Murray Rothbard was an advocate of the stateless society, but he was never accepted by the anarchist movement and is still considered more a “capitalist lackey” than anarchist thinker. Indeed, anarcho-capitalism has always been considered an oxymoron by the self-proclaimed “true” anarchists. Some of the problems persist in the anarchist version of socialism. The problems arise due to the fact that socialists generally tend to have a static view of society, which makes them totally ignorant of how things change over time. Socialists would probably not admit this is the case, since they do know that things have been changing through the course of history (Karl Marx said so) and that things never seem to stay the same. But still they argue as if “ceteris paribus” is the divine principle of reality, and it is not. FULL ARTICLE
Source link: http://archive.mises.org/4849/the-trouble-with-socialist-anarchism/
The Trouble With Socialist Anarchism
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Paul, I don’t agree with that. (Shocking, I know!)
Workers and consumers are the same people! If they don’t wait untill the products are ready to be sold, they have nothing to spend their pay on.
I don’t see how anyone, be it government, or investors, creates jobs. Needs create jobs. Seeing how all needs are not and will not be fulfilled, there can be no joblessness. Capital investment is a “solution” to an unnatural economic phenomenon: mass unemployment. A more natural solution would be anarchy.
Cosmin;
“I don’t see how anyone, be it government, or investors, creates jobs. Needs create jobs. Seeing how all needs are not and will not be fulfilled, there can be no joblessness.”
Well…sort of. Wants are expressed as a market price. They are fulfilled by people who are seeking to make a profit, in other words, to sell those wanted goods for more than the cost of production.
No entrepreneur in his right mind would risk his investment unless he can make more producing a product than leaving it in the bank. So there must be an adequate profit or production will not occur. If workers are willing to work for a wage that will allow for a sufficient profit, then they will be employed. If not, they will not.
Here in the USA, you have a choice whether or not to work – if not, you can deal drugs or leech off welfare. If you join a union, you can refuse work, and the government pays you.
“Capital investment is a “solution” to an unnatural economic phenomenon: mass unemployment. ”
More nonsense. You haven’t refuted my assertion that few if any Americans want to live a subsistence life on a farm. This question was settled a century ago when rural people left farms in droves for industry. Capital investment (and not a little mercantilism, sad to say) made that happen.
“A more natural solution would be anarchy.”
I hold that under anarchy, people will be freer than now to pursue their fortunes in any field they choose than they are now. But if anything, more people will come to earn their living as entrepreneurs, not fewer.
“They are fulfilled by people who are seeking to make a profit, in other words, to sell those wanted goods for more than the cost of production.”
Vince, don’t get me started on profits!
“No entrepreneur in his right mind would risk his investment unless he can make more producing a product than leaving it in the bank. So there must be an adequate profit or production will not occur.”
Production will occur, and the entrepreneur is not needed. I think the desire for consumption is limitless and production can naturally only try to keep up. Are you saying that production depends on the ability to raise the desire for consumption? That consumers need to be coaxed into paying more than an object’s worth, else production doesn’t take place? Here’s an article detailing how your view is wrong: http://mises.org/daily/2079
“You haven’t refuted my assertion that few if any Americans want to live a subsistence life on a farm.”
I don’t refute it because I don’t hold the contrary view, irrespective of your efforts to impute it to me.
“Capital investment [...] made that happen.”
Technological advancements made that happen. There simply weren’t as many people needed on the farm.
“Workers and consumers are the same people!”
That is true. And equally valid is this: workers, consumers and savers/investors are the same people, or can be if they so choose; to the extent that the worker chooses to save and invest, they are capitalists.
“If they don’t wait until the products are ready to be sold, they have nothing to spend their pay on.”
People often don’t buy what they work on. But this is not the point. The point is that besides capital, land and labor, time is another input to production. Someone must forgo consumption to save and then invest in capital, land and labor up front, to yield a product to sell in the future. Time is a big element in production. What Rothbard is saying is this: someone has to put the investment up front. This can be the laborer just as much as it can be anyone else. The laborer can be a capitalist. The fact is, not every laborer is interested in putting up his savings, and perhaps forgo his wages for the production period to regain his investment and be paid with interest in the future. If he were, he would be a capitalist. If he is not, someone else must put up the capital, and whoever this is, he is the capitalist. Economically, it is unimportant who invests, the laborer or someone else. The fact is: someone must save first and invest up front, for production using capital to take place for a duration, and for a product to be created and sold in the future.
“I don’t see how anyone, be it government, or investors, creates jobs. Needs create jobs. Seeing how all needs are not and will not be fulfilled, there can be no joblessness.”
The creation of jobs is not the ultimate thing. It is the maximizing of the productivity of labor that is what is important to increase overall wealth and well-being. This is done through an increase in capital per capita and the division of labor. Having everyone busy working is not what lifts people out of subsistence and poverty. Increasing their wealth through improved production tools and techniques is. The cycle that achieves this is work, production, saving, investing. No other means of lifting people from subsistence living to a civilized and cultured existence is known to man.
“Capital investment is a “solution” to an unnatural economic phenomenon: mass unemployment. A more natural solution would be anarchy.”
Capitalism and anarchy go hand in hand. The perfection of one is the perfection of the other. Anarchy without pure unhampered capitalism is unimaginable. There can be no anarchy without capitalism: a completely free market.
Cosmin, with these last few comments clearly demonstrates Bylund’s thesis.
Great commnent, Paul, at 11:44 p.m.
“You can’t have in a democracy various groups with arms – you have to have the state with a monopoly on power,” Condoleeza Rice, the US secretary of state, said at the end of her two-day visit to Baghdad yesterday.
Well there you have it: the democratic state all summed up by our very own Condi Rice! What great fortune it is for our leaders that men do not think (or hear)!
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,,1746233,00.html
Cosmin, I’m not sure who this third party would be, in a society with no man made agency of coercion,holding a monopoly on the use of force.
Shifting gears slightly, you might be interested in the Hutterites,an example of anarcho-socialism that actually works.In their colonies all property is held in common.They are quite prosperous, and truly appear to live by the credo
“from each according to his abilities, to each according to his need”.
However, I would point out the following-They depend on the outside world to trade with, and to obtain market information,so they can decide what to produce and how much.
Second,they consume very little, in accordance with their religious beliefs.(Their austere lifestyle has not attracted many imitators or converts from the outside).On the other hand they are extremely productive and skillful farmers, specializing in grain growing.(specialization of labor).
Third, they recognize that there is a limit to how large any colony can grow, then a new colony must split off.(Too large an operation= inefficiency.This is part of the reason the large collective farms in the Soviet Union were not very productive.)
“One of the rules of homesteading is that you have to mix your labor with the resource if you are going to claim to own it. This is perfectly reasonable and intuitively correct. Christopher Columbus can’t show up to North America and declare that he owns it all anymore than the first settler in space can claim to own the galaxy. The resource must be put to specific use by the claimant.”
New article: http://mises.org/daily/2106
Yancey — “anarchy” means lack of rule by the political class, not chaos.
The connotation of chaos and lawlessness is purely the result of statist propaganda and practices. Chaos happens when states break down and before the self-defense is established by the citizens who were both disarmed and brainwashed by the state – so the collapse leaves them defenseless against petty criminals, both physically and, more important, mentally.
This chaotic transitional state is a statist scarecrow by which they justify the need for the kleptocratic state. In fact, it is not at all that bad – the lawlessness and chaos following the collapse of the USSR involved a lot of well-publicized shoot-outs between the criminals, but in a few years most of the criminal groups had their most brainless and aggressive thugs eliminated, and transformed themselves into legitimate private protection agencies or banks. The period of the post-communist lawlessness was also a period of the tremendous economical recovery — from 1991 until 1998 the country went from near-starvation to quite livable (to the point that more than few of my friends decided to move back from US or Europe).
The ascendance of Putin and establishment of the “order” (meaning, in practice, elevation of his band of thugs and suppression of the competitors) brought the stagnation, the monetary crisis, unbearable taxes, and the defenselessness of even the richest citizens againts the kleptocracy (as exemplified by the case of Mikhail Khodorkovsky).
Right now it is a lot more dangerous to be wealthy there than it was when there was “no order”. And poorer people are not faring any better – a lot of employment opportunities evaporated, and the local police is doing nothing to combat petty crime, but is quite effective in extortion. TV went from being full of action movies and overt sexuality (which, while not the pinnacle of good taste, were at least somewhat entertaining) to rabid xenophobia presented as “news” and adulation of Mr.Presidente.
I guess I’ll take the chaos any time over that order.
Averros,
Like I wrote earlier in response to Vince, we define anarchy differently. However, I will elaborate just a bit.
If centralizing authorities like the US government and the various state and local governments collapsed tomorrow, men and women would work together to keep order and establish cooperative relationships to prevent theft and violent crimes like murder- I do not believe things would devolve into complete chaos, though times would be tough. It is human nature to do this, and such cooperative behavior will move to eliminate such perpetrators within the midst of the new smaller, distributed societies- either by expulsion, incarceration, or elimination. I contend that such arrangements are still states, though much, much smaller. As societies advance, they reach out to others for trade, and these cooperative arrangements extend their boundaries slowly, but surely, to cover greater geographical areas. The key is limit the scope of such governing cooperation, not to eliminate it altogether.
Are these arrangements coercive? If not, do you have a term that identifies voluntary social arrangements and also the coercive ones? I would use the terms covenantal community versus a state, respectively, myself.
Cosmin;
” Are you saying that production depends on the ability to raise the desire for consumption? That consumers need to be coaxed into paying more than an object’s worth, else production doesn’t take place?”
NO, and I don’t see how you got that out of anything I said. I said that, in general, producers won’t produce unless they can do so at a profit. At some point, the demand for any product will raise the price to where it is more profitable to produce the good than to sit on the capital. demand for consumption is what causes production.
Cosmin;
“”Capital investment [...] made that happen.”
Technological advancements made that happen. There simply weren’t as many people needed on the farm.”
If this is the case, what would they have done without industry to provide them an alternate way to make a living? Starve, that’s what.
And you have the proliferation of technology exactly backward – rising real wages make technology cheaper relative to human labor. The pull of the factory drove up wages, which sent farm wage rates past the economic threshold for many technologies. Increased demand increases prices – higher prices call more production into existence. This is the iron law of a free economy. You are arguing a position that does not hold up to scrutiny.
Paul,
Let us use the example of a murderer within the midst: to stop his actions, someone/s must use coercion. These someones, if it is a cooperative effort of like-minded individuals constitutes a government, in my humble opinion, and the trick is to keep such cooperative efforts from extending themselves into the enforcement of things like public education, for example, or to the granting of special privileges to themselves or their cronies. It is a neverending battle, even if you manage to produce the distributed “private” organizations that you, myself, or others advocate.
Yancey,
I am not sure to what extent ours is a terminological difference versus a difference in the way we look at things, but let me take a go at finding out.
1. “a murderer within the midst: to stop his actions, someone/s must use coercion.”
By “must use coercion”, do you really mean “must use defensive violence”? If so, i agree with you. The more common meaning of coercion is “the initiation of violence” or “aggression”. If you mean it in this, the common way, i disagree with your comment 1.
2. “These someones, if it is a cooperative effort of like-minded individuals constitutes a government”
By “government” do you mean an aggressive, initiator of violence which forcefully maintains a territorial based monopoly on violence, taxation and decision-making services? If so, this is a state, and i say this does not follow and i disagree with comment 2.
Rather, i argue that with no state, in anarchy, private companies can compete to provide defense, protection, courts, and law enforcement services, which could also be labeled government but would not be coercive, would be voluntarily subscribed to, and so would not constitute a state.
With protection provided and yet with no state, i say it is anarchy, even though people do “govern” themselves via voluntary agreements that provide for the use of defensive force and law enforcement.
Either the law or persons are sovereign, so when you talk about personal sovereignty it can only mean it in the sense of sovereign immunity – the King is the law, or above the law. But if we are two kings, we can be at peace or war, there can be no thought of self-ownership or any other kind. Ownership exists and is defined at my (and your) pleasure if we are truly Sovereign. However if you make the (Natural) Law or (from) Reason sovereign (which I think the Scholastics and many others wouldn’t have a problem with), it is and you aren’t.
Let me try a reductio ad absurdum with corporations and liability. In Kinsella’s example, he talks about a truck driver who causes an accident. But what if the parent corp doesn’t employ the driver, but employs the “driver-as-corporation”, which is formed per transaction, so the total money would merely be payment for that set of trips (and hence liability would be limited to that, where the driver-as-corp would just go bankrupt). Robert Kiosaki (Rich Dad) described a corporation as a “clone”. So clone myself, and let the clone be slaughtered or go bankrupt.
Bad drivers with few assets might work more cheaply than good drivers. Old trucks cheaper than new ones. Maintenance costs. At some point it is cheaper to risk an accident and bankruptcy of the corporation – if the corporation can pin the entire blame on the driver (whom they hire cheaply though they know has problems, gives him a truck with bad brakes, etc.) they have escaped their liability. If there is a crash, maybe the driver would be liable, but again if the sum of liability is reduced, then the corporation is a fraud. If liability is maintained – torts more than creditors, since the latter volunteer as someone pointed out, then there are NO differences between a corporation and something more like a partnership (under anarchy). Why would creditors prefer limited liability of debtors, and if they did, why would the debtors need a corporation?
One other problem with corporations is that they can in some ways cheat death. If a property is valued, but the old man doesn’t want to sell, eventually he is going to die and his estate will have it, then his heirs. But if it is in a corporation, the corporation need never die. Ownership without corporations cannot be perpetual because the owners aren’t.
Socialism requires a state. We should have learned that by now. Capitalism requires a state too – but a much much smaller one.
While Socialism requires centralization that leads to totalitarianism, capitalism only requires a state that can enforce private property laws, contracts and protection of other basic rights (life and liberty) and the institutions necessary to keep this going (eg democratic).
I have to disagree with your assertion that, “Socialists refer to “capitalism” as the system in which the state hands out and protects capitalists’ privileges — and therefore oppression of labor workers.” Capitalism is a system by which an individual controls the means of production, capital. This capitalist then hires workers at the lowest rate possible. The rate is so low that workers can barely make ends meet. This system of wage slavery is inherent in capitalism and is what Anarchists opposed, since it is a system of hierarchy and oppression.
However, no matter how many times I explain this to An-Caps, they still never seem to get it. I am an Anarcho-Syndaclist, but I am not opposed to a free market system, a system by which the workers control the means of production but sell commodities on a market based system.
I just stumbled upon the article. It’s like reading my own thoughts put down in text way clearer. Anarchist-capitalist I might be.
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