Thanks, but California is on my “what I can live without” list along with airline travel, television, neocon radio, Detroit, and Christopher Hitchens.
Fair enough. I like liberal societies more then conservative ones. I’ve lived in the backwoods of Georgia and the suburbans of San Fran. I mean its a really cool city. California is really beautiful. It is just so expensive and you run into crackpots. I guess I don’t mind because I like kooky socialists. By the way, Dan and Lilburne, did you guys feel that earthquake today? That was my first one. Waited a whole year for it.
ahahahhahaha
Don’t we want to move to something like this as well? Of course we understand eco so we know it can’t happen anytime soon if ever, but its the dream.
well you can perceive the cell phone in front of you without it being, in essence, a psychological thing.
G A Cohen is supposed to be the best of the non-libertarians, as testified by David Gordon, the head of the libertarian society at Oxford, and various other peoples. His arguments against Rawls are fairly good too
The action of witnessing the phone, knowing that it is a phone.
This is the most genius use of an insult against socialists I have seen, and the credit goes to you. It’s sheer power and style of psychological disarmament can only rival that of gratuitously hugging a homophobe.
YouTube or it didn’t happen.
I don’t think so. I don’t think humanity can achieve a society in which labor is not existent.
What time was this? I didn’t feel it.
Around 10 am. It was short. Like two shakes.
Most people don’t have a problem with taxation, most folks have a certain amount of class envy, most folks don’t have a problem with the government providing it services, and most folks believe that opposition to taxation means you lack the desire to help your fellow man. Society and government are confused by the majority. The fact that the majority of free market economists, thinkers, and individuals on the street believe in the validity of any government run service at all lends credence to the validity of socialism.
Krugman isn’t a sound choice at all; he’s a neo-Keynesian. Though there are important differences between Keynesianism and neo-Keynesianism (such as the incorporation of the IS/LM model, the Phillips Curve, and the Mundell-Fleming model; recall Joan Robinson’s reference to "bastard Keynesianism), Keynesianism and neo-Keynesianism are both based in the sustainment of capitalism, since socialism entails the public ownership and management of the means of production. Krugman himself is also ultimately supportive of trade liberalization.
My own advocacy of socialism is based on an interest in efficiency maximization. While even the most neutral depict capitalism as defended by those interested in efficiency and socialism as defended by those interested in equity, capitalism is characterized by an abundance of negative externalities, market concentration, and asymmetric information, all efficiency killers. Socialism, by contrast, is built upon workers’ ownership and management, which has been shown to exceed the productivity of the orthodox capitalist firm.
Cohen and Burczak’s Socialism After Hayek are both excellent choices. What’s ironic is that as Burczak in particular illustrates, the Austrian critique of central planning has been turned on its head in the case of the labor cooperative. The orthodox capitalist firm is rigidly hierarchical, meaning that there will be impediments to the acquisition and transmission of distributed knowledge and tacit knowledge. The far more horizontal structure of the labor cooperative largely minimizes this problem, and eliminates principal-agent problems caused by asymmetric information by unifying ownership and management. Since workers are both owners and managers, there is no longer a divergence of interests between the two.
I don’t think so. Let’s consider the typical rightist claim that voluntary workers’ ownership and enterprise would be introduced by market forces if it were truly a more productive form of organization. Although workers’ ownership and management has an empirically proven record of greater efficiency than the orthodox capitalist firm, it won’t spontaneously emerge as the dominant form of firm organization. Many anti-socialists are confused as to why that is, insisting that markets would be forced to introduce something if it was more efficient, since anyone could simply gain a competitive edge by using it. This is an indication of their economic utopianism and failure to consider the all-important factor of market concentration. True libertarians understand the unjust, restrictive nature of such conditions. For example, the point is well illustrated in a letter of libertarian social theorist John Stuart Mill that attacked established sellers that created an unfair barrier to firm entry through underselling:
That illustrates market socialist economic theorist Jaroslav Vanek’s point that “[t]he capitalist economy is not a true market economy because in western capitalism, as in Soviet state capitalism, there is a tendency towards monopoly. Economic democracy tends toward a competitive market.” The consolidation of the private ownership of the means of production by the financial class prevents fair market competition and maximization of efficiency.
was recently asked by a socialist: Do you admit that in AnCap, the provision of basic services that we take for granted now will be supplied on a tiered basis depending on your ability to pay?
Posted a comment here…does it have to be approved?
And you responded…
I can’t follow this argument. Why is underselling unfair? Is it not fair for me to undercut my competitor’s prices if it means selling at a loss temporarily? Why is this not “fair”? What is the standard for “fair”?
What is the difference between “soviet state capitalism” and “economic democracy”, and how does the latter avoid monopoly?
In what sense can competition exist in a socialistic system?
Are you saying that the only reason worker-cooperatives do not dominate the market is that they are shut out by underselling?
If a small company owned by an individual can become large enough to shut out competitors, why can’t a small worker-coop get large enough to do the same?
Assuming your system is more efficient, why is efficiency the ideal, and is it so important that liberty should be sacrificed to it?
Do scientific studies of industries carry more empirical weight than market evidence (profit/loss) in determining which systems are more efficient?
It makes sense that a worker may be more productive if he owned a share in the company (I am no fan of corporate beauracracies), but only because they would profit directly from their increased labor. It seems that if teh entire economy is a cooperative, the benefits would be so dispersed as to eliminate significant incentive. Am I missing something?
well it was right before I went to sleep, I am about to write back now. Part of me wants to say yes even though this person thinks its a brilliant trap, because what is so tragic about that?, and that is mostly how the world works right now anyway. But also, I don’t know how exactly “basic” services would be provided, all I do know is that they wont be funded by theft.