I can try and track down the numbers on it, but the standard of living in Stalinist Russia was significantly lower than Tsarist Russia. He was probably using GDP numbers put out by the Soviet government to track economic growth, which is the same data that led Paul Samuelson to make the claim that citizens in communist countries enjoyed the same, if not a higher, standard of living than their western counterparts.
Which economic system maximizes the standard of living, and correspondingly, economic growth is the only thing that matters, or can even be debated. Purely subjective abstracts like “liberty” and “freedom” don’t factor into the argument at all. Much like happiness, those esoteric concepts cannot be measured, quantified, or even adequately explained without engaging in question-begging. To claim they are objective truths is just as incorrect as saying that there is an objective morality. So if we frame the debate around which economic system is the most free then ultimately we’re arguing over whose preferences are superior, a contest which can have no victor.
That’s quite something to say for a libertarian. Of course liberty factors in, it’s even the most important issue for many people. Luckily freedom and economic performance go together. Command and control is not more efficient, as many people assume. Economics is not a trade-off between liberty and efficiency. Chomsky’s argument is valid though, if slavery would raise standards of living would that be an argument for slavery? The answer is yes! If slavery (or fascism or whatever) was more efficient, then that would be an argument in favor of such a system.
The proper response to Chomsky’s argument is that free markets are not oppressive, and “being compelled to work” cannot be conflated with slavery because what compels you is nature, not man. (And thus their attempt to present anti-propertarianism as the heir of anti-slavery fails. The emancipation of slaves was a form of privatization.) In capitalism a boss may tell you what to do, but that is a purely voluntary transaction that people engage in because it makes them better off. People have the choice not to participate in that kind of employment, most people do it because it’s so much better than the alternative, self-sufficient poverty. Socialists may counter that it would be better if we did not have to make such trade-offs to produce stuff. We should have the goods and services that propertarianism produces, but without being compelled to work or having to pay for goods. But that is not dealing with the real world. What compels us to work is nature, not bosses. (Also, the form of hierarchical factory wage-labor that socialists base most of their argument against the market on is merely a phase of the enterprise system. We are already seeing the emergence of a post-capitalist, post-corporate private enterprise system.)
For humans to be able to consume stuff, somebody has to produce them. There’s no way around that. A few decades ago socialists usually just assumed that their scheme to abolish property would provide a free lunch, because they don’t understand economics. These days it is hip to talk about how a socialist economy could be automated. But that does not add anything to their argument, the resources to build robots and automation are not going to fall from the sky any more than the resources to have post-scarcity in a 20th century socialist economy. If automation is more efficient than human labor, then entrepreneurs will use it in the pursuit of profit. That they currently don’t do this means that it would be a waste of scarce resources, that have more valuable uses. The limits to automating the economy are how much metal and how many engineers we have, not money or the profit system. A monetary economy merely conveys scarcity so we can best deal with it. There is no way to trick the market into releasing more resources by abolishing the need to pay for them. There is no free lunch.
Actually it is a cop out. Why? One of the first questions I asked was:
Instead of telling me what you told me now you explained:
No mundane work and no scarcity. So there is no problem to motivate people to do mundane work because there is none anymore. Now when I showed you that even if this was possible this wouldn’t be here instantly, you acknowledged the problem and suggested mutualism. Since this involved money like in capitalism, you are now argumentatively into a corner. You cop-out by telling me, that people don’t even need a motivation to work (what you could have told me right at the beginning), because work itself is the motivation to work. May I remind you what you said yourself in the quote above? Why should people only want to paint, study, invent, watch tv or whatever when post scarcity is here, but not if goods are still scarce? You contradict yourself.
I didn’t say I am or others are only lazy. Yes people need to do something, because they don’t want to lay on the coach their whole life. But it is not the work of a waiter, a cleaning lady, a garbage man, assembler, construction worker, any administrator they need to do! They need only something, and if they can chose they will chose something you wrote above, but none of those things I’ve just listed. And even if they want to be a mechanic or a construction worker, they don’t want to repair a Fiat Uno or build a clarification plant. They will want to tune their Porsche and build their own castle, but they won’t do something necessary! If you want to believe that there still would be a lot of people who’d clean privies while there are others who don’t give a damn, and always take them the fresh bread away while they are working, I can’t help it. But it for sure is not a compelling argument.
EDIT: Therefore I can conclude that your critique of capitalism that people have to sell their labour or starve (which ignores that they also can start their own company), contrary to syndicalism where they would be fully provided no matter what they do, rests on the very naive believe that people work only because they want to work, without any compensation.
I wasn’t saying that they wouldn’t want to do those things, ‘the painting, studying, inventing…’ in a world were goods are scarce. I acknowledged the ‘problem’ and suggested mutualism, but then later realised that there isn’t actually any problem. I would have told you at the beginning if it had occured to me then, and that doesn’t make it a cop-out. Perhaps I should restate my position:
In a sufficiently technologically advanced world: there would be no mundane onerous jobs.
In a world in which resources are scarce: there will be a sufficient workforce to take care of those tasks.
If you watch that interview, you see that people were saying that they would be willing to do something which is useful for the community. If you look at any journal of longevity, you’ll see that job satisfaction is a major factor of life expectancy. Why? Because people are happier when they do jobs which satisfy them. If they are happy, they tend to live longer. Why do jobs satisfy them? Because they are meaningful. Why are they meaningful? Because they do something meaningful, something meaningful for the community.
Is it? The problem is that abstracts like liberty are just that, abstracts. What people think is liberty and what people think is oppression will vary from person to person. Socialists view property and hierarchy as impositions on their freedom, and libertarians don’t. This is the problem that objectivist ethics always runs in to. Ayn Rand starts with the assumption that property rights have some sort of moral supremacy in the world, and then deducts her ethical system from there. She doesn’t prove the moral worth of property, and indeed you can’t. You can prove that private property leads to better material outcomes, sure, but proving that these outcomes are an objective “good” is impossible, and flies in the face of the subjective theory of value. The same goes for liberty. What does and does not constitute human freedom is pure opinion, which is why arguments between socialists and capitalists on which system provides more liberty for humanity never go anywhere.
I don’t think it is pure opinion. It’s just a matter of definition. If freedom means {A,B,C,D and E} then anything which is {A,B,C,D, and E} is freedom.
And of course, mathematics is abstract so that is purely subjective.
Sorry the video doesn’t prove anything. He asks the people “If you had enough money to live comfortably, would you work for the community”. That’s not the point. He should ask them: “No matter if you work or not, you would have the same amount of money to live comfortably. Would you then still work?”
The problem is that the kind of freedom that socialists want can not exist in reality. They want freedom from necessity, freedom from the conditions of the universe. We know that we can’t create a world where their brand of freedom exists, because it is impossible. Therefore, we can objectively discount their ideology without resorting to objective ethics. We can say that the material conditions that ensue when we follow the libertarian meaning of liberty are better than those that ensue when we follow the socialist meaning of liberty.
The definition varies from person to person - agreed. But that is why we need to be clear about what we mean. We need to align our definitions so to speak. If a person states that freedom = {a,b,c} and another person says that it is {d,e,f} then they both need to come to an agreement about what they mean, about what they are talking about.
So although ‘freedom’ is abstract, it is still definable. Maybe we should get rid of words like liberty and freedom and just use variables instead: x,y,z,x1,y1,z1… and define those at the beginning of a debate. That would probably help us overcome any preconcieved ideas of liberty and freedom.
I think you maybe misunderstanding me, Chris. I meant that liberty was an undefinable concept in an objective sense, not in a subjective sense. There is no universal “true liberty” in the same sense that one plus one must equal two. And even if you framed the debate around an agreed-upon subjective definition of “liberty”, then whatever side won the debate would have their position align with that specific definition only.
I think I’m just rambling now, so I’ll stop derailing the thread any further.
Okay, just so we’re clear, are you agreeing that “having to” sell one’s labor isn’t a consequence of private ownership of the means of production per se?
With that said, I’m wondering what exactly you mean by the term “means of production”. Do you consider one’s own time and effort (i.e. labor) to be such? If not, why not? But otherwise, the issue you’re talking about is called scarcity, and there’s no way to avoid it yet. In fact, there may never be a way to avoid it, even with such magical technology as molecular manufacturing and other forms of nanotechnology.
Right to freedom of speech and right to subsistence have entirely different bases. The former is negative, as the obligation it imposes on others is to not interfere with one’s speech. The latter, on the other hand, is positive, as the obligation it imposes on others is to provide one with subsistence if he does not already have it. However, in an anarcho-capitalist society, one would at most have freedom of speech only on his own property. Keep in mind that freedom of speech is also a political concept - it arose as a result of arbitrary state oppression of speech.
I don’t see how the level of importance ascribed to property has any bearing on which person was harmed (and by whom) in my example.
I don’t understand what you mean by “self-determination” or “absolute poverty”, nor do I understand why you group “absolute poverty” with death. Can you please explain?
It sounds like you’re actually agreeing with me that, if syndicalism has a maximum value that it can sustain, capitalist production and exchange will occur beyond that scale.
I wanted to know which part of the claim you’re disputing before really digging into the data. You have the tendency to press me on facts that I believe to be indisputable yet at the same time oddly difficult to prove. But it should be possible to find data that shows that the 1800s were a time of rapidly improving standarts of living for the common people, and as a corrolary of that, a shrinking gap between rich and poor.
Funnily enough, I thought it was indisputable that the 17-1800s did not see rise in the living standards of the common person. Please, when you delve into the data, include blacks and native americans. There would be nothing worse than to treat them as externalities.
By the way, I do have a chart showing rapid per capita GDP growth all throughout the 1800s, but I don’t know how to post hyperlinks. Would someone mind explaining it to me?
There are 3 rows of buttons in the editor in which you write your post.
Take the middle row
There is a button with a white flag
Left to it there are two buttons. One of it is for setting a hyperlink and one is for removing one.
And if you directly want to implement a picture, then use the button right to the white flag. (Hope it works never tried the picture button so far)
I’ll just try it, so if use see a picture below it works: