coercive extraction of people’s incomes? Some theorists have claimed that property, as a social construct, is impossible to separate from the state and its protection of the same. So whatever the state says you owe them is what you owe. We could counter this claim by thinking that property is natural (and hence prima facie wrong to violate), partly natural, or not natural at all. I won’t go over all of the views here but I most sympathize with options two and three.

But regardless of which position you take, political authority must still be accounted for. It seems implausible to argue that taxation is moral if we have no philosophical obligation (at the very least) to follow the state’s edicts and it has no moral authority to issue those edicts.

Huemer offers a “fee-based” model for an alternative to state taxation. Being an anarchist, I’m not really interested in minarchist proposals and Huemer is mostly postulating this as a way to imagine a different sort of state. That said, if Huemer’s fee-based state allowed “customers” who didn’t pay state taxes to create their own private or community-based services, then it wouldn’t be much of a state at all. That’s partly because the state is an organization that claims a monopoly on certain “essential” services. If it’s not imposing taxation or hindering private competition then it’s not, by definition, a monopoly.

The implications for government agents are fairly simple. Either refuse to implement unjust policies (like arresting people for possession and use of drugs) or resign if that’s not tenable.

There would still be laws and customs adhered to in the “free society.” As we’ve discussed, moral laws would still be abided by. Why? Because people hold themselves to moral laws every day without needing to be reminded that there are political laws. There’s also no reason to think we’d have a world without consequences for unjust actions absent a state justice system. Personal rights, property rights, and community customs would still prevail. Only the nature of the legal system enforcing those rights and customs would look different.

Conclusion

Michael Huemer is perhaps one of the best thinkers I’ve seen from the anarcho-capitalist school of thought. His arguments are logically sound, his foundations are easy to grasp, his language is clear and concise and he is charitable to his opponents.

In certain parts of the book he not only charitably reconstructs his opponent’s argument to prove why it’s unfounded, he even gives some problems he thinks are actually more likely with his own position. I thought this was a brilliant move on Huemer’s part. It gives the sense that he’s very confident in his position but not dogmatic about it. He’s aware that there are problems and that he’s considered them, a very rare thing for someone to openly acknowledge, let alone acknowledge at all.

As you may have noticed I have very little to offer in way of criticism for the first part of this book. Huemer’s arguments against political authority are intuitive, powerful and simple in their deconstruction. His responses to everything from the social contract theory, consequentialism, to prominent academics who have tried (in vain) to justify the state’s authority are devastating.

The book is not without its flaws, though. Apparently the publisher had an explicit page limit for Huemer and this shows much more in the second section than the first. But even in this first section it’s obvious that there are a few bits that could’ve used more attention. Things about prison, more theories that justify political authority, more grappling with the prominent political theorists mentioned, etc. I think all of these things would’ve furthered Huemer’s case.

As Bryan Caplan says,

My main complaint about The Problem of Political Authority is that it’s not long enough. Indeed, the book should have three parts, not two. Part I powerfully critiques the morality of state authority. Part II counters the consequentialist defense of the existence of the state by arguing that the expected consequences of anarcho-capitalism are, at minimum, tolerable. This is to say the least an abrupt transition.

Though, as I mentioned before, Huemer literally couldn’t do this if he wanted to. We can only hope (as Caplan does) for a second edition that adds a few more chapters expanding on some of his points.

That said there just isn’t a lot to criticize here. I will fully disclose that I was already sympathetic to Huemer because of our shared interest in ethical intuitionism. And although I don’t agree with anarcho-capitalism, Part I isn’t about anarcho-capitalism. I could see just about any sort of anarchist making the claims that Huemer makes against political authority. Which is part of their appeal, naturally.

The near universal praise by almost anyone who took the time to read the book also speaks to its impressive quality. Even the Bleeding Heart Libertarian symposium on Huemer’s book, the sole intent of which was offering criticism, roundly acknowledged that the book was thoughtful, well written, clear and persuasive.

If you’re disappointed that you came all this way (and seriously, thank you if you did!) without any serious criticism for Huemer, don’t worry, that’ll be in the next part. That’s because the next part deals with Huemer’s case for an anarcho-capitalist society. It’s the best argument I’ve seen for anarcho-capitalism, but it’s still wrong in the end.

For now though, even if you’re not an anarcho-capitalist I highly recommend part one to you.

Even if you’re not an anarchist at all I’d recommend it to you.

It’s one of the clearest and more forceful arguments against political authority I’ve ever read.

Feed 44
The Problem With Electoral Politics on Feed 44

C4SS Feed 44 presents James C. Wilson‘s “The Problem With Electoral Politics” read by Joey Clark and edited by Nick Ford.

Those with great wealth inevitably find ways to use it to secure more political favors for themselves at the expense of the rest of us. The system inevitably becomes increasingly rigged in their favor. To restrict their ability to use their wealth to influence elections is undeniably a violation of personal freedom, but so are the numerous subsidies, liability limits, licensing requirements, IP monopolies, military contracts, and competition stifling regulations that elites tend to support. As long as there is a state capable of imposing its will upon the rest of us, there will always be self-serving elites using it for their own gain. While electoral democracy may be more accountable than single party rule or monarchy, it still puts coercive power in the hands of politicians who are far removed from the people they supposedly represent.

Campaign finance reform is at best a band-aid measure with its own problems. Political Candidates are a part of the state, and limiting the transactions they can make in their official capacity as candidates is arguably little different than limiting the ability cops or judges to take bribes. That however does not prevent those with great wealth from finding unofficial means of influencing elections such as by influencing major media outlets. Preventing this would require major restrictions of freedom.

Feed 44:

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Feature Articles
Clinton’s College Plan: Reinventing a Very Old Wheel

In the farcical, technocratic future society of Vonnegut’s Player Piano, you have to have at least a bachelor’s degree to do even the most menial service jobs — of which there aren’t a lot left. The great majority of jobs have been automated out of existence, and the ranks of the still employed are dominated by high-IQ, doctorate-wielding managers and engineers who run the society. The unemployable, degreeless majority either go into the armed forces, tens of millions strong, which police America’s post-WWIII global empire, or join a massive public works project called the Reconstruction and Reclamation Corps (“Reeks and Wrecks”). My favorite character in the book is an elderly farm caretaker, who mocks the meritocracy’s reverence for credentials: “I have a PhD in shit. I did my postgrad work in cow shit, pig shit and chicken shit.” Hillary Clinton’s higher education policy proposals are the perfect next step on the century-long road to building such a society in real life.

Her $350 billion plan, which aims to make college affordable, would give grants in aid to states that guarantee “no-loan” tuition at public universities and community colleges.

The problem is that federal higher education policy, and the higher education system itself, have since the beginning been mainly about subsidizing the reproduction of the scientific-technical labor that big business needs. As recounted by David Noble in America By Design, this symbiotic relationship between higher education and state goes back to the state land grant colleges and was dramatically escalated by many orders of magnitude under the post-WWII G.I. Bill. The intensifying relationship between the federal government, higher education and corporate employers, (and the accompanying increase in federal aid to education) is a leading example of the phenomenon James O’Connor described in Fiscal Crisis of the State as the profitability of capitalism depending on the ability of capitalists to externalize a growing share of their input and operating costs on society at large.

And from the beginning, there’s been a dynamic at play in this complex of interlocking institutions where federal money has meant both drastic inflation in the credentials required for various kinds of employment (often largely unrelated to the actual requirements of the jobs themselves), and even more drastic inflation in the overhead costs, relative size and salaries of administration, and waste on new buildings.

The ratio of administrators to students and faculty, and the pay of senior administrators, have increased several hundred percent in real terms in the past few decades. And the growth in college tuition has been comparable to that in healthcare costs. Meanwhile, these million-dollar-salaried presidents, chancellors and deans have shifted about three-quarters of their teaching positions to adjunct faculty with sub-living wages, no benefits and no security.

And at an institutional level, the Human Resources-Education complex has created a society in which college education is mandatory for a growing share of livelihoods — one of many entry barriers the corporate state erects. These barriers enable a class of gatekeeping institutions to collect tribute from us in return for allowing us to transform our skills and effort into comfortable subsistence, and making it impossible for self-directed, cooperative labor to work without bosses.

This is all especially true of contemporary Democrats, who represent the wing of organized capital that sees its hope for the future in what’s variously called “progressive” or “cognitive” or “green capitalism.” All these models envision technological progress — heavily subsidized by the state and enclosed by big business through intellectual “property” law — as the main source of profit.

Clinton proposes tying some of the aid to state polices to lower university costs, but we can imagine how that will pan out. At least Bernie Sanders’s plan, for all its likelihood of getting passed, has some teeth; it would flat out prohibit federal grant money from going toward administrative salaries or non-academic buildings.

What we need to do is attack the root cause of high college costs (that is, creeping managerialism and corporate accounting methods that treat high overhead as a book asset), and break the unholy alliance between human resources departments and universities.

Although big business needs to enclose the new technologies of abundance as a source of profit for themselves if they are to survive, the technologies themselves render them obsolete.

Both human resource departments and the traditional credentialing routes by which human raw material is channeled to corporate employers are becoming irrelevant. Affordable technologies of small-scale production, at the neighborhood shop level, are rendering giant corporations technically obsolete for most forms of production. They depend on artificial scarcities and artificial property rights, like intellectual “property,” to retain their control over production in which they serve no useful function. When most production is carried out in cooperative garage shops or P2P networks, credentialing will be an ad hoc matter to be worked out between the shops and prospective members dealing with each other as equals. Insofar as brick-and-mortar universities continue to serve a function, as opposed to modular, stackable, open-source credentialing, why not eliminate all the high-salaried managers and go back to the medieval model of self-governing universities run by their faculties and/or students — stakeholder cooperatives, to use a contemporary phrase?

The state, by its very nature, is the political means to wealth. It exists to enable the economically privileged classes to extract surplus labor from the rest of us. So long as the state is the instrument by which corporate capitalists run the economy in their own interest, any apparent benefit to students will be a side-effect of the higher education system’s real purpose.

Feature Articles, Symposium on Mutualist Political Economy
Land-Locked: A Critique of Carson on Property Rights

In 1888, France’s leading libertarian periodical, Gustave de Molinari’s Journal des Économistes (stronghold of Lockean property theory and proto-Austrian economics) published a largely favourable and appreciative (if somewhat condescending) review of the United States’s leading libertarian periodical, Benjamin Tucker’s Liberty (stronghold of Mutualist property theory and Proudhonian economics). [1] Tucker’s journal returned the favor in 1904 by publishing a largely favorable and appreciative (if somewhat condescending) review of one of Molinari’s books (Randall 1904). Since those days, dialogue between the so-called “capitalist” and so-called “socialist” branches of free-market libertarianism has declined. [2] the publication of Kevin Carson’s Studies in Mutualist Political Economy provides a welcome opportunity to renew the conversation.

The economic and historical aspects of Carson’s case I have left to be addressed by other contributors with greater expertise in the relevant fields; as a philosopher, I shall confine my attention to a philosophical point about property rights. Carson distinguishes “three main rival theories of justice in holdings among free market libertarians — the Lockean, the Georgist, and the mutualist.” These three theories “agree that the only legitimate way of appropriating un-owned land is homesteading by direct, personal occupation and alteration,” but they “differ considerably on their rules for transfer and abandonment.” This difference arises from the fact that, unlike Lockeans, for whom “admixture of labor permanently removes land” from the commons, Georgists and Mutualists “agree in seeing the land … as a common patrimony which cannot be permanently alienated from the commons in fee simple,” and so regard “the individual’s possessory or usufructory right” as a “stewardship on behalf of the general human community” (Carson 2004, pp. 198–99). Where Georgists and Mutualists do part company is on the nature and strictness of the requirements imposed by the general human community’s residual rights; for the Georgists, the community properly plays an “active role in exercising its ultimate property rights over the commons” (as manifested, e.g., in Henry George’s famous “Single Tax” on land values), whereas the Mutualists, in the tradition of Tucker,

tend to see unoccupied land simply as an un-owned commons over which mankind’s ultimate ownership rights are latent, and which the individual is free to use as he sees fit without accounting to any proxy for collective rights; but the latent common right of the rest of mankind prohibits the individual from claiming more land than he can personally use at the expense of the common interest, and requires that his possessory title revert to the commons when he ceases to occupy and use the land. (p. 199)

Hence absentee landlordism, for example, is prohibited by the Mutualist theory.

Which of these three approaches to property in land should libertarians favor, and on what grounds? In Carson’s view, while “the labor theory of appropriation” (not to be confused with the labor theory of value) common to all three theories is “plausibly deducible from self-ownership,” where the theories differ none of their “alternative sets of rules for property allocation” can be “deduced logically from the principle of self-ownership alone” (pp. 200 01), and in particular “no system of transfer and abandonment rules can be logically derived even from an agreed labor standard of appropriation” (p. 214). Hence the choice among the three theories, Carson concludes, can be made only on “prudential or consequentialist grounds”; and here, he argues, the advantage lies with Mutualism.

Carson’s case for the pragmatic advantages of Mutualism over its Georgist and Lockean rivals depends largely on economic and historical arguments whose assessment, as mentioned above, I have left for the other contributors to this volume. For present purposes, I wish to challenge Carson’s claim that libertarian principles of self-ownership and original appropriation by themselves, apart from consequentialist considerations, give us no reason to favor one theory of landed property over the others. Instead, I shall argue that only the Lockean approach is defensible from a libertarian standpoint.

As Carson rightly points out, both Georgists and Mutualists agree in seeing original appropriation as limited by land’s status as the common patrimony of the human race. Actually, this would seem to be likewise true of any Lockeans traditional enough to accept (some version of) Locke’s Proviso that original appropriation must leave “enough and as good” (Locke, Second Treatise of Government, Book V.) available to others (e.g., Nozick 1974; Schmidtz 1991) — though it is not true of those more thoroughgoing Lockeans who reject this Proviso (e.g., Rothbard 1998; Hoppe 1993). Hence it is this notion of a common patrimony that distinguishes Mutualists, Georgists, and Proviso Lockeans on the one hand from No-Proviso Lockeans on the other.

But can those theories that accept this “common patrimony” thesis do so consistently? I don’t see how. According to what Carson calls the “labor theory of appropriation,” which he grants is accepted in some form by all the competing theories under discussion, no one can be the first owner of a good except by homesteading the good through personal labor. Now the entire human race has not collectively homesteaded all the land on earth, so the entire human race cannot be the first owner of such land; hence the human race’s residual property rights, if any, in the soil cannot be original; if such rights there be, they must be derived from an earlier owner — as the term “patrimony” anyway suggests.

Now Locke solved this problem handily enough by making the earth a gift in common to the human race from God, creator and first owner of the soil; but most libertarians nowadays are reluctant to ground their rights theories in controversial theology, and certainly

Carson has shown no tendency to do so. But in the absence of a theological appeal it’s hard to see from whom the human race could have received this “patrimony”; yet the human race cannot be the original owner of the soil either, since by the labor theory of appropriation original ownership involves homesteading, and thus the labor theory does not allow for original ownership of as yet unhomesteaded land. It follows that, again barring aid from theology, the labor theory of appropriation rules out the possibility of land’s being a common patrimony of the human race, and in so doing, thereby rules out Mutualism, Georgism, and Proviso Lockeanism, leaving only No-Proviso Lockeanism standing.

Whether or not this shows that a “system of transfer and abandonment rules can be logically derived … from an agreed labor standard of appropriation,” it at least undermines Carson’s assumption that the homesteading principle gives no greater support to Lockean rules of transfer and abandonment than to Mutualist ones. If, as Carson affirms, Mutualism’s disagreement with Lockeanism involves regarding land as a common patrimony, then the homesteading principle most emphatically finds against Mutualism and in favor of Lockeanism, specifically No-Proviso Lockeanism. If it is through homesteading that property rights arise, then un-homesteaded land ipso facto cannot come with property strings already attached.

Here Carson might reply that he interprets the homesteading principle to provide only an origin for property rights, not the sole origin. On this reading, it is through homesteading that land passes from its original state (a state of common ownership, for the Georgists, Mutualists, and Proviso Lockeans; a state of non-ownership, for the No-Proviso Lockeans) to private ownership (full private ownership for the Lockeans, constrained private ownership, or stewardship, for the other groups), but land’s original status as a common patrimony of the human race (as asserted, explicitly or implicitly, by all these groups except the No-Proviso Lockeans) is grounded on some other basis, perhaps consequentialist.

While this is certainly a possible position to take, I shall argue that it is inconsistent with self-ownership. Thus I take issue with Carson’s claim that the “principle of self-ownership alone” is insufficient to decide among these rival theories of landed property.

It is easy to think of the right of self-ownership as, at least potentially, just one right among others, as though we might have self-ownership rights and some other rights in addition. But this would be a mistake. The right of self-ownership, as I understand it, is the right to use and dispose of oneself as one pleases, without coercive interference, so long as one refrains from coercive interference with the like self-ownership of others. It follows that the use of force is never justified except in response to an invasion of someone’s self-ownership. But since rights are, by definition, legitimately enforceable claims, it further follows that there can be no rights in addition to self-ownership. For if there were such additional rights, and then there would be claims other than self-ownership that could be legitimately enforced, which would mean that refraining from invading the self-ownership of others would no longer be sufficient to exempt one from liability to coercive interference. But self-ownership, as defined above, just is exemption from liability to coercive interference so long as one respects the like self-ownership of others; hence the right of self-ownership is inconsistent with the recognition of any additional rights. (To put it another way, if the initiation of force is forbidden, then any legitimate use of force must be a response to force; but enforcing a right is by definition a legitimate use of force; so there can be no rights other than the right to be free from others’ use of force.)

It follows that whatever property rights there are cannot be rights in addition to self-ownership, but must instead be specific applications of the self-ownership right itself. Now the homesteading principle, as Carson seems willing to admit, can be justified as an application of self-ownership. The essence of human personality is not the mass of material which composes our bodies — a bundle of stuff that in any case changes over time like Heracleitus’ river, through accretion of new particles and discharge of old ones — but our activities and projects; indeed a human being’s body itself is simply one of its owner’s ongoing projects. By transforming external objects so as to incorporate them into my ongoing projects, I make them an extension of myself, in a manner analogous to the way that food becomes part of my body through digestion. What we transform in this way becomes so related to us that no one can subject it to her purposes without thereby subjecting us to her purposes and so violating our right of self-ownership; we make something into our property by causing it to have the same relation to ourselves that the matter composing our bodies has to ourselves. [3] As nineteenth-century economists Louis Wolowski and Émile Levasseur (1888) eloquently put it:

This property is legitimate; it constitutes a right as sacred for man as is the free exercise of his faculties. It is his because it has come entirely from himself, and is in no way anything but an emanation from his being. Before him, there was scarcely anything but matter; since him, and by him, there is interchangeable wealth, that is to say, articles having acquired a value by some industry, by manufacture, by handling, by extraction, or simply by transportation. From the picture of a great master … to the pail of water which the carrier draws from the river and takes to the consumer, wealth, whatever it may be, acquires its value only by communicated qualities, and these qualities are part of human activity, intelligence, strength. The producer has left a fragment of his own person in the thing which has thus become valuable, and may hence be regarded as a prolongation of the faculties of man acting upon external nature. As a free being he belongs to himself; now, the cause, that is to say, the productive force, is himself; the effect, that is to say, the wealth produced, is still himself. Who shall dare contest his title of ownership so clearly marked by the seal of his personality?

This is the derivation of homesteading from self-ownership.

But there would seem to be no prospect of an analogous derivation of the human race’s “common patrimony” in as yet un-homesteaded land. [4] How can the human race plausibly claim as part of itself, or an extension of itself, land that no human hand has yet transformed? How does this land become part of the human race’s “common patrimony”? As Rothbard rightly wonders:

It is difficult to see why a new born Pakistani baby should have a moral claim to a quotal share of ownership of a piece of Iowa land that someone has just transformed into a wheatfield — and vice versa of course for an Iowan baby and a Pakistani farm. Land in its original state is unused and un-owned. Georgists and other land communalists may claim that the whole world population really “owns” it, but if no one has yet used it, it is in the real sense owned and controlled by no one. The pioneer, the homesteader, the first user and transformer of this land, is the man who first brings this simple valueless thing into production and social use. It is difficult to see the morality of depriving him of ownership in favor of people who have never gotten within a thousand miles of the land, and who may not even know of the existence of the property over which they are supposed to have a claim. (Rothbard 1994, p. 35)

Developing Rothbard’s objection further, we may ask: just how far does this supposed common patrimony extend? To the center of the earth? The backside of the moon? The distant stars? If there turn out to be intelligent extraterrestrials, then does the entire physical mass of the universe become the common patrimony of all intelligent life, so that an alien civilization in the Andromeda galaxy can claim, just by existing, a residual property share in the cornfields of Iowa, and we likewise can claim, just by existing, a residual property share in the vapor mines of Antares (or whatever)? If we can have a right only to what can plausibly be claimed to be an extension of ourselves, then all such appeals to a “common patrimony” are shown to be baseless. This vitiates the case for Mutualism, Georgism, and Proviso Lockeanism, once again leaving only No-Proviso Lockeanism standing.

Let me close, however, with an eirenic suggestion. While, contra Carson, a public cannot acquire property rights just by existing, it is possible — as I and others have argued elsewhere — for a public to acquire property rights via homesteading:

Consider a village near a lake. It is common for the villagers to walk down to the lake to go fishing. In the early days of the community it’s hard to get to the lake because of all the bushes and fallen branches in the way. But over time the way is cleared, and a path forms not through any centrally coordinated efforts, but simply as a result of all the individuals walking by that way day after day. The cleared path is the product of labor — not any individual’s labor, but of all of them together. If one villager decided to take advantage of the now-created path by setting up a gate and charging tolls, he would be violating the collective property right that the villagers together have earned. [5]

Once a public has in such manner gained title to some piece of land, it becomes their common patrimony, and that public’s preferences then become decisive as to the conditions under which it can then pass into private hands, [6] and likewise decisive as to what residual limitations, if any, will then apply (i.e., as restrictive covenants). Such a public could with perfect legitimacy decide on Mutualist, Georgist, or Lockean rules of transfer.

As Carson notes, it is important that different property-rights régimes in a libertarian society be able to coexist peacefully. Carson writes:

Any decentralized, post-state society, following the collapse of central power, is likely to be a panarchy characterized by a wide variety of local property systems. For them to coexist peacefully, all three property systems must reflect the understanding of their most enlightened proponents. Those favoring each of the property systems must be willing to admit that it is not self-evidently true, or at least be willing to acquiesce to the system favored by majority consensus in each particular area. (Carson, p. 216)

As we have seen, only No-Proviso Lockeanism is defensible on libertarian grounds; however, a version of No-Proviso Lockeanism that allows for the possibility of a community’s acquiring title to land, not by merely existing but by collectively homesteading the land (or for that matter by receiving it as a gift from some philanthropist), provides a basis for No-Proviso Lockeans to recognize as legitimate the property arrangements of Mutualist, Georgist, and Proviso-Lockean communities, and so to “acquiesce to the system favored by majority consensus in each particular area” — so long as that means a majority consensus of the owners [7] — without any compromise of, or loss of confidencein, their own No-Proviso Lockean principles. [8]

<< Back to Studies in Carsonian Mutualism.

Notes:
1. Raffalovich 1888; cf. Tucker 1888. Molinari edited the Journal des Économistes from 1881 to 1909.

2. Though Murray Rothbard certainly drew explicitly on writers in the “socialist” branch (e.g., Benjamin Tucker, Lysander Spooner, Stephen Pearl Andrews, Clara Dixon Davidson) in crafting his own development of the “capitalist” branch.

3. It’s not that we come to own our projects, whatever that would mean, but rather that we come to own physical things in virtue of incorporating them into our projects.

4. Herbert Spencer (1851, chap. 9) in effect attempted such a derivation, maintaining that if there were no such common patrimony, the entire surface of the earth could in principle pass into absolute private ownership, in which case those who owned no land could have no right to exist anywhere, and so no right to exist at all — which would seem to be incompatible with self-ownership; hence Spencer endorsed a quasi-Georgist position with regard to land. But as I have argued elsewhere (Long 1996a):

Even when A has a right to recover some property in B’s possession, there are limits to the harm A can inflict in exercising this right. If you swallow my diamond ring, I do not have the right to cut you open to get it out, possibly killing you or causing serious injury. If you are trespassing on my property, I do not have the right to shove you off my front lawn and onto the street at the precise moment that a truck is coming that would flatten you.

Hence Spencer is mistaken in thinking that under private ownership his hypothetical “lords of the soil” could legitimately deny non-owners a right to exist; and with the disappearance of the problem, the necessity of common patrimony as a solution disappears also.

5. Long 1996b; cf. Long 1998; Schmidtz 1994; Hobbs 2003; Holcombe 2005. It matters, on my view, that the villagers’ use actually alters the land. If they simply used the land regularly without altering it, that would earn them an easement (since interference with ongoing use counts as aggression, even if the use is not literally continuous), but not a property right.

6. For discussion of mechanisms whereby public land might become private see Long 1998; Hobbs 2003; and Holcombe 2005.

7. My point is that if a given piece of land is commonly owned by group X, then the process by which that piece of land can later be privatized may depend on the majority consensus within group X. The consensus of a broader community will not be relevant (except insofar as the owners deem it relevant).

8. This paper has benefited from comments by Robert Murphy and George Reisman.

References:

Carson, Kevin A. 2004. Studies in Mutualist Political Economy. Fayetteville, Ark. http://mutualist.org/id47.html, accessed June 8, 2005.
Hobbs, Carlton. 2003. “Common Property in Free Market Anarchism: A Missing Link.” http://www.anti-state.com/article.php?article_id=362, accessed June 8, 2005.
Holcombe, Randall G. 2005. “Common Property in Anarcho-Capitalism.” Journal of Libertarian Studies 19 (2): 3–29.
Hoppe, Hans-Hermann. 1993. The Economics and Ethics of Private Property: Studies in Political Economy and Philosophy. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Long, Roderick T. 1998. “A Plea for Public Property.” Formulations 5 (3); also http://libertariannation.org/a/f53l1.html [three-ell-one], accessed June 8, 2005.
———. 1996a. “Beyond the Boss: Protection from Business in a Free Nation.” Formulations 4 (1); also http://libertariannation.org/a/f41l2.html [oneell-two], accessed June 8, 2005.
———. 1996b. “In Defense of Public Space.” Formulations (3); also http://libertariannation.org/a/f33l2.html [three-ell-two], accessed June 8, 2005.
Nozick, Robert. 1974. Anarchy, State, and Utopia. New York: Basic Books.
Raffalovich, Sophie. 1888. “Les Anarchistes de Boston.” Journal des Économistes 41, 4th series (15 March): 375–88.
Randall, S.H. [writing as “S.R.”] 1904. “An Economist on the Future Society.” Liberty 14, no. 23 (whole no. 385—September): 2, also http://praxeology.net/SR-GM-SF.htm, accessed June 8, 2005.
Rothbard, Murray N. 1998. The Ethics of Liberty. New York: New York University Press. Also http://www.mises.org/rothbard/ethics/ethics.asp, accessed June 8, 2005.
———. 1994. For A New Liberty: The Libertaran Manifesto. Rev. ed. San Francisco: Fox and Wilkes. Also http://www.mises.org/rothbard/newliberty.asp,accessed June 8, 2005.
Schmidtz, David. 1994. “The Institution of Property.” Social Philosophy and Policy 11:42–62.
———. 1991. The Limits of Government: An Essay on the Public Goods Argument. Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press.
Spencer, Herbert. 1851. Social Statics: or, The Conditions Essential to Human Happiness Specified, and the First of Them Developed. London: John Chapman. Also http://oll.libertyfund.org/ToC/0331.php, accessed June 8, 2005.
Tucker, Benjamin R. 1888. “A French View of Boston Anarchists.” Liberty 6 (4) (whole no. 134—September 29): 4.
Wolowski, Louis-François-Michel-Raymond, and Pierre Émile Levasseur. 1888. “Property.” John J. Lalor, ed. Cyclopædia of Political Science, Political Economy, and of the Political History of the United States; By the Best American and European Writers (New York: Charles E. Merrill, 1888), vol. 3, pp. 391–95; also http://praxeology.net/LW-EL-PLV.htm, accessed June 8, 2005.

Commentary
Australian Government Should Get Out of the Marriage Business

Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott recently cracked down on cabinet and parliamentary members within his own Liberal Party over their disunity on the same-sex marriage issue. The crackdown came after Australia’s Coalition blocked a conscience vote on same-sex marriage. Nearly half of Abbott’s frontbench were in favor of the conscience vote, placing them in direct opposition to Abbott’s own homophobic, anti-liberty position. Abbott has been vocal in his support of “traditional” marriage — that is, only those marriages which conform to his strict Roman Catholic ideology.

As of August 17th, Abbott has tasked the Coalition Government with forming a unified position on same-sex marriage within a fortnight. Sadly, it’s unlikely that the result will be the Australian government simply exiting the marriage business altogether. But there might be some silver lining. Abbott’s antiquated and bigoted stance may well lead to a Liberal Party loss in the upcoming September 19th election, thus ending his career as Prime Minister. Whether it’s Abbott or a new Prime Minister, though, one can count on ever more dictates and conditions coming out of Canberra regarding how Australian citizens may conduct their personal lives. That is a sad state of affairs, but an inevitability when living under the iron fist of government.

Abbott touts his “instinctive respect for institutions and approaches that have stood the test of time” including “traditional marriage”. In contrast, advocates of true freedom abhor institutions that prevent individuals from living as they so choose. Those who value liberty refuse to accept social engineering from the state, no matter how old or supposedly time-tested. This is especially true of institutions like the state-run marriage racket, under which preferred relationships are bestowed special perks, and marginalized relationships are used as campaign fodder for Bible-thumping politicians.

In a free society, marriage is between those getting married and the institution performing said marriage, be it a church, synagogue or secular entity. Marriage can and should be defined however those performing it like, and definitions as well as the institutions themselves will continuously change and evolve over time. This social evolution is a healthy process. Only stuck-in-the-mud conservatives like Abbott would reject it.

If heterosexual marriage is such a strong, time-tested institution, subject it to a competitive marketplace and let it continue to thrive. If you’re among the dying breed who seeks to restrict marriage to only the “traditional” variety, feel free to get one yourself, but don’t prohibit others from following their desires.

In a free society one can marry whomever he or she wants, not to mention however many people he or she wants, with the government having nothing to say on the issue (or any other issue, for that matter). Unfortunately, governments rarely give up the powers they have accumulated. The Australian marriage issue is likely to be no exception. Hopefully, however, the recent turmoil over Australia’s same-sex marriage ban will lead to it being lifted. This would at least end the arbitrary discrimination that same sex couples are subjected to. But it’d only be a small step forward on the long road to personal freedom.

Feed 44
Even Cops Should Have the Right to Make an Honest Living on Feed 44

C4SS Feed 44 presents T.J. Scholl‘s “Even Cops Should Have the Right to Make an Honest Living” read by Thomas J. Webb and edited by Nick Ford.

Radical feminists and other social critics often point out that the pressures of capitalist androcentrism blur the line between free choice and force, resulting in marginalized women being coerced into the sex industry against their will. This is a salient critique, especially in an era when queer homelessness, transantagonism, and misogynistic bigotry are ever-present and oft unrecognized problems. These issues are only exacerbated by the criminalization of sex work. By imprisoning already marginalized women, the state is adding weight to the already heavy burden of patriarchy. Not only must sex workers, especially women of color, contend with the oppressive forces of racism and misogyny, they must also fight to survive under a state that seeks to label them criminals for having the nerve to attempt to scrape together a simple living. This is doubly true for undocumented sex workers.

Feed 44:

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Stigmergy - C4SS Blog
The Practicability of Mutualism
C4SS-Chartier-Meme-DLL41

Mutualism is a social system based on reciprocal and non-invasive relations among free individuals. The Mutualist standards are:

Individual: Equal freedom for each — without invasion of others.
Economic: Untrammeled reciprocity, implying freedom of exchange and contract — without monopoly or privilege.
Social: Complete freedom of voluntary association — without coercive organization…

The libertarian ideal is the only concept that paves the way for the operation of Mutualism. Perfect Mutualism could not exist under any form of authority. It would be thwarted and emasculated at every turn. Just as today every social and economic evil that serves to enslave humanity is the result of some form of governmental interference with freedom and with natural processes, so would the same or similar forces tend to nullify and counteract, to all extent, the advantages to be derived from the application of the principles of Mutualism. It is a plant that requires the fertile soil of liberty in which to make its unimpeded growth…

Clarence Lee Swartz, The Practicability of Mutualism

Feature Articles, Symposium on Mutualist Political Economy
Freedom is Slavery?

Freedom is Slavery: Laissez-Faire Capitalism is Government Intervention: A Critique of Kevin Carson’s Studies in Mutualist Political Economy
By George Reisman
[1]

Kevin Carson’s new book Studies in Mutualist Political Economy centers on the incredible claim, self-contradictory on its face, that capitalism, including laissez-faire capitalism, is a system based on state intervention, in violation of the free market: “It is state intervention that distinguishes capitalism from the free market,” declares the book’s preface.” Capitalism, writes Carson, is “a system of privilege in which the State enable[s] the owners of capital to draw monopoly returns on it, in the same sense that the feudal ruling class was able to draw monopoly returns on land; or, as the left-Rothbardian Samuel Konkin put it, ‘Capitalism is state rule by and for those who own large amounts of capital’” (p. 92). Perhaps not surprisingly, in view of his description of capitalism, Carson hopes his book will provide a foundation for “free market socialist economics” (p. 10).

Exposition and Critique of Carson’s Framework

For the most part Carson is a Marxist; But not entirely. He adds to Marxism a large dose of what he calls “individualist anarchism” and, beyond that, a significant dose of apparent syndicalism.

Carson is a Marxist insofar as he upholds both an essentially absolutist labor theory of value and the Marxian exploitation theory, which follows from such a version of the labor theory of value. [2] According to the exploitation theory, all exchange value and thus all income is produced by labor and therefore properly belongs to wage earners. Under capitalism, however, a more or less considerable part of the income that properly should go to workers as wages is instead unjustly appropriated as profit, interest, and land rent, i.e., as one or another of the various forms of “surplus value.”

Marx held that exploitation is inherent in the nature of commodity production, because the determination of the value of commodities by the quantity of labor expended in their production is a universal law, applicable to labor itself, no less than to its products (hence the expression/complaint that under capitalism, “labor is a commodity”). According to Marx, the labor expended in the production of labor itself, is the labor expended in the production of the wage earners minimum necessities. It is this quantity of labor, the so called necessary labor time that allegedly determines the value of labor. [3]

Thus, for example, if 6 hours of labor are required to produce the necessities that enable a worker to work for 12 hours, all that the capitalist pays for the 12 hours of labor is a wage corresponding to those 6 hours. The capitalist is thereby enabled to obtain the benefit of the employment of 12 hours of labor, and thus the addition of 12 hours of labor value to the value of his materials and machinery consumed in the production process, for a wage corresponding only to the 6 hours. The 6 hours the worker works over and above the necessary labor time, Marx calls “surplus labor time.” It is the alleged basis of all surplus value. As illustration, if $1 of product value corresponds to each hour of labor expended in production, the worker’s 12 hour day adds $12 of value, while the capitalist pays him a wage of only $6, and thereby gains $6 of profit or surplus value. [4]

Carson accepts this analysis, but with one alleged significant difference. Namely, he claims that in what he conceives of as a free market, namely, a market without alleged state intervention on behalf of capitalists, the value of labor would not be determined by the so called necessary labor time, as Marx claimed, but by the full value that the worker’s labor adds to the value of the materials and machinery used up in the production. In other words, the worker’s wage would correspond to the 12 hours of labor he worked, and not merely to the 6 hours required to produce his minimum necessities. It would be $12 and not $6. It is this that Carson describes as “individualist anarchism’s central insight” (p. 10). In Carson’s own words that insight is “that labor’s natural wage in a free market is its product, and that coercion is the only means of exploitation. It is state intervention that distinguishes capitalism from the free market.”

Carson does not realize it, but he has fallen into a veritable abyss of error. Not only is the entire Marxian analysis as utterly wrong as an economic theory can be, [5] but in his efforts to modify it, he adds to it still more major errors.

Carson describes numerous forms of state intervention in the course of his book, many of them actual, such as wars of conquest, taxation, tariffs, subsidies, conservation laws, and licensing legislation. All such intervention, of course, is opposed by all consistent advocates of capitalism. Carson, however, includes under the heading of government intervention what he calls, following the anarchist Benjamin Tucker, “the land monopoly” and “the money monopoly,” which he regards as the respective foundations of rent and profit/interest. It is in the absence of this alleged intervention that labor would be able to receive its alleged full product as wages.

What Carson means by the land monopoly, at least as far as it relates to his claim that laissez-faire capitalism is a system of state intervention, is nothing other than that legal protection of the rights of landowners to collect contractually agreed upon rents represents government intervention (Carson, pp. 197, 200). He declares that, according to “Mutualists,” of which he is one, “[t]he actual occupant is considered the owner of a tract of land, and any attempt to collect rent by a self-styled landlord is regarded as a violent invasion of the possessor’s absolute right of property” (p. 200).

Thus, for example, if I, a legitimate owner of a piece of property, legitimate even by Carson’s standards, decide to rent it out to a tenant who agrees to pay the rent, the property, according to Carson, becomes that of the tenant, and my attempt to collect the mutually agreed- upon rent is regarded as a violent invasion of his [the tenant’s] “absolute right of property.” In effect, Carson considers as government intervention the government’s upholding the rights of a landlord against a thief. He believes he has the right to prohibit me and the tenant from entering into an enforceable contract respecting the payment of rent and that such action is somehow not a violation of our freedom of contract and not government intervention.

What Carson means by the money monopoly is equally bizarre: namely, the inability of the banking system to engage in a permanent policy of radically easy money that would drive the rate of interest and rate of profit to “near zero” (Carson, pp. 219–24). He believes that this inability is the result merely of “the state’s licensing of banks, capitalization requirements, and other market entry barriers [which] enable banks to charge a monopoly price for loans in the form of usurious interest rates. Thus, labor’s access to capital is restricted, and labor is forced to pay tribute in the form of artificially high interest rates” (p.220).

Although Carson quotes a few paragraphs from Mises, and even claims to agree to the correctness of the time preference theory of interest, he apparently never heard of Mises’s demonstration of why unlimited credit expansion can succeed only in destroying the value of money, not in permanently reducing the rate of interest. He also seems to be unaware that in a free market, competition, if not the laws against fraud, would severely limit or totally eliminate credit expansion and that it is only government intervention that has enabled it to become as great as it has and that the unlimited credit expansion he advocates would require massively more government intervention in money and credit. [6]

Carson also claims that capitalism has been subsidized by history, as though it could be guilty of practicing government intervention retroactively:

the single biggest subsidy to modern corporate capitalism is the subsidy of history, by which capital was originally accumulated in a few hands, and labor was deprived of access to the means of production and forced to sell itself on the buyer’s terms. The current system of concentrated capital ownership and large-scale corporate organization is the direct beneficiary of that original structure of power and property ownership, which has perpetuated itself over the centuries. (Carson, p. 144)

Some readers may be tempted to stop reading further, having reached the conclusion that Carson is nothing but a fool, ignorant of the nature of individual rights, of economics, and of logic, and, in claiming, on such a patently absurd basis, that capitalism rests on state intervention, dishonest to boot, seeking to hijack the concept of the free market into the service of its opposite, much as an earlier generation of socialists did with the word “liberalism.” Nevertheless, as Mises used to point out in his seminar, it is dangerous simply to dismiss people as cranks, or to attack their motives, without fully unmasking their errors. And, following that advice, this is what we must do with Carson.

Working with Means of Production Owned by Others

As will be shown, many of Carson’s errors center on his appraisal of the fact that under capitalism the workers typically do not own the means of production with which they work, but rather are the paid employees of capitalists, who are the owners of the means of production. Marx recognized that this arrangement had a major positive aspect, despite the exploitation of labor that he claimed accompanied it. Namely, it was essential to the development of large-scale manufacturing and transportation. Marx cited the instances of glassworks, paper mills, and ironworks (Carson, p. 188), to which we can add modern steel mills, oil refineries, auto plants, railroads, airlines, and, indeed, factories turning out practically anything in an efficient manner. Modern efficient production both in Marx’s time and, still more, today, typically requires the assembly of a large aggregate of capital goods and the presence of a large number of workers. It cannot be conducted by individual workers each employing his own capital goods. [7]

Nevertheless, Carson repeatedly denies the necessity of the separation of wage earners from the ownership of the capital goods with which they work and argues that it rests on the use of force. It is a theme which runs throughout his book. More than once, he depicts the separation as utterly unnecessary.

What leads him to do this, I believe, is his inability to come to grips with the phenomena of rent, profit, and interest in any other way. If the worker could work on his own land and employ his own capital, he would be the recipient of all the income earned in production and thus no question of injustice would arise. Carson wants and hopes for such a state of affairs. And he is prepared to bend, twist, and utterly distort facts and logic in order to make it seem achievable. Hence, he wants the cultivator of the land to automatically become its owner and turns the concepts of government intervention inside out in order promote this goal. He wants interest rates to be near zero and capital to be superabundant so that the worker can obtain his own capital, and is willing to ignore economic reality and again turn the nature of government intervention inside out in the attempt to make his goal seem achievable. And, first and foremost, he needs the worker’s use of his own means of production to be capable of constituting a viable arrangement of production.

In this light, one can understand what appears as a repeated display of incredible, childlike naïveté. For example, Carson quotes at length a virtual fairy tale presented by one Kirkpatrick Sale, according to which the cotton industry’s machinery based on Watt’s steam engine and Arkwright’s frame — the leading advance of the early Industrial Revolution — did not represent any actual improvement over an alleged “cottage-based, one-person machine built around the spinning jenny” and perfected earlier.

What was allegedly responsible for the triumph of the steam engine and factory production was not any actual merit or technological superiority but merely the desire of sinister capitalists for “control” of the production process, which was far more easily achieved in factories than when production was left in the hands of independent cottagers. And what allegedly put the cottage producers out of business was “‘laws that, on various pretexts, made home-production illegal'” (Carson, pp. 153–54). [8]

Carson and Sale apparently never heard of such things as the Luddites and the later attacks on machinery in 1826, both occasioned by the inability of cottage producers to meet the competition of factories. A more typical complaint about the factories, one that is at least consistent with a recognition of their far greater efficiency, is this:

Grasping factory bosses were paying youngsters pittance wages to operate their power looms, which could produce far more than the home worker could ever hope to achieve. The “putters-out,” who paid handloom weavers to produce their cloth, could not compete and the rates they offered tumbled through the floor. [9]

Carson is equally naïve when he declares:

Marglin took Adam Smith’s classic example of the division of labor in pin-making, and stood it on its head. The increased efficiency resulted, not from the division of labor as such, but from dividing and sequencing the process into separate tasks in order to reduce set-up time. This could have been accomplished by a single cottage workman separating the various tasks and then performing them sequentially (i.e., drawing out the wire for an entire run of production, then straightening it, then cutting it, etc.). (Carson, p. 166)

Contrary to Carson and Marglin, the saving of time in passing from job to job does indeed result from the division of labor, as Adam Smith demonstrated. It would normally not be present in the case of an individual attempting to perform by himself all of the steps involved in the production of a product. For example, if I am assembling, say, a table for my own use (purchased from a department store with the proviso “some assembly required”), I would almost certainly be assembling only one such table, and would experience all of the wasted motion entailed in having to pass numerous times from one distinct operation to another, not to mention the inefficiency of undertaking a considerable amount of study and learning that I would use only that once. There would be no room at all for “sequencing” in the sense used by Carson, in such a case. If I were to attempt to produce pins for my own use, I would have need for only a relatively modest quantity, and there would accordingly be only very limited scope for sequencing in Carson’s sense and thus in reducing the motion wasted in passing from task to task. [10]

Matters are different only when the division of labor has been carried to the point at which there is a regular production of large quantities of a given item for the market. In such a case there is real scope for sequencing in Carson’s sense, and it would save a great deal of wasted motion compared with an individual performing all of the steps in sequence one unit of product at a time. As just pointed out, however, the very existence of this possibility already presupposes the existence of considerable division of labor. It is only a question of whether or not it pays to carry the division of labor further, within the production of the item: i.e., to substitute the greater division of labor present in factory production for the lesser division of labor entailed in cottage production.

Unfortunately, for Carson and Marglin, it very clearly does pay. (Perhaps the advantages were so clear to Adam Smith that it never occurred to him that anyone would posit the kind of objection raised by Marglin and Carson.) It pays because, if for no other reason, factory production is far more efficient in terms of the use of capital goods, and thus of the labor required to produce them, than is cottage production. It avoids the enormous wastes in the form of unnecessary duplication of equipment and idle inventory that would be present in cottage production.

If, for example, there were six distinct steps entailed in pin making, then instead of six workers working side by side continuously, in one factory, each continuously using a definite tool or piece of equipment, we would have, under cottage production, six cottage workers each performing a large volume of a given operation, while the tools and equipment required for the other five operations remained idle. His output from any given operation would also then remain idle until he finished that operation and turned to the next operation.

The clear implication is that under the arrangement of cottage production so beloved of Carson and Marglin, the six workers would need between them thirty-six sets of tools and equipment instead of only six such sets and would have an unnecessarily large volume of partially finished product on hand at any given time. There is clearly no room in the scheme of cottage production for the output of a given worker being taken up for further processing before that worker is finished with his current task; that would require factory production. And certainly, and above all, there is no room in the scheme of cottage production for the perfection of this arrangement which is the moving assembly line.

In sum, cottage production would entail a tremendous waste of capital and be enormously inefficient, which is why the free market long ago put an end to it.

Carson’s naïveté and rejection of the modern world extend to extolling the virtues of spade cultivation over that of using the plow (Carson, p. 156), and to claiming that to induce subsistence farmers to earn money; it is first necessary to impose taxes on them payable in cash, as though the goods available for purchase with cash, which they both desire and would have no means of producing by themselves, would not constitute a sufficient inducement (p. 177).

Carson’s Collectivism

On occasion, Carson recognizes the need for modern methods of production. When he does so, however, he displays further naïveté and propounds something close to syndicalism as the means of providing them and achieving the organization necessary to implement them. Thus, he writes:

Why could not an artisans’ guild function as a means of mobilizing capital for large-scale production, the same as a corporation? Why could not the peasants of a village cooperate in the purchase and use of mechanized farming equipment? Perhaps because, in the absence of a “progressive” ruling class, they just couldn’t get their minds right. Or maybe just because. (p. 189)

Here Carson, the “individualist” anarchist shows himself to be quite the collectivist, attributing to the average person qualities of independent thought and judgment that are found only in exceptional individuals. He believes, in effect, that to obtain the financial support and develop the organization required for adopting an innovation, it is only necessary to explain it to a group of average people, and they will immediately understand its value and be willing to risk their savings on its success; indeed, that as workers in the very line of production in which the innovation will take place, they will be willing to go out of their way to implement it even though its actual effect, if successful, might very well be to deprive them of their present livelihoods.

Carson’s naïveté here is simply breath-taking. He believes that guilds, organizations notorious for their spirit of monopoly and hostility to innovation, the very same organizations that delayed economic progress in Europe for centuries, could somehow be sources of innovation. Indeed, he writes:

Had not the expropriation of the peasantry and the crushing of the free cities taken place, a steam powered industrial revolution would still have taken place — but the main source of capital for industrializing would have been in the hands of the democratic craft guilds. (p. 190)

Carson is simply unaware that innovation is the product of exceptional, dedicated individuals who must overcome the uncomprehending dullness of most of their fellows, and often their hostility as well. His obliteration of the exceptional individual and his underlying collectivism are further apparent in his assumption that the only alternatives are those of the collective of the good artisans or farmers, on the one side, or the collective of the “ruling class,” on the other. He apparently has no concept of the individual businessman or entrepreneur who acts out of concern for himself, not his “class,” and whose competitive success will cause the failure of other members of his “class.”

Distortions of History

Carson’s world is so far removed from reality that he not only sees guilds as sources of progress, but regards the “High Middle Ages” as “far superior to the world of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries” (Carson 2004, p. 178). In his view, “[t]he nineteenth century was, in a sense, a technical and industrial ‘renaissance,’ built atop the achievements of the High Middle Ages after a prolonged hiatus” (p. 179). The alleged “hiatus,” it should be noted, includes much of the actual Renaissance itself and much or all of the life spans of Da Vinci, Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton, i.e., the age of great scientific discovery leading up to the Enlightenment. In Carson’s view, this age of enormous scientific progress was a period of “barbarism and regression” in comparison with “[t]he real advancement, the real humanism and progress of the High Middle Ages.” [11] The “High Middle Ages,” along with all the other portions of the Middle Ages, was, of course, an era ruled by fear and superstition and was characterized by such phenomena as famines, plagues, dungeons and torture chambers, burning at the stake, and periodic outbreaks of mass psychosis. Carson is either unaware of these facts or does not consider them significant.

Carson’s views concerning agriculture complement his views concerning industry. In a free market, he believes, if workers were not working as independent artisans in their own cottages, it would be mainly because they were working as farmers on their own land. He presents his views concerning agriculture by means of a lengthy quotation from the anarchist Franz Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer’s and Carson’s view is that in the absence of some form of land “monopoly,” people would not be willing to work for wages because they would prefer to work on their own land instead. That they are not working on their own land, while at the same time arable land is still abundant, can allegedly only be the result of the use of force to prevent them, indeed, is prima facie proof of the use of such force. [12]

Once again, Carson’s view is directly contrary to the facts. Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, in all advanced countries, the proportion of the labor force that is employed in agriculture has been steadily declining. This has come about not as the result of people having been driven from the land or being denied access to it, but as the result of millions upon millions of sons and daughters of farmers one by one voluntarily choosing to abandon agriculture in favour of moving to towns and cities to work as wage earners. What has brought about this choice is the rapidly growing productivity of labor in agriculture that has resulted precisely from private ownership of land and respect for the property rights of landowners, and, of course, from the operation of all the other fundamental institutions of a capitalist society, such as division of labor, saving and provision for the future, freedom of competition, the profit motive and the price system, and private ownership of the means of production and respect for property rights in general.

This rapidly rising productivity of labor in agriculture, in combination with people’s limited need and desire for additional foodstuffs and other agricultural commodities, has resulted in a continuous decline in relative consumer spending for agricultural commodities and a continuous increase in relative consumer spending for the products and services of the rest of the economic system. This in turn has operated to depress incomes in agriculture relative to incomes in the rest of the economic system and thus to bring about the fact that the wages to be earned in towns and cities came to exceed the incomes that could be earned in agriculture. It was in response to these facts that the sons and daughters of farmers made the voluntary choice to leave the land and move to towns and cities.

Land Monopoly in Reality

Land monopoly is a valid concept, despite Carson’s twisting of it in holding that enforcement of legitimate rental contracts constitutes government intervention and represents such monopoly in excluding cultivators from ownership in favor of landlords. It exists to the extent that governments claim to own land and then withhold it from the market. Such action by the government limits the supply of land available for the market and does so by means of the initiation of physical force. The government is an initiator of physical force in this instance, because it is not an act of physical force for an individual to appropriate land from nature, but rather a positive act in fulfillment of his own life and well-being and thus one which he has a natural right to perform. Thus, when the government stops him from doing this by force, the government is necessarily an initiator of force. [13]

The monopoly character of the government’s action is further demonstrated by the fact that in thus limiting the supply of land available for the market, the government forcibly reserves land to the exclusive possession of those who already possess it, or to the limited number able to purchase land from this group at the unnecessarily high prices of land that result from the government’s forcible restriction of its supply.

Land monopoly also exists to the extent that government interferes with an individual’s right to sell or bequeath his land as he chooses. Such action too represents the forcible reservation of land to some and the forcible exclusion of others from the land. Entail legislation, which reserved pieces of land to specific families and prohibited their passing into the possession of others, and also legislation imposing primogeniture, i.e., inheritance exclusively by the eldest son or other closest male heir, are leading examples.

While government land ownership, entail legislation, and primogeniture constitute genuine land monopoly, none of them appear to be of any concern to Carson. For example, one of the greatest acts of land monopolization in history was the British government’s prohibition of its American colonists settling west of the Appalachian Mountains, a prohibition which was overthrown only by the success of the American Revolution. Indeed, concerning this momentous overthrow of land monopoly, Carson actually comes down on the side of the British! He writes:

One cause of the American Revolution was Britain’s “attempt … to limit the exercise of the political means in respect of rental-values” (namely, the 1763 prohibition of settlements west of the Atlantic watershed). This prevented preemption of the land by land speculators in league with the state. The mainstream history books, of course, have portrayed this as an offense mainly against the individual homesteader, rather than the big land companies. (Carson, pp. 158–59) [14]

Here Carson condemns as “the political means” the government’s sale of land to speculators, but does not condemn as “the political means” the government’s prohibition of the sale of land at all! It seems to have escaped Carson that once sold to speculators, the land would be resold by the speculators to others, including large numbers of buyers of relatively modest means, at prices far lower than would prevail under continuing government ownership and consequent withholding of land from the market.

Not surprisingly, Carson has nothing negative to say concerning the vast present-day land holdings of the United States government in the western states and in Alaska. And while he does cite conservation laws as a form of land monopoly (Carson, p. 205), he has absolutely nothing whatever negative to say concerning environmentalism, which in terms of the land area it has already denied, let alone first seeks to deny, to private ownership, under such guises as wildlife and wilderness preserves, must rank as one of the world’s greatest land monopoly movements in all of history.

Carson is highly critical of the replacement of feudal land tenure, which denied the very principle of private ownership by living individuals, and was thus monopolistic to its very core, by modern private property (pp. 145–53). The theory of land ownership under feudalism was that land was the possession not of living individuals, but of bloodlines: hence, entail legislation and denial of the right of any current feudal aristocrat to sell the land that was allegedly his or even to lease it for more than a relatively short-term.

The Enclosure Movement

Carson is especially critical of the enclosure movement, which, in contrast to feudalism, upheld the right of landowners to fire unnecessary workers (Carson, pp. 146–53). [15] As already shown, he assumes that everyone living and working on a piece of land has an automatic right of ownership to it and thus cannot properly be dispossessed. He also positively favors village common lands in pastures and forests and the open field system in crop production, along with the monastic and crown lands of feudalism (pp. 146, 150).

Nevertheless, it was precisely the enclosure movement’s replacement of the commons, the scattered strips of land of the open field system, and the monastic and crown lands with compact private farms that made possible the rise of scientific farming, i.e., selective animal breeding, the development of newer and better strains of seed, and the application of more modern tools and implements, along with a great reduction in the quantity of labor required to produce food. These were developments essential both to the building up of the system of division of labor, which can proceed only to the extent that a smaller part of the population becomes sufficient to produce the food required by the whole, and to the rise in real wages, which depends on increases in the quality and reductions in the cost of production and prices of the goods on which money wages are expended, including, of course, food and other agricultural commodities. [16]

It can be conceded that in the course of the enclosure movement, numerous individuals did not receive compensation for the loss of their traditional source of livelihood who had a just claim to such compensation. [17] However ironic it may be in view of Carson’s profound antipathy to the phenomenon, one way that such individuals could have been compensated, consistent with their leaving the land and thereby helping to make agriculture more efficient, would have been if they had been made the recipients of shares in “absentee landlord rent.” Of course, they left the land and did not receive any share in such rent. Nevertheless, it is worth noting that according to Carson’s conception of matters, such compensation would itself have represented an injustice at least on a par with their unjust dispossession from the land in the first place, for it would have required payment of hated absentee landlord rent. From his perspective, a better outcome would have been the indefinite continuation of the inefficient, medieval methods of agricultural production.

More on Carson’s Concept of Ownership

Indeed, it seems that any concession whatever to claims for compensation against a present user/occupier of land must be unjust according to Carson’s conception of matters. For he regard nothing but use and occupancy as the basis of land ownership. Recall that according to him,“[t]he actual occupant is considered the owner of a tract of land” (Carson, p. 200). Ownership and compensation claims by a past user/occupant, therefore, can simply have no standing in his view. If they did have standing, then so too could other claims by people who are not currently users or occupants of the land, such as absentee landlords.

Carson’s views on the nature of ownership give full support to the conception of anarchy, which, of course, is what he advocates, as being nothing but chaos. He explicitly extends his standard of occupancy and use as the legitimate basis of ownership to houses and apartments, advocating the seizure of vacant housing units by homeless squatters. Thus, he writes:

So long as the state is bound in legal principle to enforce property rights of landlords, any victory won by squatters will be only short term and local, without permanent results of any significance. … If every vacant or abandoned housing unit in a city is occupied by the homeless, they will at least have shelter in the short term until they are forcibly removed. … In the meantime, the squatters’ movement performs a major educative and propaganda service, develops political consciousness among urban residents, draws public attention and sympathy against the predatory character of landlordism, and — most importantly — keeps the state and landlords perpetually on the defensive. (Carson, pp. 377–78)

The logic of Carson’s position extends to legitimizing auto theft An individual rents a car from Hertz or Avis. He is the user/occupant. Hertz or Avis is the absentee owner demanding rent. It extends to the theft of clothing that is not being worn at the moment by its — absentee — owner. It extends to all property, for once in the possession of the thief, the thief as user/possessor becomes the legitimate owner, according to Carson’s conception of things.

Carson simply does not understand that ownership is not the mere possession and use of property but rather the moral and legal right to determine the possession and use of property. In the case of land, this right is properly established on the basis of an original act of appropriation of previously un-owned land from nature and then subsequent purchase and sale. Where, as has certainly been the case repeatedly in the history of Europe, there has been violent appropriation from previous owners in the past, the proper principles are those stated by Mises (1969):

That all rights derive from violence, all ownership from appropriation or robbery, we may freely admit to those who oppose ownership on considerations of natural law. But this offers not the slightest proof that the abolition of ownership is necessary, advisable, or morally justified (p. 43). … Economic action demands stable conditions. The extensive and lengthy process of production is the more successful the greater the period of time to which it is adapted. It demands continuity, and this continuity cannot be disturbed without the most serious disadvantages. This means that economic action requires peace, the exclusion of violence (p. 44). … We who only see the effect of Law which is to make peace must realize that it could not have originated except through certain recognition of the existing state of affairs, however that has arisen. Attempts to do otherwise would have renewed and perpetuated the struggle. Peace can come about only when we secure a momentary state of affairs from violent disturbance and make every future change depend upon the consent of the person involved. This is the real significance of the protection of existing rights, which constitutes the kernel of all Law. (p. 46)

Private Property and Land Rent

The final point I wish to make in connection with private ownership of land is that it is precisely this institution that has been responsible for the progressive and rapid increase in the production of agricultural commodities and minerals of all kinds and thus for the minimization of the economic significance of land rent (Reisman 1996, pp. 310–16). In the Great Britain of 1750, wealth centered on land ownership and the income derived from it. A hundred years later, it centered on manufacturing and commerce, and the land owning aristocrats were on the way to having to marry American heiresses in order to find the funds to maintain their estates.

What brought about this change was the radical extension of the institution of private ownership of land: in Great Britain itself, the enclosure movement; on the European continent, the replacement of feudal land tenure with genuine private property in the aftermath of the French Revolution and the subsequent conquest of most of Europe by the French under Napoleon; and most important of all, the privatization of the land of the United States from the Appalachian Mountains to several hundred miles west of the Mississippi river. These developments created the incentive basis for long-term investment in land and the development and adoption of ever more efficient methods of production. The result was great increases in output both per unit of labor and per acre of land, rapidly falling real prices of agricultural and mineral output, the need actually to retire a considerable amount of land from the production of many items, and the previously described mass movement of labor from farms to towns and cities. In this environment the significance of land rent in the overall economic system plunged.

These historical results are confirmed in the present day by the case of oil. In the last thirty-five years, forces have been operative tending to raise the price of oil and the mining rents yielded by its production, which has greatly increased the economic significance of the ownership of oil fields. What has caused this is growing government interference with the property rights of energy producers and the owners of mineral deposits, instigated by the environmental movement. Few things should be more obvious than that if this interference were eliminated and the institution of private ownership of land extended, there would be a great increase in the supply of oil and other forms of energy and thus a major decline in the price of oil and in the mining rents derived from its production.

Such a change in policy would mean the bringing into production of petroleum deposits residing on what are presently “wildlife preserves” and “wilderness areas,” and on the continental shelf. It would also mean an increase in the supply of both of atomic power and of coal from strip mining, as these branches of energy production became free to proceed without hindrance. The increased supplies and decline in price of these competitors of petroleum would serve to reduce the demand for petroleum and thus its price at the same time that increases in the supply of petroleum were also serving to reduce its price. The result would be a plunge in the rents derived from petroleum production.

Carson, along with the Georgists, is utterly unaware of the fact that private ownership of land and respect for the property rights of landowners is what serves to minimize land rent. Nevertheless, he implicitly acknowledges this fact when he casually writes, as though absolutely no explanation were required:

[U]ntil the nineteenth century, the control of land was probably the single most important form of privilege by which labor was forced to accept less than its product as a wage. But in industrial capitalism, arguably, the importance of landlordism has been surpassed in importance by the money monopoly. (pp. 219–20)

Thus, let us turn now to the subject of profit and interest, the alleged fruits of the alleged money monopoly.

Profit and Wages: Their Actual Relationship

Carson, along with all other Marxists, and, it must be said, along with almost all other economists of every persuasion, even including Böhm-Bawerk, follows Adam Smith in regarding profit as a deduction from what would otherwise be wages. Originally, according to Smith, there were simply workers producing products, which they consumed or sold. Since workers were the only recipients of income, all income was allegedly wages. “The produce of labour,” Adam Smith wrote, “constitutes the natural recompence or wages of labour.” And he then declared that “[i]n that original state of things, which precedes both the appropriation of land and the accumulation of stock, the whole produce of labour belongs to the labourer. He has neither landlord nor master to share with him.” Later on, however, with the appropriation of land as private property and with the accumulation of capital, rent and profit come into existence, and, according to Smith, are deductions from what was originally, naturally, and rightfully all wages: “This profit,” Smith writes, “makes a second deduction from the produce of the labour which is employed upon land [rent being the first deduction].” And

[t]he produce of almost all other labour is liable to the like deduction of profit. In all arts and manufactures the greater parts of the workmen stand in need of a master to advance them the materials of their work, and their wages and maintenance till it be compleated. He shares in the produce of their labour, or in the value which it adds to the materials upon which it is bestowed; and in this share consists his profit. (Smith 1776, bk. 1, chap. 8)

These ideas of Smith were taken over by Marx, who replaced Smith’s “original state of things” with “simple circulation,” represented by the sequence “C-M-C,” i.e., the production of commodities (C) to be exchanged for money (M), with the money received being used to purchase commodities (C) desired by the sellers of the first set of commodities. Here too, all income was supposedly wages, with no presence of rent, profit, or interest, no “surplus value” of any kind, and no exploitation of labor. Just as the deduction of rent and profit from wages came into existence according to Smith with the appropriation of land and the accumulation of capital, so for Marx the deduction of these incomes comes into existence with the appearance of “capitalistic circulation,” which is represented by the sequence M-C-M’, i.e., the outlay of money (M) for the purpose of producing commodities (C), which are to be sold for a larger sum of money (M’). [18]

And now, at the end of this train, following countless others who have taken the same position since Marx, Carson asserts that labor is compelled “to pay tribute to the owning classes by accepting less than its product as a wage” (Carson, p. 211).

What is perhaps remarkable is that Böhm-Bawerk and almost all other opponents of the exploitation theory also accept the view of Smith and Marx that profits are a deduction from what is originally and naturally all wages. The difference between them and the supporters of the exploitation theory is that they regard profits as a just deduction from wages, based on the operation of time preference and the resulting higher valuation of present over future goods. [19]

The notion that profits are a deduction from wages, just or unjust, is also held at least implicitly by economists who believe that profits are the result of the productivity of capital goods. It is held insofar as these economists believe, as they almost certainly must, that any productivity on the part of capital goods is indirectly a productivity of the labor previously performed in the production of the capital goods and that the income of labor is wages.

As I have argued at length elsewhere, in my view profit, not wages, is the original and primary form of labor income and is in no sense any kind of deduction from what would otherwise be wages (Reisman 1996, pp. 473–98; 1985, reprint, rev., 2005). The entire Smith/Marx framework is wrong.

When workers produce and sell products, the money they receive in exchange for their products is sales revenue, not wages. Any net income earned on such sales revenue is profit, not wages. Indeed, in the extreme conditions imagined by Smith and Marx, of a world in which absolutely no buying for the sake of subsequently selling took place (the world of “the original state of things” and “simple circulation”), there would be absolutely no money costs of production to deduct from the sales revenues, for money costs are the reflection of the outlays of money designed to bring in the sales revenues.

And thus, in the absence of such outlays, the entire sales revenues would constitute profit. Precisely this, the opposite of what Smith and Marx thought it was, is the actual situation in the “original state of things” and “simple circulation.” All income is the income of labor, but it is all profit and there are no wages in such conditions.

Outlays for capital goods and the payment of wages in the production of products for sale, begin only with the accumulation of capital and the appearance of capitalistic circulation. And the appearance of capitalistic circulation is what gives rise to money costs, which must be deducted from sales revenues. Thus, in total opposition to Smith and Marx, and their disciple Carson, I argue that what capitalists, capitalistic circulation, and capitalism are responsible for is not any deduction of profits from wages, but rather the positive creation of the demand for capital goods and the payment of wages, which results in money costs that must be deducted from sales revenues — from sales revenues which were originally all profit, and, hence, in a reduction in the proportion of sales revenues that constitutes profit.

Indeed, the more economically capitalistic the economic system, precisely in the sense of the relationship between Marx’s M and M’, the higher are wages and the demand for capital goods, both of which are included in M, relative to sales revenues, which are represented by M’. At the same time, the lower is the proportion of profit, understood as the amount of the difference between M and M’ taken relative to M or M’.

Indeed, it is absolutely bizarre to think of profits as a deduction from wages. Wages are a cost. Costs are a deduction from sales revenues.In the absence of capitalistic circulation sales revenues would be all profit. Capitalists create wages (and the demand for capital goods) and thereby reduce profits, not deduct profits from wages.

Critique of Carson (and Marx) on “Primitive Accumulation”

In “simple circulation,” as we have seen, the value of the first M is zero and the economic degree of capitalism is therefore zero. There are no wages paid, no demand for capital goods, and thus no money costs to deduct from sales revenues. All income is profit and no income is wages.

In such a society, the magnitude of capital invested, stated in terms of the money previously expended to buy or produce capital goods is necessarily zero, there having been no such money expended, by definition. Accordingly, the rate of return on capital is infinite, the result of the division of a positive amount of profit in the numerator by a zero amount of capital in the denominator. [20]

Such a state of society, or anything remotely close to it, must be one of the most extreme poverty. Production would be limited to what individuals could produce without benefit of the labor of any help but that of family members or others who might be induced to act as partners in their production, and, even more importantly, without benefit of any previously produced products of labor purchased from others.

In such circumstances, no amount of looting or plunder could yield much wealth to anyone, simply because there would be virtually nothing to loot or plunder.

Significant production, and the possibility of looting and plundering being able to yield significant results, takes place only to the degree those producers in Smith’s original state of things and Marx’s simple circulation begin to act capitalistically, and expend some of their sales proceeds in the purchase of previously produced products and in the employment of helpers. In so doing, of course, they bring into existence both wage payments and the demand for capital goods, cause money costs to appear as a deduction from sales revenues, and also bring into existence invested capital in terms of money. The result is a fall in the rate of profit and, of course, a rise in wages relative to profits.

The more economically capitalistic the system becomes, the greater becomes the demand for capital goods relative to the demand for consumers’ goods and the greater becomes the demand for labor relative to the demand for consumers’ goods. Both factors work to increase the extent of division of labor. The one by encouraging the division of labor vertically, the other by encouraging it horizontally. To the extent that the demand for capital goods rises relative to the demand for consumers’ goods, a correspondingly larger portion of the labor and capital goods of the economic system comes to be employed in the production of capital goods relative to the production of consumers’ goods. Since the capital goods serve in the production of consumers’ goods, or in the production of further capital goods that serve directly or indirectly in the production of consumers’ goods, the effect is to lengthen the average period of production, as Böhm-Bawerk described it. [21] To the extent that the demand for labor rises relative to the demand for consumers’ goods, the effect is to enlarge the number of helpers engaged at any given stage of production. Both factors serve to raise the productivity of labor and thus, ultimately, the supply of consumers’ goods relative to the supply of labor.

Other things being equal, the effect of this last is a fall in prices relative to wage rates, and thus a corresponding rise in real wage rates. [22] In the face, additionally, of a rise in wage payments relative to the demand for consumers’ goods, which is what occurs as the result of a rise in the economic degree of capitalism, a further cause of a rise in real wages is present (Reisman 1996, p. 621).

Now Carson seems to believe that in the absence of force and violence, the natural course of development of what I have described in terms of a rise in the economic degree of capitalism above zero, would be one in which production would always be characterized by a preponderance of self-employed workers. The profits (though he does not describe them as profits) that these workers could earn using their own capital or their own capital and land, would set a high floor on what they would have to be offered to be induced to work as wage earners. What accounts for the present system, in his eyes, in which employment as a wage earner is the overwhelming norm, is only the forcible expropriation of the land and capital of the mass of workers and its transfer into the hands of a relatively small number of large capitalists and landowners by the state.

Now it is certainly true that masses of people have, in the course of history, again and again lost their land and whatever capital they may have had, as the result of violent expropriation. The expropriations have been carried out by invading foreign armies, by neighboring feudal lords, by the depredations of their own feudal lords, by the arbitrary acts of kings, dictators, colonial powers, and parliamentary democracies, and often at the urging of the victims’ own envious neighbors.

The result of these repeated expropriations is that every part of the world and every person in it is much poorer than if the expropriations had not occurred. If the age of economic liberalism, with its strict, but by no means perfect, limitations on the arbitrary powers of government had come into being starting at around 1300 rather than around 1800, and been maintained since that time, we would probably by now have a world in which the real wealth and income of the average person, and his life expectancy and quality of life, exceeded that of the present day by as much as that of the present day, in the most advanced countries, exceeds that of cave man days.

Nevertheless, there is no reason for thinking that the basic pattern of the economic system in terms of the preponderance of employment as a wage earner versus self-employment would be significantly different.

Not expropriations and statist interference, but the rise in the economic degree of capitalism is what is responsible for the preponderance of employment as wage earners. This rise, with its attendant rise both in the demand for labor and in the productivity of labor resulting from greater division of labor and capital accumulation, both increased the attractiveness of employment as a wage earner and decreased the attractiveness of self-employment.

Those producers who saved relatively more heavily and who thereby were able to produce with the aid of relatively more capital and relatively greater division of labor, proceeded to drive less efficient smaller, self-employed producers out of business. Having reduced their own costs of production through their greater efficiency, [23] their operations could be profitable at the lower prices their increased production imposed on their less capable, smaller competitors, while, at the same time, the operations of the latter became unprofitable. [24] Masses of self-employed producers, or the children of such producers, one by one voluntarily abandoned self-employment and took jobs as wage earners, in the same way as masses of farmers and children of farmers abandoned farming in favor of employment as wage or salary earners (see above p. 57).

To the extent that acts of looting and plunder played any significant role, their effect was not to accelerate or promote this process, as Carson believes (Carson, pp. 120–23, 144–45), but to retard and stop it, indeed, sometimes to cause reversion to a lower economic degree of capitalism. This is because such acts undermine the incentives to produce and save and generally destroy existing capital.

It is certainly true that here and there government intervention took place which favored larger scale production that was actually not more efficient, as Carson shows. However, government intervention has stood in the way of the development of larger scale production to a much greater extent than it has favored it: the whole tax system insofar as it hinders saving and capital accumulation, antitrust laws, laws hampering the competition of chain stores and department stores against small merchants, and licensing laws are illustrations. [25] Thus, the basic pattern of the economic system, with its typical separation of labor from ownership of the means of production with which it works, is not the result of government intervention but of economic efficiency and competition.

In those instances in which larger-scale production or largerscale ownership, for that matter, is in fact relatively inefficient, a free market operates to replace it with the more efficient smaller-scale operation or ownership. For example, the growth of cities into what had previously been farmland makes it worthwhile to break up farms of hundreds of acres into many hundreds of small building lots, because the combined value of the lots far exceeds the value of the farms.

In just the same way, if agricultural production itself were to be more efficient when undertaken on a smaller scale of ownership, say, on small farms rather than on large plantations, the land would be more valuable as small farms than as large plantations, and the plantation owners would gain by selling out to the farmers. Even if the farmers were poor sharecroppers or starving third-world peasants, if property rights were upheld and contracts enforced, the large landowners would gain by selling out on credit and receiving interest and principal payments over an extended period of years whose present value greatly exceeded the value of their land in its present pattern of use. (Of course, this presupposes that the buyers cannot repudiate their contractual obligations and also that the buying power of the money in which the contracts are stated will not significantly diminish.)

On the basis of all of the foregoing, it should be apparent that the following claim made by Carson is simply groundless:

without the state to rob the peasantry of their land, to terrorize the urban proletariat out of organizing, and to legally proscribe alternative working class forms of self-organized credit, this property less condition of the working class arguably would never have come about, and would have been unsustainable even after it did come about. (Carson, p. 119) [26]

As we have seen, what have led to the separation of labor from the land are not any injustices that may have been committed in connection with enclosures or anything else, but the rise in the productivity of labor in agriculture and mining. And, similarly, what has led to the separation of labor from capital, i.e., working as wage earners with capital owned by capitalists, is the generally greater efficiency of this arrangement.

Carson is free to disparage these facts as a “bourgeois nursery tale” (pp. 124, 138, 154, 204). Nevertheless, they are implied by economic science. His view of “fact” and the “real world” is that capital is accumulated by plunder rather than by production and saving and that boundless capital could be created by the magic of unlimited credit expansion, if only “government intervention” did not prevent it — as though it were government intervention that prevented the achievement of effects without adequate causes, as though it were government intervention that prevented the miraculous. [27]

More on the Separation of Labor and Capital

It is necessary to address further aspects of the “separation” of labor and capital under capitalism. First, even in a perfectly just world, large numbers of people would be essentially property less. If no one else, these people would be children whose parents, however wealthy, had not yet given any significant wealth to them, and who had not yet worked long enough to be able to save significant wealth of their own. Thus, a father might be self-employed in his own business or on his own farm or own stocks or bonds for that matter. But his property is not the property of his children while he is still alive, unless he has given it to them. His children, in other words, start out property less.

And then, of course, many of the children will not significantly save for a more or less considerable time after they start working; and they may never save. And many of them will not inherit wealth from parents who themselves possess more or less considerable amounts of it but who choose to use it for other purposes, such as their own consumption. Many of the children of such children will have no possibility whatever of acquiring wealth apart from what they themselves save. Adding to all this is the fact that to the extent that parents have more than one child, whatever they do give or leave to their children must be divided. The larger the number of children, the less the wealth that an individual child can receive; and, of course, to the extent that some of the children receive more, others of them must receive less the historically common extreme case being the eldest son receiving all, and the other children, nothing.

Thus, in the best of circumstances there will be a very considerable number of people who at the moment are more or less property less and whose only source of acquiring property is what they themselves earn and save. Then, of course, to this considerable number must be added the more or less considerable number of people who may be property less because their property has been stolen, either by private criminals or, far more often, by criminal governments. Nevertheless, in either case, if such people are born in, or manage to immigrate into, even a semi-free capitalist country, such as the United States is even today, they have the means of acquiring property through the combination of working and saving. And no matter how impoverished and deprived their beginnings may be, there is typically nothing to prevent them or their children or grandchildren from achieving even the very highest levels of wealth and income in their time. This has been true in the United States since the founding of the country.

An implication of the preceding is that from the point of view of the status of individuals within a capitalist society with respect to their wealth and income relative to that of the other members of the society, all of the government intervention in the history of the world, prior to that of the preceding two to three generations is essentially irrelevant. No matter what injustices may have been committed in the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries, in the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries, indeed, even in much of the twentieth century, they are simply irrelevant to the relative ability of people to own property in the present. Carson’s alleged “subsidy of history” has an explanatory value of nil in explaining the pattern of organization of a capitalist economy.

The same conclusion follows when one realizes that whatever property may have been lost by the great grandparents and earlier ancestors of anyone alive today, it is generally insignificant in terms of the real wealth typically available to the member of a capitalist society in the present day. It would make very little difference to anyone if the equivalent of a seventeenth or eighteenth century English cottage, or the strips of land a peasant worked outside a village of that time, along with his hunting and fishing rights and other rights in the commons, could be brought forward in time to the present and be bestowed upon him. The loss of such wealth by one’s ancestors, so meager by contemporary standards, is simply not the reason that the average worker of today does not work with his own means of production.

Profits and the Labor of Businessmen and Capitalists

It is essential to realize that along with the typical separation of labor from capital, there is a major and almost universally ignored respect in which labor has not been separated from capital at all, a case of which Carson too, of course, is totally unaware. This is the extremely important case of the labor of businessmen and capitalists. They are the heirs of the workers in Smith’s “original state of things” and Marx’s “simple circulation” who produced and sold their products and who earned profits, not wages. In a capitalist economy it is businessmen and capitalists who produce and sell their products and, of course, earn profits. They perform labor and do so with their own means of production, and, of course, with the aid of the labor of more or less numerous helpers, who are their employees.

The labor of businessmen and capitalists, and the fact that its reward is profit rather than wages, is obvious in the case of sole proprietorships and small partnerships, where the owner(s) can easily be observed to be working. Contemporary economic theory is aware of such cases, but immediately obliterates them and their significance by using the doctrine of opportunity cost as the basis for reclassifying profits as wages, or as a combination of wages plus losses. [28]

At least since the time of Adam Smith, the income of labor has been held to be synonymous with wages. Adam Smith considered the possibility of profits also being an income attributable to the performance of labor — the “labour of inspection and direction,” as he called it — but quickly rejected the idea because, he observed, unlike Marx, that profits varied with the amount of capital invested. In addition, he held, they bore “no proportion to the quantity, the hardship, or the ingenuity of this supposed labour of inspection and direction” (Smith 1776, bk. 1, chap. 6).

Smith’s last statement is absurd on its face. Profits certainly do vary with the quantity, the hardship, and, above all, the ingenuity of the labor of businessmen and capitalists in the employment of their capitals. The greater the ingenuity of the businessman or capitalist, the better are his products likely to be and the more economically they are likely to be produced, and thus the higher will his profits tend to be compared with those of businessmen and capitalists who display less ingenuity. The greater the quantity of his labor and the greater its hardship, the more is it likely that he will achieve ingenuity and thus profitability in his investments.

Profits also vary, assuming that the degree of ingenuity is equal, with the size of the capital invested. However, that is absolutely no reason for refusing to attribute the profits to the businessman’s or capitalist’s labor. And Adam Smith, who regards labor as the source of all wealth, should have been among the last people to refuse this attribution. The product is always to be attributed to labor, irrespective of the fact that its size varies with the means of production employed. Thus, three different workers may dig holes, the one using his bare hands, the second using a conventional shovel, and the third, a steam shovel. In all three cases, the holes, however different their size, are the product of a worker’s labor. In each case, the worker digs the hole, because in each case it is the worker who supplies the purpose and the guiding and directing intelligence required to achieve it.

Just so with the businessman and capitalist; His labor is most essentially an intellectual labor, a labor of thinking, planning, and decision making, and becomes so the more exclusively, the larger the scale on which it is conducted. His capital is his means of employing and equipping helpers in the carrying out of his plans and the achievement of his purposes. The greater is his capital, the greater is the scale on which he can implement his ideas and the greater the results he will achieve. That he earns profits in proportion to his capital is neither surprising nor in any way detracts from the fact that he is the source of his firm’s purposes and guiding and directing intelligence at the highest level and is thus the primary producer of its products. The products of his firm are his products, not those of his employees, on the same foundation that the discovery of America is attributed to Columbus rather than to the members of his crews; the victory at Austerlitz, to Napoleon rather than to his soldiers; the foreign policy of the United States, to the President (or the President plus a handful of key advisers) rather than to the employees of the State Department and its various embassies.

It follows from this, that labor’s right to the whole produce, or to the value of the whole produce, is achieved every day under capitalism, when businessmen and capitalists, or the corporations they own, are paid by their customers for their — the businessmen’s and capitalists’ — products. The contribution of their helpers in the production of their products is paid for, in full, with the wages the businessmen and capitalists pay.

If any exploitation of labor existed by virtue of the existence of the payment of land rent or the payment of dividends or interest to more or less passive investors, who play no active role in the conduct of a firm, the exploitation would be an exploitation of the labor of businessmen and capitalists by these parties. It is they who pay the land rent, dividends, and interest, not the wage earners.

However, the payment of these incomes does not constitute any exploitation of labor. The incomes are paid in the reasonable expectation that the use obtained of the land or additional capital will serve to increase profits by more than the incomes that must be paid to secure their use, and thus be a source of net gain.

Furthermore, the rents, dividends, and interest can, and very frequently are, themselves earned as the product of labor — the labor of those who have carefully planned and followed their investments in land, stocks, or bonds. There is no limit to how much labor can be expended in this way in research and study, and the more of it that is performed, the greater the likelihood of success.

The Irrelevance of Wage Earners Being Propertyless

Carson makes a great deal of wage earners being property less, arguing that this is what makes possible their exploitation and that it is government intervention that has been and is responsible for their lack of property (Carson, pp. 92, 122, 219–24, passim). We, of course, have seen that widespread lack of property is simply unavoidable, that it is in the nature of things. Now we can see that being without property is also a matter of irrelevance to the wages that workers receive under capitalism.

The connection between being property less and alleged exposure to “exploitation” is, of course, the willingness of workers in such a case to work for as little as minimum subsistence, if necessary. Not having the reserves to fall back upon that ownership of significant property would provide, and having to work in order to avoid starvation, it seems that the workers would have no recourse but to accept the terms offered to them by the employers, however low those terms might be. Resistance to the employers’ terms, it seems, would arise only if wages were to sink below the level of minimum subsistence, whereupon the workers would presumably refuse to work because they would prefer to die of starvation while resting rather than toiling.

At the same time, it appears that the self-interest of employers, which, like that of any other buyer, is always, other things being equal, to pay less rather than more, would serve actually to drive wages to the minimum subsistence level, if it were not restrained by such things as labor unions and minimum wage laws.

These considerations are what make the exploitation theory appear plausible.

However, there is an insufficiently known aspect of the writings of Böhm-Bawerk which destroys the plausibility of this doctrine.

After having presented the doctrine of the marginal pairs as the determinants of price, Böhm-Bawerk went on to show that in a division of labor society, in which goods are produced in enormous concentrations by relatively small numbers of producers, the marginal utility attached to their supplies by sellers was typically zero and thus that the valuations of the marginal pair of sellers were irrelevant to price formation. Price, Böhm-Bawerk showed, was typically determined within the limits set by the valuations of the marginal pair of buyers alone. Supply was vitally important as an amount determining the point to which the valuations of the marginal pair of buyers would have to extend, but the value of the supply came from the side of the buyers, not the sellers. [29]

Böhm-Bawerk also demonstrated the irrelevance to price formation of the disutility of labor, showing that the essential thing was the limitation of the supply of labor and the valuation by the buyers of its marginal unit and marginal product.29 In other words, according to Böhm-Bawerk, wage rates are determined by the combination of the scarcity of labor and the competition of employers for its services. Wage rates must be low enough to make the purchase of labor worthwhile by the marginal employer and simultaneously too high to make its purchase worthwhile by the first sub marginal employer, for whose purchase the supply of labor is simply inadequate.

It follows from these considerations that even if all wage earners were totally property less and willing to work for as little as minimum subsistence that fact would simply be irrelevant to the wages they actually obtained. Their wages would go no lower than corresponded to the point of full employment. Wages below the point of full employment would result in a labor shortage, in which it would be to the self-interest of employers who were deprived of labor to bid wage rates up in order to overcome the competition of other employers not able or willing to pay as much. [31]

The Two-Sided Benefit from the Capitalists’ Means of Production

The capital of the capitalists and their mutual competition for labor is what makes it possible for people to prosper as wage earners, irrespective of their own status as property owners. The more numerous the capitalists and the greater their capitals, the greater is the demand for labor and the higher are wage rates. And rather than the possibility of earning profit based on the employment of one’s own means of production being necessary to set a competitive floor to wages, it is much more often the case that the possibility of earning wages sets a competitive floor to profits. In the great majority ofcases people do not establish their own businesses precisely because the profits they would earn by doing so are less than the wages they can earn if they do not do so. In addition, the possibility of earning wages serves to prevent the exploitation of the labor of family members within the home, as frequently occurred in the days when cottage industries were prominent.

The gain of wage earners from the capital of capitalists takes place not only in their capacity as wage earners but also, and in the long run more importantly, in their capacity as consumers.

To appreciate this fact, it is first of all necessary to grasp a revolutionary proposition of Mises that is as simple as it is profound. Namely, in order to benefit from the means of production, it is not necessary to own them: it is necessary only to be in a position to buy their products.31 The payment of wages, of course, makes this possible and does so to an ever greater degree, the more economically capitalistic the system is in the sense previously described.

In being able to buy the products, the wage earners obtain the benefit of all the means of production directly or indirectly employed in the production of those products. For example,

[t]o drink coffee I do not need to own a coffee plantation in Brazil, an ocean steamer, and a coffee roasting plant, though all these means of production must be used to bring a cup of coffee to my table. Sufficient that others own these means of production and employ them for me. (Mises 1969, p. 41)

The benefit the wage earners, and all consumers, derive from the capitalists’ means of production in this way is progressive. The capitalists are in competition with one another for a limited spending power on the part of the consumers. To cause more of that spending power to be directed to his particular products, a capitalist must make them better or produce them more efficiently in order to be able to sell them at a lower price. Such innovations are the source of premium profits. But these premium profits last only so long as the innovation has not been taken up by the rest of the producers in the industry. When that happens, competition eliminates any premium price for the improved quality of the product and drives the price down to reflect the product’s reduced cost of production. The result is that the consumers, first and foremost the wage earners, are able to buy better products at lower prices and thus to enjoy higher real, wages. Continued competition among the capitalists, whose ranks include former wage earners now taking their place as businessmen, results in an endless repetition of the process, with ever new and improved products appearing year after year at progressively lower real prices and causing real wages continually to rise by means of the greater buying power of money wages. [33]

This discussion has major implications for the appraisal of great industrial fortunes under capitalism. Earning such a fortune requires the earning of a high rate of profit over a long period of time, and saving and reinvesting the great bulk of the profits. The fortune grows only at the rate such saving bears to the capital of the previous year. The earning of a high rate of profit over an extended period of time almost always requires the introduction of repeated innovations, since competition operates to strip away the premium profitability of any single innovation, as we have just seen. Thus, in their origin in high rates of profit, great fortunes are evidence of the introduction of significant innovations in the quality of products and/or the efficiency with which they are produced.

As should also be clear from previous discussion, the saving and reinvestment of those high profits — their addition to capital — serves both to raise the demand for labor and to increase the supply of products produced. The implication is that both in their origin and disposition, great industrial fortunes under capitalism are the mark of great contribution to general economic well-being, including, first, and foremost, the economic well-being of wage earners, who, under the very high economic degree of capitalism achieved on the foundation of economic freedom and rational cultural values, are by far the largest class of consumers in the economic system.

The career of Henry Ford can be taken as an illustration of the significance of such a fortune. Ford started the Ford Motor Company in 1903 with an invested capital of $25,000. When he died, in 1946, his personal wealth was approximately a billion dollars. The growth of $25,000 into a billion dollars was the result of the profits earned on the foundation of such great innovations as the moving assembly line and interchangeable mass produced parts. These and other innovations made it possible for Ford to produce a far better automobile and sell it profitably at a price of $300 in the 1920s than the automobiles that had been selling for $10,000 when he started his company. And year by year, Ford’s growing personal wealth was invested in the factories and machinery of his company, a process which replaced the single, primitive barn-like structure in which he began his production, with the numerous greatly more advanced, enormous factories of the Ford Motor Company in later years. Thus, Ford created and earned great wealth and used the far greater part of it in a way that benefited much of the rest of mankind.

The process, typified by Ford, of a fortune built on the basis of positive productive contribution and then used in bringing the benefit of those contributions to the rest of mankind is of a diametrically opposite character than the kind of economic inequality typified by the position of feudal noblemen. While the fortunes of Ford and other great industrialists were built on positive productive contribution and represented a benefit to the rest of mankind, the wealth of the feudal aristocrats rested on the use of force to hold their serfs to the land and to plunder them by means of taxes and other exactions. Few things could be more unjust than to describe the capitalist creators of wealth as equivalent to feudal barons engaged in robbery and plunder. Yet Carson not only does precisely this, but, to reinforce their alleged essential similarity with one another, even dares to claim that the feudal aristocracy was more or less transformed into the class of capitalists (Carson, pp. 180–81).

Further Fallacies: Alleged Underconsumption and Overproduction

Carson propounds the utterly fallacious doctrines of underconsumption and overproduction, as well as their corollary, the belief in the need for a policy of imperialism to solve the alleged problem of insufficient domestic demand (Carson, pp. 239–42, 278–83). [34]

When he first introduces these doctrines, in connection with the depression of 1890, he makes it appear that he regards their operation to be the result of “Whig-Republican state capitalist intervention, and not of the ‘unregulated’ or ‘competitive’ market” (Carson, p. 240). And later, at one point, he even claims not to dispute Say’s Law, despite his support of these diametrically opposite doctrines, holding that “Say’s Law applies only to a free market” (p. 299). “The State”, he writes, in explaining what he thinks makes the market not free, “promotes the accumulation of capital on a scale beyond which its output can be absorbed (at its cartelized prices) by private demand; and therefore capital relies on the State to dispose of this surplus” (idem).

Absurdly, as this passage shows, Carson’s notion of what makes the market not free includes alleged state intervention promoting large-scale capital accumulation. Here he seems to be unaware of the progressive personal income tax, the corporate income tax, inheritance and gift taxes, the capital gains tax, chronic inflation, chronic budget deficits, and the social security system, all of which serve greatly to reduce capital accumulation. (Fourteen pages later, he gives some recognition to the actual situation when he writes of a “crisis of under-accumulation.”)

Equally absurd, although Carson refers to “cartelized prices” and implies that their existence is what prevents the quantity of output that can be absorbed by the market from coming up to the quantity that can be produced, he nowhere mentions the overwhelmingly most important source of prices being too high to make this possible, namely, government interference designed to raise wage rates. This, despite the fact that in the early chapters of his book, he stresses the relationship between prices and costs, which, to the extent that it is true, implies that lower wage rates would result in lower prices and thus in larger quantities of goods and labor demanded, thereby eliminating unemployment.

Indeed, the results of a computer search through Carson’s book under the word “unemployment” does not turn up a single instance of such government interference being mentioned as the cause. What the search does turn up, however, is a statement whose meaning is that machinery causes unemployment: “Instead of an improved standard of living for the worker-owner, increased productivity results in unearned wealth for the owner and unemployment for the worker” (Carson, p. 351).

Throughout his book, despite all his blather about his support for free markets, Carson is consistently in favor of government interference designed to raise wage rates, at least to the extent of implying that it serves to raise the standard of living of the average wage earner. Thus, for example, he writes: “the increased bargaining power of labor resulting from the corporate liberal social compact increases the portion of the product consumed by workers.” And he quotes, without a word of disagreement, the following passage from James O’Connor’s Accumulation Crisis:

Worker resistance to wage cuts during crises, labor union implementation of supplemental unemployment benefits which expanded demand, “job creating benefits” which shortened hours of work, expansion of consumer credit, earlier retirement and increased pensions, and rank-and-file resistance to rationalization of production, among other factors, increased employment and working-class demand for wage goods. (Carson, pp. 313–14) [35]

Returning to Carson’s support of underconsumptionism and the notion of excess accumulation, he and his fellow Marxists simply do not realize that it is precisely the capitalists’ accumulation of capital far in excess of what the average wage earner would ever accumulate that serves to raise the standard of living of the average wage earner. For that capital, as I have shown, is both the source of the demand for the labor the wage earners sell and of the consumers’ goods the wage earners buy. The capitalists progressively accumulate capital and on that foundation progressively increase the demand for labor and the supply of consumers’ goods. In the process, real wages and the average standard of living continually rise.

Carson and his fellow Marxists, however, believe that the consumption of the wage earners is permanently and arbitrarily frozen by the capitalists at minimum subsistence, and that almost all of what is produced in excess of the wage earners’ minimum subsistence is saved and accumulated by the capitalists who have nowhere to invest that capital but in the production of the minimal supply of goods consumed by the wage earners. [36]

This alleged situation is then held to make the capitalists seek alternative outlets for their investment and production. Thus, they supposedly turn to foreign markets, in the hope that those markets will absorb both consumers’ goods and capital. This is the situation described by the phrase “export-dependent monopoly capitalism.” [37]

Of course, those who value exports and investment abroad on this basis must equivalently disvalue imports and investment from abroad, both of which they perceive as only worsening the problems of alleged domestic overproduction and over-accumulation. What they desire as the ideal arrangement is exports of goods and capital without imports. This would solve the alleged problems and make possible all the prosperity that can be derived by giving one’s wealth away in exchange for nothing.

Unfortunately, the countries possessing the intended foreign markets are unwilling to accept such exports, which would cost them nothing to receive, and must be forced to accept them, Hence the policy of imperialism. When the imperialistic policies of different governments come into conflict, it is only a short step from these insanities to the further insanity of believing that war is economically advantageous to the extent it serves to secure the privilege of giving one’s goods and capital away for nothing. [38]

Summary and Conclusion

Carson’s book attempts to prove the self-contradictory thesis that laissez-faire capitalism rests on state intervention. His basis for this claim turns out to be the assertion that state intervention is present in the enforcement of voluntary rental contracts and the punishment of theft, and in the fact that the banking system is unable to engage in limitless credit expansion that would drive the rate of interest to near zero and keep it there. These alleged state interventions are the alleged foundation of incomes going to parties other than wage earners.

Carson is essentially a Marxist and his book is filled with ignorant Marxist diatribes against capitalism, ranging from the alleged injustices of “primitive accumulation” centuries ago to an alleged crisis of “over-accumulation” and “overproduction” in the present day, resulting in an alleged need to engage in a policy of imperialism in order to secure foreign markets in which to unload alleged surpluses of capital and goods. Like other Marxists, Carson, who claims to be a foe of state intervention, accepts without question the ability of the state to raise the standard of living of the mass of workers by means of its intervention, in such forms as pro-union and minimum wage legislation, which supposedly increase “labor’s bargaining power,” and by means of the taxation of the incomes of capitalists. His level of understanding of economics is indicated by his apparent ignorance of the fact that labor unions cause unemployment, coupled with his belief that unemployment is caused by increases in the productivity of labor.

On the positive side, Carson’s book provides a good sample of the fallacies currently circulating in a significant part of the left. It has also provided the opportunity to demonstrate three major and essential principles in defense of capitalism:

(1) Precisely private ownership of land and respect for the property rights of landowners is what is necessary to minimize the economic significance of Ricardian land rent.

(2) Profit, not wages, is the original and primary form of labor income and the more capitalistic the economic system is, precisely in terms of Marx’s so-called capitalistic circulation — i.e., the sequence M-C-M’ — the higher and more rapidly rising are real wages and the lower are profits relative to wages.

(3) Any lack of property on the part of wage earners and consequent willingness on their part to accept wages as low as minimum subsistence is simply irrelevant to the wages they actually need to accept, which are determined by the competition of employers for labor that is scarce. At the same time, continuing innovation, competition, and capital accumulation by businessmen and capitalists is what progressively increases the supply of goods and thus the purchasing power of wages, i.e., raises real wages. The capital of the businessmen and capitalists is the foundation both of the demand for the labor that wage earners sell and of the supply of consumers’ goods that they buy; its progressive increase serves continually to raise real wages irrespective of whether or not the wage earners themselves own property.

<< Back to Studies in Carsonian Mutualism.

Notes:

1. George Reisman is professor of economics at Pepperdine University’s Graziadio School of Business and Management and is the author of Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics (1996). His web site is www.capitalism.net.

2. See page 14 of his book where Carson disingenuously quotes Ricardo along these lines, totally ignoring Ricardo’s recognition of the role both of the period of time that must elapse in production and of the rate of profit as determinants of the relative value of reproducible commodities, alongside the quantity of labor required to produce them. In contrast to Ricardo’s doctrine, the absolutist version of the labor theory of value, which was held by Marx, recognizes nothing but the quantity of labor expended in production as the source of exchange value.

3. Cf. Marx (1867, vol. 1, pt. 2, chap. 6).

4. Cf. ibid. (pt. 3, chap. 9, sec. 1).

5. On this subject, see Reisman (1996, chaps. 11 and 14, passim). On the subject specifically of the exploitation theory and Marx’s treatment of interest, see also Böhm-Bawerk (1959, vol. 1, pp. 263–271; and idem, 1962, pp. 201–302).

6. This same point is made by Rothbard in the first essay of the present volume (see above, pp. 5–15) in application to Carson’s predecessors in the Mutualist School. Despite frequent references to Rothbard, Carson seems totally unaware not only of that essay but also of Rothbard’s (1962, 2001) support of a one-hundred-percent-reserve gold standard as an essential feature of a fully free market and of the fact that in such a market credit expansion would necessarily be totally absent.

7. Carson and all other Marxists typically assume that the wage earner under capitalism is propertyless. In actuality, of course, he often possesses significant savings. But under the enormous division of labor and separation of economic functions that represents a modern capitalist economy, these savings are usually employed as part of the capital used elsewhere in the economic system than in the particular worker’s own line of employment. He is a wage earner in one branch of production and a capitalist in one or more other branches. And, as we shall see, even when the wage earner is essentially “propertyless,” the significance of that fact is radically different than what Carson and the other Marxists make of it. See below, pp. 76–78.

8. It should be noted that Carson very frequently uses the technique of propounding his views by means of lengthy quotations from other authors, in this case Sale.

9. This passage can be found online at http://www.cottontimes.co.uk/1826.htm.

10. There would, however, be an enormous disadvantage present, whose nature will be explained in a moment.

11. While it perhaps pales into insignificance in comparison with his attitude toward the “High Middle Ages” overall, it still must be mentioned that Carson supports and defends the medieval doctrine of the “just price” (pp. 86–87).

12. See Carson, 2004, pp. 142–43; see also pp. 157–58 and 196–97, which contain quotations from Albert Jay Nock along these lines.

13. An important distinction must be made here between a government briefly possessing land, as part of a program of placing it in private hands, say, through a process of land auctions, and a government intent on holding the land indefinitely. The latter clearly acts in violation of individual rights. The former, it might be argued, acts to achieve their implementation in an orderly manner.

14. The quotation within the quotation appears to be from Albert Jay Nock.

15. Feudalism is perhaps best known for the fact that the serfs were not free to leave the land. At the same time, however, the feudal aristocrats were not allowed to put them off the land. The doctrine of feudalism was that the serfs were attached to the land. This shows in a second major respect the radical difference between property in land under feudalism and under capitalism. The alleged landowners of feudalism were not able either to sell their land or to fire unnecessary workers. And, of course, they could not compete with other feudal aristocrats for the services of the latter’s serfs. The feudal aristocrats, in lacking essential rights of landowners, should not even be thought of as landowners but rather as government officials. Their incomes did not rest on any economic contribution but on the ability to collect feudal dues (i.e., taxes) under the threat of flogging or hanging.

16. Concerning the effects of the enclosure movement, see Ashton (1969, pp. 18–20, 43–44).

17. It is important to realize that there were also many to whom the following words of Carson were applicable and whose claims were therefore dubious at best:

After the Tudor expropriations, many vagabonds migrated into “such open-field villages as would allow them to squat precariously on the edge of common or waste.” One seventeenth century pamphleteer noted that “in all or most towns where the fields lie open and are used in common there is a new brood of upstart intruders as inmates.” (p. 150, italics in original)

18. Cf. Marx (1867 vol. I, pt. II, chap. 4).

19. Cf. Böhm-Bawerk (1959, vol. 1, pp. 263–71). Essentially the same analysis is presented by Rothbard, another Austrian-School opponent of the exploitation theory. See Rothbard (1962, vol. 1, p. 32).

20. It should be realized that my analysis of the rate of profit in Smith’s “original state of things” and in Marx’s “simple circulation” fully accords with Mises’s views on originary interest in such circumstances. Mises writes:

If one day the state of affairs were to return which was actual at the close of the first millennium of the Christian era when some people believed that the ultimate end of all earthly things was impending, men would stop providing for future secular wants. The factors of production would in their eyes become useless and worthless. The discount of future goods as against present goods would not vanish. It would, on the contrary, increase beyond all measure. (1966, p. 527).

My analysis also accords with leading propositions of the British classical school as well, namely, with John Stuart Mill’s proposition that “demand for commodities is not demand for labor” and Ricardo’s proposition that “profits rise as wages fall and fall as wages rise.” It is only necessary to understand, as Mill did, that it is capitalists, not consumers, who pay wages and thus that if there are no capitalists, there are no wages paid and the full magnitude of sales proceeds is therefore, according to Ricardo’s proposition, profit. My analysis is consistent with factors other than time preference being operative in the determination of the rate of profit/originary interest. Namely, even though people had a time preference that was considerably less than infinite, the rate of profit would still be infinite if such considerations as extreme lack of security of property led them to keep all of their savings in such easily concealable forms as precious metals and precious stones. In this case too, there would be no expenditure for means of production and thus no money costs to deduct from sales revenues and no invested capital in terms of money. A further implication is that, contrary to Keynes and his followers, cash hoarding, at least in the long run, operates to raise the rate of profit, thereby, apart from all other considerations, making an “unemployment equilibrium” based on a “liquidity trap” impossible.

21. Cf. Böhm-Bawerk (1959, vol. 2, pp. 79–88).

22. For elaboration of the role of the productivity of labor in the determination of real wages, see Reisman (1996, pp. 618–22).

23. The reduction in costs referred to here is a reduction in unit costs. Unit costs fall at the same time that a rise in the economic degree of capitalism operates to increase total costs relative to sales revenues. What reconciles these phenomena is the accompanying rise in output per unit of expenditure.

24. Even if all producers had increased their saving at the same time and to the same extent, and produced with equal efficiency, the economies of larger scale production would have resulted in the abandonment of self-employment for employment for wages.

25. Licensing laws favor small business at the expense of big business by causing prices to be artificially high, thereby making it possible to be profitable at a higher level of costs and thus with the employment of a smaller amount of capital.

26. It should be noted that along with most others who have been inspired by Marx, Carson believes that labor unions can raise the real wages of the “working class.” Serious economic analysis, however, demonstrates the exact opposite. See, for example, Reisman (1996, pp. 655–59).

27. As we have seen, Carson’s idea of “government intervention” is the enforcement of voluntary rental contracts and the physical impossibility of creating boundless capital by means of credit expansion.

28. For an example of this dishonest practice, see Samuelson and Nordhaus (2001, p. 138). For a demonstration of the absurdities present both in the doctrine of opportunity cost and in the closely related doctrine of imputed income, see Reisman (1996, pp. 456–62)

29. Cf. Böhm-Bawerk (1959, vol. 2, pp. 244–45).

30. Cf. ibid. (vol. 3, pp. 117–18). It is possible that Carson is unaware of much of Böhm-Bawerk’s thought concerning the valuations of sellers, the disutility of labor, and much else besides. For some unexplained reason his references to Böhm-Bawerk’s main work are all to the translation of the first German edition, by Smart, rather than to the translation of the much later and more comprehensive third German edition, by Huncke and Sennholz.

31. For elaboration of the present discussion, see Reisman (1996, pp. 613–18). It should be realized that the concept of full employment must be understood as applying to each specific type of labor, location by location. It should also be realized that Böhm-Bawerk’s demonstration of the irrelevance of the disutility of labor other than as a secondary cause affecting the scarcity of labor gives the lie to Carson’s assertion that “the laborer’s subjective perception of the disutility of labor [is] the basis of exchange-value.” (p. 91) A man working as a surgeon at the age of forty may feel no greater disutility of labor in performing his surgeries than he did at the age of twenty when he labored at some far less valued form of work to pay his way through school. Nevertheless, the value of his labor is vastly greater as a surgeon, and would be apart from all state intervention.

32. Cf. Mises (1969, pp. 40–42, 311–12).

33. It should be realized that this rise in real wages, brought about by the activities of the hated capitalists, is what makes possible the shortening of the working day and the abolition of child labor, for it makes it possible for growing masses of wage earners to afford to accept the relatively lower real wages of shorter hours compared with those of longer hours and the loss of the earnings contributed by their children. In these circumstances, the preferences of the workers for shorter hours manifests itself in the wages of a shorter week being less per hour than the wages of a longer week, just as the
hourly wages of any more desired type of work is less, other things being equal, than the hourly wages of less desired types of work. This wage differential makes a shorter work week more profitable to employers than the longer work week and thus brings about its voluntary adoption in the labor market.

34. He frequently uses the terms “over-saving” and “over-accumulation,” as well as underconsumption.

35. All such policies imposed by labor unions must be regarded as indirect acts of government intervention, because the unions would be powerless to impose their demands without it. And, of course, they serve to reduce the worker’s standard of living, not raise it (for a detailed explanation, see Reisman 1996, pp. 613–63).

36. Forgetting his previous attribution of the problems to state intervention, Carson writes:

The underlying crisis tendency of monopoly capitalism … is overaccumulation.

The inability to dispose of the full product of overbuilt industry, at market prices, is inherent in the system. The primary function of the state, under monopoly capitalism, is to dispose of this surplus product and enable industry to operate at full capacity. (p. 313)

37. Carson writes: “In the realm of foreign policy, the problem of over-accumulation and under-consumption led to the regime known as ‘exportdependent monopoly capitalism’” (p. 241).

38. Of course, the overproduction and underconsumption doctrines imply that war in and of itself is economically advantageous, by creating vast new needs and corresponding consumer demand for otherwise allegedly superfluous output. On these subjects, see Reisman (1996, pp. 550–54).

References:

Ashton, T.S. 1969. The Industrial Revolution 1760–1830. London: Oxford University Press, 1969.
Böhm-Bawerk, Eugen von. [1898] 1962. “Karl Marx and the Close of His System.” Reprinted as “Unresolved Contradiction in the Marxian Economic System.” In Shorter Classics of Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk. South Holland, Ill.: Libertarian Press.
———. [1914] 1959. Capital and Interest. George D. Hunke and Hans F. Sennholz, trans. South Holland, Ill.: Libertarian Press.
Carson, Kevin A. 2004. Studies in Mutualist Political Economy. Self-published: Fayetteville, Ark. http://mutualist.org/id47.html.
Marx, Karl. 1867. Capital. Vol. 1. London.
Mises, Ludwig von. [1950] 1969. Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis. London: Jonathan Cape.
———. 1966. Human Action. 3rd ed. rev., Chicago: Henry Regnery.
Reisman, George. 1996. Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics. Ottawa, Ill.: Jameson Books.
———. 1985. “Classical Economics Versus the Exploitation Theory.” In The Political Economy of Freedom Essays in Honor of F. A. Hayek, Kurt Leube and Albert Zlabinger, eds. Munich and Vienna: Philosophia Verlag. Reprint, rev., Daily Article, The Ludwig von Mises Institute, January 26, 2005, http://www.mises.org/story/1729.

Feed 44
We Need More Treason, Not Less on Feed 44

C4SS Feed 44 presents Kevin Carson‘s “We Need More Treason, Not Less” read by Mike Godzina and edited by Nick Ford.

Let’s get something straight: The American state is and always has been, regardless of the political party controlling it, the executive committee of the propertied classes who use the state to extract rents from the working and producing population. Treason against the American state, and the economic ruling classes whose interests it serves, is a good thing. The Wobblies, socialists and anarchists who inspired bleating about “disloyalty” and “treason” from right-wing troglodytes during America’s various red scares were the good guys.

Tom Cotton’s letter to Iran wasn’t wicked because he committed “treason” against the national security policy of the Chief Executive. It was wicked, like Nixon’s secret campaign diplomacy, because it attempted to sabotage an attempt to stop war. Cotton and his co-signers were acting as running dogs for the Israeli Apartheid state and its goal of initiating a murderous, offensive war against Iran. “Treason” that attempts to stop US wars of aggression, on the other hand, is a good thing when it occurs.

Feed 44:

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Stigmergy - C4SS Blog, Weekly Libertarian Leftist Review
The Weekly Libertarian Leftist Review 94

Medea Benjamin discusses 10 steps to wean the U.S. off militarism.

Ron Jacobs discusses the footprint of the U.S. military in Africa.

Sam Husseini discusses U.S. government violence from Hiroshima to Iraq.

Uri Avnery discusses the divide and conquer strategy of Netanyahu.

George Selgin discusses how the Federal Reserve is joining the War on Drugs.

Arno Develay discusses the road to empire.

Nebojsa Malic discusses the Balkan wars and U.S. backed atrocities.

Lawrence M. Vance discusses whether the government can ban anything.

Kelly Vlahos discusses the case of Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl.

Rachelle Marshall discusses the Afghan war.

Andrew J. Bacevich discusses the promise and risks of the Iran deal.

Sheldon Richman discusses the dropping of the atomic bombs.

Jacob G. Hornberger discusses the death of the CIA’s man in Chile.

Trevor Timm discusses the war against ISIS.

Anthony Gregory discusses a book on the atomic bombing of Nagasaki.

Eric Margolis discusses the bombing of Japan during World War 2.

Dave Lindorff discusses the issues surrounding Iran.

Ismael Hossein-Zadeh discusses Israeli opposition to the Iran deal.

Norman Pollock discusses Israel.

Dahr Jamail discusses Iraq.

Christine Ahn discusses the issue of the two Koreas.

John Tamny discusses Marco Rubio’s views on federal sugar subsidies.

James DiEugenio discuses Nixon’s lies about Vietnam.

Laurence M. Vance discusses whether Bernie Sanders could be a Republican.

Ivan Eland discusses how the GOP needs to debate foreign policy.

Dan Sanchez discusses Ron Paul’s new book on war.

Thomas R. Eddiem discusses how conservatives lied to him about immigration.

Samuel Leiter discusses who will be responsible for the next Hiroshima.

Cesar Chelala discusses how Japan is threatening peace.

Fariborz Saremi discusses the meaning of the Iran nuke deal.

Commentary
Telecoms Robbing Us With Government Help — Again

Once again, a telecommunications corporation — this time Verizon — is emptying its customers’ pockets, with government help. Must be a day that ends in “y.” In the past, New Jersey heavily subsidized the construction of DSL lines, in the form of excess customer rates, on the condition that they would continue to provide DSL service on the lines built at taxpayer expense. But according to Karl Bode at Techdirt (“Verizon Thinks It’s a Good Idea to Mock New Jersey Taxpayers After Ripping Them Off for Years,” Aug. 12), the state recently exempted Verizon from this obligation. So instead Verizon is forcing DSL customers into much more expensive wireless plans with low usage caps and high overage penalties. And to top it all off, Verizon is making fun of the customers who object to this shabby treatment.

Verizon compares customers who want to keep their existing unlimited data DSL service, rather than being forced (excuse me, “upgraded”) into a crappy wireless plan, to Luddites. Verizon New Jersey spokesman Lee Gierczynski attributed their resistance to “misplaced fear” and “misunderstanding” — someday “people are going to look back and laugh at people … just like who were a part of the Anti-Digit Dialing League.” It’s much likelier that, rather than being the ignoramuses Gierczynski makes them out to be, customers are all too well informed about what it’s like living with an overpriced, snail-paced wireless plan.

Basically Gierczynski is representing a company that collected billions in excess rates in return for promises it reneged on — and making fun of the people who object to being robbed.

This is nothing new, of course. During the ’90s all the major players in the telecommunications industry collected hundreds of billions of dollars in marked up rates in municipalities around the country, based on their promise to build large-scale fiber-optic infrastructures and offer cheap broadband in those communities — and then pocketed the money and forgot about their promises.

They’re able to get away with this blatant fraud and theft because their lobbyists have uncontested sway in the state legislatures. And as if that weren’t enough, they use their political influence over government policy — much of it through their large donations to the so-called “free market think tank” ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council) — to secure state legislation prohibiting local municipal wireless services.

One such system that managed to bypass telecom interference is the Gig in Chattanooga, which offers one gigabit per second — about fifty times the US average — for $70 a month. It’s piggybacked on the excess capacity of a high-quality fiber optic infrastructure originally built to support the local electric utility’s smart grid. Of course the telecommunications industry is livid. In roughly twenty states, thanks to telecom lobbying, it’s illegal for municipalities to use pre-existing fiber optic infrastructure created for utilities, public school systems and the like to offer competing wireless service.

Freed markets and unfettered competition are highly destructive to the power of large corporations. But generally the giant corporations that talk the most about “free markets” and “deregulation” got their market power with plenty of subsidies and protections from the government. Their idea of “freedom” is to abuse that power without restriction. The way it usually works is, government gives business a big gun to rob the public, and then adds some qualification like “…but don’t use hollow points.” The corporations’ pet “free market” think tanks, heavily funded with Koch money, scream “How DARE government interfere with business’s freedom to decide what kind of ammo to use!!??”

The corporate idea — and corporate-funded “libertarian” think tank-funded idea — of “free markets” and “deregulation” is to leave in place all the forms of corporate power enforced by government, but to remove all restrictions on the abuse of that power. A real libertarian agenda is to remove the state-enforced power of big business in the first place.

Portuguese, Stateless Embassies
A teoria do valor-trabalho: uma crítica a Carson

A teoria do valor-trabalho: uma crítica ao livro Studies in Mutualist Political Economy, de Kevin Carson
por Robert P. Murphy [1]

O livro de Kevin Carson Studies in Mutualist Political Economy (2004) é um trabalho impressionante. Primeiro, tenta reabilitar a teoria clássica do valor-trabalho (dando a ela uma interpretação subjetivista) e, a seguir, faz um recorte da história do capitalismo para mostrar que ele se baseia e necessariamente depende da agressão pelo estado. Ao final, Carson esboça sua visão de um mundo justo baseado nos princípios do “mutualismo”, uma sociedade na qual o trabalhador retém seu produto e todo agente internaliza os custos de suas decisões.

Na maior parte de meu artigo, eu terei pouco de positivo a dizer a respeito da análise de Carson. Em particular, argumentarei que suas respostas à famosa crítica de Böhm-Bawerk à teoria do valor-trabalho, além de sua própria reabilitação dessa teoria em linhas subjetivistas, fracassam. Isso posto, eu desejo afirmar de antemão que Carson é um acadêmico sério; suas opiniões não devem ser descartadas como se fossem as de um maluco esquerdista. Como alguém que ensina dois semestres separados sobre a história do pensamento econômico, eu aprendi muito com a discussão de Carson sobre os economistas clássicos. Além disso, eu jamais havia considerado as origens da distribuição presente dos títulos de propriedade e Carson apresenta um forte argumento de que a defesa libertária convencional do relacionamento entre patrões e empregados é ingênua devido a uma ignorância sobre o desenvolvimento histórico do capitalismo.

Tais questões, contudo, estão fora do escopo do presente artigo. O que pretendo fazer aqui é reafirmar o argumento pela superioridade da teoria marginalista subjetivista em comparação à teoria do valor-trabalho (ou, mais geralmente, do custo) e mostrar por que a moderna teoria de Carson (que é bastante diferente da de Marx) é tão insatisfatória quanto sua antecessora.

Teorias econômicas do valor

Antes de prosseguir, devemos ter clareza a respeito de qual é o objetivo de uma teoria do valor: sua tarefa é simplesmente explicar o valor de troca de bens e serviços específicos. Isto é, uma teoria econômica do valor deve ser capaz de explicar por que alguém que está vendendo o bem X pode receber x frutas em troca dele, enquanto alguém que vende o bem Y somente encontrará alguém disposto a abrir mão de y frutas em troca de seu bem (onde y < x). [2]

No contexto de uma economia monetária, evidentemente, uma teoria do valor deve explicar os preços monetários de vários bens e serviços. Nesse sentido, uma teoria econômica do valor, na realidade, não passa de uma teoria da formação de preços. Contudo, qualquer teoria satisfatória deve ser relevante mesmo em um mundo de trocas diretas e (em princípio) deve ser capaz de explicar as razões de trocas prevalentes entre dois tipos de bens, desconsiderando o fato de um deles ser moeda.

A teoria clássica do valor de custo (ou valor-trabalho)

Os economistas clássicos (por clássicos, falo de autores como Adam Smith, David Ricardo e John Stuart Mill, além outros como Frédéric Bastiat) eram adeptos de alguma versão da teoria do valor de custo, especificamente a teoria do valor-trabalho. Embora cada autor diferisse nos detalhes e em pontos enfatizados, podemos dizer geralmente que a teoria do valor de custo afirma o seguinte: o preço “natural” (ou de longo prazo) de um bem é igual ao seu custo total [4] de produção. Da mesma maneira, uma teoria do valor-trabalho afirma que o preço natural de um bem é proporcional à quantidade total de trabalho requerida para produzi-lo. [5]

À primeira vista, essas duas teorias podem parecer incompatíveis — embora possamos encontrar várias passagens de um dado economista clássico que parecem dar suporte a uma ou a outra. Como explicar essa contradição aparente? A resposta é que o trabalho era visto como o único “custo” fundamental envolvido na produção de um bem; [6] os custos de uma dada mercadoria poderiam então ser reduzidos, em última análise, a uma certa quantidade de trabalho humano.

Um exemplo numérico pode ser útil. Suponhamos que o preço de um corte de cabelo seja US$ 6, enquanto o preço de engraxar os sapatos seja US$ 7,50. Um proponente da teoria do valor de custo poderia explicar esse fenômeno da seguinte maneira:

O corte de cabelo exige trinta minutos de trabalho e as tesouras são depreciadas em 1/20 de seu valor integral, porque (suponhamos) as tesouras devem ser substituídas a cada 20 cortes. O salário é de US$ 10 por hora e uma nova tesoura custa US$ 20, portanto o custo total do corte de cabelo é US$ 5 + US$ 1 = US$ 6. Por outro lado, engraxar os sapatos uma vez leva apenas quinze minutos de trabalho e utiliza 1/5 de uma lata de graxa. Uma nova lata de graxa para sapatos custa US$ 25. Portanto, o preço de uma engraxada deve ser de US$ 2,50 + US$ 5,00 = US$ 7,50. [7]

Um proponente da teoria do valor-trabalho poderia facilmente concordar com a análise de custo acima, indo um só passo além:

A razão por que a tesoura custa US$ 20 é que (suponhamos), um trabalhador gasta 45 minutos para transformar 30 gramas de metal em uma tesoura e os custos do metal são de US$ 12,50 por 30 g. Da mesma forma, a razão de uma lata de graxa para sapatos custar US$ 20 é que (suponhamos) um trabalhador leva duas horas para transformar US$ 5 de cera no produto finalizado. Assim, vemos que o preço da graxa para sapatos na realidade é redutível ao preço de 15 + 24 = 39 minutos de trabalho, i.e., US$ 6,50 de trabalho, mais US$ 1 de cera [8], para um preço total de US$ 7,50. Perceba que aqui nós dispensamos o custo da lata de graxa para sapatos. Se continuássemos, o preço da graxa seria reduzido à quantidade total de tempo de trabalho incorporado a ela (que nós sabemos ser 45 minutos, uma vez que engraxar os sapatos uma vez custa US$ 7,50 enquanto o nível de salário é de US$ 10).

Como este exemplo numérico ilustra, nós poderíamos teoricamente reduzir todos os gastos em insumos até que todos os bens de capital intermediários fossem eliminados. O procedimento seria muito similar ao processo pelo qual os austríacos imputam toda a produtividade líquida aos “fatores originários” da terra e do trabalho (e.g., Rothbard, 1993, pp. 410-11). A diferença, contudo, está no fato de que o teórico do valor-trabalho não acredita que o dono de um recurso natural original pode ganhar renda a partir de seu fator de produção. [9] Dado que somente seres humanos passam por desconforto para prover trabalho, mesmo os preços de recursos naturais em última análise podem ser reduzidos ao trabalho; a natureza jamais cobra por seus serviços.

Uma crítica à teoria do valor de custo (valor-trabalho)

A teoria do valor de custo tem seus méritos. Ela de fato nos dá uma explicação coerente para os preços de mercado — especial os preços relativos. O bem X tem duas vezes o preço de Y porque custa duas vezes mais produzir o bem X. Empiricamente, certamente parece haver uma tendência geral de os preços se igualarem aos custos (incluindo o custo dos juros sobre o capital investido). Além disso, há um mecanismo natural pelo qual explicar essa tendência: se os preços de um produto excedem seu custo de produção, os produtores existentes ou entrantes no mercado aumentariam a produção, baixando o preço do produto e/ou subindo seu custo. Por outro lado, se o preço de um produto estivesse abaixo de seu custo de produção, não valeria a pena continuar a produzi-lo e a diminuição da oferta futura levaria a preços mais altos para o produto e/ou custos mais baixos para os insumos.

Apesar desses pontos em seu favor, há problemas sérios — em minha opinião, fatais — em qualquer teoria de valor de custo (a fortiori, valor-trabalho). Inicialmente, revisemos algumas das mais importantes.

Objeções metodológicas: A objeção mais fundamental é a de que a teoria do valor de custo (em trocas) ignora totalmente o papel causal das avaliações subjetivas na formação dos preços de mercado. Os agentes humanos visam o futuro e, portanto, os gastos e esforços passados são irrelevantes para a determinação dos méritos relativos de duas mercadorias diferentes. Mesmo se toda a memória a respeito de gastos anteriores fosse perdida, os preços de mercado ainda se formariam. Claramente, portanto, a teoria do valor de custo não é a explicação mais profunda possível.

Aplicação restrita a bens reprodutíveis: Obviamente, a teoria do valor de custo pode apenas explicar preços de mercado de bens reprodutíveis. Uma teoria diferente é necessária para se explicar, digamos, o preço relativo de uma pintura de Van Gogh e uma guitarra tocada por Elvis.

O elemento tempo: A teoria do custo pode explicar apenas o preço “natural” (de longo prazo) de um bem; ela não é capaz de explicar as flutuações diárias do preço de mercado que caracterizam qualquer bem real. Além disso, como Böhm-Bawerk enfatizava, o fenômeno do juro originário destrói qualquer possibilidade de explicação do preço final de um bem pelos preços de seus insumos, a não ser que o “tempo” seja classificado como insumo com seu preço monetário associado.

“Custos” são preços [10]:  A teoria do valor de custo é, na melhor das hipóteses, uma teoria parcial; ela explica o preço de uma televisão em relação aos custos monetários do trabalho, do vidro e de outros recursos utilizados em sua construção. Esses “custos monetários”, porém, nada mais são que preços de mercado de bens e serviços particulares (i.e., horas de trabalho, unidades de vidro, etc.). A teoria do valor de custo não analisa os preços a partir de peças mais fundamentais; ao contrário, ela só mostra qual é a relação (de longo prazo) entre os preços de certos bens e serviços.

Em contraposição à teoria clássica do valor-trabalho se encontra a chamada “revolução marginalista”, que avançou a moderna teoria subjetiva, de acordo com a qual o preço é determinado pela utilidade marginal de um bem. Como o famoso exemplo de Böhm-Bawerk (1959) sobre o mercado de cavalos ilustrou, é possível explicar os preços de equilíbrio somente com as valorações monetárias de várias unidades marginais de diferentes mercadorias (pp. 215-35). Na exposição de Rothbard (1993, pp. 91-108), vestígios de utilidade cardinal foram completamente eliminados; razões de troca de equilíbrio podem ser explicadas inteiramente pelas ordenações ordinais de várias unidades marginais.

A abordagem da utilidade marginal à determinação dos preços (para seus proponentes) evita todas as objeções listadas acima e também é capaz de acomodar os méritos da teoria do valor-trabalho (ou custo). Isto é, a tendência de longo prazo do preços de um bem reprodutível a igualarem os gastos em dinheiro (inclusive os juros sobre o capital investido) necessários para sua produção contínua é perfeitamente compatível com a explicação da utilidade marginal.

A defesa de Carson dos economistas clássicos

À luz do da discussão acima, é possível se perguntar como alguém seria capaz de negar que esteja seja um caso em que a ciência econômica de fato avançou. Os argumentos contrário de Carson são interessantes, mas bastante insatisfatórios, na minha opinião.

Um dos principais pontos de Carson é que os economistas clássicos faziam concessões em relação a todos os maiores pontos problemáticos de suas teorias:

Uma vez que Böhm-Bawerk e outros tanto enfatizaram as várias exceções ao princípio do custo devido à escassez [11], nós examinaremos o tratamento dessas exceções nos escritos dos próprios economistas políticos clássicos e dos socialistas. Se, como veremos adiante, os clássicos admitiam prontamente essas exceções, segue-se que os marginalistas e subjetivistas atacavam um espantalho ou, pelo menos, que tinham uma ideia muito diferente do nível de generalidade necessário para uma teoria do valor. (p. 27)

Primeiro, embora os clássicos estivessem cientes das exceções (como Carson habilidosamente documenta nas páginas 28-34), não se segue que Böhm-Bawerk et al. estivessem atacando um espantalho. As várias exceções ao princípio do custo realmente são exceções e representam uma deficiência da teoria em relação à utilidade marginal. É particularmente irônico que Carson acuse Böhm-Bawerk de atacar um espantalho dessa forma, uma vez que o próprio Carson cita o tratamento caridoso de Böhm-Bawerk em relação a Ricardo [12]:

O próprio Ricardo passou pouco dos limites apropriados. Como demonstrei, ele sabia que sua lei do valor era aplicável somente a um caso particular; ele sabia, por exemplo, que o valor de bens escassos dependia de outro princípio. Ele apenas errava ao superestimar a validez de sua lei, atribuindo a ela uma validade quase universal. A consequência é que, mais tarde, ele se esquece quase inteiramente das pequenas exceções que havia corretamente feito, mas pouco considerado, no começo de seu trabalho e falava de sua lei frequentemente como se fosse uma lei do valor universal. (Böhm-Bawerk, apud Carson, 2004, pp. 42-44)

Neste ponto, o leitor mais equilibrado pode defender Carson, sugerindo que talvez Böhm-Bawerk tivesse construído um espantalho ao afirmar que Ricardo praticamente atribuía à sua lei do valor “uma validade quase universal”. Porém, isso não ocorre e, novamente, o próprio Carson fornece as evidências para tanto — neste caso, uma citação na qual Ricardo afirma que vê o trabalho como “a base de todo valor e relativa quantidade de trabalho como quase exclusivamente determinante dos valores relativos das mercadorias” (p. 87). [13]

Até aqui, eu simplesmente agi como árbitro das acusações de Carson de espantalho. Analisemos agora seu argumento mais substantivo — a saber, de que as várias exceções admitidas pelos clássicos não são um golpe contra sua teoria:

O espantalho caricatural construído Böhm-Bawerk sobre o que a teoria do valor-trabalho pretendia demonstrar certamente não resistia muito bem a seu ataque. Claro, espantalhos são deliberadamente construídos para serem derrubados. Ele poderia dizer igualmente que a lei da gravidade era invalidade por todas as exceções apresentadas pela resistência do ar, pelo vento, por obstáculos, pelo esforço humano e assim por diante. A força opera a todo momento, mas sua operação é sempre qualificada pela ação de forças secundárias. Porém, está claro, assim como no caso da gravidade, qual é o fenômeno de primeira ordem e quais são os desvios de segunda ordem daquele. (p. 25; itálicos no original)

Carson retorna a essa defesa reiteradamente — o princípio do trabalho é a força principal que atua sobre o preço natural flutua, enquanto o preço de mercado flutua ao redor daquele devido a outras perturbações. Contudo, eu humildemente recomendo que ele retire (ou revise seriamente) a analogia com forças físicas, porque elas não servem a seu argumento.

Na mecânica clássica [14] (i.e., a física de Isaac Newton), a “lei da gravidade” não era invalidada pela resistência do ar, por obstáculos, etc. A lei da gravidade afirmava (grosso modo) que a força gravitacional entre dois objetos era diretamente proporcional ao produto de suas massas e inversamente proporcional ao quadrado da distância entre seus centros de massa. Assim, um livro que repousa sobre uma mesa não viola essa lei; a força da gravidade (dada pela lei) é contrabalanceada pela “força normal” da mesa que o empurra para cima.

Essa não é uma visão análoga à de Ricardo, que pensava que o trabalho era “a base de todo valor e relativa quantidade de trabalho como quase exclusivamente determinante dos valores relativos das mercadorias”. Como Böhm-Bawerk e outros mostraram, essa “lei” simplesmente não é verdadeira, porque outros fatores influenciam o valor de uma mercadoria a não ser a quantidade de trabalho requerida para sua produção. Portanto, uma analogia mais precisa poderia ser feita a uma lei que declara que “a gravidade faz com que tudo caia”. Essa lei é geralmente verdadeira, mas é compensada por forças que a perturbam (como a força da mesa), assim como Carson admite em relação á teoria do valor. Mas que físico aderiria a essa lei? Nenhum. Os físicos corretamente a rejeitariam e procurariam descobrir leis mais precisas que governam o movimento de um objeto. [15]

Numa tentativa de demonstrar a incoerência dos austríacos modernos, Carson cita Böhm-Bawerk na questão da generalidade:

Uma quarta exceção ao princípio do trabalho pode ser encontrada no familiar e universalmente admitido fenômeno de que mesmo esses bens, nos quais o valor de troca corresponde inteiramente aos custos de trabalho, não mostram correspondência a ele a todo momento. Devido às flutuações da oferta e da demanda, seu valor de troca às vezes fica acima, às vezes abaixo do nível correspondente à quantidade de trabalho que lhes é incorporada. A quantidade de trabalho iindica apenas o ponto ao qual o valor de troca gravita — não a qualquer ponto fixo de valor. Os adeptos socialistas do princípio do trabalho parecem não dar o peso adequado a essa exceção. Eles a mencionam, mas a tratam como uma pequena irregularidade transitória cuja existência não interfere na “lei” maior do valor de troca. Porém, é inegável que essas irregularidades estejam em tantos lugares onde o valor de troca seja regulado por determinantes diferentes da quantidade de custos relativos ao trabalho. Eles poderiam sugerir que haja, talvez, um princípio mais universal do valor de troca, ao qual não se pode traçar apenas as formações regulares do valor, mas também aquelas formações que, do ponto de vista da teoria do valor-trabalho, parecem ser “irregulares”. No entanto, procuraríamos em vão por tal sugestão entre os teóricos dessa escola. (Böhm-Bawerk, apud Carson, 2004, p. 23)

Como podemos nos opor ao objetivo traçado por Böhm-Bawerk. Um critério de progresso normal em qualquer disciplina científica é o de descobrir leis ou princípios de maior generalidade. A epítome do avanço científico é a substituição da mecânica newtoniana pela relatividade; as equações de Einstein eram capazes de explicar tudo aquilo que Newton já conseguia (porque, a velocidades baixas, elas eram “reduzidas” às leis de Newton) e também podiam expliciar coisas de que as leis de Newton não eram capazes. Assim, pode-se imaginar que, para responder a Böhm-Bawerk, Carson precisaria mostrar que a teoria deste não se encaixava em tal critério.

Contudo, embora Carson de fato questione a adequação da teoria subjetiva (um tópico que exploraremos abaixo), sua reação imediata à citação de Böhm-Bawerk acima é a seguinte:

Na realidade, esta quarta exceção [ao princípio do trabalho] não tem qualquer substância, a não ser que adotemos a pose austríaca mais recente de ceticismo radical em relação à noção de “preços de equilíbrio”. E se, como afirmou Böhm-Bawerk, o próprio Ricardo admitia a existência dessa exceção, pode-se deduzir que Ricardo não a via como defeito fatal da teoria do valor-trabalho. Segue-se, portanto, que Böhm-Bawerk e Ricardo diferiam em suas opiniões a respeito da importância do fenômeno — portanto, a real tarefa de Böhm-Bawerk seria mostrar por que Ricardo estava enganado em suas opiniões a respeito do que constituía uma teoria adequada. (pp. 23-24)

Há duas questões separadas que Carson levanta nesta resposta. A mais importante é a questão da “adequação” de uma teoria do valor. Se não há explicação melhor, então, sim, certamente não seria fatal que a teoria do valor-trabalho pudesse explicar apenas tendências de longo prazo e apenas para uma classe restrita de mercadorias; um entendimento parcial é melhor do que nenhum entendimento. Contudo, uma vez que Böhm-Bawerk conhecia uma teoria superior que não sofria desses problemas e mantinha os méritos da teoria do valor-trabalho, naturalmente isso era suficiente para provar a “inadequação” da teoria de Ricardo.

A outra questão que Carson levanta diz respeito à noção de “preço de equilíbrio”. O leitor moderno deve observar que os economistas clássicos (assim como economistas atuais da tradição de Piero Sraffa [1960]), com essa expressão, falavam do preço de longo prazo alcançado na ausência de perturbações; ele é, portanto, análogo à noção misesiana do preço final (Mises, 1966, p. 245).

Mas isso não era o que alguém como Böhm-Bawerk (ou qualquer outro economista atual) diria ao utilizar esse termo. Para eles, o preço de equilíbrio é aquele que iguala as quantidades da oferta e da demanda a qualquer dado momento, considerando todas as influências relevantes sobre a oferta e a demanda.

É verdade que até mesmo essa ideia de equilíbrio seja hipotética, uma vez que o preço de mercado real a qualquer dado momento pode não ser o preço de equilíbrio. Também é verdade que muitos austríacos, seguindo os passos de Ludwig Lachmann, questionam a validade desse construto hipotético. Porém, os austríacos que continuam a endossar a noção de um preço de equilíbrio (admitindo que ele jamais será alcançado no mundo real, apenas aproximado) ainda são perfeitamente coerentes ao preferirem sua explicação em vez daquela fornecida por Ricardo. Como o próprio Carson admite, a falta de realismo (i.e., a falta de um preço de equilíbrio para igualar precisamente o preço de mercado a qualquer dado momento) é verdadeiro para os dois lados. A diferença está na generalidade da teoria: o subjetivismo moderno possui uma teoria dos preços que procura explicar os preços (temporalmente sensíveis) que se formariam no mercado dado que todas as oportunidades de “lucro puro” fossem aproveitadas. Esses preços de equilíbrio hipotético e possivelmente cambiantes incorporariam mudanças na demanda dos consumidores, interrupções na oferta e outras mudanças antecipadas, além de a teoria também se aplicar aos bens não-reprodutíveis. [16] Por outro lado, a teoria ricardiana pretende explicar apenas o valor do preço de “equilíbrio” de longo prazo (natural) de uma mercadoria e apenas aplicável a bens reprodutíveis. A não ser que se demonstre que a primeira abordagem careça de algo que é fornecido por esta última, a teoria subjetivista parece claramente superior.

Para seu crédito, Carson de fato contesta o poder explicativo (e a validade empírica) da teoria subjetivista. Uma de suas objeções principais é a de que:

[Ao] fazer com que a escassez e a utilidade dependam do equilíbrio da demanda e dos “bens presentes” no momento presente, [a teoria subjetivista] ignora o fator dinâmico. Ao considerar o equilíbrio da oferta e da demanda em um mercado particular como um “retrato” e derivar o valor da “utilidade” neste contexto, o efeito do preço de curto prazo sobre o comportamento dos agentes do mercado é ignorado: isto é, negligencia-se o próprio mecanismo que faz com que o preço se aproxime do custo ao longo do tempo. (Carson, 2004, pp. 26-27)

Mais tarde, Carson cita John Stuart Mill, que expressa esse argumento com grande clareza:

É, portanto, correto afirmar que o valor das coisas que podem ser multiplicadas em quantidade livremente não depende (a não ser acidentalmente e durante o tempo necessário para que a produção se ajuste) da oferta e da demanda; pelo contrário, a oferta e a demanda dependem desse valor. Há uma demanda por uma certa quantidade da mercadoria a seu valor natural de custo e é a ele que a oferta de longo prazo se iguala. (Mill, apud Carson, 2004, p. 34)

O suposto “dinamismo” da teoria do valor-trabalho deve ser julgado no contexto de minha discussão acima; a teoria do valor-trabalho é mais “dinâmica” no sentido de que é capaz apenas de lidar com tendências de longo prazo, enquanto a teoria subjetiva tenta explicar a alta dos preços de cada ponto no tempo, inclusive os preços do futuro distante. Não é isso que a maioria das pessoas querem dizer quando se referem a uma teoria como estática e à outra como dinãmica.

Mesmo assim, Carson (a exemplo de Mill) levanta um ponto interessante. Poderiam os subjetivistas estarem negligenciando o todo e apenas observando as partes? Mesmo se o teórico do valor-trabalho admitir que, a um dado momento, o preço é determinado pela oferta e pela demanda, se essas forças forem governadas pelo princípio do trabalho, essa teoria não seria mais fundamental, de certa forma?

Não é necessário responder a essa pergunta, porque sua premissa não é verdadeira. A demanda (não a quantidade demandada) é, de fato, completamente independente de quaisquer considerações a respeito dos custos; Mill está simplesmente sendo descuidado ao afirmar que a demanda depende do valor. Na economia convencional padrão, a oferta é determinada pelo custo (marginal). Porém, mesmo nesse caso, isso não reduz tudo ao princípio do trabalho (ou dos custos); no máximo, mostra (como Alfred Marshall insistiria) que é falso atribuir o valor de troca a um ou a outro. Para fazer uma ilustração simples: suponhamos que estejamos em um equilíbrio inicial de longo prazo onde o preço dos charutos é de US$ 5. De repente há um grande aumento da demanda por charutos (i.e., a curva da demanda se desloca para a direia). A não ser que a curva da oferta seja perfeitamente elástica [17], o novo preço de equilíbrio será mais alto (digamos, de US$ 8). O “princípio do custo” é válido nesse caso, é claro, mas o custo de produzir um charuto não é independente da demanda do mercado; seu preço passou de US$ 5 para US$ 8 (por causa de custos marginais mais altos por conta da maior produção). Perceba que esse não é apenas um efeito de curto prazo; como qualquer livro-texto de princípios econômicos explica, mesmo as curvas de oferta de longo prazo podem tender para cima (ou para baixo) dados certos níveis de produção (essa é a explicação dos livros-textos do motivo de alguns setores serem dominados por “oligopólios” ou “monopólios naturais”). Portanto, embora seja verdade que a utilidade marginal de um bem possa ser influenciada por considerações a seus custos (já que o custo dos fatores pode influenciar a quantidade de um bem), é também verdadeiro que a demanda dos consumidores pode influenciar o custo de produção de uma mercadoria (porque fatores de demanda podem influenciar a quantidade de um bem0.

Além disso, os economistas austríacos realmente consideram a utilidade como o determinante natural do preço. Isso ocorre porque a curva de oferta não é determinada somente por fatos técnicos “objetivos”, mas depende de avaliações psíquicas de satisfação por parte dos produtores. Austríacos puristas negam que exista o “custo real” e insistem que todos os custos de produção na verdade não passam de custos de oportunidade, que são definidos como avaliações subjetivas de oportunidades preteridas. Assim, o valor subjetivo permeia não só o lado da demanda, mas também o lado da oferta da determinação de preços. O ponto de partida fundamental da teoria dos preços moderna é a noção de trocas em que cada parte abre mão daquilo que valoriza menos em troca daquilo que valoriza mais. Esse raciocínio é completamente ignorado por quaisquer teorias de preço que enfatizem os custos (ou o trabalho).

As contribuições de Carson à moderna teoria do valor-trabalho

Para seu crédito, Carson reconhece que a crítica de Böhm-Bawerk à teoria do valor-trabalho continha ao menos alguns pontos válidos. Carson, assim, tenta reabilitar a teoria, livrando-a da interpretação objetivista (defeituosa, como admitido na página 87) de Marx e também para acomodar o papel da preferência temporal. Nos dois casos, eu devo concluir que as tentativas de Carson são inadequadas para salvar a teoria.

Ao fazer uma busca em seu capítulo intitulado “Uma reformulação subjetivista da teoria do valor-trabalho”, é difícil encontrar exatamente o que é a nova teoria de Carson. Ele nega explicitamente, por exemplo, que o valor de troca relativo de duas mercadorias dependa da quantidade relativa (ignorando problemas de medição) de trabalho envolvido em sua produção. Pelo que posso perceber, o trecho a seguir é o melhor sumário da teoria de Carson do valor-trabalho:

O produtor continuará a levar seus serviços ao mercado somente se receber o preço necessário, em sua avaliação subjetiva, para compensá-lo pela desutilidade envolvida na produção. E ele será incapaz de cobrar um preço maior que essa quantia necessária por muito tempo se a entrada no mercado for livre e a oferta for elástica, uma vez que concorrentes entrarão no setor até que o preço se iguale à desutilidade de produzir o incremento final da mercadoria. (pp. 70-71)

A não ser pela sua afirmação de que o “preço [se igualaria] à desutilidade” [18], imagino que a maioria dos austríacos concordaria com as afirmações acima. Se isso os torna adeptos de uma teoria do valor-trabalho subjetivada, que seja. Contudo, as duas frases acima realmente constituem uma teoria de determinação de preços? Seriam elas capazes de substituir a análise moderna baseada na utilidade marginal?

Adiante, Carson explica por que o trabalho é o único custo “real”, enquanto todos os outros custos não passam de custos de oportunidade (ou seja, artificiais):

Os próprios marginalistas, tanto neoclássicos quanto austríacos, reconhecem que o trabalho seja um “custo real”, num sentido singular. (…) Os únicos gastos de fatores que não são trabalho são custos de oportunidade — os outros usos a que eles poderiam ter sido colocados. Contudo, o gasto de trabalho é um custo absoluto que independe da quantidade disponível. Ou, para ser mais preciso, o custo de oportunidade de um gasto de trabalho não são simplesmente os usos alternativos do trabalho, mas o não-trabalho. O trabalhador aloca seu tempo não apenas entre formas concorrentes de trabalho, mas também entre trabalho e não-trabalho. (pp. 72-73, itálico no original) [19]

Devo confessar que nunca considerei essa suposta singularidade da venda do próprio trabalho (em relação a outros produtos à venda) muito convincente. Suponhamos que eu seja o dono de uma floresta virgem junto a minha casa. Eu considero todos os diferentes tipos de uso ao qual eu posso colocá-la. Eu posso limpá-la e plantar tomates, posso vender a terra a uma empreiteira que vá construir um shopping center ou posso retirá-la da “cadeia produtiva” e deixá-la em seu estado natural. Dado que eu sofreria um desconforto físico genuíno ao ver trabalhadores cortando as árvores da floresta, como isso seria diferente dos “custos reais” no sentido carsoniano? [20] Por outro lado, alguns bens (como a cerveja) geram grande satisfação física, enquanto outros (como um livro-texto de matemática) geralmente não geram. No entanto, ainda explicamos a demanda por cerveja e livros-texto fazendo referência à utilidade, mesmo que o primeiro caso inclua experiências fisiológicas, enquanto o seguinte não inclua. Assim, a cerveja oferece “utilidade em real” em contraste à “utilidade de oportunidade” do livro?

Por conta de sua relevância à discussão anterior sobre a generalidade da teoria, eu não posso abandonar este tópico sem mencionar como Carson ridiculariza o conceito de custo de oportunidade:

Os subjetivistas (…) tratavam a estrutura existente de direitos de propriedade sobre os “fatores” como um dado e passaram a seguir a mostrar como o produto seria distribuído entre esses “fatores” de acordo com sua contribuição marginal. Por esse método, se a escravidão ainda existisse, o marginalista poderia falar de cara lavada sobre a contribuição marginal do escravo ao produto (imputado, é claro, ao senhor de escravos) e do “custo de oportunidade” envolvido na alocação do escravo a outro uso. (p. 79)

A isso eu só posso responder que sim, Sr. Carson, é exatamente dessa maneira que eu explicaria a precificação dos escravos (ou, na verdade, do preço de aluguel de um escravo – o preço de um escravo dependeria da taxa de juros, da expectativa de vida do escravo, se o senhor seria dono dos filhos do escravo, etc). A teoria subjetivista do valor pode explicar diferenças de preços mesmo sob condições que não se adequam a nosso senso de justiça. [21] Eu também poderia analisar os efeitos de, digamos, uma tarifa alfandegária sobre carros, embora eu considere tarifas como imorais e ineficientes.

Finalmente, chegamos à discussão de Carson sobre a preferência temporal. Lembre-se de que uma das objeções de Böhm-Bawerk à teoria do valor-trabalho era que ela ignorava (o que chamaríamos de) juro originário. Para dar um exemplo simples, o preço de mercado (mesmo no longo prazo) de um vinho de vinte anos seria maior que o de um vinho de dez anos, embora a quantidade de trabalho envolvida na produção de ambos seja virtualmente idêntica. Assim, uma abordagem marxista, na qual o “trabalho total” envolvido na produção de um bem envolve quantidades objetivas (não importa como sejam medidas), não pode tratar de um caso como esse. [22]

Carson lida com o problema afirmando que “mesmo que o trabalho de hoje seja trocado pelo de amanhã por um preço, trata-se ainda de uma troca de trabalhos” (p. 111). A isso nós podemos simplesmente perguntar: “Por quê? Por que a troca do produto do trabalho de hoje pelo produto do trabalho de amanhã não seria de fato uma troca de produtos?” Com isso, Carson avança para um erro demonstrável:

Quando o trabalhador se abstém do consumo presente para acumular seu próprio capital, a preferência temporal simplesmente é uma forma adicional de desutilidade do trabalho presente em contraposição ao trabalho futuro. Trata-se de outro fator na negociação no mercado, onde o produto do trabalho é alocado entre os trabalhadores. (p. 111)

Essa explicação simplesmente não funciona. Carson aqui confunde a utilidade mais baixa atribuída a um produto futuro com uma desutilidade mais alta de sua produção. Carson está familiarizado (p. 105) com a crítica de Böhm-Bawerk à teoria da abstinência, onde ele fazia essa distinção de forma muito clara. Contudo, Carson aparentemente não compreendeu o ponto de Böhm-Bawerk. Portanto, permita-me aplicar o argumento ao nosso exemplo do vinho. Em que sentido há maior desutilidade na produção de vinho que será vendido em vinte anos em relação ao vinho que será colocado à venda em dez anos? Se alguém roubar a garrafa do vinho, o produtor “perde” mais se pretendia vender a garrafa em vinte anos (em vez de dez)?

É claro que não. O motivo por que o trabalhador que produz uma garrafa de vinho e a vende depois de 20 anos recebe três porcos, enquanto o trabalhador que vende a garrafa depois de dez anos só recebe dois porcos, não é que tenha havido maior trabalho físico (ou desutilidade psíquica em geral) para fazer a primeira bebida. Pelo contrário, deve-se ao fato de que (estipulados os nossos números) os trabalhadores recebem maior utilidade de porcos entregues mais cedo do que mais tarde e que (por exemplo) alguém que deseje vender três porcos a serem entregues em dez anos só seria capaz de conseguir trocá-los por dois porcos agora.

Isso nos leva a meu comentário final sobre a preferência temporal de Carson. Após admitir que mesmo em uma sociedade mutualista os bens presentes seriam trocados por um preço em relação a bens futuros, Carson escreve que “apenas em uma economia capitalista (i.e., estatista) a classe proprietária (…) é capaz de se manter sem trabalhar através do empréstimo dos meios de subsistência aos produtores em troca de uma parte do produto futuro” (p. 112). Eu me pergunto o que aconteceria, então, em uma sociedade mutualista se um trabalhador industrioso acumulasse grandes quantidades de bens de consumo e os vendesse em troca de bens futuros. Nesse caso, ele não poderia viver indefinidamente dos juros? Isso seria proibido? Ou Carson nega que isso pudesse acontecer na ausência da intervenção estatal?

Conclusão

Kevin Carson apresenta uma discussão informada sobre a teoria clássica do valor, mas fracassa ao tentar defendê-la da crítica de Böhm-Bawerk. Há vários problemas com a teoria do valor-trabalho, nenhum dos quais se aplica à moderna teoria subjetivista. Adicionalmente, tudo que é verdadeiro em relação à teoria do custo (valor-trabalho) pode ser incorporado à teoria subjetivista.

Além disso, não só a teoria subjetivista de Böhm-Bawerk e de outros foi capaz de apresentar uma alternativa melhor à teoria do valor trabalho, mas ela também permitiu que se explicasse não apenas os preços relativos, mas também preços monetários absolutos. (Devido a seu desprezo pela utilidade, é difícil conceber como uma teoria dos custos poderia explicar adequadamente o nível absoluto de preços monetários.) Inicialmente, o tratamento dos preços monetários era problemático para a teoria subjetivista do valor, mas nas mãos de Mises (1980) — como diriam os marxistas –, essa aparente deficiência da teoria foi transformada em sua gloriosa realização.

Notas:

1. Robert P. Murphy é professor-assistente visitante de economia no Hillsdale College. Seu email é robert.murphy@hillsdale.edu. Seus interesses de pesquisa incluem a teoria do capital e dos juros e a história do pensamento econômico, especialmente envolvendo Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk.

2. Perceba que a tarefa (como eu a defino) de uma teoria econômica do valor não precisa se preocupar com aquilo a que Carl Menger (1991) se referia como “comerciabilidade” de bens diversos.

3. De fato, a teoria subjetivista do valor foi originalmente aplicada somente ao caso das trocas diretas, onde ela foi usada para derivar razões de preço meramente relativas (de equilíbrio). Preços reais absolutos em dinheiro então eram explicados por um mecanismo totalmente diferente, que envolvia microagregados (como a oferta de moeda e a velocidade de circulação). Foi só com o trabalho pioneiro de Ludwig von Mises (1980) que a explicação dos preços monetários foi incorporada à teoria subjetiva do valor. Falarei mais a respeito na conclusão deste artigo.

4. Permita-me advertir o leitor que, neste artigo, eu frequentemente desconsiderarei a definição moderna do custo como valor (psíquico, subjetivo) de uma oportunidade de que o agente abre mão. Especialmente ao tratar da teoria do valor do “custo”, eu usarei o termo apenas como gastos em insumos, que é o que todos têm em mente neste contexto.

5. Perceba que eu não afirmo que uma teoria do valor trabalho iguala o preço de um bem com a quantidade de trabalho necessária para sua produção, porque (ao contrário dos custos) o valor é denominado por unidades diferentes.

6. Como veremos abaixo, Carson também concorda com esse ponto de vista.

7. Obviamente, eu sou forçado a trocar o realismo por números arredondados bonitinhos nesses cenários.

8. Lembre-se de que uma lata de graxa para sapatos requer duas horas (ou seja, 120 minutos) de trabalho e que cada engraxada utiliza 1/5 de uma lata; portanto, cada engraxada requer 15 minutos de trabalho imediato, mais 120/5 = 24 minutos de trabalho requeridos para a transformação da cera em graxa. Além disso, cada nova lata de graxa para sapatos requer 5 dólares em cera e, portanto, cada engraxada custa 1 dólar em cera.

9. Em algumas exposições — como a de Carson — o argumento é o de que o dono do fator original não deve receber compensação além de seu trabalho.

10. Na realidade, devo esclarecer que esta última objeção não se aplica à teoria clássica do valor-trabalho, uma vez que as unidades de trabalho não são, em si mesmas, preços.

11. Isto é, casos em que a oferta e a demanda relativas, e não o custo, determinam o preço.

12. Leitores familiarizados com algumas das ferozes críticas formulados por Böhm-Bawerk apreciarão a relativa cortesia demonstrada na citação acima.

13. Na verdade, Carson alega anteriormente que o termo mercadoria (“commodity“) deve ser entendido como bens reprodutíveis, i.e., precisamente aqueles a que o princípio do custo (trabalho) se aplica. Mesmo assim, as outras exceções ao princípio do trabalho (como flutuações temporárias na demanda e nos juros originários) ainda se aplicam e fazem com que sua citação a Ricardo seja imprecisa.

14. Utilizo aqui uma analogia com a mecânica clássica tanto por uma analogia à economia clássica quanto por sua versão da lei da gravidade ser muito mais simples do que a versão de Einstein.

15. Eu não desejo enfatizar excessivamente este ponto; há certamente outros princípios das ciências naturais que seriam análogos à visão de Carson da teoria do valor-trabalho. Apenas observo aqui que sua escolha da lei da gravidade foi equivocada.

16. A teoria moderna consegue tratar facilmente de economias de “dotação pura” (isto é, sem produção), como os campos de prisioneiros de guerra da Segunda guerra Mundial. Em seu famoso artigo que discutia o padrão de preços (em cigarros) dentro do campo e sua conformidade às leis de oferta e demanda, Radford afirma que “é difícil reconciliar este fato com a teoria do valor-trabalho” (Radford, 1945, p. 193).

17. Para que Carson não me acuse de atacar um espantalho, permita-me esclarecer aqui que Carson discute elasticidade. Porém, assim como as admissões de Ricardo em relação às exceções a sua lei, Carson também parece não perceber a importância de suas admissões.

18. Em alguns pontos, Carson parece depender desse erro ao invés de simplesmente escolher suas palavras descuidadamente. Por exemplo, ao criticar a tentativa de Marx de comparar as horas de trabalho de diferentes habilidades, Carson afirma que “a única maneira de fazer tal redução sem circularidade, através das forças de mercado, seria pela atribuição de uma característica comum tanto ao trabalho ‘complexo’ como ao ‘simples’ que pudesse compará-los em uma escala comum: ou seja, a desutilidade subjetiva dos trabalhadores” (p. 90; ênfase minha).

19. Nessa linha, Carson escreve em outro ponto que:

[O] valor de troca de um bem deriva do trabalho envolvido na sua produção; é a desutilidade do trabalho e a necessidade de persuadir o trabalhador a levar seus serviços ao processo produtivo, fenômeno único entre os “fatores de produção”, que cria o valor de troca. (Carson, p. 83)

20. Para um exemplo diferente, imagine uma viúva que seja forçada a penhorar seu anel de casamento para não passar fome. Se isso causa a ela uma dor “objetiva”, isso poderia contar como “custo real” de fornecer ao mercado um anel de casamento a mais?

21. Carson também explica os desvios do valor natural devido a lucros e juros afirmando que esses itens (a não ser pelo papel da preferência temporal, a que Carson abre exceção) são “retornos de monopólio sobre o capital” e não distorceriam os preços de mercado em uma sociedade mutualista (p. 24).

22. A abordagem da utilidade marginal, evidentemente, pode explicar esse fenômeno facilmente: em primeiro lugar, o vinho mais antigo tem gosto melhor e, por isso, os consumidores o valorizam mais.

Referências:

Böhm-Bawerk, E.v. Capital and Interest. South Holland, IL: Libertarian Press, 1959. 3 vols.

Carson, K.A. Studies in Mutualist Political Economy. Fayetteville, AK. 2004. Disponível em: <http://mutualist.org/id47.html>

Menger, C. “On the Origin of Money”. In: Ebeling, R. ed. Austrian Economics: A Reader. Hillsdale, MI: Hillsdale College Press, 1991, pp. 483-504.

Mises, L.v. The Theory of Money and Credit. Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1980.

_____. Human Action: A Treatise on Economics. 3ª ed. Chicago, IL: Contemporary Books, 1966.

Radford, R.A. “The Economic Organization of a P.O.W. Camp”. In: Economica vol. 12, no. 48, novembro, pp. 189-201.

Rothbard, M.N. Man, Economy, and State: A Treatise on Economic Principles. Auburn, AL: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 1993.

Sraffa, P. The Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960.

Traduzido por Erick Vasconcelos.

Stigmergy - C4SS Blog
In Which I Accept a Challenge

So, just a reminder as electoral season resumes: If you want to say that I am obliged to support Bernie Sanders’s campaign on the grounds that, however much it may offend my purist sensibilities, I need to speak to real-world practical gains, then you need to show me how, practically, me being invested in this campaign is going to advance any of those real world goals, under realistic political conditions, before you can claim the high ground of practical politics.

I’m not even going to worry you with explaining how we can be confident that a Bernie Sanders presidency would be significantly better than the status quo. That’s a tedious argument and one that is actually a lot harder to sort out than it might seem.

So let’s set that aside, for the sake of argument. Take it for granted. But now at a minimum, it is still actually on you first to demonstrate how my “supporting” Bernie Sanders is even going to contribute to Bernie Sanders being elected president in the first place. I don’t think anyone doubts that that outcome is still a long shot at best. And whether it is a long shot or a sure thing, once again, I live in Alabama, and no matter who I vote for I can predict with 99.989% confidence right now that this state will break 60-40 in favor of whomever the Republican Party happens to nominate, and all of the electoral votes will go to that Republican. If Bernie Sanders has a shot at winning, I cannot possibly improve that shot by swinging my vote. Even if I convinced 100% of my neighbors in a fifteen mile radius to vote for Bernie Sanders, I still couldn’t improve that shot. If Bernie Sanders has no shot, I certainly can’t do anything to chip away at that impossibility from where I am.

Telling me to support the Sanders campaign is not, as far as I can see, practical politics in any way. It is only a fetishistic imitation of “practicality” which cones from the ritual form of electoral participation. In real-world terms it doesn’t matter how great you think a Sanders presidency would be; it is not an outcome I can practically contribute to by my actions. What you are asking for is a futile, purely symbolic gesture from me in support of an idle hope.

And hey, I am an anarchist after all. I have no problem with futile, purely symbolic gestures for the sake of unrealistic idle hopes. I indulge in them all the time. But if I am going to hold out for an unrealistic, utopian dream, I would like to at least hold out for an unrealistic, utopian dream that I actually believe in, not the hypothetical lesser-disaster of another Progressive Democrat presidency.

Until you have some concrete way of improving on those odds, my view is going to remain that social protest, direct action, honest debate and day-to-day little pushes on the margin towards radical cultural change are not just more idealistic or “pure,” but more immediate, immensely more practical outlets for whatever activist energy I have than cheerleading for yet another long-shot presidential campaign. Practicality doesn’t come for free with a ballot. Ignoring that doesn’t make you a hardnosed realist, it just makes you another dreamy devotee of American civic religion.

Stigmergy - C4SS Blog
The Distinctiveness of Left-Libertarianism
C4SS-Chartier-Meme-DLL41

…Left-libertarians share with other leftists the recognition that big businesses enjoy substantial privileges that benefit them while harming the public. But they stress that the proper response to corporate privilege is to eliminate subsidies, bailouts, cartelizing regulations, and other state-driven features of the legal, political, and economic environments that prop up corporate power rather than retaining the privileges while increasing state regulatory involvement in the economy — which can be expected to create new opportunities for elite manipulation, leave corporate power intact, stifle upstart alternatives to corporate behemoths, and impoverish the public.

Gary Chartier, The Distinctiveness of Left-Libertarianism

Greek, Stateless Embassies
Ανοικτή Επιστολή προς τον Ελληνικό Λαό

Προς τον λαό της Ελλάδας. Εμείς στο Κέντρο για μια Ακρατική Κοινωνία (Center for a Stateless Society) λυπόμαστε για την πρόσφατη απογοήτευση σας στην αποδοχή από τον ΣΥΡΙΖΑ του καθεστώντος λιτότητας που σας επιβλήθηκε από την Ευρωπαϊκή Ένωση. Δυστυχώς, κινήματα τα οποία εστιάζονται στην κατάληψη της κρατικής εξουσίας ως τον κύριο άξονα του αγώνα, καταλήγουν όχι μόνο ανήμπορα, αλλά γίνονται στην πραγματικότητα μεγαλύτερος στόχος για εγκλωβισμό και εκβιασμούς από τις παγκόσμιες δυνάμεις του νεοφιλελευθερισμού. Αυτό το γνωρίζεται καλύτερα από τον καθένα.

Ευτυχώς έχετε ακόμα πολλά όπλα στη διάθεσή σας για να καταπολεμήσετε άμεσα τις δυνάμεις του εταιρικού δεσμού, χωρίς να το πράξετε μέσω του κράτους – όπλα πολύ πιο δραστικά από αυτά της κυβέρνησης ΣΥΡΙΖΑ, ακόμη και όταν αυτή βρισκόταν στα απόγειά της μετά την εκλογές ή το δημοψήφισμα.

Ο πρωταρχικός μας στόχος στο Κέντρο για μια Ακρατική Κοινωνία (c4ss.org) — ένα επιστημονικό επιτελείο αριστερών αναρχικών των αγορών (left-wing market anarchist) — είναι η άμεση δημιουργία τους είδους της κοινωνίας που θέλουμε μέσα από οριζόντιους, αυτοοργάνωτους αντιθεσμούς και άμεση δράση, παρά με μάταιες και δαπανηρές προσπάθειες για μία κατά μέτωπο επίθεση κατά του κρατικού μηχανισμού. Ή όπως το παραθέτει και το σύνθημα Wobbly, “δημιουργώντας την νέα κοινωνική δομή μέσα στο κέλυφος της παλιάς.”

Σημειώστε οτι με τον όρο «αναρχικός των αγορών» δεν εννοούμε μια κοινωνία στην οποία οι περισσότερες κοινωνικές λειτουργίες διοργανώνονται μέσω των επιχειρήσεων και των χρηματικών δεσμών, αλλά μια κοινωνία οργανωμένη γύρω από όλες τις μορφές της συναινετικής αλληλεπίδρασης — περιλαμβανομένων και των συναλλαγών μίας ελεύθερης αγοράς. Το μεγαλύτερο μέρος της πραγματικής παραγωγής και διανομής μπορεί κάλλιστα να οργανωθεί μέσω της άμεση παραγωγής για κατανάλωση και αυτοδιάθεση στην άτυπη και οικιακή οικονομία, την κοινωνική και χαρισματική οικονομία, των κοινοτικών φυσικών πόρων και της μαζικής συνεργασίας — βασικές αρχές τις οποίες μοιραζόμαστε με όλες τις άλλες αναρχικές κοινωνικές τάσεις.

Και χρησιμοποιούμε τον όρο “ελεύθερη αγορά” για να αναφερθούμε, όχι στον καπιταλισμό ή σε κρατικά επιβαλλόμενους νεοφιλελεύθερους επιχειρηματικούς κανόνες (όπως κάνουν οι εκβιαστές σας), αλλά απλά σε μια οικονομία στην οποία το κράτος δεν παρεμβαίνει για την επιβολή των τεχνητών δικαιωμάτων ιδιοκτησίας και τεχνητών ελλείψεων (όπως «πνευματικής ιδιοκτησίας»), από την οποία οι ιδιοκτήτριες τάξεις εισπράττουν ενοίκια, περικλείουν άδειες εκτάσεις γης και ορυκτών πόρων ή εκδιώκουν καλλιεργητές από τη γη τους για λογαριασμό των εξορυκτικών βιομηχανιών και ολιγαρχών, καθιστούν τη γη και το κεφάλαιο τεχνητά σπανιο ως εμπόδιο για την αυτό-απασχόληση και την συνεταιριστική παραγωγή, ή επιβάλουν τα μονοπώλια και τα εμπόδια εισόδου που επιτρέπουν στις επιχειρήσεις να ιδρύουν βιομηχανικά καρτέλ. Με άλλα λόγια, μία αντι-καπιταλιστική ελεύθερη αγορά.

Στόχος μας δεν είναι να αναλάβουμε την ηγεσία υφιστάμενων θεσμών, αλλά να τους καταστήσουμε άνευ σημασίας. Δεν θέλουμε να αναλάβουμε το κράτος ή να αλλάξουμε τις πολιτικές του. Θέλουμε να καταστήσουμε τους νόμους του μη εφαρμόσιμους. Δεν θέλουμε να καταλάβουμε τις επιχειρήσεις και να τις καταστήσουμε πιο «κοινωνικά υπεύθυνες». Θέλουμε να οικοδομήσουμε μια αντι-οικονομία με ανοικτή πηγή πληροφόρησης, με μικρές συνοικιακές βιομηχανίες, περμακουλτούρα, κρυπτογραφημένες νομισματικές συναλλαγές και συνεταιριστικές τράπεζες, αφήνοντας τις επιχειρήσεις να μαραζώσουν μαζί με το κράτος. Δεν ελπίζουμε να μεταρρυθμίσουμε την υφιστάμενη τάξη. Προτιθέμεθα να την θάψουμε.

Με απλά λόγια, η αμφισβητηση του καπιταλιστικού ελέγχου του κράτους ισοδυναμεί με το να παίζουμε τους όρους του εχθρού μας, σε ένα παιχνίδι σχεδιασμένο να δίνει το πλεονέκτημα στην μεριά με τα περισσότερα χρήματα και τις εσωτερικές διασυνδέσεις. Τα καλά νέα είναι ό,τι ότι και να ίσχυε στο παρελθόν, οι ιεραρχικοί θεσμοί όπως το κράτος και εταιρείες σιγά σιγά απαρχαιώνονται. Η πλειοψηφία των διεργασιών όσων αφορά την οργάνωση παραγωγής, της διανομής της και της κοινωνικής ζωής δεν τους χρειάζεται.

Νέες, ανοιχτές τεχνολογίες παραγωγής όπως η μικρο-βιομηχανία (micromanufacturing) καθιστούν εργαλεία υψηλής τεχνολογίας προσιτά σε αυτοαπασχολούμενους καθώς και σε μικρές συνεταιριστικές ομάδες — ουσιαστικά μια αντιστροφή της τεχνολογικής αλλαγής που από τα ατομικά προσιτά εργαλεία πέρασε στα ακριβά μηχανήματα μεγάλης κλίμακας που οδήγησαν στο εργοστασιακό σύστημα. Η υπερυψωμένη εντατική κηπουρική μπορεί να παράγει αγροτικά προϊόντα εις πολλαπλού ανά εκτάριο σε αντίθεση με τις εταιρικές βιομηχανίες. Δίκτυα P2P (peer to peer) με την τεχνολογία των οικιακών υπολογιστών, αφήνουν κατά πολύ πίσω τις παλαιές εταιρικές βιομηχανίες πληροφόρησης.

Τα μεγάλα αποθέματα επενδυτικών κεφαλαίων των παλαιών εταιρικών δεινόσαυρων και των εισοδηματικών πρακτικών, βασίζονται εξ ολοκλήρου στα κρατικά μονοπώλια, προσπαθώντας να επισυνάψουν τις νέες τεχνολογίες ελευθερίας και ενδυνάμωσης στο πλαίσιο του εταιρικού τους πλαισίου. Ευτυχώς, οι ίδιες τεχνολογίες παραγωγής που καθιστούν περιττά τα κεφάλαια και τους οργανισμούς τους — όπως ο διαμοιρασμός αρχείων (file-sharing) και η κρυπτογράφηση — καθιστούν και τα μονοπώλια τους μη εφαρμόσιμα.

Τα όπλα αυτά για την οικοδόμηση μιας νέας κοινωνίας πέραν του καπιταλιστικού ελέγχου σας είναι ελεύθερα διαθέσιμα εδώ και τώρα. Οι Κεντρικές Τράπεζες, το ΔΝΤ και η Άνγκελα Μέρκελ είναι ανίκανοι να σας σταματήσουν, διότι, σε αντίθεση με την κυβέρνηση των Αθηνών, εσείς δεν είστε ενσωματωμένοι σε ένα επίσημο θεσμικό όργανο πάνω στο οποίο μπορούν να ασκήσουν επιρροή. Πολεμούν με ένα φάντασμα.

Stigmergy - C4SS Blog
Please Don’t Vote. It’s Worse than Worthless. There are Alternatives.

Three and a half years ago I wrote an essay about why Americans should stop participating in the presidential election — either as voters, as supporters of one candidate or another, or as participants in the endless social media and conversational back-and-forths. In short, that they should pay as little attention as possible to the election campaign and should revel in and take pride in their ignorance of the horse race and the candidates and their “positions.”

A couple of days ago, a friend of mine posted this on her Facebook wall:

I feel bad because I feel like I should listen to everything they have to say but, I just had to turn off the Republican Debate. I just couldn’t handle it. Even while looking at pictures of puppies and kittens.

So I decided I should dust this essay off and polish it up a bit in the hopes of helping her and other people who feel guilty about ignoring politicians. This election is shaping up to be the best one in my lifetime not to vote in, so I hope my essay will ease many unnecessarily troubled consciences.

It’s still 2015, isn’t it? The presidential election is fifteen months off and the party conventions are still almost a year away. These days campaign season seems to never end. You’re probably already being inundated with tweets and status updates and comments and op-ed pieces forwarded from family members and blog posts and video clips of indignant pundits — almost all designed to deride one candidate or boost another.

There are some rare, mature, and sensible ones that urge you to carefully consider the important issues, resist the distortions of propaganda and the news cycle, and look at the big picture before you vote. But above all, to vote! Vote as if it were the most important decision you were going to make this year.

I hope you will indulge a different point of view. I’m going to urge you not to vote. Further, I’m going to ask you not to encourage your friends and family to vote for anyone, or at all. Even better, I’m going to suggest that you cultivate a studied ignorance of the candidates and their positions so that even if you were forced at gunpoint into a voting booth next November you wouldn’t have any idea which lever to pull. And not only that, but I’m going to tell you how, by (not) doing all these things, you can be of greater service to your country, your community, your loved ones, and yourself.

There are two main reasons why I expect you to follow this heretical advice. One of them is utterly rational, logical, and easily demonstrated: your vote is utterly unimportant to the outcome of the election, and whether you carefully consider your vote and cast it wisely or whether you just flip a coin in the voting booth or whether you instead make other plans entirely, the effect you have on who becomes president will be the same. It doesn’t matter for whom you vote in the privacy of the booth, and so there is no reason to become an informed voter, and indeed no good reason to vote at all.

The second reason requires a little more imagination but amounts to this: presidential elections are harmful, and they become more harmful the more that people care about them and the more attention they devote to them. Most anything else you can imagine doing with your time other than paying attention to politicians for the next year and change would be more beneficial to you, to your loved ones, and to your community.

Then there’s the dessert — almost the best reason of all: if you decide now that you aren’t going to vote in November, you can stop paying attention. You can let all of the squabbling rattle on without you, and you can ignore the impassioned partisans and the indignant commercials and the breathless commentators and your earnest and tireless relative who forwards everything. You’ll thank me.

Voting is Pointless

Your vote, should you fail to heed my advice and decide to cast one, will make no difference in the result of the presidential election. If you cast your vote for the candidate whose stated positions most closely match your views, whose image is most sympathetic to your self-image, who seems wisest and most well-advised — or if you devilishly succumb to a whim to do exactly the opposite — it doesn’t matter, because your vote will not make any difference in who becomes the president.

This is not because American elections are corrupt and error-prone, though certainly they are. True enough: because of poor interface design, the ease of malicious hacking, politically-motivated voter roll manipulation, and other such reasons, there is only a dim resemblance between the vote tally and the actual intended preferences of the voters. Also true: your well-considered, researched, intelligently-selected vote may easily be swamped by the haphazard votes of dozens of morons or by flipped bits in the slapdash voting machine or by snafus at the post office. It also cannot be denied that if the vote totals are by some chance close enough to matter in any important precinct (e.g. Palm Beach in 2000), the results will quickly be taken out of the hands of the voters entirely and left to the chad-wrangling of political operatives or partisan judges.

But these are not the reasons why voting is pointless. Even if none of these things were true, the sheer size of the electorate makes any individual vote mathematically worthless. Even if every vote were counted, only once, and actually represented the real, informed intention of a real, live voter, and even if every eligible voter were indeed permitted to vote, and even if the weird electoral college were abolished or replaced with something more sensible – even then, you would be wasting your time to vote.

Simply as a matter of scale, as the size of the electorate increases, the likelihood that any one vote will matter quickly, asymptotically approaches zero. At the current scale, at the width of the finest pen with which we can draw this asymptote, it is indistinguishable from zero.

But, you may be thinking, although my vote individually may not have any effect, our votes (you and me, and our right-thinking friends) in the aggregate just might – if the aggregate is big enough. If it is true that it is completely irrational and worthless to vote, and if rational people act on this knowledge, doesn’t that mean that our elections will necessarily be decided by the opinions of people who are too irrational, mathematically illiterate, or unwise not to refrain from voting? Can we risk that?

The answer to this objection is that, yes, tautologically, to the extent that our presidential elections are in fact decided by the expressed aggregate will of the voters, they are decided by the expressed aggregate will of those too unwise to know not to vote. No, we shouldn’t risk such a crazy thing, but we cannot change it by voting, because by voting you immediately become part of the problem you hope to solve.

It’s like looking at a sidewalk 3-card-monte game and saying to yourself that you’d better throw down a bet, because otherwise that unscrupulous dealer will be able to successfully con all those unsophisticated people who are playing without knowing the trick. If you play, you become the sucker.

But aha! Here is a reductio that beats my argument cold: “If my vote is so darned worthless, why are so many people spending so much time and energy and money trying to obtain it?” This is indeed a nut that needs cracking, but it will have to wait until the next section.

If participating in the electoral spectacle were merely pointless, I wouldn’t be writing this screed. Lots of things that people do aren’t really good for anything, and that’s nobody’s business but their own. However…

Voting is Harmful

If you put the dread judgment of mathematics aside, elections might be worth getting excited about if they were actually what they sometimes pretend to be: our way of choosing qualified people to take necessary and important policy-making and -enacting jobs, in such a way that those people best represent the considered judgments of the citizenry.

But these parody elections like the one being inflicted on us today are nothing of the sort.

For one thing, elections like these effectively select some of the worst people among us by perversely rewarding the sort of charming mendacity and amoral ruthlessness that characterize sociopaths. If you watch a political debate or stump speech or what-have-you, you’re watching an extended act of dishonesty. You’re watching someone whose every word is being chosen (or, more often than not, has been carefully chosen earlier) to manipulate you. Honesty – that is, the genuine motivation to inform someone accurately about what they want or need to know – never enters into it for a second.

I’ve met people like this, and you probably have too – people who seem to think that the only purpose of speech is to tell self-serving stories that trick other people into doing what they want — but when we meet them in real life we warn our friends about them and speculate as to how they became the monsters they are. But when they put on power ties and try to get us to vote for them, many of us lose all of our good sense.

“Well, that’s the way the game is played,” I sometimes hear. “If you don’t fight dirty, you aren’t going to win, so even the good ones have to fight dirty. An honest candidate couldn’t win.” But if you have accidentally (let us hope) established a political system that excels at elevating psychopaths to positions of power and authority, maybe the answer is not to hope for a flock of honorable people who can impersonate psychopaths long enough to climb into power, but to stop propping up a process that installs psychopaths as your rulers, and, once these psychopaths have been successfully identified by their success in the electoral process, to stop giving them so much power to do evil.

Sometimes people respond to criticisms like this by saying that there is no point in holding out for an ideal democracy, but that the sorts of imperfect elections designed by mortal men, of which the American presidential election is one variety, are better than none at all. Would I rather have a hereditary monarchy or a communist one-party state?

But these elections aren’t just “imperfect” incarnations of democratic decision-making — they’re not democratic at all in any important sense, that is in the sense of being an instance of people ruling themselves rather than being subjected to the decisions of others. It’s as if your dad promised to take you to a baseball game and instead took you to a junkyard where nine mannequins were stood up against a wall wearing baseball caps. “Well, it’s not an ideal baseball game, I’ll grant you that, but we can’t expect perfection. The perfect is the enemy of the good. Besides, you told me you hate football. Want a bag of styrofoam popcorn?”

Those who exaggerate the importance of elections (usually as part of their campaign pitch about how important it is for you to vote, and in a particular way) also tend to exaggerate the power of office-holders and the abilities (and propensities) of the politicians who hold office. This has the unfortunate effect of getting people accustomed to the idea that these offices ought to have great powers concentrated in them, and ought to be looked on to solve our problems, create miracles, provide for our needs, and so forth. This in turn makes the psychopaths in power more dangerous.

These elections also degrade the honesty, decency, and community solidarity of ordinary people who are induced to participate in them. They turn otherwise good people into spin doctors who see half of their fellow-citizens as enemies to be defeated and who annoy the rest of us with their email forwards and arguments at parties. These elections harm our communities, waste our resources, and embarrass us in the eyes of posterity. The best way we can confront them is to refuse to fan the flames or provide fresh fuel.

Earlier I raised the question of why so much money and effort is being spent to chase down votes that I claimed weren’t worth anything at all. The simple answer is that your vote is of no worth to you, but it may under some circumstances have some tiny worth to those who want to harvest it. Let me explain:

Your presidential vote (assuming your state is even “in play”) may be a tiny bit important and a tiny bit valuable to vote harvesters — though only as a fraction of the aggregate votes in your state (this makes intuitive sense). But to you, your vote is not even worth that fraction (this, people have a harder time understanding).

It’s kind of the same way that Coke & Pepsi spend an enormous amount of money, creative talent, and personnel to try to influence people to choose one of two almost identical products. Imagine how eagerly they would be trying if, by convincing 50.1% of Americans to choose one or the other, they could force 100% of us to drink nothing but for the next four years. In such a case, your vote — even your wee little vote — might indeed be worth something for Coke & Pepsi to pursue in the course of pursuing a larger percentage… but how much would it be worth it to you to cast that vote? Nothing at all.

(And as with the campaigns for Coke and Pepsi, the campaigns for president have little to do with the actual merits, if you can call them that, of the products. People cast their presidential votes not for the person and policies that eventually may occupy the office of president, but in a popularity contest between carefully market-tested candidate/brands. Witness all of the people who are angry at Obama because he did not behave in office at all like the president he had successfully convinced them to Hope for in order to win their votes. What were they voting for? A president or a brand identification? Blaming Obama for failing to usher in Change is like blaming Coke for failing to Add Life.)

If you pay attention to this charade, you give it more media market share – more “eyeballs.” You make the aggregate a little bigger and the election that much more expensive (if you’re buying it) or profitable (if you’re selling the tools to win it) – slightly increasing the amount of money, time, and attention necessary, and thereby also the various harms, including of course the endless corrupting pursuit of campaign cash by the politicians.

Also, in order to convince yourself to vote, or more specifically to vote “correctly,” you must tell yourself a story in which your vote is actually important or influential. This reinforces the illusion that the subjects of the U.S. government have meaningful democratic influence over its policies, and therefore this reduces the chances that you will look honestly at the real state of politics or will work for genuine change.

When you exaggerate the importance of voting for president – by urging people to vote one way or another or by making a big deal about anything the candidates are doing — you reinforce the illusion that voting for the right thing is anything like doing the right thing. The problems with our country aren’t caused by what people vote for on their ballots one day in November every four years, but by what they vote for with their actions on the 1,460 days in-between.

What You Can Do Instead

Well, then, what do I suggest? It is important, isn’t it, who the president is? We have to do something to make our influence felt, and, unless you’ve got the sniper chops of a Lee Harvey Oswald, election season is the time to do it, right? After all, even if the saying is true that “if voting could change anything, it would be illegal,” isn’t that also true of not voting?

Don’t slip back into superstition! Just because there isn’t an actual way for citizens to exercise reasonable democratic guidance over their government doesn’t make the fake ways any less fake. Just because you can’t win the lottery by crossing your fingers doesn’t mean you should knock-on-wood twice as hard.

I’ve got a better idea: Every time you feel tempted to click on that headline about the latest debates, every time you’re tempted to unmute the campaign commercial or click “play” on that dreadful gaffe posted to YouTube, every time you find yourself on the verge of forwarding some news about the campaign to your friends… get up, walk calmly to the bathroom sink, and floss your teeth.

Most people don’t floss their teeth nearly often enough. I know I don’t. But flossing can prevent painful tooth decay, embarrassing and off-putting bad breath, infectious disease, and apparently even (through mechanisms still under investigation) heart disease. By flossing, you practice inexpensive preventative medicine that will contribute to your better flourishing while at the same time it reduces the likelihood that you will need expensive medical care.

Make a disaster preparation kit. Check your smoke detector batteries. Read a good book. Bake cookies for a neighbor. Any of those things would be better for you and your community than participating in the Election 2016 fooferaw. I bet you’ve got some even better ideas.

But please don’t vote. And encourage your friends and loved ones not to vote as well. Don’t feel like you have to participate in discussing the foibles of the candidates or comparing their “positions,” and don’t be afraid to be utterly ignorant of the horse race. Be proud of it! As it is, I couldn’t pick Jeb Bush or Mike Huckabee or Carly Fiorina or Ben Carson out of a photo lineup, but I’d be even happier if I’d never heard their names.

If you decide now that you’re not going to vote and that you’re not going to encourage other people’s political baloney either, you are immediately freed from any obligation to follow the campaign trivia. You’ll be happier, more productive and helpful, and less of an annoyance to your friends and family. Heave a sigh of relief. Get your “Delete”-clicking finger ready, and start daydreaming about what you’re going to do with all of your extra time, mental energy, and social capital.

Feature Articles
Abolish Child Protective Services

Standing in an office while two kids beg me to go back to their home, I begin retreating back into my inner-child. I imagine how I would have felt if I was seven years old and a Child Protective Services (CPS) investigator told me I couldn’t stay with my mom anymore. Their mother had committed the crime of respecting the children’s desire to play outside.

Paperwork has already been checked by the supervisor, the judge has backed it, and now I have to find a placement. I put them in my car and we drive. The tears continue, my guilt is overwhelming, and I grant them over to a temporary shelter. Two court proceedings, tens of thousands of dollars out of the mother’s pocket, and five bottles of ADHD medications for the kids later, the mom is given back her children. All because she let them play outside.

Guilt is what led me to where I am today. Guilt for kidnapping children for the state, and guilt for being an anti-drug warrior. It has led me to become a child advocate, an author of a book on the subject, and an anti-reformer. There is no reforming CPS, and there is no reforming the government.

The entirety of government’s power comes from its promise of reform. No one believes the government is perfect, but nearly everyone believes it can be changed to benefit them. When you see the tears of children begging for their mother, when you see children drugged because the government gives incentives for doing so, and when children die in part because of your actions as a CPS drone, you stop believing in reform.

I fell for political hope. I had faith I could be the good guy working for the state — that I would be different. We all imagine that we’ll be the hero in our story, but I was not. My faith is gone and reason has replaced it. The state is a religion and the political reformers are keeping the faith strong. The only way out is complete abolition.

Abolition Because of the Actions They Have Committed

There are over 400,000 children in Child Protective Services care in America. Eighty percent of those cases are not for physical or sexual abuse, but rather parental negligence. Negligence can mean the child is playing outside, is too fat, doesn’t like school, or — as in forty percent of cases — is for the parent using marijuana.

Foster kids are seven to eight times more likely to be abused than normal children, and nearly half will end up homeless when they age out of the system at eighteen. They are three times more likely to be put on psychotropic drugs, and they are seven times more likely to develop an eating disorder. They are more likely to have PTSD than veterans of war, and less likely to recover from that PTSD. They are more likely to become pregnant as a teenager. They are also twenty percent more likely to be arrested. And tragically, they are six times more likely to die than if they stayed in an abusive family household. These citations, and many other like them can be found on my website, Legally Kidnapped.

What makes all of this disaster possible is the horrendous (and expensive) CPS training practices, the perverse incentives to remove children, and the very basis of CPS’s funding. In training, we were told how to tell if people are lying by checking which direction they looked when they spoke (debunked), the unfailing validity of eyewitness testimony (debunked), and how the world is more dangerous for children than ever (debunked).

Perhaps CPS’s biggest problem is its evidentiary standard. CPS cases can be based on something that happened years ago and not even something that a witness saw firsthand. The agency uses evidence that is based on a memory of a story that a witness overheard years ago. How’s that for reliability?

The investigator is actually told not to record the information taken during interviews word for word. Instead, they’re instructed to take notes and to use their judgment in entering the notes into a database in narrative form.  In other words, the investigator creates a story based on their own memory of another person’s memory, which person may not have even seen the alleged abuse. Fantastic. This third (or even fourth) hand story is considered evidence strong enough for life-altering legal action.

All of this is done despite an array of information documenting CPS’s extreme faultiness. Yet, CPS maintains a massive budget subsidized by the very parents they terrorize. This is the nature of government. Abolitionism is the only ethical stance in the face of a coercive agency like Child Protective Services.

Portuguese, Stateless Embassies
Anarchy in the U.K.: A experiência inglesa com serviços privados de proteção

Entre os objetivos do nosso futuro Forum está considerar o alcance até o qual os seguros privados, numa sociedade livre, poderiam assumir as funções que atualmente atribuímos ao governo. Os princípios da economia do laissez-faire podem nos convencer de que as seguradoras privadas poderiam de fato assumir esses papéis, mas nós indubitavelmente nos sentimos mais seguros se essa conclusão teórica pudesse ser sustentada por exemplos históricos concretos.

Numa edição anterior, discuti como uma forma particular de seguro — a associação de ajuda mútua — agiu como substituto privado efetivo para os programas assistenciais estatais, particularmente na área do tratamento médico (“Como o governo dos EUA “resolveu” a crise no sistema de saúde”, RoderickLong.com). Nesta edição, minha preocupação será com o papel das associações de ajuda mútua na provisão de segurança e eu me concentrarei em dois exemplos históricos da Inglaterra, que possui uma longa história de provisão privada de serviços “estatais”.

Aplicação da lei por ajuda mútua: o borh

Antes da conquista normanda de 1066, o governo da Inglaterra era radicalmente descentralizado. O rei tinha pouca ou nenhuma influência na política interna, que era jurisdição das moots1, cortes locais que passavam julgamentos de acordo com o direito consuetudinário. O rei tinha autoridade principalmente sobre a política externa, onde agia como líder guerreiro, uma espécie de empreendedor militar, a quem os seguidores forneciam voluntariamente recursos financeiros e serviços militares. A Inglaterra não possuía uma força policial nem exército permanente; a aplicação das leis e a defesa nacional eram prerrogativa e responsabilidade dos cidadãos armados.

Para a segurança, a mais importante unidade social era o borh. O borh era uma associação, tipicamente de doze pessoas, que se certificavam do bom comportamento uns dos outros. Se um membro do borh cometesse um crime, os outros membros se comprometiam a levá-lo à justiça — mas também a ajudá-lo a pagar restituição (a restituição financeira, e não a retribuição, era a sentença normal para maioria dos crimes; aqueles que se recusavam a pagar restituição colocados fora da alçada da lei — o que significava que qualquer um poderia matá-los impunemente).

borh pode se ter originado como um grupo de parentesco. Contudo, se isso for verdade, seu aspecto familiar logo desapareceu; no apogeu do sistema anglo-saxão, os borhs eram arranjos puramente contratuais. Os indivíduos eram livres para se juntarem ao borh que escolhessem e os membros daquele borh eram igualmente livres para aceitar ou recusar os pretendentes. Uma vez aceito, o indivíduo era livre para deixá-lo, mas também poderia ser expulso. Uma vez que os membros do borh poderiam ser responsabilizados pelas ações uns dos outros, havia um forte incentivo para policiar o comportamento dos membros. Igualmente, havia um forte incentivo para pertencer a um borh e não ser expulso, porque poucas pessoas desejariam estabelecer relações com alguém que não pertencesse a nenhum. Tal pessoa seria um risco, já que não teria companheiros de borh para assumir a responsabilidade por seusa tos. O sistema dos borh criou, assim, um forte incentivo ao comportamento responsável.

Como observou Tom Bell:

Esses acordos voluntários recíprocos têm um certo apelo atemporal. Considere os paralelos modernos: como agências de seguros, os grupos de fiação [borhs] ajudavam os membros a disseminar os riscos fazendo um pool de recursos; como agências de crédito, eles atestavam o bom comportamento de seus membros e negavam acesso a outros indivíduos que houvessem demonstrado inconfiabilidade; da mesma forma que companhias de cartão de crédito, elas davam suporte às reclamações e atos de seus membros. (Bell, 1992, p. 4)

Pode-se argumentar que esse sistema poderia não funcionar na vasta, impessoal e altamente móvel sociedade atual, onde os laços e o conhecimento pessoal requeridos por um borh efetivamente não existem. A reputação, ao que parece, pode servir como um incentivo efetivo somente em pequenas comunidades onde todos se conhecem. Mas a experiência da Lei Mercante sugere o contrário: esse vasto sistema de direito privado que operava através de reputação, crédito e boicote econômico foi capaz de regular as transações comerciais através de toda a Europa no fim da Idade Média entre mercadores de diferentes nações sem o benefício da interação cara-a-cara nem do poder do estado. Na moderna era da informação de comunicação eletrônica instantânea, relatórios de crédito e afins, pode-se esperar que sistemas de reputação sejam ainda mais eficazes como uma ferramenta de manutenção privada da ordem social.

O que finalmente destruiu o sistema dos borhs foi a invasão da Inglaterra em 1066 pelo normando Guilherme, o Conquistador, que consolidou sua vitória completando a centralização do poder real que havia começado já no século IX com Alfredo, o Grande. Guilherme e seus sucessores submeteram os borhs a supervisão e controle reais, em parte para que uma grande fração das compensações financeiras administradas pelas associações fosse desviada para os cofres reais.

Por diversos motivos, os conquistadores normandos introduziram um sistema chamado Frankpledge, que substituiu os borhs por tithings — grupos de dez pessoas de função similar ao dos borhs, com a diferença crucial de que a associação a um tithing não era voluntária. Sem o direito de livre entrada e saída, e o direito de recusar admissões ou expulsar membros, o Frankpledge não foi capaz de reproduzir os incentivos do sistema anterior. O sistema dos borhs penalizava o comportamento irresponsável; sob o Frankpledge, um tithing não tinha influência comparável sobre seus membros, que agora poderiam ter más condutas impunemente. A concorrência foi eliminada — com resultados previsivelmente negativos.

Aplicação legal por ajuda mútua: os caçadores de ladrões

No fim do século 18 e no começo do século 19, a ajuda mútua no âmbito do direito vigorava novamente na Inglaterra. O país não tinha polícia no sentido moderno antes de 1829, quando o Secretário do Interior Sir Robert Peel (daí o termo “Bobby”) estabeleceu a Scotland Yard em Londres. Estruturas policiais parecidas para outras áreas foram criadas nos anos 1830 e 1840. A liberal clássica feminista e reformadora social Josephine Butler reagiu com alarme, escrevendo uma áspera denúncia do estado policial em seu livro Government by Police (“Governar pela polícia”, em português).

Mas antes da predominância dos Bobbies, a aplicação das leis na Inglaterra dependia fortemente de organizações conhecidas como Associações para a Perseguição de Criminosos2 — também conhecidas como associações caçadoras de ladrões. Imagine um cruzamento entre uma Neighborhood Watch3, uma agência de seguros e uma posse estilo Velho Oeste. Os indivíduos de certo num local particular juntavam seus recursos e ofereciam seus serviços para sustentar suas associações de caçadores de ladrões. A associação ficava de olho em assaltantes (particularmente aqueles que roubavam casas com placas de membro da associação!). Se um crime (contra um membro de uma associação) ocorresse, a associação iria atrás do o culpado ou pagaria para alguém o perseguisse, frequentemente cooperando com associações similares de outros distritos — e assim usariam os recursos da associação para pagar pelo processo num tribunal do estado (a justiça criminal já não era livre nessa época).

O sistema tradicional inglês — com raízes na antiguidade anglo-saxã, chegando até o século 19 — está a mundos de distância do moderno sistema de polícia centralizada e controle de armas. Sob o antigo sistema, todo cidadão homem capaz era efetivamente um policial e o comportamento desses policiais não era regulado por decreto estatal, mas pelas leis econômicas do interesse individual. A despeito de importantes diferenças nos detalhes, tanto os borhs quanto os caçadores de ladrões operavam de acordo com o princípio do seguro mútuo: os indivíduos juntavam seus recursos e esforços para proteção mútua.

Seguros para segurança são uma fantasia libertária? Pelo contrário — são história.

Notas

* O título em inglês faz referência à música homônima do Sex Pistols.

Assembleias.

Associations for the Prosecution of Felons.

Uma associação de moradores dedicada a evitar crimes, contatando a polícia ao sinal de atitudes suspeitas.

Bibliografia:

Arthur, H.W. Without the Law: Administrative Justice and Legal Pluralism in Nineteenth-Century England. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985.

Bell, T. Polycentric LawHumane Studies Review, vol. 7, no. 1, 1991/92.

Benson, B. The Enterprise of Law: Justice Without the State. San Francisco: Pacific Research Institute, 1990.

Davies, S. Private Provision of Public Goods in Nineteenth-Century Britain. Paper não-publicado.

Hay, D; Snyder, F. eds. Policing and Prosecution in Britain, 1750-1850. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989.

Loan, A. Institutional Bases of the Spontaneous Order: Surety and Assurance. Humane Studies Review, vol. 7, no. 1, 1991/92.

Morris, W.A. The Frankpledge System. New York: Longmans Green, 1910.

Stigmergy - C4SS Blog
We Consider it Utterly Perverse
C4SS-Carson-Meme-WLL54 (1),

… We on the Libertarian Left consider it utterly perverse that free market libertarianism, a doctrine which had its origins as an attack on the economic privilege of landlords and merchants, should ever have been coopted in defense of the entrenched power of the plutocracy and big business. The use of the “free market” as a legitimizing ideology for triumphant corporate capitalism, and the growth of a community of “libertarian” propagandists, is as much a perversion of free market principles as Stalinist regimes’ cooptation of rhetoric and symbols from the historic socialist movement was a perversion of the working class movement.

The industrial capitalist system that the libertarian mainstream has been defending since the mid-19th century has never even remotely approximated a free market. Capitalism, as the historic system that emerged in early modern times, is in many ways a direct outgrowth of the bastard feudalism of the late Middle Ages. It was founded on the dissolution of the open fields, enclosure of the commons and other massive expropriations of the peasantry. In Britain not only was the rural population transformed into a propertyless proletariat and driven into wage labor, but its freedom of association and movement were criminalized by a draconian police state for the first two decades of the 19th century. …

— What is Left-Libertarianism?

Anarchy and Democracy
Fighting Fascism
Markets Not Capitalism
The Anatomy of Escape
Organization Theory