I have had enough of definition games this week to last me a year. What is the principle of socialism?
I believe it is. I don’t think it is possible to voluntarily exchange without clear ownership over what is being traded.
This is not my prefered property convention. This is the Austrian property convention.
No, monopoly. Which is what communal ownership of a resource is. Monopoly.
A monopoly arrived at voluntarily, but maintained without market competition. Thus, it is an institutional monopoly. A hierarchy if you will.
Worker self-management is a non-sensical term. In the free market, every worker can be self-managed if he or she so chooses.
Worker’s councils and unions have just as much capacity for bureaucratization as large firms. Also, please stop using the term corporation as you are. Peter Klein, Stephan Kinsella, I and many others have clearly shown where Long and Carson are lacking the understanding of corporations to make a conflation between them and large firms. Not all large firms are incorporated, and not all corporations are large firms.
You’re redefining Mises calculation argument to suit your own social values.
Austrian economics is a "value-free"analytical tool - it has nothing to say about such ethical questions by its own methodology.
There is no “austrian property convention”.
Communal ownership of a resource does not necessarily mean that there is no competition external to a particular communal association. A communal association is inherently “private” relative to everything external to it. It is possible for a particular case of communal ownership to be created sustained by forcibly outlawing competition, and it is possible for it to merely be one particular segment and manifestation of people’s voluntary associations. Likewise, it is possible for a particular case of more explicitly “private” ownership to be created and sustained by forcibly outlawing competition, and it is possible for it to be a manifestation of voluntary associations. It can go either way, and you’re thinking too one-dimensionally to aknowledge this. In some sense, true free competition is free competition between property arrangements and economic systems.
Look in the mirror, pal. You’re the one conflating your prefered property conventions with the broader concept of a free market, while I’m defending an over-arching neutralist and pluralistic take on the matter. My view is that both “private” and “communal” forms of association can be either voluntary or authoritarian depending on the context, in contrast to a narrow view that picks one side and proceeds to refuse to recognize any distinctions or subtleties and conflates a particular manifestation of freedom of association as the only true form of it. The fact of the matter is that freedom of association takes multiple forms, as does authoritarianism. I think that free competition inherently breeds increased complexity and diversity in economic organization over time, which means a tendency towards decentralization on both an inter-institutional and internal level.
Mises’s calculation argument is a significant piece of a larger puzzle involved in organization theory in general.
Do all self-proclaimed “anarcho-capitalists” consistently respect the rights of individuals who do not wish to have someone fraudulently claim ownership over the city that they live in and dictate the laws from that standpoint? Or the rights of individuals who do not want to be forcibly removed from their own property for not being social conservatives or belonging to the right cultural identity group? Or the rights of individuals to not be “voluntarily” enslaved via being forcibly blocked from opting out of contracts?
snickers at the resident Hoppeans and Block-heads I somehow doubt it.
I’m not necessarily a Kantian in thinking that all individuals act with ration and logic at all times and in all decisions but the law is not something Anarcho-capitalists exclude from their theoretical world.
Certainly a transgression of rights.
I think it is a self-refuting argument. I would not say to one 'You cannot be a slave and I will coerce you into not ‘being one’.
It’s interesting you would mention Hoppe, because his communitarian vision actually has a lot of similarities to the anarcho-communists. In fact, he laments the “erosion of familial, communal, regional, and religious affiliations” in one of his articles.
Are you saying that individual private property ownership is not a convention of Austrian Economics?
Communal organizations are cartels. Cartels are created bearing the seeds of their destruction. Recently you evaded replying to a response about unions. I suspect because you know that your position is flawed, as it is on communes. Anyone can leave a commune and compete with a commune at any time in a “free market”. If we go a step further, lib-socialist philosophy likes to embrace proximity and use (or some wording thereof) which means that they could also make a case for being entitled to take property out of the commune with them when they leave.
There is absolutely no purpose to a commune, and it is not a sustainable social model.
So is a corporation.
Ha! You are indirectly arguing for hierarchy! True free competition is always at the smallest possible level. In this case, the individual level. The notion of a commune isn’t “bad” in my opinion because the group is not a competitive force, it’s that the group has to outlaw competition within the commune, because otherwise, the cartel will dissolve with winners choosing not to carry the losers.
You’re avoiding the point of my argument. Communal forms can only exist as cartels in a free market. Cartels are always susceptible to being dissolved due to internal competition. The only way to have an enduring communal structure, is to get people to voluntarily give up competition amongst each other, in perpetuity. This means to stop competing or to stop engaging in free market activity.
This is why we constantly see leftists crying out for solidarity. Because without an ideological commitment to abandoning competition with one another, there is no potential for an enduring communal union.
The free market is a system where one can choose to give up their option to compete and join a commune, but a commune INTERNALLY and BY NATURE cannot tolerate the internal competition necessary to be “free market”.
I got you guys by the grapefruits.
h/t to Cork for inspiring me with his comparison of anti-hierarchy to anti-division of labour.
The 1950’s nuclear family is itself quite unnatural, as historically families involved multiple generations living within the same “house.” (The word house at the time having a much broader meaning than today’s cheap wooden building. A house was not only a place to sleep and eat, it was also a small workshop and the center of economic life.)
Thanks, man! The division of labor problem is the ultimate nail in the coffin of left-libertarianism, as far as I’m concerned. They have no answer to it. None. Nada. Zip.
I guess I don’t get what there is to destroy. It’s a matter of fact that big business, the state, and modern labor unions have a close partnership. Whether you call it “capitalism” or not is just a matter of definitions.
Threads like these remind me why I don’t like to use the words “socialism” and “capitalism”. There’s a point when a word acquires so much baggage that you just have to stop using it, and find another.