No, we should expect large private firms to exist even without the state (the word corporations is misleading). Of course, these firms will be large because they are efficient in production, as opposed to efficient in political bribery. I haven’t mentioned limited liability, so I don’t know why you bring it up. They can assure greater financing by issuing stocks and bonds. Additional capital means lower production costs and higher real wages per worker.
Even if they aren’t lazy, they will have different goals, and different ideas about how the coop should be handled. Replacing the corporate structure with “democracy” assures the efficiency of congress for every single coop.
This statement ignores all of human history. The nations which have gone down the path of socialism have been economically and psychologically ruined. There is torrential evidence showing the disastrous affects of high taxation, debt, inflation, and regulation, and yet socialist propaganda still dominates much of the world. A recent study showed that most Ukrainians want to go back to communism, even though 10 million of them were murdered/starved to death under Lenin and Stalin (some say the real figure is much higher).
The vast majority of Americans hate economic liberalism, even though it has made them the worlds economic superpower (when I say economic liberalism has made the U.S the wealthiest nation in the world, I mean its relative economic liberalism–but this no longer exists. We’re just another welfare/warfare state consuming our previously accumulated wealth). The Republicans (right-wingers) are simply hyper-aggresive social democrats–they support deficits, wars, regulation, ect. What you don’t understand is that the Marxian/socialist arguments are not appeals to reason, they are appeals to emotion, and sound altruistic (superficially so). The latter is much more effective.
It doesn’t take much to agitate the masses and cause social unrest. The “revolutions” of 1848 perfectly demonstrate my point.
I have a tough time forseeing the huge firms of today making it without state granted privilege. It seems to me that smaller, more liquid firms would constantly be outmaneuvering them with innovation, faster/higher risk reward investments, eventually toppling the behemoth. I don’t know if you’ve ever worked with a large industrial concern (my company does), but I can tell you, they move excrutiatingly slow to implement any sort of change.
Well, that’s because we are talking about human future. True lassiez-faire is almost historically unprecidented, without a central state, even more rare. If it delivers the prosperity it promises, what is there to get revolutionary about?
I don’t know what you mean by “more liquid firms”. Small companies will attack the big companies, and there will be fierce competition. But the most efficient companies will grow until they aren’t the most efficient anymore. This happened with Standard oil and IBM, for example. Big firms have greater power in financial markets, as their bonds and stocks are more lucrative, and they have more money to invest in research and development. This is called dynamic efficiency. They also have lower production costs (but as they grow larger they suffer from Hayek’s tacit knowledge problem).
Okay. So you think this time it will be different. Care to back this claim up? Why will those who are ideologically tied to socialism not respond with anger and jealousy when their dream is destroyed, and when they are that much poorer than those around them? Why is anti-liberalism so prominent today (Barack Obama)?
I would just suggest reading the Anarchist FAQ in order to get a look into the brain of one of these socialists. I haven’t spent much time reading the thing, it is very large, and displayed in a very annoying format (small letters, single spaced paragraphs). In addition to this its tone is unbearable. i find it to be very spiteful, and of the usual mocking dismissive type that is typical of the left.
If you do read it, you will see that there are arguments against every facet of Right-Libertarian theory in general. Austrian economics are supposedly refuted. I find this unlikely, but I find it worrying that I haven’t seen an austrian response to this. It is also worth noting that many of the arguments are nothing new, and have been refuted by Austrians in various forms. Some things are easy to point to as out right fallacious. The section on “the myths of capitalism” begins by claiming that economics is not a value-free science.
It has many interesting criticisms that are worth looking at. In particular, I found their section on Hong Kong very interesting. They state that most of the land in Hong Kong is owned by the State, and the land is then rented on the market for 50 years to corporations.
It is important to realize though, that Anarcho-Communists are not our allies, they are just probably our theoretically strongest enemy. What I mean by this is that I can refute the arguments of liberalism, Marxism, fascism, protectionism, and conservatism pretty easily. These guys seem a little harder, just because the world view is so unfamiliar. It is like they are from an entirely different planet.
Spending all of your time debunking already debunked crap on the internet is counter-productive. Carl Menger, for example, spent most of his career refuting the German historical school, wasting much of his talent. Unfortunately, it proved to be one giant waste of time. The world has forgotten the German Historical school, but continue to employ its methods.
Did the world forget the German Historical school because he annihilated it or do you think they would have been forgotten in the absence of his contribution. That is a real question, I just want more thought put into this before I decide to dismiss a whole world view based on this idea.
Well, their world view is unfamiliar because when I read most things, I see them put in the everyday-guy paradigm. The everyday-guy paradigm has many variations, and can seem very radical. But it is usually based on the same few cliches and sentiments and amounts to little thought. These guys however, have a paradigm that isn’t the same as the everyday-guy paradigm, nor is it the same as mine.
The way in which they define the sate is completely different. Besides the mainstream ones (I don’t think Chomsky is really an anarchists anyways), they also don’t seem to view philosophy in the same way I do (methodology, economics, politics, win!).
The way history is looked at is also different. If you read “a people’s history of america”, you will get an entirely different view of the united states you would get by reading “The Politically incorrect guide to U.S history”. You get an anti-authoritarian sentiment out of both books for sure, but there is something creepily similar yet different about both world views.
Oh yes, Menger thoroughly refuted the German Historical school, which claimed that there are no economic laws, and supported only ad hoc explanations for everything. This debate was known as the methodenstreit, or, “battle of the methods.” The mainstream, if they’ve ever heard of it, will tell you that Menger was the victor. Similarly, Bohm-Bawerk refuted Engles and the Marxists, and Mises refuted the Neo Marxists, but the mainstream believes that Hayek lost to Keyens. A soft form of historicism reemerged with Friedman (“exogenous shocks” theory, for example).
Hmmm. It does give me confidence to know that Austrians seem to be more concerned with the history of thought than the history of politics. Leftists seem more obsessed with accusations and showing how right their world view is rather than demonstrating why their way of thinking is better. That is why Mises is my favorite philosopher over any other, He demonstrated why his method of analysis was write before even getting to talking about capitalism.
Austrians defeated most of their ideological enemies, namely the various groups of socialists, with pure logic. The socialists, out of utter desperation, were forced to accept, or retreat to, polylogism (the belief that there’s more than one logic). Austrians, they said, couldn’t understand their arguments because they had “bourgeois logic”, which was inferior to “proletariat logic” (which they had).
I generally agree with Jackson and Merlin on this. The whole reason there is an Anarcho-Left (and the objectivist conception of AnCap for that matter) is that people have not really understood the nature of anarchy. The nature of anarchy is that “you” or your group don’t get to plan or designate anything for all others to be bound by.
This is just another one of those needless internal conflicts that libertarians are famous for, based on that non-understanding. However, a number of theories neatly sidestep this issue, thereby allowing a “big libertarian tent.” Although they are silent on the issue of “capitalism” per se, it is included automatically in practice whether the leftists realize it or not:
-Panarchism
-Common law anarchy (see here)
-Pure anti-monopolism
Note that these theories entail zero compromise toward the left. All they do is reframe the issues to show that the two sides have no need to fight each other.
Right, so companies will have a sort of “ceiling of profit” as far as size is concerned.
Well, I kind of defended that in the rest of that quote, you know, the whole “laissez-faire with no central authority is historically unprecidented” part?
The anarchist Left seeks the same ends as the Marxist Left: a flat, non-hierarchical society. The Marxist Left perhaps recognizes that the State is the only institution with enough weight to crush the society beneath it into this form. (Of course, the result is a two-tier society, like Maoist China or Cuba.) The anarchist Left appears to recognize the evil of the State, but seems obsessed with equality of outcome. Like the Marxists, they envision a great ‘smashing’ of all existing institutions at which point, they believe, an egalitarian utopia will arise. Most people are repulsed by such an outcome, to say nothing of the methods that would be required.
Hmm, that’s kind of what I (and I thought most Libertarians) were looking for as an outcome. Is the distinction the “smashing” part? I’d much rather wait for them to topple under their own weight. Is that really all that different?
Funny you mention that, I have a thread going about that utopia arising from laissez-faire, rather than collectivization.
Well, take a look at my tran of thought on that other thread, and tell me what you think. It doesn’t sound too repulsive (to me at least), and the methods aren’t that bad either.
Jackson: The simple answer is that most ancaps, unfortunately, are ideologues that don’t understand the history of libertarian and anarchist thought very well, or even of the philosophy implicit in their own doctrines. They have conceptual blinders on. They generally don’t understand the nuances or differences between the things like classic individualist anarchism, mutualism, anarcho-collectivism, anarcho-syndicalism, anarcho-communism, and so on. For many of them, everything is either ancap or an overgeneralized boogieman of “socialism”, which basically translates to “anything other than an absolutist natural rights, propertarian position”. Their understanding of “freedom” is filtered through the lense of semantic word-association dogmatism and the influence of the political right on contemporary american libertarian thought.
I myself am a mutualist of a more individualist anarchist interpretation, as well as a thick “left-libertarian” of the Roderick Long/Charles Johnson/Gary Chartier variety. But even something as subtley “left” as that is mostly heresy in these parts. That’s why I rarely post here anymore. When it isn’t an outright echo chamber, it’s mostly internal disagreements over the philosophical justifications for the same conclusions (with the exception of the more recently endemic natural rights vs. moral nihilism debates) and semantic and strategic in-fighting, combined with a vocal minority of hyper-conservatives that believe outlandish things which have no precedent in libertarian or anarchist thought. So yea, good luck trying to be nuanced and sober about ideas.
You should come back on more often, I’d really like to stir the pot a bit. I think libertarianism has great potential, but really need to shake the creepy, pseudo-religious deification of “rights”, to really gain wider appeal.
I respect real anarchists. The problem with a lot of “so-called” left-anarchists or socialist anarchists is that most of them are not real anarchist. They just hide there for intelectual discusions and then they will support all kind of goverment internvention and even plain comunism (in the facist form).
I was very open to them, but I have come to realize that very very few of them are real anarchists, and that most of them are just statists that support all kind of statists programs, but use anarchism as a theoretical framework to discuss. Some of them have even confessed to me that they really dont believe that socialist anarchism is posible, and so we need goverment (sic).
So basically the problem with socialist anarchists is that most of them are not really anarchists. With the ones that really are anarchist I have no problem.