I’ve seen certain people write that the current economic system is not judgeable as legitimate or praiseworthy at all since it isn’t somehow completely capitalistic or minus the state. But can’t individual actions in the marketplace be judged as more (or completely) anarchistic or less anarchistic – in effect to show that anarchism is not a mystical total system (that only exists in utopia) but is a common human occurance that exists in specific acts. As well as businesses, though working in a mixed economy, work (and thereby promote) as much freedom as possible in the market. Though many anarchists work under a system of a priori rights… that have come about through theory or deductive logic, is nothing in current society praiseworthy as anarcho-capitalist? It seems silly to automatically assume that since property would be distributed differently (or more properly) under an anarcho-capitalist society that none of the actors in the market are as deserving of that property as in the ideal system. Nor should anyone think, in my opinion, that business – as much as it has existed without state interference – is not a heroic thing that has improved the lives of many. This would keep the theories only theoretical, while giving no credit for freedom coorelating with better conditions and less misery. As Austrian economists can use economic theory even in a not totally free society to predict the general (though not exact) results of government intervention, those who favor the free society should see even unperfect systems not as a monolith of one single condition or variable (the state as controller) but as system that contains good freedoms as well as bad tyrannies. From there they can judge the good and the bad.
In fact, socialists often make the case that they’ve never recieved full socialism. But what we know about socialism is that it exists in individual industries coming under socialist methods of accumulating capital (run by the state; the state as capitalist) and how it has ruined that individual price system and lead to shortages. The full socialism would be by far an even greater disaster, but it seems to me that we can see the difference between socialism and capitalism in these societies… without fretting about their perfection. Socialism depends on the price system of capitalism to make forecasts and generalizations. Capitalism in no way depends on socialism. It would be a cold day in hell before a businessman asked the bureaucrat for hints on prices. In a way this lends itself to the bureaucrat and the businessman seeing things in the market as pieces of the final result. The means to the ends. They are both capitalists, as Milton Friedman would say. But what seperates them is the freedom. The freedom to control prices. And the freedom to lose to another competitor if consumers do not desire what is being sold. So this particular good (whatever is being produced by this industry) can be judged as being freely produced or not. Even if the factory is on government leased land or a commune or whatever. And the businessman is equally deserving of whatever profit he can make from his sharp business sense to produce products people want to buy, whether he is working under perfect capitalism or not. The point is that you can see the workings of free decision making outside the realm of the state. The state doesn’t apply its whip of slavery to every aspect of society. Even the eye of Mordor (washington or the kremlin) can only see so many things.
And even if the supposedly “unqualified profiteer” of the unperfect free market is benefitting from the state’s privilege indirectly (the state’s infrastructure, distribution schemes, etc. all interconnect with aspects of the economy) he should still remain a “hero” in the Walter Blockean sense because there is not much he can do to reverse the situation besides perhaps give up some of his own freedom to the state in order for others to just take over this same power, starve to death and give up to fatalism, let other people get lesser or no products because of the absense of his business sense, or any other number of things that are as absurd as if we all refused to use the roads. Now as all things economic, it isn’t exactly morally correct what they do. You may not even enjoy their service or the product. But how moral they act is up to subjective interpretation.
But we know the nature of liberty (not the freedom the state gave them to do it, but the John Stuart Mill sense of the absense of restriction on the individual) resulted in the end product of their labor and successful enterpeneurship. And each of the things a country has can be attributed to individual freedom wherever it exists. Even in a dictatorship that has relaxed some controls. The freedom of the individual to serve their own interests has done this. And the individual should always be heroic in the sense that they make this apparent as well as making life easier for others. We can’t blame the existence of things for state interfering (even the current war and election cycle has proved that many are as bloodthirsty for more war as they are for more products). We can only blame the state for the absense of what could be better (war isn’t only an expensive mess, it’s also the antithesis of preferable market activity and free peaceful trade between nations). You can really substitute public school in for war in this situation. Many public school teachers are fine and bright individuals working in an unworkable socialist system. The whole is made up of individuals (many of whom are mediocre teachers), but without consumer choice and price system based on demand for these same teachers their individual merit means little. And without such a system, it cannot be understood in objective terms how much “credit” each teacher deserves. Even those we find to be bad. They are only the product of mediocrity and not the cause. Still, the teachers who deviate from the pack of drones in the teacher’s unions and make an impact on students are heroes. And even more so, the very freedom to follow self-interest into teaching (and for a suitable amount of money!) is the reason teachers exist (not because the state forces them into it to attempt to make them altruistic public servants). And that very principle is free market.
And the strength of the market is not that it is a solution, but that it is readily observable. It requires no conditioning or brainwashing of the public like the New Socialist Man. The strength is that economic liberty is responsible for all great achievements throughout history – regardless of culture, nationality, time frame, “epistemology”, property titles, etc. And economic tyranny in as much as it can strangle liberty has resulted in mediocrity and worse conditions. The free market is something we can point to in theory and in everyday life. While socialism is something few would still dare point to in theory or in everyday life either.
David Friedman describes very well some of these common everyday things in a poem in Machinery of Freedom
In Washington there isn’t any plan
With “feeding David” on page sixty-four;
It must be accidental that the milk man
Leaves a bottle at my door.
It must be accidental that the butcher
Has carcasses arriving at his shop
The very place where, when I need some meat,
I accidentally stop.
My life is chaos turned miraculous;
I speak a word and people understand
Although it must be gibberish since words
Are not produced by governmental plan.