Thanks so much - but I think I’ll stick with ‘The State’ - if it’s good enough for Rothbard, Spencer, Nock, Oppenhiemer, Wolfe, Bovard, et.al., it’s good enough for me. 
Wrong. What is so difficult to grasp about the notion of collective action? I’ll let Spencer, in The Coming Slavery, explain the fundamental difference to you between an agent of the coercive State and an individual operating in a purely voluntary free market:
“Every extension of the regulative policy involves an addition to the regulative agents—a further growth of officialism and an increasing power of the organization formed of officials. Take a pair of scales with many shot in the one and a few in the other. Lift shot after shot out of the loaded scale and put it into the unloaded scale. Presently you will produce a balance; and if you go on, the position of the scales will be reversed. Suppose the beam to be unequally divided, and let the lightly loaded scale be at the end of a very long arm; then the transfer of each shot, producing a much greater effect, will far sooner bring about a change of position. I use the figure to illustrate what results from transferring one individual after another from the regulated mass of the community to the regulating structures. The transfer weakens the one and strengthens the other in a far greater degree than is implied by the relative change of numbers. A comparatively small body of officials, coherent, having common interests, and acting under central authority, has an immense advantage over an incoherent public which has no settled policy, and can be brought to act unitedly only under strong provocation. Hence an organization of officials, once passing a certain stage of growth, becomes less and less resistible; as we see in the bureaucracies of the Continent.”
/sigh. I had hoped this sort of delusional thinking would not exist at mises.com. Look, this is really simple: our current system, which is what you are implying is a ‘free market’ so you can take pot shots at it is nothing of the sort. Our society is not capitalist. It is corporatist (what Nock called 'economism). It is Big Biz in collusion with Big Gov at the expense in dollars and liberty - the coins of the realm - of the citizens, who participate because they are trapped, and don’t even know any better. When I talk about the market - the free market - I am talking about a theoretical which does not exist. In this nation, we have a heavily regulated, heavily protectionist market, not a free one. So feel free to blast all the holes in our current system you like - I’ll help you - but don’t try to assert that you have discovered a failure in the free market and then point to ours, because this is just a straw man fallacy.
It’s absurd to say that “society recognizes their claims to power as legitimate” - legitimacy has NOTHING to do with it, and society barely anything. The reason such practices take place is because illegal government actions which favor the corporations which can most readily fund the campaigns of the politicians who ‘help’ them. None of this is ‘legitimate’ under a Republican form of government. So we don’t have a Republic, nor do we have a free market. We have a democracy verging on a dictatorship at the present time, and an at-bext ‘mixed’ corporatist economy.
I’m so tired of this mindless, bogus straw man argument. It’s really discouraging to see it repeated here.
So now you are reduced to making specific assertions about what I ‘see’ and what I don’t see? You don’t know jack about my philosophy - it’s laughably presumptious of you to assert you know what’s going on in my brain. I would speculate that you are used to winding out certain arguments over and over again, and so now you have decided that I fit into some template and you’re using that argument. Ain’t gonna work. You have demonstrated pretty compellingly that you have never exposed yourself to any of the thinkers that inform my philosophy, so your arguments are just not on the mark.
Wrong again. Reread your statement 3 lines up. You said I contribute to the state in taxes, state is evil, then I am complicit. There are only 2 parties here. Me and the State. Me and the mugger. You are entitled to your own opinions - you are NOT entitled to your own facts. My analogy holds - yours does not.
Huh? Where did I assert that I feel entitled to protection from other people? Where did I assert that you should sacrifice your well being? Where did I assert any of this? You feeling OK dude? Talk about outta left field…
I see - so by making up a bunch of stuff I never said, and simply saying I said it (and even calling it a CLAIM LOL!), you are now rejecting this phantom reality. That you made up and assigned falsely to me. That’s a neat trick.
Hopefully, I didn’t screw up the quoting too badly…
But, as you yourself acknowledged, the state IS the agents that made up the state. Given that the agents who made up the state at that time are dead, there is no one alive who was responsible. The continuity of the state is merely a convenient fiction, as the state itself is. You have no right to force me out of my home for a crime committed by dead men against dead men. They have nothing to do with me. The fact that I occupy the ground on which unfortunate events happened does not obligate me to make up for those unfortunate events.
if you can suss out these uncompetitive firms still in existence, then wall st has a corner office and a car-bay with your name on it. warren buffett is proof it is possible. better still, cough up a few names that we may load up our portfolios, and sit back to enjoy these abnormal profits.
there’s an internal contradiction here! contracts are only binding for legitimate activities. anyway it’s insulting to real slaves (check out the eastern europeans who are sold unwittingly into italian prostitution rackets). pop terminology doesn’t further your arguments.
JC, in regard to the above, I see what you are saying, and I sort of agree with much of it, but I’m having a hard time buying it - this is just too convenient. Let’s use the analogy I made in my not-post: State as organized criminal conspiracy, or mafia. When a new don takes over the reins of the existing organization, he continues the criminal activities seamlessly. The numbers racket goes on, the prostitution, the drug smuggling, whatever. New criminal activities may be initiated, and some old ones modified or stopped, but there is a continuation, and that benefits the crime family. This can go on for generations. Now, is a member of the family now criminally liable for, say, a bank robbery committed years before his time? Well, the robbery benfited the organization, perhaps allowing it to fund its drug smuggling operation, which in turn enables it to keep its numbers racket going. So the current mafioso benefits from the illegal actions of the past because he inherits the funds and is in a position to perpetuate the ongoing illegal activity without much effort.
So while the current don is not criminally liable for that robbery, because he and the family benefit from the crime and it was used to perpetuate further criminal activity, which may not have existed absent earlier crimes, it seems to me there must be some moral responsibility here.
As I said before, I don’t have a good answer to all of this, but the situation where a State can inflict all sorts of violence upon people, up to and including genocide, and then escape any justice for it simply by normal personnel turnover, seems like a situation which is going to incentivize the ongoing visitation of violence and force against people, and an ethical system that cannot offer any hope of justice for such seems to be a limited ethical system.
And the idea that individuals from group B can justifiably take all the land that once belonged to group A (and kill most of those in group A as a by product) by force, but that there is no remedy for this under an ethical system, seems, again, to expose a fairly severe shortcoming in that ethical system.
Finally, we need to address this issue that has been raised several times recently: that the State is no more than a bunch of individuals. While that is true on one level, there is more to it, because that definition implies a randomness and incoherence that doesn’t exist in the case of the State. Rothbard, Nock, Oppenheimer, Spencer - all saw the State as a specific type of entity (and used The State as I use it) - comprised wholly of individuals, to be sure, but addressable as a collective entity with certain specific characteristics, operational dynamics, etc. So in this sense, the State is much more than just a collection of individuals - it is a collection of individuals brought together for a specific purpose, operating toward a specific agenda, in coordination with each other. As Spencer put it:
“A comparatively small body of officials, coherent, having common interests, and acting under central authority, has an immense advantage over an incoherent public which has no settled policy, and can be brought to act unitedly only under strong provocation”
The quickest way to understand this is, I think, Rothbard’s ‘The Anatomy of the State’, but I would strongly urge those who have not done to to also read Spencer’s ‘Man vs The State’ and Nock’s ‘Our Enemy the State.’
It’s a mistake to place the state outside of the market. The government’s existence depends on market forces.
Markets precede governments, because the trade of goods precedes the regulation of trade.
If governments could not be established under markets, then government would never exist today. Since they do exist today, there must be some reason.
And they only continue to exist because of market forces. If every individual in the market today suddenly said, “We don’t want government,” and engaged in civil disobedience or violence, the government would fall apart. The government, too, is restrained in how much debt it can incur. Because if it incurs debt that it clearly can’t pay off and it has to default, the debtor is liable to go to war or at least demand some kind of appeasement.
This is why non-corrupt democratic regimes tend to be more stable than corrupt, authoritarian regimes.
So, there is no difference between collective action in the market or government. Either way, you’re forced to be subject to the values and policies of others.
The only reason the government is so powerful is because of it is the least competitive economic entity within any given region. Since not all economic entities are competitive, there is a very thin line between large, monopolistic businesses and governments.
So, is the “free market” a fiction like “communism” that hasn’t existed and never will exist, anywhere?
Humans all act in their own subjective interest – basics of praxeology. This is why we have what you call “economism.”
In order to have your free market, you have to some cause most people in the world to share your own subjective interest of having a free market.
It’s simply a manner of speaking.
“You see,” doesn’t literally mean “this is your opinion.”
Don’t nitpick if you get my general meaning. Many words have multiple meanings but it’s very easy to get the general meaning. For instance, if I say, “Are my statements above clear?” you know I’m not asking if they’re transparent.
No, there isn’t. There’s the rest of America, too, remember. By paying taxes, you contribute to your own theft and theirs, just as much as they contribute to your theft by paying taxes.
Plus, the government offers services which many people believe are justifiable on philosophical ethical grounds. This is far from the mafia, which only offers protection tongue-in-cheek, which nobody actually takes seriously.
Not to mention, you have means of recouse if you feel you’ve been wronged, you have certain rights, etc, etc.. The analogy is so wildly off.
By opposing my right to support the government.
…/yawn…