From another thread…
How is the state not a result (or a part) of the market? How is the state (or any other human creation) not the result of humans using means to pursue their (subjectively valued) ends? Who/what apart from acting humans creates a state?
How is any provision of law and security (including uniform law and territorial power/security monopoly) not a market outcome?
Z.
Can you give me your definition of the market please?
A market (from: marketplace) revolves around the institution of property rights. Under property rights, people can produce under the division of labor and raise their standards of living cooperatively.
A state revolves around aggression, where one has to suffer for the benefit of the other.
The state is the result of violent human action. But we don’t call that a market.
Pursuing self-interest is not the key of the market; trade (cooperation) is.
LS, I would define the market as the domain in which a set of human agents are using means to pursue their subjectively valued ends.
Nielsio, is lack of aggressive human action in X a necessary (defining) requirement for X to be called a market? In other words, must a market exclusively exist in conditions devoid of aggressive human action?
Z.
That’s almost a proper definition for human action. Certainly, the State is the outcome of Human Action.
No, the State is not under the umbrella of “catallacty” (peaceful, voluntary transaction) to use the Misesean term, however, Mises explicitly says in the opening of Human Action that the action principle - “humans act” - is far broader than just catallacty. So, the State is - like any feature of society - is the creation of human action but it is not a result of the market, that is, the result of peaceful, voluntary transactions.
Clayton -
Clayton, do you define: market = peaceful, voluntary transactions?
Z.
No, not quite, but catallacty is the study of peaceful, voluntary transactions and is the Austrian term for what mainstream economists would call “the free market.” The difference is methodological since in mainstream usage - which is less abstract than Austrian usage - “the market” includes many things (for example, the Fed-set interest rate) which are clearly not catallactic.
Clayton -
Maybe state is a remnant of our past tribal times, when we didn’t have that much intelligence. It was just at the last century when some people realized that society could work without it, and just at the late 90’s we got the technology to challenge those groups who can decide about things.
And therein lies the issue. Nearly everyone else defines a market as a process of voluntary exchange.
You’re conflating markets with any human action.
I find that leftists have a harder time making this fairly simple distinction. I once defined the market to a leftist as “any action which is the result of the individual’s own free choice” and he responded by saying if a mugger puts a gun to my head, it’s still my free choice whether to hand over my wallet or take the bullet… I was like “huh???”
Clayton -
In a way that leftist was correct, in that the mugger is only constraining your choices, and every buyer and seller does that when they refuse to let you take their goods/money for free. What counts as “voluntary” (and therefore as a market interaction) really depends on the norms/customs/attitudes of the society in question. Now of course in any society in history, mugging is considered involuntary… Nevermind: taxation.
In other words, if the key question is to be, “Is the state a market outcome?” and if market is defined in terms of voluntary, and voluntary is defined in terms of norms/customs/attitudes, the key question becomes, “Is the state an outcome of the norms/customs/attitudes of the society?” Or more simply, “Is the state an outcome of what the majority wants?” (especially their desire for/against centralized power?)
So you merely define aggression away from the market? Are you implying (assuming) that any aggressive human action is outside the realm of the market? Are we discussing Platonic or real worlds?
A guy threatens to crush my skull tomorrow so I go and voluntarily buy myself a gun today. How did aggressive human action (threat) manage to affect a voluntary transaction (gun purchase) from outside the realm of the market (as you defined it)?
Z.
As I wrote on a related note in a recent post…
"Humans act. Human parasites are human. They act, too.
By definition, human parasites are those humans which hamper voluntary exchanges between humans for their own benefit. The “state” can only be eliminated to the extent that human parasites can be eliminated from the human population. AE does prove that humanity without human parasites, i.e. humanity in which voluntary exchanges are unhampered, is one which creates most peace, wealth, and prosperity, but AE can not prove the non-existence of human parasites. Empirically and historically, they’ve always been among us.
So the question is not whether one prefers a world with human parasites to a world without them. The question is rather how does the non-parasitic (productive) portion of humanity best deal with its parasitic counterpart."
Perhaps “the state” is a market outcome that (so far) best addresses this problem.
Z.
But the difference is that the seller’s refusal to give his stuff up for free and the buyer’s refusal to give all his property up to the seller in return for nothing - both of which are backed up by the possibility of violence if necessary - is different because they conform to human conception of property and it is this conception of property minimizes the use of human-on-human violence (hence, granting it an evolutionary advantage). You can think of property as the “boundaries of justifiable violence” and the less fuzzy those boundaries are and the more tightly those boundaries are bound to what you can justifiably claim to be your own, the more effectively violence is minimized.
“Voluntary” in this case should not be taken to refer to “any act involving the use of the voluntary muscle groups” but in the more restricted sense of conforming to the ordinary human conception of unimpeded action. Yes, this definition is fuzzy but it can be made as sharp as desired in any particular case.
I recently posted on this subject (“I’m an aesthetic fundamentalist - and why you should care”) and I eschew the “majority” criterion but all-in-all I agree that the State is definitely possible only because people are the way they are. And changes in attitude matter. Steven Landsburg has pointed out that a common form of entertainment in Paris 400 years ago was slowly lowering a cat by a string into a small bonfire and watching it scramble and scream as its fur was burnt off and it eventually died. The Prince also put people into Iron Maidens and had red hot pokers shoved in people’s eye sockets and other places even worse than that. Today, most adults would react in horror and outrage at the torture of a cat and would also be horrified if the government applied medieval torture tactics (unless it’s waterboarding - the Spaniards called ‘tortura del agua’, litreally ‘water torture’ - and the neocons trivialize it as “splashing a little water on someone’s face”). The key is to leverage this principle of “moral shift over time” into squeezing the State itself out of existence and all the evidence is that we (libertarians) are on the winning side in the long-term. The only trouble is it can be a very long-term.
Clayton -
That’s like saying, “so you merely define aggression away from peace?”
The market doesn’t include aggression. The market only works if property rights are in effect. Aggression violates property rights.
I am speaking as an Austrian economist. Surely you’re aware of how Austrians and other free market economists use the word market?
Where is the exchange? You’re still conflating any human action with a market.
It didn’t. Check your premises please!
I do think such norms would generally be held to, at least in the societies I’m familiar with, as long as no centralized authority arose. (Though the fact that such norms would materially benefit the general populace would only encourage such norms to come about if people actually believed that to be the case.)
It seems to me that as long as people can be persuaded to categorically reject centralized power, the actual “normal” norms prevailing in each society (probably things you and I - for example - would find fairly acceptable) would prevail. By “normal” I mean presumably without the double-standard morality you’ve mentioned before, and whatever other oddities of state apologetics have infested people’s minds due to the rise of the modern super-state.
You’ve defined the market to incorporate the state, and apparently everything else that ever has and ever will exist. This broad, supposedly Misesian claim that all purposive action can be subsumed under “the market” makes “the market” a completely useless term.
Clayton: I think your definition needs mention of money, because isn’t catallactics (can’t find “catallacty”) concerned solely with exchanges done with money? It is directed precisely at the question of economic calculation using money prices. Market activity, then, is voluntary exchange conducted in money. This allows us to better distinguish what is and is not part of the market. We might say a man gives time and a sympathetic ear with a woman he fancies in exchange for a roll in the hay, but it is not market activity. A man also gives money to a mugger in exchange for his life, but it is not market activity, The resulting state of affairs in both cases is not a “market outcome.”
There is an important question here, it’s just posed horribly, bringing in the market for no real reason. This was a better way to put it.
A guy threatens to crush my skull tomorrow so I go and voluntarily buy myself a gun today. How did aggressive human action (threat) manage to affect a
voluntary transaction (gun purchase) from outside the realm of the market (as you defined it)?
A cloud threatens to rain tomorrow so I go and voluntarily buy myself an umbrella today. How did a meterological event manage to affect a voluntary transaction (umbrella purchase) from outside the realm of the market ?
I mean really…
If market = peace, then how is peace (the best?) means of protection against aggression?
This is circular. So the market only works in conditions (law and security) of which it is the best (most efficient) provider?
Aggressive human action/exchange (AHA): A guy breaks my nose and threatens to crush my skull tomorrow.
Voluntary human action/exchange (VHA): I buy a gun.
How did an AHA affect a VHA if the former is outside the realm of the latter (the market)? How does an action which is supposedly outside a realm affect an action within the same realm?
Which of my premises are wrong?
Z.