Filc, there is no COGS, as nothing is being sold(assuming only tax income), so all revenue is gross profit for government(at least from my understanding of accounting).
As for justification… yes, as the alternative of gang warz is worse due to high time preference exploitation vs low time preference in statism’s case.
Cost of action A < Cost of supplying A, because supplying A requires performing Action A on other people who perform it.
SIeben, how can there not be a monetary disincentive for supplying A, if the monetary income is smaller?
Jesus. You only need to use “A and B” notation if you have more than one thing you’re talking about… This is a very convoluted sentence.
If you are saying that it costs more to provide something than you can charge for it, then that is correct. I have no idea if this is what you are saying I have to guess.
Please clarify. Your saying that government always generates a positive income(Profit)?
Please answer my prior questions.
According to your logic this would be true.
You argued earlier that government is profitable. Answer my above question.
Xarthaz:
And government makes a gigantic gross profit(as there is no cost of goods sold, except for exchanges that government makes, but that isnot the main part of revenue), in fact all their tax-revenue is gross profit. Though it is immediately spent, but that is more of a characteristic trademark of democracy.
Please comment on this. Your saying it’s profitable, does this come at a cost at all to individuals in general?
Why aren’t gang-bangers rich? Your logic explains that they should inherently be wealthy. Those profits should be attracting entrepreneurs ect…
FYI You need to look up the difference betweem
-Revenue
-Gross Profit
-Net Profit
What governments are doing when they tax is generating a revenue, not a profit. Likewise when I sell a book from my business, I am generating revenue, not profit. The profit portion comes later after i’ve done my accounting. If I have to sell 8 books and immediately buy a new bookshelf(cost) then it can’t be said I made 8 books worth of profit.
You said earlier.
Either you concede these as costs, or your simply making non-sensical statements, no-offense.
Also earlier you fouled up earlier and never bothered to comment.
Xarthaz:
Filc, responsibility and rights are arbitrary
Xarthaz:
effective property is the base of property rights.
If rights are arbitrary then what are “effective property” rights. Is it also arbitrary?
Depends on empirical factors. Nothing follows from this…
Assuming you mean what I guessed you meant above, which is that it costs more to supply something than you can charge for it, then the good will not be provided by profit seeking actors.
My posts are just getting buried under critiques of Xarthaz’s arguments, and her rebuttals. I can’t even follow all this A and B does this and that C and D, effective property, use of force monopoly, attack/defense dichotomy … etc.etc. I’m lost.
Thx all for the good discussion, I think I learned a great deal. No better way to find out what you belive than to mercilessly attack any positions you think are good. Thx again.
mcintyre im sorry, i wont post any more in this thread, sorry for thread hijack, but please do continue your line, i have been most interested in hearing it, perhaps that explains my overzealous participation.
It isn’t binary. It isn’t like A is either 1, exploited, or 2, not exploited, and that is the only thing that matters. If someone exploits A, he slows the capital accumulation of A, but he probably won’t stop it, so there isn’t a “prisoner’s dilemma”.
If someone exploits A, and the capital accumulation of A slows down, it might still be the incentive for someone else to trade with A, or even to also fight the person exploiting him, because A would still be accumulating capital, he would just be accumulating it more slowly. So, yes, it might be the incentive to try to be the first person to exploit someone, but, if someone exploits someone else, it doesn’t mean that they wouldn’t still have enough of a rate of capital accumulation to make it the incentive for someone else to trade with them, and not exploit them.
I already alluded to this, but an important point is that, if A is exploiting B, he is making it less profitable to trade with B even in the longterm, and that might seem to create a vicious circle, where, whenever someone gets exploited, it becomes more profitable to exploit them, and so on. But the fact that, if someone defends the person from that exploitation, he will be allowing the capital accumulation to increase for the person that he is defending, destroys the circle. What I mean is that, if A is exploiting B, and C defends A, C will be making it easier for A to accumulate capital, and will be making him more and more profitable to trade with. So the two forces fight each other, and the defenders tend to win, because of the theory that I came up with earlier, the result of which we can see all around us, because, if they didn’t tend to win, society wouldn’t exist, yet it does exist.
The sentence means that its tougher to rob robbers than to rob regular people.
SIeben, how can there not be a monetary disincentive for supplying A, if the monetary income is smaller than action A?
Filc, Gross profit = Revenue - COGS; COGS = 0 for government so Gross profit = Reven
Everybody in this thread needs to stop treating government as a single entity. Governments are made up of people, of varying pay scales and low men to high men on the totem pole. The COGS are not zero. You have to pay people to actually forcefully take revenue and give it to you. So tell me, why exactly is it that when an IRS agent takes money in for the government, he doesn’t just keep it?
Excellent post. And in the process B runs dry on funds as no one funding them and the expense of robbing becomes too costly to continue. Eventually C can scale back on operations and A can grow even bigger offering more services to everyone. Or B can offer other varied types of services, especially once the problems of B become marginal.
Please explain how, in your opinion, this must be true. As far as I can see, “effective property” (why you don’t just use “control” or “possession” is beyond me; probably another attempt at obfuscation) is only part of the picture. If control/possession is the whole basis, then by your apparent logic, a thief who steals something becomes the owner of it. That is, if A takes something from B without B’s consent, A also obtains the property right in that something. Am I missing anything here?
Robbery != trade. I don’t see how you can equate the two at all. In both cases there is a transfer of property, but “trade” would be taken by everyone in this thread (save perhaps you and mgmcintyre) as necessarily voluntary on the part of all participants, whereas “robbery” would not be. Please clarify, if you can.
If morality is subjective, then “might makes right” has no more external validity than any other moral theory or system. Otherwise, if what you mean is “might makes things happen”, you’re essentially stating a tautology.
Again you’re being disingenuous. To say “if they didn’t think it would be in their own ‘best interest’” is different from saying that it is in their best interest. From my point of view, the latter statement is an attempt to claim that external reality has values that it imposes upon human beings – a claim that, as far as I can tell, is entirely false. Do you see my point?
If you understand that the concept of “best interest” is necessarily subjective, then you must concede that it’s always possible for someone to believe, for whatever reason(s), that trading instead of stealing is in his best interest. At that point, your attempt to simplistically model human behavior (i.e. “everyone will steal when given the chance”) falls apart.
We (or at least I) are doing more to than that to justify our system. In fact, we’re appealing to what we see as human nature. Morality and ethics are in fact additional incentives for human behavior. For you to say that people mainly behave based on incentive, yet discount moral and ethical incentives, is to only get it partly right. Indeed, what one person sees as an incentive can (at least theoretically) be seen as a disincentive by someone else! So the very concept of incentive is subjective. So for you to say that people mainly behave based on incentive can only make sense, as applied to the real world, if you mean that people mainly behave based on what they see as incentive, whatever that may be.
However, it appears that human nature is not a tabula rasa. Rather, we’re each apparently born with a set of moral and ethical instincts. While these instincts seem to be relatively flexible and can be overridden, they still seem to exist. Furthermore, they seem to reflect our evolutionary heritage. This is based on empirical evidence which I don’t have the time or space to get into at length here. Stephen Pinker’s The Blank Slate is a good read on this subject, though I don’t think he gets it all completely right.
Anyways, the idea that human nature is at least somewhat fixed harkens back to the idea of “natural law” or “natural order”. We can therefore judge the likely stability of a hypothetical social system based on how well it accords with human nature (as far as we have delineated it). In essence, then, anarcho-capitalists such as myself claim that anarcho-capitalism would in all probability accord most closely with human nature.
But the concept of “wealth” depends on the concept of “value”. Since the latter is subjective, the former must be as well. However, I fail to see how robbery is “by FAR the most effective way to gain [stuff]”. Resorting to brute force uses up much more time and energy than employing stealth and deception. You also seem to think that no one would change their behavior if people started getting held up at gunpoint on a regular basis.
As far as “the success story of the state” goes, others in this thread have pointed out that a given state relies a great deal on the effectively voluntary cooperation of its subjects. Why take from people by brute force when you can deceive them into sacrificing of their own free will?
Your “exploitation criterion” has been exploded.
Another bare assertion. Please explain how it must be a case of the prisoner’s dilemma.
You can abandon this thread, but it won’t abandon you.
I don’t see how any of your posts are “just getting buried” under anyone else’s. You don’t seem to have any problem keeping up with the responses. Rather, you seem to pick and choose the “easy targets” and ignore the hard ones. The only thing I can conclude from this is that you’re not actually interested in honest intellectual discourse. You’re simply trying to “win” by trying to silence your opponents.
As far as I can tell, you didn’t attack mercilessly, but you did attack disingenuously at best and deceitfully at worst. But perhaps that’s what you mean by “mercilessly”.
EDIT: If I’m truly wrong with the above, then you’ll find a way to convince me, at which point I’ll graciously and publicly apologize and stand corrected.
If it weren’t possible to exploit people long-term then how did states originate. Or i guess by the logic i am seeing, i should conclude that states don’t exploit b/c if they did they would have “gone out of business” long ago.
All modern western governments are residual from agricultural societies. We haven’t really gone over anything more sophisticated than speculation that people will attack eachother maybe because its profitable, but defense is essentially a collective action problem. If everyone is on sustenance farms, they can’t communicate and coordinate defense against viking warlords. With lower communication costs, the collective action problem becomes solveable.
So states are just kind of sticking around living for however long it takes for their propoganda takes to become ineffective in light of the internet, or whenever states are outcompeted by external private firms ala seasteading.
Of course, no one knows for sure how states originated.
However, I think their origin was much more complicated than systematic exploitation. I’ve been researching ancient cultures off-and-on for some time now, and what I’ve discovered is that at least some ancient states originated more or less due to the following:
strong kinship systems, which were the norm in the ancient world
blood feuds and vendettas that arose between kinship groups
In at least some areas, such as ancient Scandinavia, methods apparently evolved over time to reduce conflict between families/clans/tribes/etc. Probably beginning with the concept of property, other concepts such as law and judges arose in turn. The Scandinavian ting, known to most people as a quasi-legislative assembly, probably had its origin (IMO) as a court of justice. Likewise, the king was originally the judge of the court.
Also there apparently arose agreements between kinship groups for certain things. These agreements could be called treaties, but I prefer to call them contracts. Some of these contracts were made to be binding forever. In other words, the descendants of the kinship groups that made these “eternal” contracts were considered to be bound by them, in spite of the fact that they never explicitly agreed to them. This may, in fact, be the ancient historical basis for the modern idea of the “social contract”.
Add to this the fact that some judgeships became essentially inherited by a matter of blind tradition, and the temptation for the “judge-heirs” to see the families/clans/tribes/etc. that they “presided over” as something more like their personal property increased. That appears to be when the exploitation began in earnest, at least when it came to doing so against “one’s own people”.
Rather, you seem to pick and choose the “easy targets” and ignore the hard ones. The only thing I can conclude from this is that you’re not actually interested in honest intellectual discourse. You’re simply trying to “win” by trying to silence your opponents.-
I did the best I could to advance a half-way decent theory (off the top off my head, after watching “Seven Samurai”) while simultaneously responding to at least 4 lines of questioning.
I have have gone back multiple times and tried to pick out the various internal threads from amongst the tangled wreckage of random comments directed at other posters. If I missed something please let me know specifically what question(s) i did not respond to, or need to clarify my position on, and I will provide you a detailed response. Personally I feel I did OK for my first thread on these forums.
also, when i wanted to know what comment(s) you felt I should comment more on you said:
Autolykos: … your responsibility to go back and read what I wrote. Until you respond to the sections you “missed”, I will continue to conclude that you are unable to mount an effective counter…
And when I explained to you that when you argue with Xarthaz, I don’t respond because she isn’t me, and she is saying different things than i am, you said:
**Autolykos: “**Too late. You’re both essentially on the same “side”. So yes, I will lump your arguments together if I wish, thank you very much.”
So, you haven’t helped me answer you questions/respond to your arguments very well. sorry.
Xarthaz: