Conflating terminology in order to concede a point to someone who’s entirely confused cannot, in anyway, be considered “reasonable.” But again, I don’t want to get into a debate about debating. Also, no one has questioned his intelligence, just the validity of his arguments. I’ve answered all of your questions, can I go now?[:|]
I didn’t conflate any terminology. You just did not take what I wrote into the context of the post, and/or decide to split hairs. What I wrote was, within the context, correct, and in line with what you would eventually respond to Leviathan. Capitalism, in the purest sense (or capitalism without the distortions caused by intervention), has never existed within the time frame of written history. You may have misinterpreted it as something else, but that was through no fault of my own (and, I’m not sure why you would misinterpret it, or what motivation you had to misinterpret it).
Nobody is forcing you to.
What does this even mean? What do you hope to gain by posting sentences/questions such as these? Are you taking this as a lecture (which it is not)? If anything, it comes off as an attempt to belittle. If you really don’t care for what I have to say, then why not say that? You responded to Leviathan that a productive debate had to have lucid language, but you are giving everything but lucid language.
How so? Are you blaming people that lives today for an alleged “coercion and fraud” that happened centuries ago?
You didn’t answer my question about what you actually advocate. Anarcho-communism? State socialism? Property = theft, in your opinion? If I want to run a business with privately held shares and not really make them available to the laborers I employ, do you advocate taking my things being a justifiable punishment for an evil capitalist? Most people normally call that robbery, not an antidote to it.
I think that we owe the good of the industrial and technological revolutions to actual capitalism, voluntary exchange, and the bad to state intervention. I have a problem with the distribution of wealth as well, but only from the factor of institutionalized violence and state coercion. We totally support setting that right. Voluntary association and free trade is not the problem.
Libertarianism says nothing about economics. I’ve seen you try to hijack the word (don’t respond about this as I could care less). I guess you are just conflating things again, like actual capitalism and mercantilism-“capitalism”.
I don’t suspect people would voluntarily give up the modern conveniences we owe to capitalism and return the primitive barter society that would be the result of anarcho-communism being followed completely.
There is some truth to this. But worker co-operatives face many barriers. Workers do not have many assets, so they have to borrow. But they may not even have enough assets for collateral. If they do, they will likely face high interest rates. Burczak discusses this in Socialism after Hayek. I do not share Burczak’s optimism about the desirability or feasibility of deviations from laissez-faire. But I am sympathetic to left-libertarians like Roderick Long who would like to see a greater variety of organisations and types of employment.
Consider this: If capitalism, or laissez-faire, the market economy, voluntarism, market anarchy etc. were as efficient as we Austrians think, one would expect them to be the prevalent form of economic organization in this country. Yet interventionism-corporatism-mercantilism appears to have proven its superiority. Of course, we don’t believe this. There is an important distinction between an institution or economic system being able to break through existing arrangements, and being efficient enough to continue to exist. The former is usually much more difficult.
You should.
It does if it is through consumer preference that the firm attains such a position.
Meaningless drivel.
If the firm is enjoying high profits, it will attract competitors willing to supervene said “barriers” - either existing well capitalised firms or upstarts. The exception is firms which enjoy legal protection and thus have market share solely because of the state slanting matters in their favour. Existing resources are absolutely no guarantee a firm will retain its share, and competition is making it ever harder for firms to entertain such stupid notions.
Personally I doubt more ‘hierarchical’ firms will predominate in market anarchism as they will suffer increasing inefficiencies, but this will not hold for all markets, where in some cases such firms will better serve consumers. This is a non-issue to me… There’s always exceptions like that Brazilian ‘worker’-owned firm, though of course based on details I’ve read its divergence from the stereotypical capitalist firm is not huge. Merely broader dispersion of share ownership by employees of the firm.
Leviathan,
I think that just because something is more productive doesn’t necessarily mean that it is the best economic system. Take the sushi economy example where the islanders discover and use a motorboat to cash extra fish and expand output. The problem is that the villagers don’t have sufficient capital to maintain the motorboat and their other tools so something has to give and this is usually seen in an economic downturn and increasing unemployment.
OF course it is possible for output to rise in the interim but your preference for more consumption now is, like everything else, subjective and depends on purposes.
So in the example the motorboat would be the cooperatives.
Ditto. However, they neither involve central planning nor some fantastic notion that capitalist firms (as in those engaging in division between capital owners/entrepreneurs and “workers”) will disappear or even should be banned (the latter utterly disqualifying one from being an anarchist.)
Ehm, if the workers wanted to buy all the the corporations they could do so in like 25 years. (I think that is a calculation from the 80s found in the Machinery of Freedom.)
Still now corporate profits are like 3% of the economy, it is very small.
The real question here has is:
Do the workers want to own capital?
No, they don’t. They wouldn’t be poor workers if they wanted to own corporations.
If that is what they wanted they would be saving rather then spending everything they earn.
But they think that having fun today is more agreeable then saving for the future, so they consume.
Anyone with any kind of a job in any western country should be able to save money, and a good portion of there wage too.
Just taking my own economy as an example:
- I am a full time student.
- I work weekends cleaning trains (about as bad as a job gets).
- I pay the highest taxes in the west. Swedish taxes…
- I live in a decent place in down-town Gothenburg .. which is the second largest city in the country so the second most expensive place to live in the country.
- I can afford to go to many college events and parites.
And I still manage to save almost 100 Euros per month.
When I work full time during the summer could easily save 400-500 EUR per month and still increase my standard of living from how it is during the semesters. If you have any brains you should manage at least a 25% return per year on that.
(Pension savings etc isn’t calculated in that cause that is already forced by the government on top of that amount.)
Unless they are in the 15-20 years of there adult life when they have kids and stuff there is no reason what so ever for workers to not to be saving money.
Workers have a choice and they choose to spend to there money rather then become capitalists.
This has nothing to do with “concentrative effects of market power”
Workers choosing not to save at all is the primary reason there are so few large coops.
The few workers that do save some money tend to avoid risk. To start a coop they would put almost all there savings into one extremely risky asset (new companies are very risky). This is complete insanity, even to the most highest risk seeking investors out there … and workers seek low risk.