Long’s reply to Kliener and to Block and Huebert.
Quite a long reply by Long (ha!). I’ll finish it later. 
Long has been clocking in a lot of overtime, latley. Frankly, I think it’s safe to say “He’s on fire!”.
bookmarks this for later
I thought that his first recent article (the one that’s ignited all the controversy) was a little weak; he didn’t back his claims nearly as well as he usually does. He’s back in form with this one though.
boooooo! bad joke! haha
In a true free market I think there would be greater variety in structure and therefore people who hate working for an organization where they are pushed around could more easily find one where they are not.
Don’t get me wrong, but isn’t Roderick Long a professional intellectual?
It’s not like he’s working for “the man” getting all oppressed and pushed around. I thought he was definitely reaching during this part of his response. The plight of the workers sounds a lot more convincing from someone who labours.
Professional intellectuals would operate in the free-market as well. Quite honestly, it’s very hard to be a professional intellectual & operate accordingly in a coerced & un-free market, such as what we have today.
Chomsky for instance, not only operates within this market, but willingly supports the status-quo, whereas Long does not support the un-free market, but has no choice but to operate within a monopolized territory.
I have no choice but to get a job in order to support myself regardless if the market is free or unfree, & even if I chose the black &grey markets exclusivley (i.e. not bothering to operate in the pink market at all), I would still have a full time job & my work cut out for in being able to maintain a standard of lviing via free-market action & trade in a largley un-free market (which I would imagine would be quite hard but ultimatley fufilling).
I view the issue as largely the same as maintaining a living a standard despite the government’s interference (reluctantly utilizing monopolized services and/or monopolized territory), as opposed to not using them at all (expelling oneself from society as best as possible ala Into The Wild), while working towards being able to utilize services & territory that are free from monopolization & coercion.
I just view the pro-labour position as completely fallacious. The leaders of these movements rarely are workers or foremen (supervisors, superintendents) but intellectuals or politically motivated hacks.
I’m not saying that is Rod Long, it’s just seems disingenuous for a public intellectual, who if they are tenured has near immunity from being fired in a very casual and lucrative environment, to tell me what it is like to work for McDonalds. I worked for McDonalds when I was a teenager. I should be telling them what it is like to work for the man, or to labour on the margins of making a living wage.
People who are real, don’t play at being what they are not, is what I suppose I mean to say. Lately, some of the stuff I have been reading about mutualism is so fantastic, it makes me wonder who is coming up with it. Like did someone who was working say “Hey this sucks” or is it someone on the outside looking in and going “gee, that looks like it sucks”.
Marx apparently did not support himself, and yet he was all about liberating people. A mooch, for liberation. How rich (pun intended).
I absolutely agree regarding possibly hypocritical intellectuals (perhaps duallectuals would be a more apt word), & hold a mixed feeling towards those who do not know anything regarding a certain job or lifestyle (yet, their words may be worth considering regardless), those who don’t but do enough research to not look like ignorants, and those who do but are never managed to be heard or are lesser heard do to “bigger” or more vocal bvoices (i.e. I would hold every human being capable of rational thought as potentially an intellectual, and certainly those who work in the wage jobs are more than capable of giving intellectual insight into the labor environment).
That said, I can’t speak either as to whether Long has had experience or not (a biography or an auto-biography would help clear that up, methinks) in the labor environment (probably more than Marx ever did, I’d imagine).
As for mutualism, I haven’t read much into it to comment on possibly fantastical claims (I suppose you could count Carson’s An Austrian & Marx Synthesis of Monopoly Capitalism as signifigant, but I am only half way through…), but I suspect some of it (certaintly not all of it) has to do with the relativly new interest in the school of thought itself (which to my knowledge, beyond Prodhon, wasn’t very developed until recently, I think?).
Your post also gave me the idea that maybe newer intellectuals, when concoting papers, essays, theories, or remarks on a given enviroment (say, the labor movement) should possibly approach it from an investigative reporting stance, possible even injecting themselves (as real life time would permit) into the very jobs of the economy they conjecture about.
Personally, I don’t see why more intellectuals don’t do more interviews with people & develop their theory & views in conversation, building upon the interviewee’s experience as a referrence point to ensure credibility.
I think there was probably a reason behind this.
Anyway, I too have a lot to learn yet. And my own biases to overcome for sure. Just seems to me that some of these perspectives (not just mutualism) seem to come from first having a populist ideology, then looking for facts to support it.
The one thing I’ve caught is that Klein has yet to refute the analogous relationship between the large corporate firm and the socialist planner. That alone is sufficient to convince me that in a truly free market, “big business” would cease to exist. Until a defender of big business manages to refute that point, I will continue to believe that centralized corporate firms are entirely the product of statism.
So in your mind, the absence of proof is proof?
How do you reconcile that with being a Christian?
(I’m just kidding, well, kinda. I really don’t want to discuss religion…)
No.
Big business firms suffer from the same economic calculation problem as the socialist commonwealth, for exactly the same reasons. Klein has niether acknowledged nor refuted that argument, and that argument is sufficient to disprove his position.
I can’t speak for why Klein hasn’t acknowledged it, but I have recognized that “big business” and “corporation” are just rhetoric.
How does Carson define a big business? Employee size? Charter? Amount of capital? Activity?
Then we have to ask, if big business doesn’t pass muster for economic calculation, why would a large labour union?
I don’t know, and don’t particularly care. I don’t get my beliefs from him. I would just put it that the larger the firm, the less efficient it becomes. It stands to reason that smaller firms will be more common than large ones in a “freed market”, as Long puts it.
They don’t, and that’s why Carson is wrong about labour unions.
But how do you define large then?
@Everyone, or for that matter, how has Rod Long defined it? He may have, and I may have missed it. Seriously, when Rod takes Carson’s position, what is the size and nature of the firm that he believes is state supported?
By how much potential for monopoly the firm has?
Is that your definition?
he asks for clarification, not confrontation…
Nope, I was just guessing, actually. If it’s a reasonable guess, I suppose that’s my position [H]
While monopoly can occur naturally in a free-market, I’d imagine data gathering services on other services would be common place, and various statistics such as market share, how a firm operates, etc. could possibly be counted towards how much potential a firm could have in becoming a monopoly.
Monopolies could be a good or bad thing depending on how the entity/agent is doing business, and such reporting services could help keep people updated on which firms they might need to shun business from in order to prevent monopolies before they become abusive.