Extremely well stated.
Yes, that’s exactly how Mises defined the market.
So now you’re expanding “market” to encompass not only all human life, but all phenomena in the cosmos whatsoever. As I’ve said to another person who shares your linguistic tendencies, if each thing means everything, than nothing means anything.
A state is a territorial near-monopoly over the use of force. It is not just any aggressor.
AJ, not quite. I agree with DD5 (and have expressly stated myself in a recent essay) that a hampered market is still a market. I never said that the property rights order associated with liberalism had to be 100% implemented for a market to exist. But the existence of a market does depend on those property rights being implemented to some extent. And the extensiveness of the market depends on the degree to which those property rights are implemented.
This confusion is sadly common and it comes from sloppy definitions of the state. Unfortunately, libertarians have often used oversimplistic definitions like characterizing the state as “aggression” or a “monopoly on force” or “coercive monopoly.” None of those characteristics define the state as it actually exists. Aggression, force, coercion, territorial monopolies all exist both in libertarian contexts as well as unlibertarian things like theft and slavery. A rapist engages in coercion, someone acting in self-defense uses force, a thief may use aggression, and private land owners have territorial monopolies. David Friedman and Jan Lester and a few others have tried to draw this out, but it is not emphasized enough among anti-state libertarians.
So.. the state, following from the classic Weberian definition, is a static territorial monopoly on mass ideologically-legitimized (i.e. “legal”), mass coercion. Each element of this definition could have volumes of books clarifying and expanding it empirically, conceptually, etc… but if you can understand that much, you should be okay.
For example, the state’s mass coercion is uniquely legitimized by the state’s ability to act via legislation as law-maker as opposed to law-taker (including when the state is enforcing law). This is analogous to the socialist state’s ability to act as price-maker as opposed to price-taker. In neo-Hayekian terms, law, like any order in human society, emerges bottom-up from individual interaction (i.e. human action, not human design). Order in human society is emergent.
Now, the state is emergent too. It’s emergent from mass ideological legitimacy projected onto a top-down law-making, price-making, coercively-enforced human institution. It is emergent from a popular denial/ignorance of emergence in human society (kind of like how creationists evolved).
Another part of the definition of the state to unpack is the territorial aspect. The state acquires and maintains its land claim via fiat, via mass ideological legitimization (and via agreements with other states in the modern, global nation-state cartel), as opposed to how any other humans must acquire and maintain property: use, trade, gift, conquest, physical defense of actually held property, etc. The human consensus on property rights is uniquely different for the state’s property claim. This is part of the mass ideological legitimization.
More could be said, but I’ll try deal with some more potential confusions. Yes, “coercion” of some kind is inevitable (though libertarians often argue that force in self-defense or defense of some form of property right or retribution of some kind is not “coercive” because it is not proactive). Absolute, universal, complete voluntary-ism is not possible. Rights are sometimes necessarily violently enforced. However, the state acts a top-down imposer of mass coercion. It can do this because it is uniquely subsidized to do so. The mass ideological legitimacy projected onto “the state” makes this mass coercion economically feasible. Thus mass coercion is made much much cheaper for the state than for, say, a security firm. Indeed, mass coercion is generally not economically sustainable without mass ideological legitimization (or extreme asymmetries of power). Thus, with the state, you get more coercion and more coercion disconnected from the emergent order in society.
A non-statist society (e.g. anarcho-capitalism) is different from the status quo in that it does not have mass ideological legitimacy projected onto the state (i.e. does not have subsidy-via-mass-ideological-legitimacy given to top-down/law-making/mass coercive land monopolies). Also, keep in mind, a state is controlled by a few individual human beings at any given time. Thus, an ancap world is a world where no group of humans has mass ideologically subsidized mass coercive territory-monopoly at any given time. Or something like that.
This is appeal to evolutionism, tradition, custom. Purely normative differentation of property and aggression. The fact is, non-normative differentation of property right enforcement from aggression is impossible. Property enforcement is initiation of violence/aggression, it is that simple. The an-cap ideal is not a NAP society, only a primitive tribal society without any need for productive capital or tools for survival can conform to NAP
groan Proudhonlite returns!
Most people (not just ancaps) have very similar criteria for property rights and thus for what is considered aggression interpersonally. As Vernon Smith has shown experimentally, NIE scholars have shown empirically, and Austrians have shown logically, this is what emerges from from humans pursuing their self-perceived interests within the confines of bounded rationality. Think of property like language (or specifically grammar or punctuation or spelling). They are very similar institutions. Most people agree that what agents of the state do is aggression on an interpersonal level. However, they exempt (often without thinking) the state due to the mass ideology of statism. And that’s what NAP advocates are usually trying to make people see.
That is incorrect. Just look at the variety of political beliefs which value non-aggression as important ends, they define aggression differently. Including the an-caps with the very circular logic of the NAP criterion(the justificaton of ancap, nap, being defined on the basis of ends of ancap)
No, it’s not. I’m not talking about “political” beliefs. I’m talking about what emerges interpersonally as “property.” See the extremely well-known empirical work on the emergence of property rights from new institutional economists like Demsetz and Greif, or the extremely well-known lab results of experimental economists like Vernon Smith, or the extremely well-known theoretical work on property norms from Hayek and other Austrians, or even the lesser-known anthropological work of people like Michael Dove at Yale who point out that individual property rights in land and goods were the near-universal norm even in tribal, stateless societies that practiced things like hunter-gathering and swidden agriculture.
As I already pointed out in the post to which you are replying, people in their “political” beliefs make oft-unconscious exemptions for agents of the state with regards to property rights criteria. NAP advocates are trying to make people conscious of this - pointing out that what state agents do (proactive death threat) is what they would consider illegitimate aggression from anyone else. And, as an ethical argument or position, the NAP is not circular any more than every ethical argument is circular. Definition is intersubjective: there is no ultimate objective definition for any word. Therefore, “aggression” like every other word depends for its meaning on how the people using it define it. That is neither relevant nor interesting.
This is a bit squishy IMO.
Can you substantiate this without making an appeal to authority?
Reality (actual acts) says a lot about actual subjective valuations. It says that the robber values the loot more than the potential danger of getting killed or imprisoned. The person on the floor values his life more than the potential glory he may earn by confronting the robber.
Reality would be different if all girls were horny, too. Things would be different, if reality was different. How is this saying more, or anything?
Z.
Life. Humans acting. Please provide your definition, if possible without refering to words in potential need of definitions themselves. Let’s stick to a vocabulary that is least likely to lead to misunderstanding caused by diverging definitions of terms.
The outcome of humans acting (pursuing their self-interests).
I value reality because that’s where I live and act. But values are subjective, so to each their own. I also think that actual outcomes of human action provide information about actual subjective valuations which drive the actions of humans.
Your idea is real, alright. So is the idea of (non-market) parasites to act in their own self-interest and profit from hampering your idea. So is my idea that all girls can be horny. All ideas are real. They exist – in someone’s head.
Of course, voluntary exchange is possible. No one needs to be coerced. But why would a parasite care about your needs if he calculates that coercing you would be in his best interest?
I understand them perfectly. You advocate that all exchanges be voluntary. I advocate that all girls are horny. We both wake up in the morning and observe that not all exchanges are voluntary and not all girls are horny. Tough titties for both of us.
Z.
Which part? The part about markets still being possible even without 100% adherence to liberal property rights in a given society? The part about markets being impossible with 0% adherence to liberal property rights? Or the part about greater adherence to liberal property rights extending the ambit of the market? Each part seems pretty firm to me.
Danny,
We reached a consensus earlier in the thread on the more narrow definition of the market (process of voluntary exchanges). I saw you also contributed another one involving profit, loss, money, etc. Do you think sticking with the “process of voluntary exchanges” would be ok or is your definition essential for the discussion?
I have to run and will respond to your and other posts later.
Z.
It’s one thing for major scholars to recast language, but in our sublunary realm, I think it makes sense to stick to the terminology as we find it in the best works in our tradition. And Mises’ definition of “market” is the one Michael Green and I are using.
Also voluntary exchanges that don’t involve money prices are a distinguishable kind of event. But they are not part of a “process”. There is no such thing as a “barter process”. There are barter opportunities that people can take advantage of when they arise. But they don’t form the kind of multi-stage process that you find in a market order as Mises defined the term.
An-archy literally means “without rulers”.
It seems to me you take every term (anarchy, markets) to mean everything (all life, all action). That’s bound to lead to some intellectual confusion. Maybe your claims are correct if you could clean up your use of language, because you’re badly misusing terms, and then participating in debates where everyone is using the term in a different manner. As I said, it just leads to a bunch of non-sequiturs.
As an aside, how have you managed to post here this long and not know what everyone else means by anarchy and market? Have you not read anything by any Austrians?
I’m late to run errands, I will try to get back to the other matters in this thread later today.
Yes. This bit is squishy. What % between 0 and 100% is the line where markets aren’t working?