Free market competition does not involve coercion. Underselling is not coercion, and neither are advantages gained through labor and or assumption of risk or capital accumulation. Taking someone’s products through taxation is coercion.
How is group ownership “public” and not private? You seem to be just playing with words. In fact, you called it private ownership in the next paragraph.
Firms that produce better products more efficiently will accumulate more capital and grow in size and market share.
What is “inordinate access to resources”? Does that mean that a firm the out-produces/outsells its competitor can’t buy any more new resources than the poorer firm? How does this foster efficiency and competition?
What is “equality of opportunity” and why should I value it? Opportunity should arise from chance and labor, both previous and present. It should not be controlled and distributed like a commodity. Do two runners have equal opportunity to win a race?
Every group of runners in a marathon separates according to strength and speed. So it must always be in an economy, unless force is used to hinder the strong and shore up the weak. Harrison Bergeron knew that.
I don’t see how there can be any “profit” in your system. If there is profit, then there will be inequality of wealth and opportunity. If the profit is immediately confiscated and redistributed, then it ceases to be profit at all and cannot provide incentive.
As free market competition is currently nonexistent, there’s no basis for claiming that. Moreover, I did state that my view was that only the socialist economy could facilitate the “free market,” as the labor market of the capitalist economy is characterized by a mixture of exchange and coercion.
I don’t know why you keep referring to underselling as though it was a chief focus of my commentary; I referred to it merely as a symptom of concentration. Advantages gained through “assumption of risk and capital accumulation” are not coercion in and of themselves, but are facilitators of coercion inasmuch as they collectively permit compulsion of laborers to participate in the hierarchical firm through the threat of resource deprivation if they refuse.
If that’s the case, then it’s a fundamental deficiency of capitalism, inasmuch as taxation funds the state so integral to the continued survival of capitalism.
No, I referred to ownership by the collective public through egalitarian distribution of firm and individual ownership as being “public,” and ownership by a small number of individuals and firms as being “private.”
That is reliant on the utopian assumption that capitalism produces optimal market results. As illustrated by the existence of market concentration and the impediments to competition that it entails, that is not the case.
Actually, it refers to the inequality of opportunity that characterizes the current capitalist labor market, and basis behind the ability of established firms to create unjust barriers to entry, impeding the ability of individuals and firms to rise and fall on their own merits as opposed to predetermined arrangements.
Very silly comparison; we’re speaking of socially created differences in ability through unequal distribution of access to productive resources and no ability to rectify that, not of natural differences in ability, which will exist regardless of the economic paradigm in place.
There will be inequality of wealth, but I never advocated that there be complete equality of wealth so much as more egalitarian distribution, and market socialists are especially emphatic on that point.
Just because it is not empirical does not mean you cannot logically deduce it.
You cannot by definition have a ‘socialist market.’ A ‘market’ denotes exchange. Exchange denotes a preexisting system of private property. You cannot exchange goods and services in which are owned by everyone.
Freely assented labor contracts are not compulsory.
Such a statement is nonsensical. Government intervention into the economy is not what can be called ‘capitalism.’ Invisible hand, self-regulation, these are terms used to define how capitalism corrects itself.
Wonderful, a complete contradiction in the laws of logic. The market concentrates itself and also competes.
Ah yes and if we all went to Harvard, we would all be geniuses. Please, stop with the mentality that mankind is playdoo in which you can shape into anything you desire. It completely ignores the development of value preferences and specialization
.
And wealth is a subjective evaluation which will be arbitrarily defined by the societal planner. Why listen to such trash?
Thanks. But I still don’t understand your position. You seem to have different definitions of terms like ownership and profit and competition than I do. For that reason, this discussion seems futile.
Ownership is when you own something but don’t own it because everyone owns it but no one owns it.
Profit is when someone steals.
Competition is when employees are pit against each other for jobs offered by employers. It is also when employers are pit against each other for potential employees. From this, it is trivial, we can logically deduce that the proletariat is enslaved by the capitalists. Ergo “ownership” for “profit” results in “competition”
Maybe it comes down to our differing views on what is fair and not-fair. I guess we have different ideas about right and wrong. I think it is OK if one entrepreneur outcompetes another for resources. I do not consider this coercive or morally wrong. In fact, I consider it fair and “right”, inasmuch as it leads to maximization of individual fulfillment. It is in accord with the natural rules of social cooperation and coexistance. It is a necessary component of any system that aspires to true freedom. If I am to be free, then I must be able to accumulate property.
It seems to me the alternatives must lead ultimately to the abolition of the individual and therefore of individual fulfillment.
1 a) Would you than concede the word to a non political anti-determinist?
b) The whole idea to “value liberty for the sake of liberty” and egalitarian strains of thinking all stems from the Enlightenment/ republic/ liberal fork in political theory. They both usually seem to promote the maximization of positive freedoms, etc. Many of the aims are the same. The methodology is off a bit, and one is more moralizing the other is more moralist, but that is it. Point being, I do not see a dramatic switch in the word and a strong argument could be made that it still has a familial relationship to its “original” meaning.
Using a phrase like “most productive evolutions” does not hold, it’s too subjective here. I also suspect you are filled with the truth, when discussing the meaning of the word and fail to look at the facts as to how it actually applies. That, you could argue, is an unproductive use of language.
c) Once again, and most important, you are on specialist site where this word, capitalist, etc have a very specific meaning. When visiting this site it is best to use its language for the sake of clarity, productivity, civility, and to avoid looking like a crusader. Of course there may be a topic or two (perhaps one you could start?) where your points on definition are relevant, but that should be an exception rather than a rule
I will admit, my response about democracy was out of place. Thinking back, I think I misread the post. It seemed relevant at the time and, I can assure you, a life changing profound quip.
You’re right, but I interpreted his usage of present tense as a statement that free markets were currently performing. But more than that, logical “deduction” can just as effectively lead one to the conclusion that the capitalist “free market” is impossible, and a sound opinion derived from that would be that advocacy of it is idealistic and utopian.
Very ill-informed comment. Socialism merely entails the public ownership and management of the means of production, and markets are merely allocative devices not specific to capitalism or socialism (though their existence is necessary in the capitalist economy), that can be used in the socialist economy for the purpose of exchanging consumption goods. It’s unfortunate that there’s such a detachment between the at least partially informed Austrian economists (Boettke, Horwitz, and Prychitko, all of whom salute Theodore Burczak’s “post-Hayekian” market socialism), and their rather ill-informed Internet acolytes, who generally cannot grasp even intermediate theory because so much of their commentary is thoughtless regurgitation of talking points set by their better informed masters.
For all the disparagement of anarchism on this forum, there seems to be little knowledge of its tenets. The informed would realize that the anarchists were first and foremost among the socialist movement in advancing a libertarian ethical critique of the capitalist labor market, which is not characterized by consensual exchange, but by varying degrees of coercive exchange. The capitalist labor market is a far more complex beast than a realm of free and just exchange, and though most defenders of capitalism point to an absence of outright force as a condition of it, they neglect to consider other forms of unethical influence that are not openly forcible. Of various forms of influence, the political scientist Robert Dahl has defined a spectrum of influence terms that range from rational persuasion to manipulative persuasion to inducement to power to coercion to physical force. Power and coercion are the guilty elements that exist. Consider, for example, an analogy of David Ellerman:
The same is true for the matter of changing jobs within the capitalist labor market; just as the right to migrate between an island chain of kingdoms but not outside of them would not free one from monarchy, neither can the right to select specific masters in a capitalist economy free one from that authoritarianism as a whole.
We must also consider inequivalent power between laborers and employers that subject the former to a greater degree of coercive influence (recalling what work and subsequent subordination in the workplace is an effective necessity). As noted by Adam Smith, “in the long run the workman may be as necessary to his master as his master is to him; but the necessity is not so immediate,” and “[t]he workmen desire to get as much, the master to give as little as possible…It is not, however, difficult to foresee which of the two parties must, upon all ordinary occasions, have the advantage in the dispute, and force the other into a compliance with their terms.” As noted somewhat more complexly by Alfred Marshall, “labor is often sold under special disadvantages arising from the closely related groups of facts that labor power is ‘perishable’, that the sellers of it are commonly poor and have no reserve fund, and that they cannot easily withhold it from the market.”
Considering the numerous disadvantages of the working class in terms of their sustenance reserve, their lesser skills of negotiation that have been bred by the capitalist economy, the role of equilibrium unemployment in serving as a threatening influence to ensure effort extraction, and the role of extraction of surplus labor and subordination under hierarchical authority in the workplace itself, it seems absurd to suggest that workers are not subject to one of the more negative forms of influence, such as “power” or “coercion.” The consistent libertarian will condemn such influence terms.
Nor are external economic conditions based on freedom, so long as privileged and elite segments of the population (namely the financial class, as they have more dominance than the coordinator class outside of the internal structure of the firm), to make decisions that affect the rest of the population without their democratic input. After the unjust consolidation of the means of production and the resulting power that comes as a result of it during a stage of primitive accumulation (the state had a major role in class creation), the financial class, characterized by a small and elite segment of the population is thereby able to use their control over the means of production to drastically affect the vast majority of the population in whatever way they please, which is obviously a significant rationale for collectivizing the means of production, decentralizing them, and subjecting them to direct democratic management. The fact that even the confused propertarian would condemn a state of affairs wherein a tiny and privileged elite control such vast resources as the means of production as an authoritarian one were it manifested through the vessel of a state and the tiny elite were a ruling party only lends credence to my analysis.
Capitalism requires only the private ownership of the means of production, market exchange as the primary means of resource allocation, and the existence of wage labor. That is the dominant economic system of the planet, and the one characterized by the presence of varying degrees of government intervention to correct market failure, as it always has been. From the incorporation of state protection of infant industries to ensure the sustainment of dynamic comparative advantage to the unemployment benefits that extend job search opportunity and reduce underemployment (a form of static inefficiency), by encouraging appropriate skills set matches, to Pigovian taxation to correct the negative externalities that unregulated capitalism produces, to antitrust law to correct the market concentration that unregulated capitalism produces, to consumer protections to correct the asymmetric information that unregulated capitalism produces, and to so many other state interventions in the economy, capitalism and the state are inexorably intertwined, contrary to the misconception of the two being opposing paradigms.
If water pressure is reduced, does that mean it ceases altogether? Even that is misleading as it depicts “the market” as a homogenous entity, but the suggestion that it’s not possible for competition to occur even as concentration is present is ludicrous.
If anything, that seems to be the mindset of the crude Austrian conception of human nature, which is at least implicitly reliant on rational choice theory, imputing characteristics to humanity that they do not possess. Of course, it doesn’t surprise me that the point flies completely over your head; the poster attempted to compare natural differences with artificial social differences, and while natural differences exist regardless of the economic paradigm in place (and are certainly not limited to physical differences, as you seem to erroneously imply), social differences do not. That certainly includes access to financial resources.
I try not to. I only wish I could encourage you to do the same.
That seems to be due to the fact that you’ve accepted the capitalist economy as the epitome of ownership, profit, and competition, not considering the fact that socialism might actually promote the aspects of capitalism that are so often rhetorically praised while eliminating those that are quietly ignored. Did you ever expect to hear a socialist claim that her preferred system could promote market competition in a manner superior to that of capitalism?
Profit and loss is a necessary condition of incentive promotion, particularly in the market economy. It’s simply that market socialism entails remuneration actually based on supply and demand criteria, while the concentration so prevalent under capitalism enables those with greater means to eliminate those with greater abilities, slapping any meritocratic mindset in the face and preventing individuals from rising and falling based on their own skills and capacities.
You are obviously not a fan.
Capitalist society in Star Trek is characterized by the Ferengi Alliance.
There is not much military in Star Trek, they are explorers and they do not conquer.
There is no need for you to insult or belittle any other member of this forum; this is unacceptable behavior:
Personal Attacks
Avoid all personal attacks, whether against another user, or any other person–member or non-member, living or deceased (for example, do not post material that berates Ludwig von Mises). These inflammatory remarks have no place in civil, rational discourse.
Nah; sounds too much like a propertarian by proxy.
Did the change occur to natural evolution through description of similar ideas with the same terminology, or through the conscious appropriation of a term by a movement opposed to the aims of its original subject movement, as evidenced by our debates on this board?
I promote the use of language that I believe will facilitate the clearest and most nuanced understandings of words’ subjects in the long run, even if it requires brief explanation in the short run, as simply using popular definitions will cause long-term problems inasmuch as they’re often based on shallow understandings. For example, I will not simply accede to popular misconception that an “anarchist” is merely an ill-informed youth who advocates chaos and disorder because of his hatred of rules because that will and has already bred long-term ignorance of anarchist political theory.
You’re quite the inconsistent descriptivist, but regardless, I try to avoid abandoning accurate economic terminology for the sake of the no true Scotsman fallacies of a marginal heterodox school.
That’s why I avoided doing that (though I did smirk slightly at thinking of the irony of proponents of a “libertarian” movement that choose to prohibit material that berates Ludwig von Mises), which is partially because I’ve actually found that there’s somewhat greater knowledge among the Austrians on this forum than on the acolytes scattered throughout the Internet.
I purchase insurance against fire because I think it’s best for me and the other insurance company’s customers to pool our risk.
I am a member of homeowner’s association, where we can benefit from economy of scale - by buying services (like cable TV, or landscaping) in bulk at a (usually) cheaper price. I have to put up with other members but I’m willing to take that risk.
I am a Costco club member where we buy in bulk at cheap prices in exchange for paying dues and putting up with unattractive warehouse-like stores and horribly crowded parking.
My only complaint is being forced to participate in socialist arrangements I’d rather not. Like servicing $100 trillion debt in exchange for being protected by having pregant Iraqi women be blown up and having AIG be bailed out.
My point is socialism can have benefits but don’t force your form of it on me. Maybe they should call these folks “coercionists”.
Means of Production: The tools (instruments) and the raw material (subject) you use to create something are the means of production.
So, am I a capitalist if I privately own a paintbrush (tool), oil-based paint (raw material), and canvas (raw material), and use those raw materials and tool to create a painting?