Some claim that Private Property and Possession differ only in their degree. But this is not the case, they differ structurally and the systems that rise out of each will be therefore much different.
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Quite large discussions seem to have been sparked by my recent article counter posing Private Property to Possession, both in the comments of my own blog, and on the Austro-Athenian Empire. In both cases it’s an argument mostly between me and my generally communist views and Lockeanists who argue for the homesteading principle as defended by Murray Rothbard.
The discussion has already unfortunately grown impossible to manage through the comments of the AAE and as several questions have been put to me lately, I thought I might answer then in a new post. This might also give an opportunity of other Anarchists/Communists to engage or state their opinion on this, plus it will hopefully allow the discussion to flow better in my comment system which is built for it 😉 .
RE: Private Property and Possession have only differences of detail and degree.
Mostly based on Kevin Carson’s article, is the idea that Possession and Private Property are simply parts on a scale of Ownership rights ((Mutualists generally call all ownership rights ‘Property’, but this is different from my use of ‘Property’ by which I generally mean the Lockeanist take.)), from less “sticky” to more, that is for Lockeanists, property rights, once claimed remain even if the original owner does not use them anymore or rents them out, while for Socialists, property rights remain only as long as use is maintained (with a grace period of unuse based on common sense of course)
But while this on first view seems like a small difference of degree, in functional terms, the difference is immense. To put it simply, for Socialists, wage labour and rent would be impossible as one cannot be said to own something that someone else uses.
While Lockeanists tend to concentrate on terms of unused land and claim something like “oh, the difference wouldn’t be so big between our systems. Why are we fighting then?” they miss the really fucking big difference it would make on the kind of society which would be formed on it. This is because without wage labour you cannot have Capitalism, as it is the most crucial gear by which accumulation (and thus investment) can occur. The difference does not lie in the original distribution of land, of which in the Lockeanist system will look benign, but in the results of this “sticky” possession.
This is why claims by Rothbard that all previous claims to property are null ring so hollow, since Rothbard ignores that along with the state enclosing on the commons or creating a buying monopoly (which he acknowledges), the Capitalist backed state also imposed the mentality of “sticky” property that most people did not hold, and which was of course for the benefit of the Capitalist. Thus to nullify the claims of the land but to insist that people retain a Lockeanist concept of property is as invalid as not wishing to nullify property claims at all. The result in any case would be similar. Property would start accumulating again and a system of inequality and authority would be built on top of it.
On the other hand, anarchists insist that you cannot make any difference unless, along with the state and the unjust distribution it enforced, you also utilize possessive ownership which will allow the egalitarian system (for which people undoubtedly revolted for) to remain in place.
RE: Wouldn’t lending undermine the concept of Possession?
The question put by Roderick seems to be this: Even in a possessive system, lending would still happen, that is, people would still allow others to borrow their cars, or use their lawnmowers. If this is possible without having to change ownership in between, then this would mean that the difference between possession and PP is a matter of degree.
Certainly lending would still be possible under a possessive system, but it wouldn’t be based on rent. A rent for any item, can be seen to mean that the other person is paying towards ownership of it. As such, if I borrow your car for a day or a week, by common sense most people would recognise that it’s not my car now as it was based on a favour. People would have to throw their senses out of the window to recognise either result (It goes against all people’s interests basically). However in order for you to somehow convince me that I would have to pay you an amount to borrow your car, but then your car would still be yours, would require something more. It would require inequality.
Think of it this way. Such acts of renting do not happen between friends even now, even though such acts would be perfectly legal and in the self-interest of those involved. Even under dire circumstances, a friend would not ask another for money to help (quite the contrary in fact). This is because friendships, at the core, are about equal individuals wanting to relate to each other. This equality and most importantly, the recognition of it in the minds of those involved, is what instinctively prevents them from asking for rent. Likewise, in an egalitarian society, such as those based on possession, any lending would happen based on needs, and not for profit. Were one to ask for such a profit from the other, it would immediately sour their relationship, as well as most likely the relationship they have with the rest of society. Just think of how would you react if you suddenly needed a friend’s car to head for a week vacation and he asked you for rent (obviously, over any maintenance that may happen). You’re most likely to decline the offer and go rent from a shop, even if it’s more expensive.
So in short, while lending would still happen with a possessive ownership, it wouldn’t undermine it, nor would it put it on the same scale as Lockeanism. It would simply be based on common sense and maintaining the egalitarianism that exists.
That’s it for now. There’s more question posted over at the AAE but I think this post has already grown quite long. I urge you to check it and give you perspective as the contributors seem an amiable bunch 🙂
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Πρώτος ε; Η αληθεια ειναι πως ολο τα επιχειρηματα περι της "ηθικοτητας" των δικαιωματων ιδιοκτησιας ειναι προβληματικα απο την φυση τους.
Προτιμω συμφωνια (κατι σαν το κοινωνικο συμβολαιο του Προυντον) στο θα οργανωνεται η χρηση των πορων, με την προυποθεση οτι η Κατοχη των καρπων της εργασιας και η στεγη του ατομου ειναι ασφαλης.
Εμεις οι μουτουαλιστες αγοριστες μπλα μπλα παντως γενικα ειμαστε φιλικοι τυποι. ΥΓ: Πολυ μικρα σχολια επιτρεπει η φορμα σχολιων σου, ειναι λιγο σπαστικο νομιζω
Τι εννοείς; Λογικά πρέπει νααντέχει κάπου 6000 χαρακτήρες 🙁
Aντεχει περιπου οσο τα σχολια που στελνω. Μαλλον κανω κατι λαθος… Θα ξανακοιταξω το comment policy.
Το μόνο που μπορώ να σκεφτώ είναι οτι για κάποιο λόγο, οι ελληνικοί χαρακτήρες του φαίνονται πολύ περισσοτεροι. Θα το ψάξω
Well I'll be writing english in the future (Wait I am already writing english!).
Cheers! Let me know of any problems 🙂
I'm still unconvinced that capitalism must be abolished completely – an anarchic system, unmotivated by patriotic identity or political positioning, could likely put both systems to good use.
I do agree that communism would be far more sensible, humane and productive on the scale of community interactions, but it appears to me to break down on a larger scale.
What if your community decides to produce a good that requires materials from the other side of the continent? These are people you don't associate with regularly, or have much reason to think you'll associate with again. Perhaps more importantly, from that community's point of view, they have no idea whether your allocation of their resources will be at all efficient. A capitalistic idea like collateral, or even a simple bartering of goods, would be an *efficient* way of restoring this trust.
Even as a voluntaryist, I agree that in the absence of people identifying themselves patriotically (stupid) by their economic system (stupider) society *would,* and *should,* move in a generally communistic direction. Your livelihood would depend so greatly on that of those who live near you that it'd be downright imprudent to treat them the way one does a competing business in our current system. But even the society you describe doesn't completely do away with a vague sense of reciprocity and equal return for goods and services. And I think, here, that a little bit of "capitalism" on a large scale could go a long way to more efficiently dissipating troubles that would interfere with the livelihood of the smaller-scale communism.
Incidentally, I do think literal socialism – worker ownership of means of production – is the ideal norm in *any* economic climate over wage working. Hell, it wouldn't be a bad idea to implement in modern capitalistic societies while we wait for common sense to sink in.
But I think the level of trust required between complete mutual strangers in the system you propose is downright imprudent, and offers little defense of the system's self-perpetuation. It'd just take one group of control-minded assholes who remember how to make guns and nukes and how easy it is to live off other people's effort to exploit the trust of a systematically benevolent society to surreptitiously stockpile enough munitions to send everything back to statism.
One has to think that such things would ever be a requirement. Most real requirements for any community can be achieved by local material and anything else is generally a luxury. So we're talking about what if material for a luxury can only be found on the other side of the continent. In a communist system they have no reason NOT to give it to you, as long as they have the productive capacity. Why would they not? It's not like they will starve if they do.
Remember, we're not talking about a Capitalist system were if the other party "burns" you, you might be royally fucked (ie, you cannot pay your debts etc). In a communist system, you basic needs are handled by the local community anyway, so all that matter for working people is to be able to fulfil the needs of others if they can. As such, there is no reason for collateral or any other concepts. Perhaps the other community might expect the first shipment of these new luxuries you will create as a reward, but I don't see any other issue
"In a communist system they have no reason NOT to give it to you, as long as they have the productive capacity. Why would they not? It's not like they will starve if they do."
Like I mentioned – the worry that comes to mind most obviously would be confidence in their *efficiency* in using the resource. Scarcity would still exist in a communistic society, even if it wasn't the primary determinant of value. And pride would exist, too. You might be happy to send a few tons of metal down the street to the bicycle factory, the staff of whom you live with and know to be fine, upstanding gentlemen. You might be willing to send it a few miles away to a roofing factory, because they always get their metal from you, and you know they're trustworthy. But there's no *efficient* way to build that trust based on long association for the first (first few, perhaps) contact between two parties that are significantly far apart.
Think of it in the sense of an abstraction of the modern capitalistic view of cost vs return. You want to make sure you're reasonably compensated for the value you provide in exchange for a good or service. In a communistic society, the cost exists in *exactly* the same form. You have raw materials to give, in exchange for *someone* getting a return. Removing the selfishness of "what return do *I* get" wouldn't negate the desire for efficiency. Pride in your work would demand at the very *least* that you are sure the value of the resource you provide is maximized *somewhere* to the benefit of *someone.*
I feel too many of your arguments for anarcho-communism depend on a very particular state of mind of those involved, which you simply can't guarantee across the entirety of humanity, much less for longer than one generation.
I again do not see the issue. In a communist society, you are most certainly not worrying about ROIs or anything like this. You give according to ability and need. If you create sheets of metal and a factory the other side of the continent came to ask for a part, the factory council would most likely hear their plan and then decide democratically if they will give it to them. If the plan sounds good enough, why would they not?
Again, there is no compensation required since the needs of the workers are already being taken care of. Nor do they need to worry if the people they give the material will be efficient. If they are not, then it's their problem.
Of course communism depends on a particular state of mind, much like any other system (You cannot have capitalism in a society of epicureans for example). But this mindframe is promoted by the way the system works, much like crass individualism is promoted naturally by the way Capitalism works.
> "You give according to ability and need. If you create sheets of metal and a factory the other side of the continent came to ask for a part, the factory council would most likely hear their plan and then decide democratically if they will give it to them. If the plan sounds good enough, why would they not?"
This would be — I think you realize — incredibly, just fucking incredibly slow. Now you can argue that "but the workers basic needs are met, so who cares about the speed at which flat screen TVs can be made", but such limitations on the overall speed at which anything can therefor be produced (or rather the speed by which society can respond to changes) are substantive enough to crush many of our dreams. I'm a physicist. In order for me to even begin to follow my desires, I need complex industrially produced materials with necessarily many, many steps to the accumulation and processing of resources and final assembly. If I'm forced to dick around while folks in every community or collective involved send letters back and forth and hold meetings debating the merits of my proposal versus 200 others… I'm never going to be able to do any fucking work. Further, as a frequent blue collar worker, I simply wouldn't WANT to sit through such discussions. I have better things to do with my time. Finally, the speed we're talking about is so fucking slow that there are critical questions as to whether it would even be able to keep up with infrastructural entropy — replacing the factory's machines in a timely manner when they break.
(All of which is not to mention the fact that there are serious questions regarding the capacity of local communities to provide for basic needs when they have to operate at the speed of collective decision making rather than diffuse individual decision making.)
You're assuming that there is a better system than mutual agreements, and you're probably thinking of supply&demand, but this is not true.
First, it's telling that in the age of instant global communication you selected the slowest possible means (letters? please) to show that the system will be “slow”. In fact, most decisions would easily be made over the telephone or IM, where face-to-face meetings might probably be the rare occassion when big deal between syndicates might be required.
Then, what I'm talking about would not require you to request parts from every part of the production. It's still very likely that there will be “shops” (if you could call them that without them having prices) where you could go and pick up the tools you need (or order them online to your place). The demand the shop owner would have for each good then, would translate for the signal he would send to the syndicates providing him for extra supplies. And since most syndicates of the same production will likely have a confederation, such signals would not risk creating an overproduction.
Second, the current system is based on pretty much the same mechanism I described above. With the signal going from the consumer, to the shop owner, to the factory owner, to corporate management. They are not based on the price, but rather to how fast the signals of effective demand can be tranfered upwards in the chain of command. If anything, this is slower since the threat of fraud demands extra bureaucracy and waste on every step. And then, for the material as well, companies do in fact have meetings with each other for large orders or to arrange contracts. So pretty much nothing changes, with the exception of two things. First of all, the markets cannot satisfy demand, but only effective demand (which means that poor people must go without). And second the price mechanism is a direct cause of a crisis of overproduction, as it transmits incomplete signals. Simply, a high current demand may not constitute a high future demand, so when the price goes up, new investments come it, new capitalists come in the game and supply skyrockets (since everyone got the same signal). Once this new supply floods the market, the Capitalists may find themselves with no-one to sell to.
I think you are confusing 'Capitalism' with a market exchange. Capitalism is any system that is based on the Capitalist mode of production, in other words, the exploitation of the worker – ultimately wage labour.
This definition would, of course, imply that nobody advocates capitalism, since nobody knowingly advocates exploitation.
No, it would imply that most people who advocate Capitalism are in denial or too much conditioned to see it but think that this is something unchangeable.
You could say that exploitation is a consequence of what they are advocating, but that would imply that they are not advocating exploitation if they do not know or believe this, and it would also imply that capitalism is not exploitation, but exploitation is a consequence of capitalism (like smoking is not lung cancer, but lung cancer is a consequence of smoking).
No, I couldn't say that, because capitalism is a consequence of exploitation, not the other way around. Capitalism is based around wage-slavery. Take away wage-slavery and you don't have anything to sustain the capitalist mode of production anymore. Of course if you take away wage-slavery and keep rent, then you simply have feudalism which is not much better, which is why I support to abolish both.
My closest friend quit her job because her boss got on her nerves. I had another friend who also quit hers for similar reasons, but perhaps more extreme (she didn't get lunch breaks). I find it hard to think of these people as being like slaves, sorry. Could slaves turn down work because the boss got on their nerves?
Your friend is fortunate enough to live in a boom period in one of the richest countries in the world. She would not have the same choices, had she been living in Indonesia, India or the US of the 19th century for that matter. In fact, the only reason why your friend can willingly cancel her contract and not get in legal trouble, is because some workers in the UK in centuries past, organized and fought to have the right to cancel their contracts (and then fought some more to be able to get the wages for the time they worked in that contract).
So don't assume that the experience of your friend is natural, or even common.
For that matter, there were quite a few slaves who were very well treated. Would a slave be less of a slave if he could leave a bad master and go to a better one? Your friend will eventually have to find another boss. Much like a slave, she does not have much freedom in this particular matter.
Actually, this does seem quite common here. Of course, things are different in other places or different times, as you say. Usually because they are developing capitalist economies, or not even capitalist at all, they are countries like India, where it takes five years to get through the regulations to start a business, for instance.
And, I can't see why the likelihood that she will have to find a new boss makes her like a slave, either. Is that something slaves had to do? If they didn't like a boss they had to go find a different one?
There's something you are missing. The type of mentality humans have is generally shaped by the system they live in and what kind of values it promotes in order to reach happiness. It's an evolutionary thing really as people who "play the game" as it is meant to, go further, while those who have the wrong values (say, altruism) get left behind.
Capitalism promotes crass individualism (ie greed) and the "me first" mentality, as such it is understandable that most people who live in it, start to act like this, or expect others to do so. This is why it takes a much larger amount of trust to build a recipocal relationship, instead of a market one.
However, socialism as a system, promotes a totally different bundle of values, values which incidentally are much more psychologically familiar to humans than crass individualism. It is actually surprising how fast people can rediscover these values if the system permits it, which is, incidentally, what happened in the Spanish Revolution for example or in the early days of the Russian revolution.
So why would there be this "level of trust between strangers"? Because the system will permit it. Because without the drive for accumulation and the zero-sum competition built-in the system, you can generally expect that people do not have the incentive to act "evil".
Yes, there may likely be assholes with dreams of rulership, but we're talking about a post-revolution society here, where already the people have resisted attempts at counter revolution by much more powerful forces. Once this is achieved, the mentality of the society itself with be the force which prevents such assholes from being created. To put it simply, why would an asshole try to stockpile weapons or try to achieve rulership (a very dangerous endeavour in a libertarian society mind you) when he can have whatever he wants already?
"when he can have whatever he wants already?"
Problem.
You assume here, as elsewhere, that anarcho-communism is the *perfect* system. I assure you: even if it is a million times better than any other system of human interaction, anarcho-communism is still flawed. It may account for the happiness of nearly everyone, far more than state capitalism, but the word "utopian" is pejorative for a reason.
There will always be people, regardless of the culture they grow up in, who won't think your epicurean idea of happiness is *enough.* A few of them will be smart enough and driven enough to decide to fuck everything up for everyone else.
And the evil party here would simply be playing a waiting game – they're bringing production materials in, at no cost, with no third party that has any incentive to seek out groups such as themselves and catch them in the act. Hell, thoughts of statist revolution aside a society could live a bourgeois lifestyle in a concerted effort as described above.
Your system can't be based purely on the *best* outcome, it has to account for the *worst.*
This is notthing to do with expecting a perfect system. It has to do with how the system works. I can very well consider people that will be driven enough to try and achieve more on the backs of everyone else but there would be 2 problems for such people.
1) Society has already renounced statism and not only that, but individualism is activelly promoted and nurtured for every person. You somehow expect that a vast majority of people who have lived free could ever go back to being slaves. I suggest you look at the fate of tyrants in most systems, and that is with people used to authority in the first place.
2) There is of course incentive to catch such people in the act. Hell, in order to achieve anything like this, they would have to setup in a remote location and practically have very limited contact with people (or their authoritarian tendencies will show). Then, even though in a communist society people have generally incentive to provide materials freely, there is a general expectation that something eventually is going to come out. If this doesn't happen, then eventually word will break out about that secretive community which takes but gives nothing back. Thirdly. even if they do amass such a armament that they can attack others, they will have to face a world of communists ready to die rather than becomes slaves. Good luck with that.
What you're saying here is that socialism is a natural system. Presumably then, it's the system that people used to have originally. You're also claiming that once socialism has been adapted again, it's going to shape people so that there will no longer be greed or other evil. If that is so, how come socialism was replaced by other systems in the first place?
While Lockeanists tend to concentrate on terms of unused land and claim something like “oh, the difference wouldn’t be so big between our systems. Why are we fighting then?” they miss the really fucking big difference it would make on the kind of society which would be formed on it.
Let's make this clear: some Lockeans think the difference wouldn't be so big, not all, probably not even a majority.
Ok. I don't know which camp you belong to so I can't really comment any more on this
PS: You can use the blockqouote html tag to mark your quotes better.
This is why claims by Rothbard that all previous claims to property are null ring so hollow
What claims? Why do they ring hollow?
Look, I am not in the mood to explain Rothbardianism. I suggest you ask those who espouse his views.
Once you know what Rothbard claims, then we can possibly discuss (although it's outside the scope of this article)
I'm not asking you to explain Rothbardianism (I myself espouse his views, well for the most part), I ask you what exactly you are referring to.
To put it simply, for Socialists, wage labour and rent would be impossible as one cannot be said to own something that someone else uses.
(…)
This is because without wage labour you cannot have Capitalism
So, you need sticky property to have capitalism, but:
the Capitalist backed state also imposed the mentality of “sticky” property that most people did not hold, and which was of course for the benefit of the Capitalist.
How could there have been capitalists before the mentality of sticky property was imposed?
Capitalism first developed in UK, and the main drive was the slave trade and the imposition of sticky property (ie enclosures) for the benefit of the landlords. Those indirectly led to the industrial revolution and the birth of the Capitalist class. The power of the Capitalist class was initially small but the (aristocratic) state had much more to gain from them than from the landlords, so it started working towards their interests.Hence acts and laws which strengthened sticky property were passed and and through which, the Capitalist class was strengthened and backed the state even more, until it served their interests no more and had to change it.
As I understand the terms, there have been capitalists well prior to capitalism. Some figures, mainly merchants, owned property for the purpose of investing it so as to generate a return from the market. 'Capitalism' means a society where that mode of action is the dominant one, where most production takes place according to that pattern. In prior societies capitalists proper were a peripheral class.
Just think of how would you react if you suddenly needed a friend’s car to head for a week vacation and he asked you for rent (obviously, over any maintenance that may happen). You’re most likely to decline the offer and go rent from a shop, even if it’s more expensive.
Would I? Good chance I would offer him rent, so as to not be indebted to him, and because I think he deserves I little something in return for helping me out like that.
Why on earth would freeloading on my friends make me their equal?
Well, unfortunately this is the mentality I expected from apologists of capitalism. Fortunately very few people think like you.
Between friends, this is not freeloading. Between friends, doing each other a favour, is not a form of indebtment.
Usually. friends who wants to return a favour find non-monetary ways, which will not increase inequality. (Say, making your friend a nice dinner)
"Fortunately very few people think like you. "
This is unbelievably anecdotal. And most anecdotal evidence I can provide, as well as martin apparently, conflicts with it.
Right, then until we get some empirical evidence of how friendships work for most people I guess we'll have to agree to disagree on this point.
Sounds basic reciprocity to me. Most people tend to feel a little guilty about taking something from someone without giving something in return. Sounds like a pretty pro-social thing to me, which you acknowledge below.
Usually. friends who wants to return a favour find non-monetary ways, which will not increase inequality. (Say, making your friend a nice dinner)
Why not just pay them the rough monetary equivalent of a dinner? That's might be more convenient depending on the situation (I might not know how to cook the food they like, might not be available at the right time), even though it lacks some of the sentimental value. What power does money have that the commodities it represents don't?
Exactly! Why is that? Because of human psychology. Because equal people instictively seem to not generally prefer exchanges which trade power (money is power). Not only do you see friends trading gifts (which is not an exchange of power as I explained above) but even if one were to offer money, it is most usual that the other party will rather refuse them altogether.
In fact, as far as I'm aware, friendships which work on such monetary terms are severely weakened compared to others. Of course you might cry about "anecdotal evidence" but in that case, I'll have to point you to what I said elsewhere.
Exaxtly? Why is that? Because of human psychology. Because equal people instictively seem to not generally prefer exchanges which trade power (money is power). Not only do you see friends trading gifts (which is not an exchange of power as I explained above) but even if one were to offer money, it is most usual that the other party will rather refuse them altogether.
In fact, as far as I'm aware, friendships which work on such monetary terms are severely weakened compared to others. Of course you might cry about "anecdotal evidence" but in that case, I'll have to point you to what I said elsewhere.
the Capitalist backed state also imposed the mentality of “sticky” property that most people did not hold
Did it? Do you have any proof of that? How could the state allready be capitalist backed at the point where it imposed that mentality, when sticky property rights are a precondition for capitalism?
Sticky property existed since farming was invented. It was just not applying everywhere but it was enough for a class of industrialists to have power to affect the state somewhat. When I say a capitalist-backed state, I do not mean that the power of the state came solely from the capitalist (although that happened eventually, as Capitalism grew dominant), but rather that the state had the full blessing of both capitalists and landlords on their actions to apply sticky property everywhere.
that is for Lockeanists, property rights, once claimed remain even if the original owner does not use them anymore or rents them out, while for Socialists, property rights remain only as long as use is maintained (with a grace period of unuse based on common sense of course)
But while this on first view seems like a small difference of degree, in functional terms, the difference is immense. To put it simply, for Socialists, wage labour and rent would be impossible as one cannot be said to own something that someone else uses.
This dichotomy ignores the socialist American individualist anarchists, who favored "sticky property" with regard to everything other than land (Spooner being the exception and going for complete Lockeanism) and to which Kevin Carson belongs. Thus it is demonstrably (empirically lolz) not true that that is the "socialist" position unless you plan to rewrite history. So are they real anarchists or not?
I'm just curious because the communist party-line grudgingly accepts that they are, when logically they shouldn't be.
You probably do not understand individualist anarchism. While they call what they support property, looking closer to their views one discovers that they do indeed favour possession and denounce wage-labour and rent (simply call it by another name), which are only compatible with sticky property.
You probably do not understand individualist anarchism. While they call what they support property, looking closer to their views one discovers that they do indeed favour possession and denounce wage-labour and rent, which are only compatible with sticky property.
You probably do not understand individualist anarchism.
HAHAHAHAHAHHA!!!!!!
While they call what they support property, looking closer to their views one discovers that they do indeed favour possession and denounce wage-labour and rent (simply call it by another name), which are only compatible with sticky property.
Let's look a little closer to their views:
Cont . . .
"Such acts of renting do not happen between friends even now"
Dude.
1) Yes they do. One friend of mine just agreed to let a whole troupe of his friends drive out to a convergence, they obviously agreed to pay for gas — but my friend's primary concern was that said friends would act like the dirty punx they are and there'd be a significant chance of them trashing the car too, so one of the friends on the trip threw him a boxed set of DVDs to compensate him for the worry. THAT'S RENT.
2) Economic relations, particularly exchange, tend to be more informal among friends. But informality and friendliness aren't sufficient to run a distributed technological infrastructure even the slightest bit more complex than gardens and FNBs.
1) This is not really what we call a "friend". Friends generally trust one another. Were they friends, he would likely expect them to pay for any damages they would do to his car (or expect them to be careful
Convenient how your system to account for the welfare of six billion different people depends on the definitions of concepts espoused by one of them.
Convenient how your system to account for the welfare of six billion different people depends on the definitions of concepts espoused by exactly one of them.
FOR THOSE OF YOU LOOKING THROUGH THIS THREAD FROM THE START
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There are some massive problems when it comes to viewing posts made in this thread. For example I keep getting email notifications of response, but can only sporadically view them. Sometimes even individual responses disappear. And I assume this is also true for db0 and the others involved, so it's a massively frustrating meandering conversation to read and keep up with. All of which is to explain why some of the datestamps on various posts seem at odds or ignorant of previously posted things.
Also: At this point, I'm out. My weekend's over and I've got work to do, meetings to go to. I might be up to continue eviscerating you, db0 at a later date but it would have to be at an *emphatically* different locale, you have my email.
Yeah, it was fun wrecking your arguments but I can agree that the experience has been frustrating. Perhaps we can continue after the devs have finally fixed this ridiculous bug
I want a world of perfect trust too, and automatic sentiments of reciprocity would be nice, but that's not going to happen anytime soon. And I think it's perfectly rational to not 100% trust people and to make agreements accordingly ahead of time — as opposed to trying to hunt down, prosecute or force compensation after the fact.
(Incidentally the friends of mine who you somehow claim are not "true" friends because they don't magically trust one another with absolute perfection — or rather one of them knows the others quite well and can judge the risk he's taking with them — are probably the closest comrades I know and not so incidentally anarcho-communists. Well a couple are primmies, but not the relevant two, which is why I used them as my example.)
Further, say that there's an object of SENTIMENTAL value to you that the sheer act of being away from with provides you with disutility, but needed or desired by another person. I have a beaten first edition copy of a book that is incredibly important to me — and a friend of mine may want to borrow it — I may trust him completely to return the book, but still dislike being parted with it. Enough to expect him to foot the bill on lunch or something. That's rent too.
You don't need a world of perfect trust and automatic reciprocity. You only need a world were there's no incentive to fuck one another.
Which is probably why he didn't ask for rent but settled for a box of DVDs (as if that would cover car damages). He gave him the car because he still probably expects the friend to cover any damages. I don't know their personal relationship so I can't comment further but perhaps you can point them to this article and we can hear their perspective. Lets hear what they think of friendship.
No, a DVDs, Food and other stuff are not what people call rent, mostly because they do not constitute a transfer of power or lead to inequality. This is especially true since friends would never ask for something they knew the other couldn't afford. For example, your friend above would probably not ask for anything if his dirty punk comrade suddenly needed to get his (say) pregnant girlfriend to the hospital.
It's also funny that you had to bring up sentimental objects to somehow make a point, when in fact, rent happens on items of no sentimental value to the lender.
Explain to me exactly how the DVDs aren't rent?! If I give my landlord the complete series of The Wire instead of said DVD's price in cash, it's still precisely the same payment.
> "your friend above would probably not ask for anything if his dirty punk comrade suddenly needed to get his (say) pregnant girlfriend to the hospital."
No, and I have a nice landlord of generally good intent. If I couldn't make the rent on my sublet one month because of a medical crisis he'd almost certainly write it off.
> "It's also funny that you had to bring up sentimental objects to somehow make a point, when in fact, rent happens on items of no sentimental value to the lender."
LOL. While classic sentimentality was invoked as a case study, explain to me how there could even be a distinction or boundary line between sentimentality and any other form of possessiveness that leads to sticky property.
While one can expect someone to attach sentimental value to something and then allow only close friends to use it when he doesn't (it's unlikely that someone with sentimental value will be more interested in the payment instead of getting the item intact back)
With accumulation, sentimental value plays very little role. In fact, it requires as little sentimentality as possible on the part of the lender who will expect to not use the item at all but rather have everyone else do so in exchange for rent.
So, in fact, sentimentality is less likely to lead to rent.
> "it's unlikely that someone with sentimental value will be more interested in the payment instead of getting the item intact back"
Dude, think before you speak. It's unlikely that a landlord would be more interested in getting the payment than ultimately getting the property back intact!
> "With accumulation, sentimental value plays very little role. In fact, it requires as little sentimentality as possible on the part of the lender who will expect to not use the item at all but rather have everyone else do so in exchange for rent."
Agreed. But we're not arguing for a world with the sort of greedy capitalist accumulation you're talking about. For tangential reasons we think that would be quite impractical and hard to sustain in a truly freed market.
You haven't addressed the distinction, though. If I'm a toddler irrationally possessive of my playing blocks, is that sentimentality? How about my landlord who built the house adjacent to his own with his own hands, is his continued possessiveness towards the house not just another slightly different form of the underlining feeling that sentimentality reflects?
I gues "we" in this case means lockeanists? Without going into too much details, I think this vision is wrong and at odds with reality. This is party what my last post on Possession was meant to explain.
If you're a toddler irrationally possessive with your playing blocks, then I'd argue that you're unlikely to rent them and furthermore, not exactly the example we're looking for an adult social system.
First of all, one has to question his motives on building a second house he will not use. If he did it for rent, then I don't feel a lot of pity by not allowing him to exercise that. If he built a house to get money, he can sell it. The sentimentality argument does not apply in this case and indeed, sounds exceedingly hypocritical.
> "First of all, one has to question his motives on building a second house he will not use. If he did it for rent, then I don't feel a lot of pity by not allowing him to exercise that. If he built a house to get money, he can sell it. The sentimentality argument does not apply in this case and indeed, sounds exceedingly hypocritical."
Why? Such distinctions of intentionality DON'T MATTER. It's not something we can determine with any clarity or regulate! And so friggin' what if he builds a second house with the explicit intent to earn a bit of income renting it to tenants? What differentiates that from a SERVICE like any other?? It's still his property so he has to do work maintaining it. Consider motels, or hostels. A collective of anarcho-syndicalists offering hospitality for weary travelers have to expend a certain amount of energy building the damn place — it's an upfront investment cost, like that of my landlord laboriously building the damn house with his own hands. Why shouldn't he and they be able to recoup from that investment? If folks aren't able to undertake initial investments that are tied to eventual demand for use, you're going to have some really bad investments become standard.
Oh yes they very well do, especially when you bring me the sad story about the poor guy who build the house all by himself by the sweat of his brow.
If you want to talk without intentions, then stop bringing in emotional arguments in the discussion and simply talk about simply a guy building a second house he doesn't want to use himself.
I don't think that intentions matter, but they do to you. So I was consequently elucidating examples that muddled your distinctions in intentionality. That's a legit usage.
Unfortunately, it didn't muddle my "distinctions in intentionality". I was easily able to point out and ask "Why", even though you weren't (Although you seem to be perfectly capable of asking "Why" when it might affect your future society)
Is he paid for the service? Is he acting as a hotel? No he's not. To equate landlordism with motels is intellectually dishonest as there's a big fucking difference that I shouldn't have to point out.
If he's doing some service for the house tenants, then he deserves to be paid for this service. But we all know that these services are calculated ON TOP of the rent.
So no, he does not deserve any income from rent from the house because the value of the house is not infinite (which is basically what rent implies). He deserves a fair exchange price for the labour he invested. He can set the price he believes it's worth it and see if others agree (if we're talking about a system with money). Just like the free market you so much support.
An assertion with no basis. Just because I do not recognise the right to rent, does not mean that people wouldn't still invest labour in order to sell it. Hell, that's been going on for millenia.
> "Just because I do not recognise the right to rent, does not mean that people wouldn't still invest labour in order to sell it."
That's not what I'm talking about with regard to investment. See the example with the transient college kids versus families. Being able to recognize one use — the one that is capable of upfront limited payments — but not the other is a failure in efficiency and will lead to bad investments.
And you're calling me unrealistic…
I'm not saying such relations are legion in our society, I'm saying that they CAN exist.
My landlord is a really nice mexican immigrant who lives next door, we share barbecues. He built the house my friends and I live in by hand.
And I'm telling you that the system itself forces people to act selfishly. Much like it causes companies to always look for the short term. And while exceptions may exist, much like biological mutations that do not fit the environment, they will be at a competitive disadvantage and bred out of existence
And I've addressed this — see the pawn shop example. Trust and reciprocity are ultimately evolutionarily advantageous behaviors in a free market, even with lockean property allowed. Selfishness — in the form of focus on rationally pursuing one's subjective individual interests and the assignments of value that FUNDAMENTALLY can't be known well by other individuals, is a matter of basic common decency. Even the most altruistic of angels can't avoid Mathematics, individuals are generally best at pursuing their own desires. Selfishness — in the form of the socially destructive focus on the immediate accumulation of material power — is *ultimately* not a stable strategy. It IS useful for corporations and individuals TODAY because of the myriad ways that Capitalism (which barely if at all qualifies as a market) has been systematically influenced by coercive political power as well as CULTURALLY propagated delusions and hangups.
It's EXTREMELY disingenuous to take the currently dominate organizational patterns and psychological habits present in the world today as indicative of some evolutionary end-states that would likewise emerge in a freed market. Not only are there are SPECIFIC impediments and politically environmental conditions that critically alter the payoffs and possible strategies in micro and macroeconomic evaluations, but MORE IMPORTANTLY, things are still developing. Many of the approaches endemic throughout our society's methodology of market interaction have not fully evolved. Some may ultimately die out.
Further I strongly suspect that your claim about the inherent psychological consequences of (Lockean) market interaction are ones you've reached through induction upon consideration of the present system alone rather than through some objective and universal deductive logic. So stop asserting the former as though it can serve the role of the latter. What Market Anarchists are talking about is the latter, not the former. We all know why Presently Existing Capitalism is Teh Evil. We're not interested in specific critiques of it because nothing inductive can give us concrete language to address future possibilities. You've tended towards sloppily positing your future possibility as purely the antithesis of the currently existing. But there are chunks of baby you're throwing out with the bathwater — like Rent, Interest and Wages.
Now, we're asserting (for the details see a bunch of shit out there, basically because it's impossible to accumulate significant wealth even with such methods) that there's NO fucking way that renting or classical wage work would constitute a SIGNIFICANT component of an anarchistic Freed Market. But there are perfectly good reasons for them to exist on the margins.
Now, interest? Interest is all about letting the market convey information regarding future conditions. It's a critical component of price signals.
As I've told you in your hypothetical pawn shop examples, we can sit here inventing hypothetical scenarios which fit our respective arguments and then punch holes to each other's fantasy worlds. This DOES NOT CONSTITUTE EVIDENCE. It's as much evidence as the neoclassical economics world of perfect competition. You try to somehow attach your example to laws of goddamn mathematics to give it some credence but the only connection it has to them is your word.
You say that the effects that happen today would not be possible in a free market but you don't explain why. YOu don't explain how the world would go from the world we have today to a free market paradise, because it will not happen by the power of the market which you've already admitted that NOW will skew the results to socially destructive tactics.
Furthermore, I can very well deductively explain why Lockeanist concepts of property will still promote socially destructive mentality, as I've done in my previous post on Possession.
> "YOu don't explain how the world would go from the world we have today to a free market paradise, because it will not happen by the power of the market which you've already admitted that NOW will skew the results to socially destructive tactics."
1) see Agorism for how to get there from here. But 2) so fucking what? Stop referring to presently existing capitalism as "the market". Markets are mathematical concepts. Capitalism is a historical and present day context. Blah, I've already addressed the ridiculousness and limitations of this focus of yours. So what if we have to have a violent revolution and radically re-order the world before we can build a society that takes advantage of all that Freed Markets have to offer. So fucking what? It's not relevant. We're not defending the present system.
Because if we're going to have a revolution, you can be damn sure that people are going to do it for an egalitarian world, not one of inequality. There's a reason why "Anarcho"-Capitalists are basically unknown outside the internet and why even individualist anarchists are a minority in general Anarchism. There's a reason why all revolutions have had a socialist character.
> "Because if we're going to have a revolution, you can be damn sure that people are going to do it for an egalitarian world, not one of inequality."
Agreed. I'm fucking arguing for an egalitarian world! Both as the consequence of a freed market, and as a starting point for it.
> "There's a reason why all revolutions have had a socialist character."
Incorrect. Leave it to a Brit to forget about the American one.
It's worth pointing out that if we're going to have a revolution anywhere in our present society you can also be pretty sure it's going to have a STATIST character. As folks have tended in that direction in every goddamn revolution so far. …While I cherish Spain and Ukraine as much as the next circle-a, there's no denying the rather horrifying emergence of statist qualities to both our attempts. So just because people are likely to revolt in pursuit of something (material egalitarianism, social power) doesn't make it something we should support in OUR revolution. Further there's an entire stretch of the world (one might say the most important stretch of the world) in which the Proletariat is historically quite vehement about supporting equity in opportunity and culturally despises material egalitarianism. If the American Proles rise it will with out a doubt be in support of Libertarianism, not Socialism.
> "There's a reason why "Anarcho"-Capitalists are basically unknown outside the internet and why even individualist anarchists are a minority in general Anarchism."
1) I'm not an Anarcho-Capitalist.
2) They're growing and developing real world activist projects quite fast, especially recently. And I say that with no small surprise because that's something I've always been quite critical of them on. IT's rather important where you draw the lines on "individualist" anarchism and what you consider the defining components of "General Anarchism". If by that you're talking about the more or less culturally contiguous global social movement, then I agree. But the vast majority of anarchists in the world aren't actually a part of the movement. And individualist anarchism had a majority market share for a span in the early 60s when everyone was emerging from teh beatniks and Dorthy Day and Ammon Hennessey and Tucker's works started to get published again.
Bullshit. You're arguing for a revolution to equalize everything and then wishfully thinking that the post-revolution world will approximate a fantasy world required for the Austrian model to work flawlessly
1) For god's sake, I'm not a fucking Austrian. I like them, I think they're smarter and generally more correct than Marxists and Neoclassicals, but that certainly doesn't mean I'm one of them or that I share the vast majority of their perceptions. And they damn well don't accept me.
2) Dude, EVERYTHING that involves the real world is going to be messy. Whatever your analyses are they're going to face the same messiness. But we can investigate certain models and approximations in order to give us the lay of the land before we plow forward. That's called being a fucking human being.
1) I didn't say you're an Austrian, I said that you support the "Austrian model"
2) No. We cannot find the way forward from certain "models and approximations", because those models and approximations, are based on a system that's already perfect. But the biggest god damn problem we have is how to get there in the first place. And for that, economics not only does not give us any help, but actually harms us by suggesting paths which in the current reality will make things worse!
1) But the biggest god damn problem we have is how to get there in the first place.
Agreed. But it's NOT THE ONLY PROBLEM!
There's this tendency in the scene to only address the issue of forward motion and never spend any time looking at future limitations and obstacles, distant or immediate. It's not like we can't do both. This is a debate we have on the side while we're smashing capitalism. Stopping us from engaging in that kind of thinking is really fucking crippling.
Incorrect. Leave it to an American to confuse everyone else for a Brit.
Let me rephrase this. All revolutions that were not backed by the bougeoisie (that is, all revolution from below), had a socialist character.
No, all revolutions didn't have a STATIST character. They developed one due to the circumstances they found themselves in. To argue that the end result was the character of the revolution is ridiculous.
> "Leave it to an American to confuse everyone else for a Brit."
If you're not British and you use the term "bollocks" then you're pretty fucking pompous. 😉
> "All revolutions that were not backed by the bougeoisie (that is, all revolution from below), had a socialist character."
Oh, whatever. Bringing the bourgeoisie in as a one-drop invalidation is pretty fucking lame. The American Revolution had immense support from the poor and working class, as well as from the bourgeoisie — although it's important to remember that the majority of the bourgeoisie and swathes of the working class supported the status quo and were counter-revolutionaries in the American Revolution. Almost EVERY possible revolution will have some backing from the bourgeoisie. And calling names, dividing up who's legit "bourgeoisie" and who's legit prole is a pretty big waste of time.
> No, all revolutions didn't have a STATIST character. They developed one due to the circumstances they found themselves in. To argue that the end result was the character of the revolution is ridiculous.
While the end results may have lined up well with the Westphalian NationState, the primary point is the tendencies towards power within the revolutionaries and the revolutionary aims from the start. And, yes, even the fucking Paris Commune got characterized by some pretty damn strong lines of power and internal-external exclusionary hierarchies. I'm not happy about that, and I'd love to see a revolution where that wasn't the case but so far they've always had a bit of rot in them from the start.
I blame it on The Preacher and the fact that it sounds awesome! 🙂
No it won't. Socialist revolutions generally have no support for the bourgeoisie, because they are antithetical to their interests. In fact, in such revolutions, the bourgeoisie tended to support military coups, or failing that, authoritarians within the socialist movement.
It's not about who's legit this or that, but recognising that a "revolution" that is backed by the ruling elite, is very likely to not be to the best interests of everyone else…for some strange reason.
Meh. I don't really think the class stuff you're talking about is really that clear cut or useful on any level.
It's not worth arguing about and any way the majority of the movement these days agrees with me. 😉
I don't care to burst your bubble, reality will take care of that.
Weren't you going to stop commenting? Am I that irresistible? 😛
No it won't. Socialist revolutions generally have no support for the bourgeoisie, because they are antithetical to their interests. In fact, in such revolutions, the bourgeoisie tended to support military coups, or failing that, authoritarians within the socialist movement.
It's not about who's legit this or that, but recognising that a "revolution" that is backed by the wannabe-ruling elite, is very likely to not be to the best interests of everyone else…for some strange reason.
That is not an absolute.
This is why we learn from past mistakes and look for ways to avoid granting power to individuals but rather the get us to a state where looking for power is counter-productive or just too difficult to bother.
Didn't I already make a post here saying I agreed with this, no fucking duh, that was my fucking position?
I remember seeing the email about it, so it's probably hidden.
America, FUCK YEAH!
's what I'm sayin'
Time will tell. One thing is certain, Capitalism crisis and Revolutions quickly turn people socialists. For all their vehement, these "equality of opportunity" rebels haven't revolted until now unless agitated and driven by higher interests.
I don't think all revolutions do have a socialist nature. I think many are made up of peasants who are not fighting for socialism or communism, or something, but are fighting for more food, more wealth, etc. and have been told, or lead to believe that the socialists willensure it for them, and not told that it will mean central commities telling them how to produce, what to produce, and who they can give the produce too, and under what conditions. This is precisely why you get the Kronstadt uprising, which syndalists and anarchists communists could say was a workers' council, "all power to the soviets" response to Lenin's centralising, but they would be forgetting that those involved in the urising demanded a free market for bread and grain.
(BTW, one of the most successful mass political movements, a movement that provided a framework for future campaigns, celebrated its 163 anniversary of its success just the other week – I mean the Anti-Corn Law League, and the repeal of the corn laws.)
Really? You do psychology by universal deductive logic now? The problem with Lockeanism is exactly because it ignores human psychology and tries to build itself upon axioms that have no relevance to how humans live, interact and what makes them happy.
> "humans"
There's no such thing. and
1) While cognitive biases are important to consider in anything, markets, like any other dynamic system can route around them and provide answers.
2) If we're to simply accept that there's such a thing as essentialist and immutable human nature then, I'm sorry but evolutionary psychologists and neurologists have made it quite clear that while Kropotkin was partially right, he wasn't right enough to simply base a society on such ingrained realities.
3) The entire point of anarchism is to change human nature. If we're going to wipe away psychoses and biases to make Anarcho-Communism work then why can't we wipe away psychoses and biases to make Market Anarchism work. It's very much worth evaluating which one would be more efficient if people were angels.
I should have expected such a reply
1) Yes, the market is god
Basically, you say that the markets can work, because it's proven mathematically in the fantasy world examples which ignore all aspects which they do not like.
2) The only part of human nature that is essential, is reason. From that you can explain reasonably that it's in everyone's interest to cooperate instead of compete. That cooperation and recipocricy is built into our evolutionary psychology somewhat is simply a big plus.
3) No it's not. The entire point of Anarchism is to work with the human nature that is already there, which is compatible with it.
> "Basically, you say that the markets can work, because it's proven mathematically in the fantasy world examples which ignore all aspects which they do not like."
> "The only part of human nature that is essential, is reason. From that you can explain reasonably that it's in everyone's interest to cooperate instead of compete. That cooperation and recipocricy is built into our evolutionary psychology somewhat is simply a big plus."
I'll leave you to figure out how these two quotes contradict one another. I agree with the later. The only part of human nature that is essential IS reason. And cooperation and reciprocity follow from that. The most efficient form thereof (when material scarcities are the primary dilemma) is within the set of possible systems known as Markets.
I disagree. Scarcities do not have to be settled by markets. They can very well be resolved on a needs-based system. If anything, Markets are only "efficient" for the result that markets expect. Ie this is begging the question
> "I disagree. Scarcities do not have to be settled by markets. […] If anything, Markets are only "efficient" for the result that markets expect."
What? Maximizing pareto? What else is there we'd want to make efficient?
> "They can very well be resolved on a needs-based system."
Whatever the crap a needs-based system is supposed to be. If you want to claim a substantive, non-arbitrary difference between needs and desires, well… I just don't see how it can be done.
Is health care a basic need? What if you choose a lifestyle that's never fatal but incredibly destructive in the ways you treat your body and are constantly taking up space in various Emergency Rooms due to snowboarding accidents? Is this "need" of yours for care patching up your broken limbs on the same degree as that of a carpenter who had a one-time accident? How do you possibly keep track of or mediate between these sorts of uses of health care in any efficient manner?
What if — to work better in space say — I alter my body, replacing some components with cybernetic components, I might "need" nuclear materials rather than food to keep my changed body alive. (Are you to set some arbitrary "baseline" or "normal" human configuration?) We can all agree that needs will vary wildly, but it's important to consider that we have agency in determining some of those needs — with the transhuman as with the snowboarder. These are not isolated quibbles but examples of a broader issue. And that's both where needs and desires become impossible to differentiate between and where it's important to have information, to have signals to keep track of and mediate between the varying demands.
>What? Maximizing pareto? What else is there we'd want to make efficient?
Talk about low expectations.
I don't know, to make everyone better? Maximizing pareto would mean that a starving person in Africa could stay like this as long as some rich guy in America got an extra mil. That's efficiency for you…
And again, you're beggin the question. "Maximizing Parero" is just another way of saying "Whatever the markets do".
Not only that, but there's no evidence that the markets maximize Pareto, and especially not in a disequilibirum situation.
> "I don't know, to make everyone better? Maximizing pareto would mean that a starving person in Africa could stay like this as long as some rich guy in America got an extra mil."
No. Dude. No. It means the exact opposite. Ten million starving africans will full bellies is more pareto efficient than another mil for Gates. Further gates doesn't care that much about another mil, whereas the cartoonish africans we're invoking certainly would care immensely about each additional drop of food. What Pareto at face value DOES allow for is inequalities in relative wealth — so long as absolute wealth is driven up across the board. So this can — at least hypothetically — produce the situation where a millionaire eats caviar on the moon while the rest of us no longer starve and get the cure for AIDS. It took me a long time to get over my class hostility at the very possibility of such relative differences, but I've gotten over it.
Isn't Pareto efficiency when someone is gaining something without someone else losing? Because what you describe now, does not sound like that.
> "Isn't Pareto efficiency when someone is gaining something without someone else losing?"
Pareto efficiency is when every interaction that benefits both parties has been made and there's no more such transactions that can further satiate people's desires. In short it's when everyone's desires have been satiated to the best possible level without lowering anyone else's. The focus on desires rather than accumulation of goods is important.
And this is why this is not actually efficient. Because all empirical studies have shown that it's not the absolute wealth that counts, but the relative inequality within society. There's a reason why even though the US has one of the highest absolute wealths in the world, human misery is so large in so many areas there.
So in short, a world were differences in inequality are large is likely to be a world where, even if people don't starve and get AIDS, they will pay that with inordinate amounts of labour and authority throughout their lives.
> "Because all empirical studies have shown that it's not the absolute wealth that counts, but the relative inequality within society"
In satiating people's desires? I laugh. In our current world, I agree that the MASSIVE inequality (once again, ultimately started and perpetuated by non-voluntary things like state coercion) is the primary pressing concern in people's lives and not necessarily their absolute gains. But that's obviously not relevant to the conditions we're talking about because — at the very least — it's certainly not pareto efficient.
Basic Needs are objective. Food, shelter and friendship. Lets get these covered for all first, and then we can look for desires from a utilitarian pespective.
> "Basic Needs are objective."
No they're not.
I understand where you're coming from. I'm involved in a million basic-needs organizing (A) projects, but ultimately the concept is not clear-cut and it's not objective.
I disagree but I doubt we'll agree on this.
Yes, and to answer you following extreme examples (one has to wonder why Lockeanists keep falling back to sci-fi in order to make a point) the society would try to care for those people but others, who do not come all the time, would get priority (if there is a time scarcity issue). If there isn't, then I don't see the problem.
> "the society would try to care for those people but others, who do not come all the time, would get priority (if there is a time scarcity issue)"
HOW?? That's the fucking problem! How would you know how to best allocate priority??!!!
Without some form of market signals you're fucking fudging, to a gross degree.
> "one has to wonder why Lockeanists keep falling back to sci-fi in order to make a point"
Alright, I'm done with you, I'll finish this batch of responses and say an amicable goodbye. If you can't see such concerns as valid if not incredibly immediate and pressing, then you're not really interested in operating in the full extent of the real world. And your revolutionary pursuits just won't be dexterous enough to matter in the long run. The "sci-fi" jab is just… it's just banal and really limited. There are those of us who care about such realities, you're free to live with condescending fratboy dismissal.
You see a guy with a record of coming in every week with another injury – and you've already asked him to told him this activity because your hospital is at capacity, and you have another person who comes in for the first time.
Both of these are now waiting with the same severity. Obviously the later will get priority.
There you go. Based on simple common sense.
On the other hand, in the market system, the guy who kept breaking himself but had a lot of money, would get priority not even over the guy with the same severity, but over others in worse conditions.
You're fucking shitting me? A guy with cybernetic organs who needs nuclear power instead of food is an "incredibly immediate and pressing concern"?
Pull the other one, it's got bells on
Obviously from that data point you should be able to recognize the continuum of all the other possibilities. Pacemakers, replacement eyes, transexual operations requiring expensive chemical upkeep, et fucking cetera.
You cannot talk about the possibilities of Rent, interest and Wages when considering a world which you've built in your brain to work perfectly with Rent, Interest and Wages. This is from where such stupid concepts such as the homo economicus come from, from people who need to change reality to fit their fantasy models.
Not only are these worlds unrealistic but they tend to ignore a lot of aspects which would create internal inconsistencies when considered. This is because they ultimately base them on Austian economics which is severely flawed.
LOL
Nice counter, Will.
I know, amiright.
He's just randomly throwing out a blanket denunciation of Austrian economics which can't be responded to with any specificity and claiming that the rational man, "homo economicus", can't exist — when he openly said the opposite elsewhere.
What? Please quote me on that.Saying that reason is part of human nature is not the same as saying that all people act rationally all the time you arse.
I don't have to throw blanket denunciations of Austrian economics. I can counter their bullshit specifically too.
My pleasure:
> "The only part of human nature that is essential, is reason."
I snickered the first time and I snicker now.
> "I don't have to throw blanket denunciations of Austrian economics."
Well, whatever. But in that post you were. Hence my explanation of why I didn't attempt some specific rebuttal to it, but stuck with a general statement of disagreement.
I should have known that you would use the same quote I already countered before you did so.
Again, there's a difference in considering reason the main part of human nature, and expecting humans to act in a perfectly rational self-interest all the time.
Snicker all you want. You can have a Mars bar too.
> "there's a difference in considering reason the main part of human nature, and expecting humans to act in a perfectly rational self-interest all the time."
Ah! Ah! Ah! You didn't say that "reason was the main part of human nature"!! You said that it was the ONLY ESSENTIAL part of human nature!! There's all the world of difference there!
And I'm not EXPECTING humans to act rationally, I'm trying to create a culture, society etc in which they do. Because their irrationality isn't an essential reality, so it's one that can be overcome.
Yes, and I say that your assertion is bollocks *. Because by assertion I can speak myself about a state socialist utopia which is sustained because everyone is altruistic and the glorious leader is a superhuman, omnibenevolent master. Obviously it would work logically, but realistically it's a bunch of bullshit.
*And you assertion is bollocks because usury is in fact THE way that accumulation of wealth would happen, and such accumulation would automatically trigger extra accumulation in a never ending spiral, leading ulimately to the same thing we have today.
> "Obviously it would work logically"
The whole point is that it DOESN'T work logically. And thus there's no fucking way whatsoever, no matter how much material or psychological context you change to get it to work.
Oh no, it works logically. It's built on the assertion that this facts are reality see?
Your sentence doesn't parse. But if you'd like to explain how state socialism can logically function with any of the efficiency it claims to, I'd point you toward Hayek and Carson.
> "usury is in fact THE way that accumulation of wealth would happen, and such accumulation would automatically trigger extra accumulation in a never ending spiral, leading ulimately to the same thing we have today."
Except for forms of inflation and directional credit. Plus there's the fact that such centralized accumulations of wealth would have to be maintained though centralized hierarchical controls, which are inefficient for EXACTLY the same reasons that communism is inefficient. And so such conglomerates of wealth would be eaten alive by other market actors.
I don't see how inflation would harm accumulation, it's most likely the other way around. On the other hand, there's the barriers to entry that would be caused by the rise of bigger and bigger companies which would make accumulation and competition against smaller rivals easier.
Well remember that at the beginning the specific (post-revolution, say) markets we're talking about resources would be for all intents and purposes distributed evenly. So the homeowners who build another house and offer it out for rent aren't (we can agree at least initially) offering said services in a world where there are folks to whom that is the only option they can afford. The question is whether, once a few people decide to use this service rather than building/buying and maintaining their own homes, these initial landlords will through such transactions accumulate enough additional resources to build and rent out more homes, compounding again and again until they own everything.
The standard answer is that whatever wealth the accumulator gets from renting would be below the average wealth being created in the rest of the market by those doing active work. This isn't necessarily true, but it IS true in a window of starting values regarding relative wealth. No one would argue that things don't polarize in the opposite direction if you go far out past a much higher hump and have really, really extreme variations in relative wealth. If five people own nearly all the wealth and everyone else owns less than what they need to get by on, then you might as well have recreated the state and any diffuse signals that may still exist hardly constitute a market. Even Rothbard said as much.
But that's not all there is!
Say that somehow through some windfall or freak accident a market actor manages to accumulate such a vast amount of wealth that they could leverage it to garner wealth above the general inflation of it or change market conditions and do things like increase costs of entry….
1) In order to maintain control over all this wealth they face diseconomies of scale, a la Carson. Having one market actor oversee a bunch of wealth is inefficient because one mind can't spread widely enough over all that wealth and get it to work as efficiently as other minds spread over smaller amounts of wealth. e.g. whether it's one crotchety landlord trying to keep up an entire building or a corporation that hires teams of janitors and accountants to act as nerve endings, there won't be internal signals and thus the units will be kept up at either/both a higher expense or/and lower quality than that by smaller, more responsive management.
2) People are going to refuse to deal with them. If I have a choice between entering into an relationship/agreement/transaction with someone both clearly without mutualistic intentions and the capacity to fuck me over to a certain degree, versus someone who doesn't, I'm going to go with the latter. At least unless the former agrees to take a hit relative what they would otherwise be getting. You keep on operating as if there would be some sort of universalistic currency or currencies in a Freed Market, similar to what we have today. But that's preposterous. If A owns almost all the gold on the market and I need gold for something I could pay the near-monopoly price, or I could recognize that A doesn't have much else besides gold and offer him a sandwich. This on the face of it may seem like a ridiculous example ignoring all sorts of classical realities regarding goods and demand,but that's still how things turn out. And this reflects a deeper reality involving the plasticity and directionality of credit/trust/goodwill as well as the shifting nature of 'currencies' and our resulting non-blindness to a potential trade partner's conditions in terms of desires and needs. Now you can throw in a bunch of other actors who desire a bit of that gold and are willing to trade for it but the concentration of one form of wealth is at a disadvantage. If one person starts to dominate one currency that currency will lose value. Because it will make dealings within that currency riskier . Iterated, this slowly grinds down concentrations of wealth that impede pareto.
2) There you go again, assuming some perfect goddamn knowledge and desires,and no pressure at all in this "society of equal opportunity". If your new wage-slave job is next to his appartments, then most people would take them, even if the landlord looks like kind of an arse (which you won't know unless you live under him). This is especially true if this is a very good job, or if you are in financial difficulties. Others might also take the appartments, because they do not care about the landlord but want to "maximize pareto" or somesuch. Your theory is not based on people judging others, just on markets.
So what the fucking incentive of the landlord is shouldn't make a difference RIGHT?!
WHAT?! This is some kind of super revolution that you're going to do there mate. Even the most optimistic rebel would expect a post revolutionary period to be one of transition, and remaining inequality from which we will progress TOWARDS egalitarianism.
Given that you expect a post-revolutionary period to magically be suddenly like the perfect competition expected by the economic textbooks, it's no wonder that you think your fantasies can work.
Again: This is the model we're evaluating in order to understand how system behavior functions at certain end points, in certain conditions.
Obviously the real world won't exist like that. But that doesn't keep the realities we discover within such a model from being relevant or applicable.
We're never going to be able to mirror the real world perfectly, but that doesn't make these sort of evaluations worthless. I focus on a post-revolutionary, generally equitable situation because that's what we're striving towards (however we get there or however long and complicated that may be). What is interesting and even relevant to our strategies on said road are what we can do from that point on.
You focus on post-revolutionary situations because it's easy. I can focus on how perfect communism can look and feel all warm inside about the kind of perfect society I want to live in. Does it help? No.
The reason is the same why most Utopian systems couldn't come into being. The difficulties of progressing toward the ideal were not considered, and those difficulties were so great that is completely derailed the idea to the point of it becoming unfeasible.
So focus all you want on fantasy worlds of working market anarchism, it makes no fucking difference and only will only serve to defeat any progress towards any kind of anarchy, by trying to pull in a direction which will be supporting the counter-revolutionary interests of the time.
> "You focus on post-revolutionary situations because it's easy."
This is why I ran another bucket of comments. Because it's fucking enraging. That's not true. I take the hard road on everything. I'm focusing on post-revolutionary situations HERE in this specific thread because THAT'S WHAT WE'RE ARGUING ABOUT. I doubt we'd have much to ultimately debate on the rest.
> "I can focus on how perfect communism can look and feel all warm inside about the kind of perfect society I want to live in."
BUT IF YOU SPENT A BIT ON IT YOU'D REALIZE IT WOULDN'T WORK. YAARRRG! Hayek, Mises, Carson. Shut the fuck up.
Yes we damn would, because you cannot separate the end result you want to achieve from the road you're going to follow to get there. YOu can't achieve a mutualist system by following anarcho-syndicalist tactics to take down capitalism.
And no, this is not what my argument is about, it's only what you think is about because that's the only thing you can fall back on to for evidence! Ever since I'been discussing with Austrians And Friends, all I've been hearing was examples about the perfect system and arguments built around the legitimacy of perfect system (See Free Markets etc).
But the rotten fucking core of your whole argument, is the way to get there.
> "you cannot separate the end result you want to achieve from the road you're going to follow to get there. YOu can't achieve a mutualist system by following anarcho-syndicalist tactics to take down capitalism."
Yes you can. Ends and means are interconnected but not 1:1.
> "And no, this is not what my argument is about"
Well okay, but we're not interested in that in this back and forth. And I haven't made claims against that at all. I can quote the language you've used and the universals you've attempted, to show what your argument started out in the territory of, and what we took exception to, but if you're doing so badly now that you need to fall back on something as specific as here to there implementation, have at it. It's an interesting topic, but it's not what the topic has been before now.
And since it's so goddamn broad and often completely different, I really think we should leave this one at this and not try any new tangential topics in this already extremely aggravating forum.
Oh shut up. The Austrians have been thoroughly spanked by the Keynesians and then humiliated by the post-Keynesians. It's why the Austrian school is so marginal, because they've already lost the ideological war.
The only reason they've got still some traction is because they lure in naive ideologues with promises of "freedom" and avoid mentioning the criticisms to their theories.
So shut the fuck up.
Yes, because Carson is Austrian. And the issues at hand between the neoclassicals and the Austrians totally have relevance to the stuff we're talking about. And Keynes totally won. Because using the state = winning. And all those differences totally invalidate the critiques Hayek et al made of communism. Yups. And further lockean market economics totally = austrian. Because it's not like there was a David Friedman along with Rothbard.
Dude. You FAIL.
Oh for the love of…
What I am saying is that the assumptions on which the whole Austrian model has been built on have been utterly demolished. Who did it is irrelevant as long as the arguments are sound. It is also irrelevant to mention Hayek's critique of centrally planned economy, since this is not what I'm suggesting.
Sorry, I couldn't leave this bullshit just lying around unanswered for long
> "the assumptions on which the whole Austrian model has been built on have been utterly demolished."
That;s really big talk. Suffice to say that I disagree vehemently with your statement of the situation. But that would be broaching an entirely new line of discussion when you've been trying to press a number of tangential discussions for a while now. We can probably find a million things to disagree on if we try, let's keep this back to what the original post was about: the alleged arbitrariness to distinctions of possession from private property . There's piles of quite intelligent academics who disagree with your sweeping assessment of the Austrians as well.
And it's worth noting that while their alleged incorrectness could conceivably be cause of their relative unpopularity, their hostility to the state and focus on explanation rather than pragmatic money-making are unarguably cause enough to make them unpopular. Maybe it's over-caused. Maybe it's just the latter.
To dismiss Hayek's critique as purely applicable to the largest and most obvious and soviet-state like cases of centrally planned economies is juvenile. Your claim that the hospital desk clerk should decide the allocation of treatment between ER patients is exactly the same thing.
That would be only as much as your support for the market is the exactly same as the system we have now and vulnerable to the same critiques.
Given that you have characterized communism as "a bunch of folks sitting in a circle guessing." I don't think you're anyone to be calling dismissals juvenile…
Yes it fucking does!
1) They're not realities. They're possibilities.
2) They're not applicable because nothing in the fantasy system is similar, and trying to apply laws you've pulled out of a hat to reality will only end in dislocation. They're not relevant because the laws of the market you discover there, don't apply to the market we have here.
It's like trying to apply space flight psyscs to atmospheric flight physics. Yes, they both work in their respective worlds, but a spaceship won't fucking fly in the atmosphere.
The only relevance they have is to think how a possibly market anarchist system might work, and what conditions it would require. BUt the problem is getting from here to there!
> "They're not applicable because nothing in the fantasy system is similar, and trying to apply laws you've pulled out of a hat to reality will only end in dislocation."
The sort of physics that gets pulled out of a mathematical hat prior to empirical data is the rooted most basic fundamental laws kind of physics. The E = MC^2 kind.
> "It's like trying to apply space flight psyscs to atmospheric flight physics. Yes, they both work in their respective worlds, but a spaceship won't fucking fly in the atmosphere."
No, it's like thrust. Thrust is fucking thrust. Conservation of momentum is fucking conservation of fucking momentum.
What I'm doing is akin to talking about such conservation of momentum in a particle decay and you're laughing and saying "the particle is still here" it's not moving or splitting *nyah* this isn't relevant. It's a "strong force only has certain effects in the present system, therefor those effects = the entirety of what that force can do".
No it's not like fucking thrust, most of all, because thrust has been empirically proven BEFORE being accepted as true, unlike the goddamn markets.
What you're saying is that "Markets are pareto efficient and we prove that by taking this theoretical system of small scale businesses and blah blah blah". But this is not fucking proof! You then have the gall to say that because markets are always pareto efficient, we should make reality like our theory world. THIS IS BEGGING THE QUESTION. IT'S CIRCULAR FUCKING REASONING!
> "thrust has been empirically proven BEFORE being accepted as true, unlike the goddamn markets."
No, concepts like thrust are a way of looking at relationships that are already known and clarifying our conceptual models of them.
Evolution. I can get out a computer and program the Game of Life. That's sufficient proof of the mathematical concept.
> "What you're saying is that "Markets are pareto efficient and we prove that by taking this theoretical system of small scale businesses and blah blah blah…"
JESUS FUCKING CHRIST NO.
I've never said anything of the like. Markets are far, far more basic and primal a mathematical concept than anything involving small scale businesses or models of such. Those are just possible strategies. But an evaluation of all possible strategies is not necessary for the proof.
Lawls. This is not begging the question because it doesn't presume that pareto efficiency regarding material scarcities (what it calculates) is the only possible goal. In fact I've spend quite a lot of time explaining to my Market Anarchist buddies how a truly anarcho-communist system can completely differ from theirs — that is to say mediating between uses not titles of primacy. That's another really interesting model. (Although it's not what you've been describing.) It does extraordinarily well in artificial or largely closed contexts where materials aren't a problem — like in the development of open source software. And that's an important approach. It's where I'd like us to end up after scarcities are no longer a problem. But I think it's pretty clear that the dominate economic problem in the foreseeable future is one of material scarcities, thus THAT IS WHY markets of property titles offer us good examples of where we can move our world to solve said problems.
On the other hand, the landlord by hiring more and and cheaper personel (than managers), and by having more stuff to buy, will reduce his costs as he'll be able to get discounts for buying en mass. Plus he will offer a standardized experience to all people in the flats, get a franchise rolling, be able to pay for better adverts, hire more marketers and rent his houses faster etc.
As such, his wealth will most likely keep increasing, and especially since landlordism is a monopolistic tactic (that is, it's hard for otherts to "steal" tenants, compared to customers), even if not as efficient, there's still be people wanting his houses.
See how easy is to put holes in fantasy examples?
> On the other hand, the landlord by hiring more and and cheaper personel
I don't think its established that the landlords with more wealth can hire folks for cheaper. Just the opposite. (Although obviously in today's corporatist market conditions with huge economies of scale that's not true)
> "by having more stuff to buy, will reduce his costs as he'll be able to get discounts for buying en mass"
That's not necessarily true. But I agree that it can be a economy of scale — albeit far milder one. See Carson on this.
> "Plus he will offer a standardized experience to all people in the flats"
Why is this preferable? And anyway why can't it be assured by agencies inspecting the little guys?
> "be able to pay for better adverts, hire more marketers"
Bah. I agree that this is currently an economy of scale, but advertisement is a weird and twisted phenomenon of our scarcities in information and corporatist culture. If the internet is left to develop and metastasize the very concept of advertising will be dead in twenty years. …So long before any of us get a revolution going (Greeks and S Koreans possibly excepted although it's hard to have high hopes for their survival).
> "that is, it's hard for otherts to "steal" tenants, compared to customers"
Meh, not really. Folks shift housing relatively quite a lot. I mean, how many places have you lived in a two year period? That's the appeal of renting as opposed to owning.
Where the fuck did my lovely response go?
Which one? I see the one above about the landlords. In any case, don't worry if you don't see an argument of yours. It's still there and once this fucking bug is fixed, I'll reply and you'll get notified of your new humiliation 😛
And that doesn't work because you do not have a single-commodity market and thus interest gives vague and not at all useful information.
But interest CAN be applied in specific, directional relations.
Can you explain that?
Again see the lack of a single overarching currency.
Specific to your vague ALL future goods and conditions critique: If I have a "currency" that's primarily used by the steel industry when I write a contract involving that currency the interest is going to be tied to the future conditions of that industry.
Did you delete my replies?
No, there's a bug in the system. I'll make them appear shortly
2) In a socialist society, lacking the incentive to do the other guy one over? It certainly is enough.
No. No, good intentions are not enough. They're not sufficient. You and I may have good intentions in the ways we relate to one another economically, but still end up accomplishing next to nothing. THERE ARE MATHEMATICAL LIMITS at hand. Issues with regard to the distribution of information in non-market systems and the capacity of those systems to process said information at sufficient speeds to get complicated things done. Dynamic, many-minded systems are far, far better at handling the allocation of resources given even the smallest amount of scarcity or regional disequilibrium. And, whatever our emotional associations with the very broad concepts of "rent", etc given the way they are applied in our present Capitalist context, that doesn't invalidate them or make them inherently tied to such. Rent, interest on a loan, etc is a damn fine way of transferring incredibly useful and relevant information in our economic interactions, namely the value we personally place in objects and the probabilities with regard to the future that we assess from our individual perspective.
You CAN have market based on Lockean property in which everyone operates with the best of intentions. Just as you can have a collectivist or gift economy wherein everyone operates with the best of intentions. But the latters don't work very well at a large scale! The Gift of the Magi may be all nice and heart warming between two people, but it's fucking catastrophic when applied to the production of WiFi chips.
Unfortunately not, because Good Intensions in a system built around crass individualism is a competitive disadvantage to the person practicising them. As such, they are "bred" away in an evolutionary manner.
"Markets" are an incredibly broad set of possible systems and relations. In one culture or configuration Good Intentions may be a competitive disadvantage — this is arguably largely true in presently existing Capitalism (which is just one of many possible Market configurations). But in another, they can be an advantage. Consider the following example:
I have a choice between pawn shops in my neighborhood. Now I am going to be inclined to visit the one with the greatest reputation for honesty. That's what I prize. I don't know the best price for my father's guitar. And while I could shop around, all the pawn shops could conspire to lower the price. But when I run across one who engages with me truthfully, respectfully and with a general ethos of reciprocity that's something that's going to stick with me. It's going to bias me towards frequenting them as opposed to their competitors in the future. Because they're honest and open about how they try to make operating costs alone, they'll almost certainly make less of a profit off of each individual sale compared to their competitors. BUT THEY'LL MAKE MORE SALES. "Oh man, grandpa O'Neil is an honest, good intentioned old fella, you can trust your dealings with him."
This is most likely true and the value of markets improves depending on the system they operate in. Which is incidentally why under a possessive system they would be superior (which is what mutualist propose).
Nevertheless, they would still cause problems as the price mechanism gives incomplete signals (eg current demand, not future demand) and people almost always lack the full information which means that shady tactics can bring a bigger short term profit until they are countered.
Each of us can make countless imaginary examples that prove our points but these are next to worthless. We cannot build imaginary scenarios and then claim that the markets work. We need to look at how the markets work and then make theories explaining their benefits and failings.
> "This is most likely true and the value of markets improves depending on the system they operate in."
My point is that a critical element of this are the cultural tendencies present. These can affect the behavior of the market substantively, but it's wrong to presume that the mere presence of dynamic individual exchange (lockean or whatever) is causally prior to the culture. Rather, for the most part, the exact opposite is true.
> "Nevertheless, they would still cause problems as the price mechanism gives incomplete signals (eg current demand, not future demand…"
Seriously? Seriously? This is where you're at? Well, your entire bit is wrong. No one has magical knowledge of the future but there are plenty of really important mechanisms that markets provide in order to sort out such likelihoods efficiently. Like fucking interest. Communism has nothing better than a bunch of folks sitting in a circle guessing.
> Each of us can make countless imaginary examples that prove our points but these are next to worthless.
The crux of our disagreement is that you're making sweeping universal statements regarding "Lockean Property" and I'm pointing out counter examples. Because you're dealing in universals that's all that's required of me to prove you wrong. Even hypothetical counter-examples, so long as they're not internally incoherent or impossible, are sufficient,
> "We cannot build imaginary scenarios and then claim that the markets work. We need to look at how the markets work and then make theories explaining their benefits and failings."
Nonsense. And self-debilitating nonsense at that. The concepts of markets, game theory, etc. are mathematical relations, empiricism is no more needed than we need stone counters to prove that 17+23 = 40.
This conversation is not about the benefits and failings of existing markets, everyone here should already know that shit. No, the conversation we're having is not about the PRESENT it's about the POSSIBLE. There's all the fucking world in that distinction. When I calculate phase-space boundaries on the values of a possible particle, I'm not in the slightest bit interested in the values of the particles we already know about. If we were simply to react to the bits of Capitalism that strike us as negative in the present context we constrict ourselves irrationally. When attempting to build the best world we can we cannot afford to be purely reactive in our analysis, we have to move beyond present context and investigate the more fundamental underlying realities that govern ALL POSSIBLE worlds. Because something that almost always seems like a tool for evil in our present context may end up being a useful tool for good in a very different context.
I don't understand this. What are those "cultural tendencies"? What is a "dynamic individual exchange (lockean or whatever)"?
> "What are those "cultural tendencies"?"
Well not every pattern in the market is there because it's the most efficient one. A lot of them stick around because they've generated a culture around them and their perpetuation. Even in the face of radical change folks will often default upon inherited ways of doing business or relating towards one another because "they feel more right", or — more accurately — because they don't want to alter their habits, learn or try something new. Hence all those old folks who put search terms in Google in the form of a complete sentence: "Where can I find good shoes?" as opposed to the more effective "shoestore [zipcode] ratings". So you get all those ancap free market advocates who expect to organize and do business in a Free Market in exactly the same hierarchical manner of firm or corporation as they grew up with. When that's clearly not efficient.
You dare fire the accusatory arrows of ignorance at me and then say crap like this?
Oh the hypocricy! Oh the Tu Quoque!
Yes, seriously! The fucking Interest can't do a fucking thing about the fact that markets do not supply adequate information to the capitalist to predict future demand. No matter the fucking interest, firms which see a demand rising or falling, will attempt to increase or decrease production, all at once. This is a classic example of game theory results.
> "No matter the fucking interest, firms which see a demand rising or falling, will attempt to increase or decrease production, all at once."
But they don't. Smart firms and smart players in Game Theory can add meta levels to their strategy. Ultimately everything that everyone is guessing about the future is a guess, but in a market there's actually ways to communicate and weigh these guesses.
So are you saying that these "smart firms" and "smart players" will do better than everyone else, but somehow not manage to start accumulating more? Even in a market in disequilibrium? Or are these smart people, with those extra resources now, going to turn suddenly dumb tomorrow?
Really? What? Because this is what we're arguing now and I just spanked both your concept of prices and interest.
So are you saying that these "smart firms" and "smart players" will do better than everyone else, but somehow not manage to start accumulating more? Even in a market in disequilibrium? Or are these smart people, with those extra resources now, going to turn suddenly dumb tomorrow?
Really? What? Because this is what we're arguing now and I just spanked both your concept of prices and interest.
And where did the fucking reply to this go either? Given which one's I'm not seeing and the "points" you keep making as though I hadn't already addressed them, I can't help but have a small suspicion that you're deleting my posts.
I see you reply above. It's the one starting with "Sure you did. " yes? It's still there.
I've sent you an email about this.
So all it will take is for me to show you why your hypothetical example will fail and you will admit that your theories are crap? Or will you then create another hypothetical example that does not suffer the same problem, endlessly shifting the goalposts?
Well that's how critique functions. While there's a lot of tangential stuff getting brought up in this the central point I'm asserting is that no concrete distinction between the concepts of property and possession can be made that isn't ultimately arbitrary. You're asserting an absolute, all I have to do is poke a single hole in it. I've poked a bunch.
Of course all this talk about 'shifting goalposts' is still somewhat meaningless as you've yet to invalidate a single counter-example I've given, save by complaining about possibility in modern existing context, which is inapplicable when you're talking about absolutes.
The abstract concept of markets or game theory may be axiomatic but it's the situation that defines what results you will have. You do not have the same game theory numbers in a classic prisoner's dilemma, with the ones you have in traffic jams, with the one you have for a tragedy of the commons scenario. The mistake economists do is that you take one theoretical scenario, find out how the markets would work there, build up an economic theory and then try to apply it to reality on "as if". This can only end in tragedy, as it has.
And now you say, that based on this or that theoretical fantasy example, markets should work to the benefit of all, as such, we need to make reality like this theoretical fantasy. But the problem is of course that this theoretical scenario has left our so many variables in order to make it work that it's not even funny.
I think there are some really profound things you're not getting in this. You seem to be talking about individual problems or models of relations. But all of them are beside the point. Nobody's claiming that markets are most efficient because of a bunch of specific graphs of say the relation of supply and demand, given hypothetical and extremely limited and uncomplicated contexts — the sort of thing you might find scattered throughout a neoclassical book on economics. No, markets are far, far more primal and universal than those specific irreproducible instances.
Given a set of points and substances flowing through those points with arbitrary disturbances and impediments, what's the most efficient arrangement or approach to creating and dissolving relations between points? The answer is always generated and maintained by a many-minded approach. That is to say taking the preexisting payoff (desires) matrices in the set and allowing them to evolve, test and implement infinitely complex strategies and meta strategies vis a vis one another. The reason we argue for a FREE(D) Market is because whenever you universally remove a swathe of strategies said removal becomes an effective impediment for plasticity in response and adaptation. Sure a given strategy may not be very effective in most circumstances or in repeated application, but there will always be stray situations in which it is most efficient. And cutting it out of the strategic vernacular at best slows the processing speed of the system and at worst can create systematic catastrophes.
This is the problem with divinely reaching down and cutting an arbitrary swathe of tactics called "rent" out of the strategic vernacular of everyone. There will be (from your perspective "fringe") conditions in which that removal creates unfair, inequitable and inefficient situations: as in the case of my friend expecting a form of recompense for the worry (psychological disultility) that renting his car out entails.
To clarify: that my friend should NOT be reimbursed for the worry (cost in terms of subjective desires) is unfair, inequitable and inefficient.
Actually it isn't. Rent, Interest and Wage-labour (usury) are simply a measure of the inequality within society. They reinforce and maintain those inequalities. They provide no useful function other than to enrich and empower people who do not work productively (or at all).
They do not show how much value one places on an object, but rather how much value he expects to get from those who are in a worse position. It reinforces the fact that exchanges between inequal individuals, benefit the more powerful.
> "Rent, Interest and Wage-labour (usury) are simply a measure of the inequality within society. They reinforce and maintain those inequalities. They provide no useful function other than to enrich and empower people who do not work productively (or at all)."
You keep stating such things — and they certainly can appear common sense inferences from the conditions of the world we live in — but you've yet to reference or present a deductive argument justifying why such is necessarily and universally so. I've given counter-examples of rent and interest serving vital roles to transmit important information regarding value and certainty without denoting or creating fundamentally hierarchical relations.
I use the term "hierarchy" specifically because I'm not going to utilize the concept of "equality" / "inequality" because I think its a poorly defined and slippery term. Material equality is hardly something that would benefit most folks. If everyone gets precisely the same amount of lithium, cadmium, carbon, helium, gold, iron, etc… that's materially equitable, but it doesn't suffice to satisfy the desires of folks. One person may highly treasure wood figurines, another jello. In the populace at large jello may be valued far more than wood figurines. But the wood figurine person's happiness is not hurt by only possessing the wood figurines the rest of society considers worthless. There is no inherent hierarchy there.
Further if I pay a Proudhonian free tradesman to cobble my shoes and give him certain directions and a time limit on said cobbling, how does that SUBSTANTIVELY differ from briefly employing him and paying wages? It's ultimately nothing more than a matter of degree. My friend's mother is a master craftsman when it comes to wedding dresses, which she loves to make, but the nature of wedding dresses is such that each one must be made to individual desires and before a set date. Often she is paid by the hour for emergency repairs. Because she's in a freer, more dynamic, even black-market (under the table) sort of market, she has generally far more freedom and job satisfaction than a McDonalds fry cook. But this comes from the fact that her more dynamic market gives her the capacity to Fire Her Boss at will and get a new job to work on. This is what Mutualists and Market Anarchists are defending when we defend wages.
> "Your comment must be approved by the site admins before it will appear publicly."
Huh. Only happened to that post.
Yeah, it happens sometimes due to heuristic scanning
PS: If you can, please use the blockquote tag, as it makes quotes more distinct
It differs substancially because the cobbler owns his own tools. If he doesn't like your terms, or your business. He can still cobble for other people at the terms he finds acceptable. While if he's a wage-salve, if he doesn't like your terms he's fucked, especially if there are a 1000 others people who will accept any term for any job (therefore bringing the cost of the labour to the minimum).
If he owns his tools, he can work how he wants, when he wants, as long as he gets your request in time and quality. If you own the tools, he has to work how you want, when you want at the time and quality you decide or else.
Put more simply. The self-employed cobbler is free. The wage-slave is not, except in the meaning that he is free to choose the best master he can find.
LOL
My friend's mother owns neither the fancy sowing machine (which she rents), nor the dress material, which the brides usually buy.
Most construction workers own their own tools but not the building they're working on.
Then she's being exploited because she does not own the means of production. Someone is taking part of her money without working. If renting wasn't possible, the price of the sewing machine would be lower and your mother could afford it. Then she wouldn't have to pay some leech for the priviledge of him havnig more money.
You forget that those constuction workers belong to a company that takes off the surplus value they create (the building or the cost of the building). It's a great example of the effects of inequality and the barriers to entry to cooperative contruction companies.
> "Then she's being exploited because she does not own the means of production."
I disagree profoundly (and I'm quite workerist). She may not "own" all the means of production, but she CONTROLS them. If the owner of the sowing machine demands it back she can go and get another one within hours. For a variety of reasons she doesn't WANT to own her extremely fancy sowing machine, central of which is because the cost of it would be less than she's likely to pay in rent over her total time using it, while the machine's going to last a long time, probably past her career.
> "You forget that those constuction workers belong to a company that takes off the surplus value they create (the building or the cost of the building)."
No, I'm not forgetting! I'm pointing it out!! The workers own and control their tools but are STILL fucked because of market conditions they work within. My friend's mother does not own her tools but is incredibly free and is NOT fucked over, because of the market conditions she works within.
Which is of course because the possibility of rent of such machines jacks up the price, since as I said before, the concept of rent implies infinite value.
So again you're looking at 'what' but not 'why'. A trend I've noticed
Wait, my bad.
What I meant to type was :
central of which is because the cost of it would be MORE than she's likely to pay in rent over her total time using it,
Otherwise that entire point doesn't make sense.
And I'm saying that inequality would create the same goddamn conditions unless you can somehow manage to reset reality.
Yes, you're ignoring everything I say and stating the same thing over and over again. Yay!
My deductive argument is on my previous post actually (which I assumed you've read already)
I'm sorry… what?! Seriously? You still think that was a proof of such? Let me quote your own damn post contradicting you:
> "Common sense would say that this would be acceptable. Of course these are not hard and fast rules, but up to each community to define to their own culture and experience."
You think that's a deductive argument proving that the periods of abandonment or loaning necessary to swap title can't be made arbitrarily long in a given culture/society?! WTF. A given culture or experience could very well be that possession NEVER (or not for decades) ceases no matter how long since the last use. Something very close to this is commonly accepted culturally in America.
When I say material equality, I mean that each person can get what they need. Not that they all get the same. So Material equality would be the guy who likes jello getting it and the guy who likes wooden figurines getting them (or allowing them the freedom and capability to make it themselves), while material inequality would be the guy liking jello getting it because he's rich, while the guy who likes wooden figurines not because he's poor.
Seriously? You can't see how fucking arbitrary of a distinction that is?
Nevermind the whole "determining need" ridiculousness.
Then you're not defending wage-labour. This is much different from what I condemn and this is the classic confusion about what communists condemn and why both collectivists and individualists are both socialists.
Then you're not defending wage-labour. This is much different from what I condemn and this is the classic confusion about what communists condemn and why both collectivists and individualists are both socialists.
All right, then replace every instance of "capitalism" with "market economy," and read my response again.
Your article here, as well as the philosophical canon you've established in your other posts, rejects private ownership and a market economy outright, based only on arguments against the capitalist mode of production.
While one can think that market exchange might be useful, most collectivist anarchist reject it because it is more likely to create more problems than it solves. However this discussion is neither here nor now I'm afraid.
My article here, actually rejects Private Property based on utilitarian arguments and those are not limited simply on pointing out how bad the Capitalist mode of production would is. For example, the rejection of a market system (which can exist outside of Capitalism) cannot be based on the renounciation of Capitalism
It doesn't have to. People who do consider friendship to be like what I describe, will be convinced. Those who aren't, won't (at least without empirical evidence). I may also convince people to change their definition of friendship with Epicurean arguments. In any case, the end result would be that if it is my arguments that make a difference, it will be because there were indeed enough people with this concept of friendship that were convinced by them.
Good post. I would comment more, but I find myself with little to add and nothing to criticize. 😉
Yea, I'm also in agreement on all points. I'm starting to think that the differences between mutualism and capitalism are pretty much subsumed by their position on money.
I thought it had to do mostly with their position on usury
What? Mutualists are against usury in all forms. Aren't communists also against usury in all forms? Or do communists accept some forms of usury? I'm confused now.
I think I'm more confused by your use of "subsumed". What did you mean in your original sentence?
Meaning that the only major difference I've seen is the position on money.
Yay! Tremblay disagrees with me! That's how I know I'm right! 😉
How do I disagree with you?
Heh, in that case just jump in the comments and counter the criticism the others presented. I could do with some support against the onslaught 🙂
Eh, I would, but for a few things.
A) I'm not sure if it's just on my end, but comments seem to misbehave rather badly. Like it will say there are 9 replies to a comment, but only one will appear, and the descending pages of comments don't seem to be organized by any sensible system. Makes me think I'm missing something, and I'd rather not argue under conditions that conspire to keep me ignorant. 😛
B) I'm extremely awful when it comes to debating political economy and theory. I'm a communist because I've seen the effects capitalism has on people, and how it concentrates power in the hands of the few while marginalizing and dehumanizing the vast majority. Any discussion about why this happens, how it occurs, is, at this point, beyond me. I'm disgusted enough by the end result to know its wrong, but still trying to grapple with the mechanics of it. I'd probably do more damage to the cause by opening my mouth. I'll just sit quietly in the corner and watch you wreck the capitalists for now.
Eh, I would, but for a few things.
A. I'm not sure if it's just on my end, but comments seem to misbehave rather badly. Like it will say there are 9 replies to a comment, but only one will appear, and the descending pages of comments don't seem to be organized by any sensible system. Makes me think I'm missing something, and I'd rather not argue under conditions that conspire to keep me ignorant. 😛
B. I'm extremely awful when it comes to debating political economy and theory. I'm a communist because I've seen the effects capitalism has on people, and how it concentrates power in the hands of the few while marginalizing and dehumanizing the vast majority. Any discussion about why this happens, how it occurs, is, at this point, beyond me. I'm disgusted enough by the end result to know its wrong, but still trying to grapple with the mechanics of it. I'd probably do more damage to the cause by opening my mouth. I'll just sit quietly in the corner and watch you wreck the capitalists for now.
Heh, thanks for the support then. I'm glad I can be seen to be "wrecking" by someone at least 🙂
RE:Weird comments: yeah, sorry about that, it's a bug of the system and I'm pestering the devs to get off their arses to fix it already
So, there's my proof that I probably do understand individualist anarchism. What's your's?
This man says it better than I ever could.
"Proof" as in primary sources of individualist anarchists actually saying what they believed on this issue, not more unsupported assertions and failure to address my evidence.
Note: my citation of their views does not necessarily constitute an endorsement of them, but is simple to say that those were their views.
I would suggest to check the proof I provided which has ample quotes, plus background and context.
Furthemore, quote mining is not generally good proof.
Sorry, link bad, Once more with feeling
Sorry, link bad, Once more with feeling
Sorry, been to that FAQ before. Iain McKay is a liar and fraud who deliberately cherry picks his quotes out of context and omits information that doesn't fit the preconceived biased picture that he wants history present, and he's been lying or simply inventing the "facts" as he goes several times before.
<blockquoute>I would suggest to check the proof I provided which has ample quotes, plus background and context.
Furthemore, quote mining is not generally good proof.
1. You just contradicted yourself.
2. You haven't cited one reference or presented any kind of deductive argument; you just keep making the same unsupported assertions over and over again.
Sorry but I can't take any post which ends up in the conclusion that Rothbard was a socialist, seriously…
1) Ample quotes plus background and context. Important things to distinguish from quote mining.
2) I've got a whole blog full of deductive arguments. Have you read my previous post on Possession or did you just come to this post straight from the AAE with an axe to grind?
You say that when your counter to my linking to the AFAQ was to links claiming that the AFAQ is not so accurate? One of which makes a totally absurd conclusion and the other is from 1996! (the AFAQ is in its 13th iteration now). How did you exactly counter anything?
From a quick skim again, I counted at least 8
Citation for fucking what? My own arguments? Do I need citations to express a logical argument now?
Your main argument is "AFAQ" 🙂 This is stupid.
Express a logical argument and then get back to me.
Actually it isn't only because the payment is simply not enough to cover the costs of fixing the damage. And this is why we have deposits to take care of small damages (which then leaves the landlord peace of mind). FOr large damages, there is the law.
Very simply, the only reason the landlord cares to get back the property intact, is because he doesn't know if he can request the money out of you if he doesn't. While the reason why someone giving you a sentimental item and wanting it back intact, is because he places a much higher value on it than the objective value it has (ie the standard exchange value). So he will not care if you can repay him the item, because he wanted the item itself, not the money.
Exaxtly? Why is that? Because of human psychology. Because equal people instictively seem to not generally prefer exchanges which trade power (money is power). Not only do you see friends trading gifts (which is not an exchange of power as I explained above) but even if one were to offer money, it is most usual that the other party will rather refuse them altogether.
In fact, as far as I'm aware, friendships which work on such monetary terms are severely weakened compared to others. Of course you might cry about "anecdotal evidence" but in that case, I'll have to point you to what I said elsewhere.
Exaxtly? Why is that? Because of human psychology. Because equal people instictively seem to not generally prefer exchanges which trade power (money is power). Not only do you see friends trading gifts (which is not an exchange of power as I explained above) but even if one were to offer money, it is most usual that the other party will rather refuse them altogether.
In fact, as far as I'm aware, friendships which work on such monetary terms are severely weakened compared to others. Of course you might cry about "anecdotal evidence" but in that case, I'll have to point you to what I said elsewhere.
My deductive argument is on my previous post actually (which I assumed you've read already)
> "If you're a toddler irrationally possessive with your playing blocks, then I'd argue that you're unlikely to rent them and furthermore, not exactly the example we're looking for an adult social system."
Way to completely miss the point. The point is the fuzziness of the psychological roots to possessiveness. What the fuck is the inherent neurological difference between that sort of situation and those we would arbitrarily classify as "sentimental"?
The difference as I explained elsewhere is that such psychological roots to possessiveness do not lead to rent
A can be the cause of both B and C. Just because B and C might be addressed differently, doesn't mean that A must be really two separate and distinct causes.
That tells me nothing.
Le sigh.
The distinction between two people getting the exact same stuff regardless of what they want, and two people getting what they want is arbitrary?! Are you obtuse?
And you don't need to "determine need". Needs are objective and once fulfilled, wants are determined by people themselves
I've got to log. There's a bug that periodically makes it impossible to see any of the replies to my first post. Which is highly obnoxious.
Fix it and I'll continue demolishing and embarrassing you tomorrow, or maybe for a bit in a few hours when I get home.
Yeah, I'm aware of it and I can't fix it myself. I've informed the developers (practically screaming at them at this point) but I'm still waiting. Try to reply by email if you can (you can reply to the notifications you receive and they will appear as a reply) or simply wait half an hour and try to refresh the page. Sorry about that however. It wasn't always like this 🙁
Certainly, and I'll return the favour and continue bitch slapping your inane arguments to kingdom come as always. 😉
I can imagine a world with the preconditions suitable for a State Socialist utopia as much as I can imagine such stuff such as perfect future knowledge, clearing labour markets and the like that a market economy (especially based on Lockeanism) would need to work
By the same logic, your argument (I assume) is “Austrian school of Economics” 🙂 This is stupid too
So giving him money increases inequality, but giving him food doesn't? What's the difference?
(Btw, below my post it says 3 replies, but I see only one.)
Yeah, sorry about that. There's a bug around. I think I need a awareness note about it somewhere visible
It depends. If there are another 1000 cobblers who all own their own tools and only a few people who want their services, the cobbler would do best to accept the terms. If there are a 1000 employers who could use the skills of the "wage-slave", he can negotiate terms he finds acceptable.
It's not so much the owning of your own tools, but the competition that determines your ability to set the terms.
Which is yet another reason why market economies in anarchism are a bad idea.
Yes, but sadly, there never less employees than emloyers, and full employment sends the system into crisis.
Why would there be unemployment in a free market, and why would full employment send the system into a crisis?
> "To equate landlordism with motels is intellectually dishonest as there's a big fucking difference that I shouldn't have to point out."
Well as someone who's incidentally worked behind the counter at a motel, I fail to see the distinction. At least as anything other than degree. If you would like to finally enunciate the critical distinction between one piece of property rented out for occupancy in the long term and another piece of property rented out for occupancy in the short term, please be my guest, it would be about fucking time.
> "So no, he does not deserve any income from rent from the house because the value of the house is not infinite (which is basically what rent implies). He deserves a fair exchange price for the labour he invested. He can set the price he believes it's worth it and see if others agree (if we're talking about a system with money)."
It's important to realize that rent takes place in a world in which housing is a good that deteriorates in value over time and use. If it wasn't then there'd be no such thing as renting because there'd be nothing even close to scarcity in homes. When the landlord rents the house he does this because he thinks it'll be of greater value to folks as a disposable home from which they can move without the hassle or problem of selling it. But it will not be of infinite value to the landlord, and quite reasonably the landlord may decide that keeping the house to rent out for the rest of his life will make smaller profit than outright selling it — this HAPPENS. Thus renting conveys critical information regarding individual assessments of future conditions. Tendencies within the neighborhood, for example. A bunch of transient college students will want to rent, not buy, whereas families will want to buy.
To capitalists and landlords who can make some use of it to make more money? Certainly. To everyone else? Not likely. As such, this "critical information" is just another way to help accumulation.
In a usufruct world, such information would not be required. There would be solutions for those who are transient, such as those we have now (ie, student housing)
> "To capitalists and landlords who can make some use of it to make more money? Certainly. To everyone else? Not likely."
Well it's pretty damn hard to have information signals in one part of the market not have effects everywhere else.
> "There would be solutions for those who are transient, such as those we have now (ie, student housing)"
Wait. what? ? FAIL. Because student housing is totally not a renting situation… ?? What they pay is not rent at all. (Well, I suppose it could be paid for them by a welfare project of the state, but that's hardly a step up.)
The difference, is that in a hotel, you would be paying for the service, not the rent! In a socialist society where for some reason money still existed, the existence of Motels would villify the existence of rent is idiotic. Because a person going to a hotel would be paying for the service the people provided him while for the rent, one is paying someone else for the benefit of simply staying there!
YOu're ignoring the fact that there's scarcity of land, and increasing population. You're also ignoring the fact that people concentrate in cities. That people want to live close to where they work etc.
Mainly you're ignoring a bunch of other shit that would create an incentive for rent in areas of human concentration, which is incidentally where rent happens, even though there's a lot of open and cheap space on the countryside.
I think it's perfectly safe to ignore such things — or, hell we can address them, they don't really make a difference or contribute noticeably to scale.
> "That people want to live close to where they work etc. "
Yes and people want to work close to where they live. That's why people will often decide on both things simultaneously. It's not like one goes by the wayside, people consider both. Doesn't mean that they'll put up with an entire neighborhood of closely conspiring shitty landlords because the job somehow comes first. Unless it's a damn fine one-in the world job that somehow outweighs everything else. And if so, good for them. But that's the rare case.
Finally I know of next to no one who lives within a mile or two of where they work. A mile radius in a city is a pretty big market to shop around in.
That does not follow. Interest according to Austrians, is based on saving and loans. As such, the interest, no matter which currency you take it in, would be the same.
And that is, without going into the difficulty of keeping a different currency for each industry in the face of simplicity.
> "Interest according to Austrians, is based on saving and loans."
Well, again, I'm not an Austrian, I'm not interested in arguing the Austrian Party Line. But you're misportraying them as far stupider than they are.
> "As such, the interest, no matter which currency you take it in, would be the same."
Nope, because currencies trade differently against one another — there's lag and issues of relative credit. Just think about the "market" today and what signals are sent by investments in different currencies. If people start investing heavily in gold, that means bad times a-comin' universally, or it means that gold mining is probably going to slope off. If people invest in Bonds it can be an act of faith that those will appreciate in value because the government will be stable in the future. These are all roughly speaking within the very wide expanse of "currencies". And if I write a contract with you in terms of US Bonds and I demand high interest that means I have reason to think the value of US bonds will appreciate against everything else.
Can you begin to see from that just how much potential there is within currency? An book-making anarcho-syndicalist federation's labour notes can have a different interest rate than another currency. This conveys important information.
Again, you're assuming too much.
Since you renounce the claim that interest is based solely on savings and loans, then you renounce the idea that without government interferece, the interest would be in equilibrium.
This is particularly true since you base the concept of interest in what people think will happen (I think that the US gov will be stable. People think that bad-times are a-comin' etc)
But then you consider that all the subjective evaluations of society will produce an equilibrium situation (ie, counter each other off) but that does not follow. It equally follows that all those subjective evaluations will feed each other's worries and lead to greater dislocation (eg, some people think that bad times are a-comin and start hoarding gold, which leads some others to be afraid of the gov stability and thus lower US bonds interest)
Third, you still have not explained why these different currencies would make any change in the price-mechanism problem I explained above. Won't steel industrialist be able to borrow from US borns to finance the steel industries investment? Is someone going to force them to be using "Steel credit"?
Fourth, you still haven't explained why different currencies for each different industry would come into being. This has never happened before and I see no reason why it should. While there were different currencies per bank, a different currency per industry would somehow have to be agreed by everyone in the industry.
Fifth, even if we have industry specific credit somehow, based on your explanation above, the interest of it will be based purely on speculation and as such extremely flaky.
So while I can see how much potential exists within currency, it does not convince me of the stability of the system, or the feasibility of it coming into being
> "It equally follows that all those subjective evaluations will feed each other's worries…"
It's in everyone's interests to have their signals reflect reality, thus if some start freaking out some others will move in and take advantage. This doesn't happen very fast in the current system for a variety of reasons — mainly impediments to communication and inefficient centralized models.
> "Won't steel industrialist be able to borrow from US borns to finance the steel industries investment? Is someone going to force them to be using "Steel credit"?"
Not going to force them but there are obvious reasons for such trends to develop along lines of trust, mutual interest and close connection (eg credit unions, reasons for an anarcho-syndicalist federation to pay labour notes, instead of a big corporation there could be an agglomeration of the otherwise constituent parties that would somewhat pool their efforts along complementary lines but still run currency to have internal price signals) and the presence of such trends facilitates advantageous market behavior because it allows for more information to be conveyed.
> "While there were different currencies per bank, a different currency per industry would somehow have to be agreed by everyone in the industry."
See the above. But not just industries but local communities — see the popularity of LETs. (Consider the extremely simple and mostly symbolic example of commune of twenty friends closely intertwined with one another on a commune, they run a currency between themselves in order to facilitate day to day stuff, but instead of paper money that's counterfeitable by any wandering hoodlum they have bank cards. Just like in the modern world, every transaction is electronically cleared by the bank, but the difference is that the bank is THEIRS. It's just a computer, and they all have an interest in making sure it's inviolate because that's the stability of their currency which allows them to be traded against other currencies etc. Now this is sorta ridiculous with 20 people, but you can see the appeal.
Most importantly remember that this is a FREE market. So there are no laws against counterfeiting. Which means that currencies are going to collapse into much smaller personally-connected things in order to function. And credit is going to be extremely important in the sense of the good behavior of a currency. And there are probably going to be many layers of currency. (That is to say that entities that bundle in to varying degrees lower, smaller level currencies.) Extreme complexity in myriad forms.
> "Fifth, even if we have industry specific credit somehow, based on your explanation above, the interest of it will be based purely on speculation and as such extremely flaky."
All our information on the future is speculation. What markets and many-minded systems do is crowd source, dynamically interact so as to trend towards the best. There are a million light reading popsci books on this subject. I'm sure you can be walked through it.
It does not matter what effect it has for the landlord. It only matters that the concept of rent, implies infinite value, or at least a value that is a multitude more than the efford one took to build a house, compared to the payment a wage-slave would get for the same amount of work.
There's so many things wrong with this sentence. Why would the wage worker get paid so much less? Today's wage-workers are practically slaves thanks to all the market distortions we've got. Why on earth would they in an equitable free market where they have other options work for the renter without shooting for a higher proportion of the income?
> "It only matters that the concept of rent, implies infinite value, or at least a value that is a multitude more than the efford one took to build a house,"
You wanna somehow define the cost of the labor to build the house? The disutility of labor is subjective.
Yeah, in a capitalist world, investment are occasionally bad, no matter the "critical information" or else you imply superhumans who can predict the future.
If a usufruct world would create problems for a market in Anarchism, then that's an argument against markets in anarchism than anything else.
No my deductive argument was to prove that it SHOULDN'T
Yeah they have. Just in American history alone there've been plenty of classical instances of local rebellions and uprisings that were centrally motivated for and characterized by a pursuit of and desire for "equality of opportunity" rather than material. …And they got stomped on. But, you know.
You're talking about a pre-capitalist society of small farmers and artisans, the kind of stuff that people like Proudhon and the Individualists supported. But this is not the world we're living now, nor could that world support our population or lifestyles.
There's a reason why Individualist Anarchism cropped up in such eras while Communist/Syndicalist anarchism takes over once industrialization becomes the norm. It all has to do with the world people are used to, the way production is happening and the way to progress toward (and after) a revolution.
> "There's a reason why Individualist Anarchism cropped up in such eras while Communist/Syndicalist anarchism takes over once industrialization becomes the norm."
… Just as there's a reason that Individualist Anarchism is once more on the exponential rise in the information age while the Black n Red sects of Anarchism are on the decline or barely keeping it together. :p
> "If your new wage-slave job is next to his appartments, then most people would take them, even if the landlord looks like kind of an arse (which you won't know unless you live under him)."
WTF are you talking about? You'd check his profile on RankMyLandlord.com or the equivalent and ask the other tenants. Nobody I know rents blindly (….well, unless they're dirty punx with bad credit fleeing a place they destroyed and looking for the first landlord who doesn't check references, but that's all about market signals too… and skuzzy punx). If you need a place in a very small certain location there are still going to be choices — if not, get the fuck out of that company town.
> "Others might also take the appartments, because they do not care about the landlord but want to "maximize pareto" or somesuch."
Uhhh… part of maximizing pareto means not having to deal with a shitty landlord. Or in some conditions having the benefits more than offset it.
So what do you do if the landlord is a great guy, and gives a great service and because of that, he actually accumulates more? Didn't you say something about how the trustful pawn shop would prosper?
Before you said that you wouldn't go to him because he's anti-mutualist, but you can't see that from the market, nor from the way he works. Only from the fact that he likes to accumulate, and as you said, intentions don't matter.
> "The difference, is that in a hotel, you would be paying for the service, not the rent
What service?! LOL
Motels have nothing to do with service. Granted we clean up the slabs of bed for the next tenants, but that's hardly the cost one pays.
*Shrugs* Meh, the Objectivists have been claiming the same thing for decades so excuse me if I'm not convinced by your optimism, especially when seeing that Individualism is only a US phenomenon and pretty marginal over there as well, while the social anarchists keep making headlines in the real world multiple times per year.
> "There you go. Based on simple common sense."
Dear fucking lordy. YOU CAN'T RUN A COMPLEX ADVANCED INFRASTRUCTURE AND MASS SOCIETY ON "COMMON SENSE"!
> "You see a guy with a record of coming in every week with another injury – and you've already asked him to told him this activity because your hospital is at capacity, and you have another person who comes in for the first time."
How do you fucking know all that with any mathematical substance? How do you know what he was doing? How do you know how many times he's been to a hospital? There are dozens of cases flooding into your ER, are you going to have some secretary scour shared databanks for hospital records of people using the same names and somehow calculate prioritization? It's not possible.
> "On the other hand, in the market system, the guy who kept breaking himself but had a lot of money, would get priority not even over the guy with the same severity, but over others in worse conditions."
Maybe, but that would be okay because he would have to PAY for it in terms of contribution to the broader society (useful work within the market). And would be able to substantively evaluate the risk of his actions and take action accordingly! As opposed to the vague and unquantifiable loss of "maybe getting moved to the back of the line because the secretary noticed some shit on your sheet and made a snap judgement."
> "So what do you do if the landlord is a great guy, and gives a great service and because of that, he actually accumulates more? Didn't you say something about how the trustful pawn shop would prosper?"
Let him! He's still bound by diseconomies of scale. If he tries to accumulate too much wealth and rent out a bunch of other properties he'll manage poorer and thus do worse than the smaller landlords who are content with what they've got.
BY CROM! This is what we're arguing now!
The landlord already has accumulated more property than smaller landlords due to his amazing charisma or whatever. The size of it is not going to be reduced since there's nothing pressuring it. Because he is getting more rent than others, it means he has more value to reinvest into his property, for example to hire wage labour (which since you claim there is no class warfare, will work at optimal rates). As such, he'll be providing the same service but with less costs which will allow him to grow even more, slowly buying more of the small landlords. And since one of his main values would be "great service to the tenant" which he will enforce on his wage workers, RankMyLandlord.com will give him great ratings too, sending even more and richers tenants his way.
Then, once he had much more rents than others, he will afford to lower his rents to undercut the competition. He'll make up for it by bying services and raw material in bulk discount, compared to others.
From where I'm sitting, there's no reason for him to slow down.
> "The size of it is not going to be reduced since there's nothing pressuring it."
Um, all the things I've discussed like interest and the various ways the market routes around tumors that you've yet to do anything but slobber in the face of?
Natural DIS-economies of scale are what Kevin Carson has spent countless works elucidating. I do suggest you read him. That is to say things that drastically counteract the economies of scale you're talking about.
The things you've discussed I've already countered (and I will counter your further replies once the system is fixes)
I will attempt to. Links?
However I will point out that one can easily suggest books to the other, but this is hardly an argument.
Well, yes, but I had assumed that you'd read Carson. Cuz you know… he's fucking Kevin Carson. I disagree with him on some stuff, but that's sorta the context of this entire conversation, of the people you were flaming on Roderick's site, etc.. Which would explain why you seemed so disingenuously thick… Not being familiar with the arguments regarding dis-economies of scale. I mean… okay, well I apologize for my belittling approach to you up till now.
http://mutualist.org/id114.html
and less so:
http://www.mutualist.org/id47.html
There's a lot more that Kevin doesn't address or hasn't addressed so far, but I've mentioned and elucidated some of them elsewhere in this gargantuan monstrosity of a thread.
Kevin will at least get you started.
For the record, most of the stuff you have mentioned, were unconvincing. I wonder what you will do if I'm unconvinced by Carson as well…
> " For the record, most of the stuff you have mentioned, were unconvincing. I
wonder what you will do if I'm unconvinced by Carson as well…"
Not care? You haven't exactly made a stunning impression on me either. I'm just trying to throw some bones out in good faith.
The reason why I invoke Carson so strongly is that the people you've been debating are not conventional Austrians but folks more in the vein of Carson. So if you're in the habit of making sweeping statements about what they believe and the failures of it prior to such particulars being stated by them, one would assume you would actually have some done some relevant research in what they believe.
I counter what is laid in front of me, not whatever I think they believe. Most of the arguments that were mentioned, were based on Austrian economists and eventually sweeping statements were made on this basis. As such, I made sweeping rejections.
If you notice in the AAE, I didn't dismiss Roderick because he's a Lockeanist, or uses Austrian economics or whatever, but rather took his criticisms and made my own argument. I didn't even criticize first the AAE in the first place.
If anyone is guilty of coming here and claiming "Oh you're horribly wrong because this or that guy has said so", that's not me!
Sure you did.
> "So are you saying that these "smart firms" and "smart players" will do better than everyone else, but somehow not manage to start accumulating more?"
If someone starts adopting a smarter strategy that strategy will be adopted or will eclipse its opponents. But momentarily superior income doesn't in any way mean they'd start some infinite accumulation of wealth. It means that they'd make a few more bucks until people caught on. If we're not talking about strategies but innate intelligence of individuals, well, I'm with Tucker, no matter how smart you are I just don't see you making that much more than an honest day laborer. And again, the same goddamn diseconomies of scale apply to anything you'd invest in usury wise.
Emphatically agreed. No fucking duh.
(You see how boring this would get if the topic were the present world and our immediate strategies?)
Emphatically agreed. No fucking duh.
(You see how boring this would get if the topic were the present world and our immediate strategies?)
You arse! The relativity theory was not taken out of a hat. IT WAS BASED ON OBSERVATION and it was created to explain that why that observation differed from newtonean physics, and it was then further confirmed by falsification!
This is very fucking different from economics where you prove theories based on theoretical observations and have no chance of falsification!
We can argue philosophy of science endlessly, but yes, relativity was derived from looking at mathematical models and seeing what would make them more elegant. The empirical verification would have been gratuitous if more than a few people had been able to understand Einstein's work and troubleshoot it.
That there were arguably observations somewhere back in the formation of the mathematical model is not really a relevant critique, because there are observations (at least just as arguably) behind the ideas of individual points, connections, strategies and the flow of material that underling the concept of markets.
When string theorists or anyone else doing substantive work in theoretical physics derive a theory of the universe they first start with mathematical relations and try to make them both more elegant with persistant qualities. If the ideas are sound then they figure out the resulting phase space for things like particles and the relations we already know in great depth. These theories are generally accepted as not necessarily having to make predictions of undiscovered things. They could simply accurately describe everything we already know because we could already have all the relevant data.
I'm missing a lot of my replies as well so it's not just you. No I have no reason to delete just SOME of your replies. It's just this fucking bug.
Yeah, well, I don't "do" celebrities unless they're relevant. Most of the stuff I write about is based on my own understanding and are changed by solid arguments.
All transactions, even lending, can be expressed as either selling or renting. If I lend you my lawn mower so you can get your lawn tamed, I might ask you to, in payment, fill it up with gas. Or, I might reasonably expect to be able to borrow your drill next week to finish up my shelves.
The sliding scale is not how “sticky” the property is… It’s how much you trust the other party to respect your property rights. A professional rental company has you sign a contract and pay up front, because they don’t know you. Your buddy next door, however, not only has known you for the past ten years, but knows where you live. He can afford to allow you to pay him back later.
To a degree yes, but I'm not asking to stop borrowing or giving items away. I merely say that we shouldn't do it through a medium which repressents economic power and thus give the opportunity to some to accumulate this power and exercise it over others.
That doesn't define property rights. The rental company within a possessive system would not exist in the first place so there's no point in talking about how much they would trust you and thus need "sticky" property to do business.