Quite frankly your original post was absolutely fantastic, it practically defeated every single one of her arguments and forced her to move her position into totally different territory. I found it very odd that she claimed in her first post that the government should redistribute wealth, but in her second post she claimed that the state should not exist. I’m not sure you really need our help here, but none the less: Firstly Sieblen’s post was excellent as usual, quite a thorough little critique he has there, and Conza’s video’s appear helpful.
Her entire objections rest upon two misconceptions. The first is wage slavery (perhaps that is too strong a word as I don’t think she used it, but at any rate she misunderstands the process of monetary valuation, and secondly she does not understand the very nature of the market itself in terms of the type of social organization which the market brings about. Both of these could be considered part of the same fallacy, but let’s deal with each one individually.
The process of monetary valuation which manifests itself in prices, profits, losses, and wages, is the process of each individual in society expressing his value for goods and services. That is all, it is a way of expressing value preferences. The way in which individuals know how to serve their fellow men suddenly appears through the price mechanism, this becomes true of ALL goods and ALL services. In this way the market works under all sets of value preferences, men need not be greedy in a market society, they need not work only for themselves, they can do whatever they wish with their money, they can spend it upon satisfying the wants of others, or they can spend it purely upon themselves. Furthermore there is nothing stopping people from performing the jobs which they want to do in and of themselves, if you are arguing that this would yield greater productivity then the market would reward this. If you are arguing that this is simply a better state of affairs then when people work for a wage by performing a job which they do not wish to perform then the market will punish them for the value which they fail to provide to society, but it will only do so through that which they DO NOT receive, it will simply retain that which the individual in question would have received, but if the person is happier for forgoing this monetary wealth then they are free to do so. If however, that which the individual performs leads to a charging of costs which he cannot repay then this means that his actions have had a net drain upon the wealth of society, and he must once more perform services which create wealth. If a society was organized in another way then it would soon find itself in utter squalor.
To summarize: Monetary pricing places values upon freely exchanged services, it does not say what these people must spend their money on and it does not force anyone to do anything. What it does do is makes economic calculation possible, and economic oblivion through missalocation and waist from occurring
Her second misconception relies upon the first. To put it simply the market does not necessarily depend upon hierarchical firms in order to provide goods and services. It in no way denies collectives, mutual aid organizations, or non monetary exchange. If collective, mutualistic firms are more profitable then they will be able to produce more valuable goods at lower prices and therefore more firms will begin to emulate this. If workers prefer to live in such an environment and the structure is at least sustainable then the organization will be able to expand and control more and more labor, land, and capital to the point where traditional firms must either pay workers high enough wages to the point where they return to this firm, AKA they provide a better service than the collective does for the worker.
To summarize: The market in no way, shape, or form excludes collectives or any other type of non-traditional firm. Indeed if I’m not mistaken theres a little something known as charities which exist in marketesque societies, even when the state gives the appearance of handling all problems at hand.
I hope this helped.
