As Hoppe has documented, feudalism is a lot less parasitic than modern democracy. The king could hardly tax 5% and 10% increases in taxation could unseat him from the throne. The feudal lords were frequently at war but they didn’t mess with commoners for the most part because the commoners were part of the capital value of the feudal lands. All things equal, I would much rather live under a feudal system than the highly centralized democratic socialism we live under today which consumes literally half of all economic production. A medieval king could not even have dreamed of a 50% tax rate.
To understand Marx psychologically, one should use the following dictionary:
Yahweh=Dialectical Materialism
The Messiah= Marx
The Elect=The Proletariat
The Church=The Communist Party
The Second Coming=The Revolution
Hell=Punishment of the Capitalists
The Millennium=The Communist Commonwealth
The terms on the left give the emotional content of the terms on the right, and it is this
emotional content, familiar to those who have had a Christian or a Jewish upbringing, that
makes Marx’s eschatology credible. A similar dictionary could be made for the Nazis…
I fully agree, but still we know that states tend to aggregate. So a world of crime syndicates (feudal manors) would probably turn into nation-states again, and that is my problem. Still I wouldn’t mind 300 years of decentralization. And perhaps nukes could make aggregation much slower if not halt it altogether.
I had doubts based on reading history but to seriously believe that coercion works, implies so many contradictions with reality that I have to drop these doubts for the sake of sanity and intellectual consistency.
My biggest doubt about free markets is the interim between an occurrence and the price/wage adjustments in response to market actions (e.g. sticky wages).
But then, any government intervention, which creates further distortions, is no better, actually worse, than letting the market adjust, however long it takes. Besides, the occurrences which are the pretext for government intervention are usually caused by earlier intervention. And much of the aid the government promises to provide before long-term adjustments occur, could be provided just as well by private charity.
What’s great about Austrian economics, is that it deals with the medium-term, before a hypothetical equilibrium occurs, as Roger Garrison points out, but also after the very short-term where preferences have not resulted in price adjustments to a satisfactory degree in the eyes of interventionists.
Thanks, that means a lot. As you are one of my favorites as well. You stay consistent to ethics, reason and principles without forgetting the importance of the real world or becoming a total nihilist.
How do you react when you debate with a socialist? Do you sometimes laugh in their face?
I recognize that when I debate with a socialist I tend to get a little cocky, after reading Bohm Bawerk, Rothbard and Mises, I expect that self-evident logic wins the debate but when it doesnt I wonder if there is a problem with my logic.
I mean I just debated with a guy who finally admited that people has different tastes and that utility is an important part of value but he continued to argue that there is a “concrete” value and even though people perceives utility diferently there is a “concrete” utility, later he just replied saying that “labor time is the source of value”, I was disconcerted to say the least.
The tax rates are true. But there was a lot of the state meddling in peoples lives that did not consume a lot of revenue in those days. For example it was considered a crucial role of the state to enforce the state religion. Also there were a lot of regulations maintaining status, for example minute rules for what clothing people could wear (so the commoners wouldn’t pretend to be nobles) and how someone of the lower classes had to react to someone of the higher classes. You could loose a limb for not greeting someone the right way. Feudalism wasn’t quite as nice as you picture it. Wars would often lead to immense suffering amongst the peasants. All in all it is vastly nicer to live today, and you should be glad they “only” steal your money these days.
But you make a good point, it seems peaceful elections are not a way to empower “the people”, but a way to protect the ruling class from violent reactions by the public. Democracy makes the ruling class less accountable to the public, so they can do what they feel like. In a sense absolutist monarchies were democratic, people just voted by rebelling and gutting tax collectors.
All the time, but it reassures me. My doubts mean I’m not a fanatic or zealot blindly following a doctrine someone else has laid out. It allows me to question, learn, and improve myself, possibly even the theory as a whole. Our doubts mean we think, and I don’t think that could ever be a bad thing.
I typically do not have doubts about logic. Since I hold the action axiom as being a legitimate premise to build from I have very little doubts in the natural consequences that results, capitalism.
Keep in mind that the whole point behind elected representatives was to protect “the people” against the legal positivism of the absolutist monarchs. Unfortunately, once the monarchs’ power was checked, the representatives took up the mantle of legal positivism themselves. And here we are today.
Religion was a two-edged sword, the it also worked on behalf of taxpayers. Charles Adams discusses the exactio inaudita or “unheard-of-tax” which was an objection rooted in religious belief to paying new taxes. Specifically, since God had set the taxes to be thus-and-so, how could it happen that there should be some new, unheard-of tax (exactio inaudita)?
A lot of our improved living conditions it is just down to technological and economic progress. The upper classes are as privileged as they ever were and it’s harder than ever to fabricate membership in them.
I think free will does not exist (philosophically speaking), but that doesn’t mean people do not make choices based on their preferences, genes whatever. In that sense I am compatibalist. But I know what you mean, I have such doubts too, just not about capitalism per se, but anarchism (or freedom philosophy).
Doubt is good. Don’t treat it as though its negative or bad. The fact that you can still doubt proves that you are not a dogmatist. The best thing to do when your’e doubting what you believe is not to run straight to something which will immiediatly erase your doubt however, the best thing to do is to try to fully read up on a side which supports your doubt, and then attempt to disprove it, either by your own reasoning or by more experienced minds. If you cannot disprove it however, you find that your doubt was well placed.
With that being said socialism is not a threat, its morality is childish, its economics has lost its credibility under the most favorable of conditions (one could say that what happened to marxian economics was the opposite of what happened to Austrian economics) and it has been shown exceedingly dangerous to impliment.
A much more impressive threat comes mostly from other economic schools and their various proposals for intervention.
(1) “Capitalism” was originally a word used as a pejorative for a system of society where there is a significant separation in production between the few capital owning class ruling over the many, the working class.
(2) The term “Capitalists” was used by a radical free market advocate, Thomas Hodgskin, in 1825 (this predates Marx), as a class of capital owning class using State privilege to exploit the working class.
(3) “Capitalism” is still associated by most people as this existing dominant economic system where there is two distinct classes, the capital owners, and the working class. The many working people are subordinate to the few capitalists. This dominant existing system isn’t and has not been a product of a free market, but a heavily Corporatist one, but yet, many knows this system under the term “Capitalism” (pretty difficult term to promote for a popular support)
(4) The free market does not necesarrily form a society where labor is commonly subordinated under the power of capital. In fact, the workers would have more freedom to own their own means of production (small business and cooperatives). Under what is commonly known as “Capitalism” workers have limited freedom in access to credit to form their own business (i.e. worker cooperatives).
To be honest, I’m not even sure cartels(when formed voluntarily on the market), are necessarily even a bad thing. As RB notes in MES, their formation to coordinate production for greater efficiency could be very much analogous to the way in which firms form themselves. Furthermore, firms restricting output beyond the point where a demand curve turns inelastic would actually allow funds to be diverted to the production of goods with far more elastic demand (the existence of which necessarily follows from the inelasticity of the former good), and hence demanded to a greater degree by consumers, increasing welfare to a greater degree than it could have been.
I do need to look more into this though, I believe Pascal Salin also has some interesting work on cartels and their benefits as market structures.
