This guy I’m conversing with seems to think so. Is he right, or was his assertion as ridiculous as I thought it was?
Eh… I don’t think I’d call it a free market. I’m sure they used a lot of force on one another.
Well they had no division of labour. So even if they had a theorethical right to engage in a free market, in practice there was no market to engage in.
BTW, he should define “cavemen”.
He meant “Cavemen” as in, well, cavemen. Thanks for the explanation, BTW. For some reason, I had a huge mental block and couldn’t think of it.
Cavemen exercised a lot too. I guess you shouldn’t exercise because cavemen had a low standard of living…
Well they had no division of labour
Thats actually debateable, Most primitive societies, did seem to have a distinction between hunting, and foraging/gathering. Not sure if that qualifies as ‘division of labor’ since they both involve the production of food.
The real problem though, is that they had no savings. They consumed everything that they hunted/gathered. It wasnt until the discovery of agriculture that they were able to ‘stockpile’ food so some people could spend time doing other things, instead of producing just enough food to get by.
It depends on how one defines “free market”. Based on my own definition of “free market”, my answer is that cavemen (i.e. prehistoric hunter-gatherers) did have one.
I agree that there was a very primitive division of labor in hunter and gatherer socities. However, I wouldn’t go as far as to claim that hunters and gatherers did not save. To some extent, they had to. Some type of capital accumulation was necessary for them to have the time to fabricate the tools to increase the productivity of hunting (spears, arrows, or what have you), and some capital accumulation was necessary to make the transition into an agricultural society (that is, to afford them the time to plant seeds and till the soil, and then wait until the crops actually produced food). Capital accumulation was necessarily low (indeed, a primitive society with a primitive division of labor), but it was not non-existant.
Was this primitive society free? I’m not sure this question can be answered with the knowledge we have today. To what extent was their government? It is possible that these societies were tribal, which could mean that they were governed to some extent or another. But, given the extent of the division of labor and the the probable minimal size of tribes and society as a whole, it seems to me that discussion of freedom is inconsequential. The ability to interfere in another person’s activity was probably very minor.
Some type of capital accumulation was necessary for them to have the time to fabricate the tools to increase the productivity of hunting (spears, arrows, or what have you), and some capital accumulation was necessary to make the transition into an agricultural society (that is, to afford them the time to plant seeds and till the soil, and then wait until the crops actually produced food). Capital accumulation was necessarily low (indeed, a primitive society with a primitive division of labor), but it was not non-existant.
Fair enough, I suppose I may have overstated when I said they had no savings.
However I would imagine that most of their savings would be a product of chance: i.e. whenver they happend to catch/gather more food than they needed. I doubt primitive societies had much control over how much food they brought in…