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I think you are overlooking the economic principle of voluntary exchange. In a free market two parties walk away from an exchange better off. There's no exploitation involved here. At no point was violent force used to secure any of those transactions (unless the laborers belonged to a union) and so everyone from the laborer, to the entrepreneur, to the consumer all walked away from their respective transactions better off than they had started.
Free markets are always just because of this simple principle. Marxism, conversely, is utterly unjust because you don't keep the fruits of your labor (in this instance, the wage you are paid by the entrepreneur) but are instead forced to hand them over for redistribution by a governing entity in whatever way THEY see fit, which is almost always in an inefficient way.
And people forget that the entrepreneur is the entity who is shouldering the risk. He is freely exchanging his money for labor in the hopes that what he is producing will earn him a profit. If he pays $90 in labor for that bread but consumers decide they don't want to pay more than $80 for that bread (perhaps because a competitor found a more efficient way to make bread and make his workers more productive and thus produces it at a lower cost), that entrepreneur loses $10 because he already paid for the agreed-to wages and now couldn't sell it for a profit.
The price you are paying of $110 instead of the actual cost of $90 means that the opportunity cost (that is, what you sacrifice to get something) is $20. If you're not a bread maker and lack the stock of capital to efficiently make the bread yourself, I imagine $20 is worth it if you lose more than $20 worth of your productive time trying make something you don't specialize in. Otherwise, you're essentially reverting to a barter system where every man, woman, and child is forced to be not only a blacksmith or a cobbler, but also a tailor, a baker, a farmer, and a lot of other things they probably aren't as good at.
Capitalism is only a paradox to those who don't understand the fundamental principles of economics and instead would prefer to perpetuate class warfare through the manipulation of collective ignorance.
1. Capitalism is just because all three parties: entreprenuer, laborer, and consumer are all "better off" in the end and no violent coercion is used.
2. Marxism is unjust because a large entity (the government or whatnot) forcibly takes wages and/or profits and redistributes them.
3. The entreprenuer deserves his profit on account that he or she is shouldering the risks of free market fluctuations.
4. That the premium the consumer pays is justified as a part of luxury of the division of labor.
Let's get 2. out of the way first. I don't actually advocate Marxist economics. I'll admit that I lack the intimacy necessary to pass judgement on Marxism (have you every seen Das Capital, that book is freaking huge, even by my standards.) But, I do understand his interpretation and answer to the Aristotilian econonmic paradox and that is merely what I'm appealing to. Though, I do have very strong socialist tendencies that extend far beyond the typical socialist charicature that most people have.
As for 1. People's particular feelings about a situation is not a good indicator of whether a situation is just. Assume that my point is true: that captialism is unjust; further assume that most people have no other experience with any other economic system and that their entire lives they've been told that capitalism is just, then it is perfectly plausible that upon entering a capitalistic transaction they'll have positive feelings about it. There are countless, and I mean countless other examples I could muster that demonstrate that peoples feelings about something does not necessarily indicate the justice value of any situation.
As for 4. I alread covered that in the original post, the premium for division of labor is paid by the consumer in the form of the wages paid to the laborer. You're right in that I would rather pay extra for a pair of shoes I didn't have to cobble myself, but this extra ought to cover the wages of the cobbler only, otherwise I'm being ripped off, I'll show why in convering 3., the most important point you bring up.
As for 3. I do not deny that the entreprenuer is shouldering a risk when he invests, in fact, it would be absurd to deny that. The question, then, is whether or not this risk justifies his exacting profit. First of all, we have to understand that value is created only through human labor. For example a mountain full of gold ore is has absolutely no value until people go in and extract it. A pile of grain is worthless unless someone converts it to bread. The list goes on. In effect, objects, by themselves, have no value until we imbue it with value via our labor. So, what labor does the entreprenuer contribute? None, nada, and zip. The entreprenuer does not create value.
But, you may argue that he facilitates the laborer's efforts to create value, henceforth, through logical extention (If A is B and B is C, therefore A is C) then the entreprenuer does create value, right? Further, the entreprenuer does is the only one shouldering the risk, he may loose all his money if the market turns on him, so he deserves his "wage" (read: profit), right?
No and No, that's no to both rhetorical questions. Here's why: both situations orginate from within the free market system. The entreprenuer's involvement in the value making process is a product of the system of the free market. In essence, the involvement of the entreprenuer is NOT NECESSARY, but arbitrary and mandated by the system. Same goes for the "risk". The risk is a product of the free market system and is there, not out of necessity, but arbitrarily. NO SYSTEM CAN JUSTIFY ITSELF FROM WITHIN! The arguement presented in 3. is SELF REFERENTIALLY INCOHERENT, this just means that any system must seek its justifcation from a source other than itself, if you need qualification on this then go to wikipedia and type in "Liar's Paradox" or "Goedel's Incompleteness Theorum", what I'm argueing here has been proven mathematically by Geodel.
Capitalism remains unjust because the appeals to its just nature rely on assumptions from within the system, not from without, which, just so you know, doesn't work. A final example for this point. Let's say I write a manual on how to torture people and in this manual I state that: "All of the above methods of torture are just." Now when I get taken to court for writing this manual on how to torture people, I calmly explain that these torture methods are just because it says so in the manual. Do you see why you can't appeal to something within a system as its justification?
Excellent comment, please keep them coming.
Best regards,
Andrew
Forgot to mention, violence is not the only way to coerce someone, in the case of capitalism, it's done through education... life long education.
ReplyDelete"Forgot to mention, violence is not the only way to coerce someone, in the case of capitalism, it's done through education... life long education."
ReplyDeleteNice.
Here's the thing about capitalism though, a free market is not mandated by any entity, like language or science, no human "creates" a free market, it naturally evolves from the aforementioned principle of voluntary exchange. In fact when humans try to *control* a free market, it is no longer a free market. Government interventions on markets and price systems are what led Capitalism into its bad rap in the first place, because systems were put into place that could be exploited by less-than-savory entities. Remember, we always assume that a person operates in their own self-interest.
ReplyDeleteWhen we started out in a barter system we became bogged down with simple problems of inefficiency. Say Sven the Farmer needs to shoe his horse so he can plow his field. He goes to Bjorn the Blacksmith and says "I'll give you two chickens if you shoe my horse." If Bjorn thinks two chickens is worth reshoeing Sven's horse, then we have a fine transaction. but what if Bjorn is a vegetarian? What if Bjorn needs a ceramic pot more than he needs chickens? Well then Sven has to find the potter and hope that the potter needs chickens and has a pot that Sven wants. So now Bjorn is not only a farmer, but he's also a pot salesman. And it spreads out from there. Meanwhile we have a bunch of people out there with a specialized advantage in some sort of trade or service wasting a lot of productive time on things that they're not good at.
So money naturally evolved and from money banking systems evolved. Finally people could freely trade with one another in a system where they all traded in a commodity that had a store of value and was easily measured. Now people just buy what they want.
Now say Bjorn the Blacksmith wants to make his forge bigger. He goes and borrows money from a bank so he can make a bigger forge. The bank pays other people to store their money there which they in turn charge the borrower a fee to borrow and the bank makes a tidy sum themselves for handling the transaction. Otherwise Bjorn has to go to all his neighbors and try to convince them individually to lend him a little money. Again, inefficient.
So now Bjorn has a bigger forge but he can't keep up with all the business he is getting. The forge is bigger but he hasn't gotten any bigger or faster himself. So he decides to hire someone. He asks around the village and finds out three people of equal ability want to work for him. He only needs one though, so he negotiates with them until he finds one willing to work for the least amount of wage. This isn't an exploitation; if the worker wanted more and wasn't willing to work for any less than that, he could simply refuse the job. If what Bjorn was offering was two low for ALL three men, he'd have to offer more to sweeten the deal.
So Bjorn has a worker, they both work hard and Bjorn's blacksmith shoppe is booming. But suddenly Otis across town decides that HE wants to operate a blacksmith shop and figures that since he knows a bit more about blacksmithing and has better tools he'll be able to do more for less cost. Additionally, he offers to hire Bjorn's helper for more money because with Otis' tools, Bjorn's helper would be twice as productive at his shop. So Bjorn's helper takes the offer for a higher wage and Otis' shop is both more productive and can make their goods for a lower cost, thus undercutting Bjorn's prices. Meanwhile, everyone in the town is benefitting from a higher standard of living because blacksmithed goods are now cheaper for them to buy so they can buy more of them.
This is the fundamental function of capitalism. Capitalism has made society richer at a much higher rate of speed than any economic system in history before it. Technology and the standard of living are accelerating faster than can even be measured now.
ReplyDeleteConversely, command economies, like those proposed by Marx, have only ever made societies poorer. In a free market system goods and services are nearly instantly adapted to human needs as old technologies and production practices die out and new ones fill the gap offering better and cheaper products. Better and cheaper products means more people have access to them which means more people can buy the things they want or need. Everyone becomes richer. Consider in America even our poorest people live richer lives than people in other countries who have weaker property rights, no incentive to invest time or money, and tax systems that redistribute any additional wealth earned.
So I wouldn't say it relies on some sort of insidious rhetoric to exist, it exists naturally when people are allowed to freely exchange. It doesn't need its own proponents to justify its existence from within any more than quantum physics does. Economies are natural occurrences.
I doubt there are many Russians that grew up all their lives in the Soviet Union would go back to waiting in lines for bread and toilet paper or happily emigrate to North Korea just because *they* were indoctrinated from birth by their government that "From everyone according to their ability, to everyone according to their need" was the fundamentally right way to live.
Another point: the entrepreneur adds value to the labor by A: generally laboring for the sale of his product in the first place (otherwise the laborer would simply seek to sell the product of his labor himself which, incidentally is how entrepreneurship generally starts!) and shoulders the risk for investing in capital, both human and physical.
ReplyDeleteB: The profit the entrepreneur exacts is worth exactly what you feel like paying for it. That's where the term "voting with your dollar" comes from. There are certain businesses I feel are either unscrupulous or offering a product that is more expensive than I want, I simply don't patronize their business. Multiply this by an entire consumer base and you have the price system. If you don't think the entrepreneur should get a $20 profit on the bread he sells, then you can seek out other providers of that product. Or find a substitute product.
Wow, you have made some very substantial points. It's gonna take me some time to manifest my response, but good comments and please keep them coming. Exciting!
ReplyDeleteOkay, so here's what I see going on between the two of us in this discussion. Let's say you and I walk into a newly constructed room. This room is, perhaps, the most beautiful room ever constructed, the furnishings are dazzling and everything about its aesthetics are perfect. But, I go to inspect it closer and realize that instead of drywall, the walls are made of paper, instead of insulation there is moldy straw, instead of support studs, there are only cardboard tubes.
ReplyDeleteYou claim, "This room is perfect," while I claim, "This room is terrible."
I am not concerned with details internal to the room (i.e. captalism) rather I am concerned with its fundamental structure (read: how the room is constructed, not the quality of its interior.) I think you are talking about the interior furnishings of capitalism and I am talking about its fundamental structure, so in essence there is no argument between the two of us, unless you meet me on the basis of fundamentals rather than particulars.
I justify this as being one of the fundamental aspects of philosophy. This is why philosophy books tend to be so long, so methodical, and deliberate. Because before any system can be understood, its fundamental structure must be understood; if this fundamental structure is flawed, then the particulars are of no consequence, as in the case of capitalism.
I'm arguing that the fundamental structure of capitalism is corrupt, diseased, and fundamentally unjust. The particulars are irrelevant.
Well, I argue from the standpoint that the fundamental structure is sound and that corruption and moral decay are qualities bestowed upon it from the unscrupulous, the politically motivated, and those who lobby to put strictures in the markets as a way to protect their interests and bar others from freely operating.
ReplyDeleteWithout delving into something like moral relativism, which is a whole other discussion with its own sets of arguments, a free market isn't a structure so much as it is the *lack* of a structure. So instead of a building, I'd use water as an example of free markets. On its own water simply exists. If, for instance, the moon didn't exist and for the sake of argument we didn't have weather, if you went out into a distant point of the Pacific Ocean water simply rests and is inert. By itself its harmless (unless you try to breathe it!) and really the only force being exerted on it is gravity. It is completely and utterly malleable. If you scoop it into a glass, it conforms to the shape of the glass. If you throw it into the air and lands back into the ocean. By itself the water is neither inherently benevolent or malevolent, it simply exists in a completely natural state.
But let's put the moon back in there again. The moon exerts gravitational force and causes it move, swaying back and forth with its tides. The ocean is still malleable at this level but it has obvious outside forces influencing its movements. Now lets think of water as it flows down a stream. Over time it will follow a natural course all on its own without outside forces influencing its movement much; it takes the path of least resistance. Human settlements will spring up around it because the river gives life and facilitates things like travel. If you go with the current it will always serve you in the best possible scenario. Sometimes it may flood with heavy rain or dry up from an arid season but these are all a result of natural forces.
But then let's say some humans up the stream decide they want the river to themselves, so they petition a local ruler to build a dam. They try to control the natural flow of the water to benefit themselves without realizing that they are doing so at the expense of others. They live off the water in their dam while other groups wither from the lack of water.
But one day, one of those inevitable rainy seasons comes along, and the natural force those people tried to control corrects itself, flooding and breaking the dam, causing unfathomable suffering not only to the people who lived around the dam, but to all the people downstream who had tried to adapt to their lack of water in other ways. Once again, the natural force is dominant, and the people are actually worse off altogether than they were back before they tried to control it in the first place.
This is how economies work. The free market is a natural force that operates perfectly well on its own but is only sullied and corrupted when people try to control it for their own ends. Socialism is often a huge culprit in this sort of thing. The intentions are often completely well-meaning; Marx was not by any means an evil tyrant who wanted to control other people. But the Law of Unintended Consequences shows us that when well-meaning people attempt to control natural forces, they haven't actually created something more benevolent or stopped evil people from operating, but they have instead built a system where the corrupt now have an easier means of implementing more corruption and we actually end up worse off altogether.
ReplyDeleteWhen governments subsidize a portion of farming output, for instance, they do so with the intention of influencing farmers to create more goods but what happens is that farmers only produce only the amount needed to collect their subsidy and no more (so as to avoid taxation), letting food that could be feeding people to rot in their silos and keeping the price of food artificially high. Or when the government decides to print a bunch of money in order to stimulate the economy they put extra money into the hands of already rich and politically-collected individuals who spend the money first, leading to prices going up and the poor and middle-income families actually becoming poorer as what meager earnings they have buy them less and less.
As I continue further in my academic pursuits and start working on large research projects and graduate dissertations, I'm taking a long hard look at poverty, world hunger, and social stratification and hopefully bringing to light the root causes, the continuing influences, and possible *real* solutions that governments and special interest groups don't want people to hear as they have a vested interest in keeping people poor while engendering the illusion of attacking it.
I see your point regarding free markets and agree that they themselves are morally neutral. Further, that the prime source of corruption comes from third party entities that seek to control free markets.
ReplyDeleteI would argue that when I refer to a capitalistic system, this is different than a free market, in that a free market doesn't assume third party entities, but a capitalistic system does assume a third party entity, namely the entrepeneur.
Would you agree then, Pfister, that the entrepenuer, assuming he or she does no labor, including any form of transporting goods or selling at the market place, as these are forms of labor, is a pernicious third party much like the third parties in your examples above?
I would say that the entrepenuer is a pernicious third party in that any individual or group of individuals who are not either laborers or consumers exert ONLY a corruptive influence in the free market.
In the case of the entrepenuer, he or she contributes nothing to the free market (i.e. does not create any value on account of providing no labor), but takes goods out of the free market, like a leech or parasite.
To reiterate my contention that investment does not add value nor is considered labor, it's fairly easy to imagine a situation in which the laborer purchases his or her own raw material up front, adds value (does labor on the raw material), and sells it his or herself (or by proxy, but paying a laborer to the selling.) Thereby being able to charge more than the raw materials corresponding specifically to the amount of value added to raw goods by their labor.
What I am really rallying against are two economic practices fundamental to capitalism: usery and speculation. Both are the means by which people get super rich and as far as I can tell, neither means replenish value into a free market, they only take value out, thereby exerting a corruptive and pernicious influence which ends in things that you've mentioned: poverty, hunger, inflation, price gouging, etc.
What do you think?
"Would you agree then, Pfister, that the entrepenuer, assuming he or she does no labor, including any form of transporting goods or selling at the market place, as these are forms of labor, is a pernicious third party much like the third parties in your examples above?"
ReplyDeleteNo, I would not. I'll tell you why. If a laborer buys his own materials, makes the product himself, and then sells the product himself he will more often than not meet limited success. Small business owners are rarely ever wealthy, but they are certainly hard-working. In the implicit model you are proposing, the entrepreneurial spirit is benign up until a point where he or she would require someone else's labor to expand their enterprise. In this model any person who would elect to be hired by another person is being exploited because he is not owning the means or the product of his labor. But I would state that he is his own entrepreneur because he is selling his labor to an employer.
If we strip away semantics, all workers are doing is selling a service they provide (in the form of a specialized skill or simply his muscle, his data entry ability, or his salesmanship) to another person or group of people. And just like the price system involving goods, the worker seeks to sell his labor for the highest price possible and his customer (the employer) is trying to buy it for the lowest price possible. Where the actual price ends up is somewhere in the middle. This is called the price equilibrium; where the quantity demanded meets the quantity supplied. This is a free market maxim.
Where we run into a "moral" argument involving this transaction is when people feel that workers should be paid an arbitrary value that is considered a fair wage for their labor. But the price system determines what a fair wage is. I'll present an example:
If you are a fruit vendor on an island full of monkeys and you have one banana tree and three apple trees. Monkeys want lots of bananas but no apples. If, ceteris paribus, each fruit tree yielded the exact same of fruit, you'd have three times more apples than bananas. No, being a fruit vendor you need to sell all your product or it will rot on your shelves. If all the monkeys want bananas instead of apples but you want to sell everything you're going to have to offer an incentive to do so. You either accomplish this by lower the price of the apples or raising the price of the bananas. But say you can't lower the price of apples because you'll be operating at a loss. Since the supply of bananas is low and the demand is high, you'd naturally raise the price of the bananas to cover the profit on what you're not getting for the apples. The substitute good is cheap enough that more monkeys will demand apples because they can buy more of them for the same amount of money and the equilibrium is achieved.
ReplyDeleteThe same applies for labor (I'll even use an example from my last management job). Say you have 10 guys who are welders and 20 guys who are painters and all of them are looking for a job. Company A needs to hire 6 welders and 5 painters. Company B needs the same.
In this example there is more demand for welders than welders exist and there are twice as many painters as there jobs for painters. In the free market (and the capitalist market, as they are essentially one and the same) if these welders and painters are considered "entrepreneurs" (because they are selling a product, their labor, to a customer who is an employer), then they must haggle for the best price. Since there are 10 welders but 12 welders needed for a company to operate at full output, the welder has the advantage because he can haggle between the two companies for a higher price (his wage). If Company A will only offer him $20/hour, he can go to Company B and they might offer him $21/hour. This back and forth will continue until the companies reach the point where the marginal benefit (the worker's output) equals the marginal cost (the price of employing the welder). At that point the welder has reached the point where he can ask for no more money otherwise either company would be losing more than they are gaining.
But let's go to the painters. There are 20 of them and only 10 positions to fill. In this scenario, the company is at the advantage because if a painter asks for $20/hour, the company can go to another painter and ask if they'll settle for $19/hour. If another painter comes up and says he'll settle for $18/hour, he will have the better chance of getting the job. This will continue until the marginal cost equals the marginal benefit for the painter (wherein the painter will make as little as he is willing to accept before he refuses to take the job and specialize in another task). In this scenario, if the companies can get the painters to accept $10/hour and, ceteris paribus, the input and output are equal, the companies could hire twice as many painters as they needed and this economy reaches full employment. The welders, who were in short supply, could haggle for more and the painters, who were in overabundant supply, would have to settle for less for the economy to equalize and reach full employment.
And so now that wages are determined, we can understand how prices are determined.
ReplyDeleteOn average 70% of the pre-tax cost of a product is the cost of the labor to produce it. At some point there is a value that equals the total cost.
To keep it simple, a product that costs $100 means that $70 was required in just what was paid to employees to produce the product. The remaining $20 is the cost of the raw materials used to create the product.
Now, by your reckoning it is entirely unfair for the entrepreneur to charge more than $100 for his product, even though the entrepreneur also labored for the creation of that product (the money he borrows to buy the capital in order to have a facility and tools in which his employees use, the procurement of raw materials to be used in the product since raw materials don't buy themselves, and the sale and distribution of the final product since product don't sell or deliver themselves), under your proposed system he shouldn't make any money from his labor simply because he wasn't the one lifting the hammer to build it and thus you feel he hasn't added any value to it.
Well, maybe that's a fair enough assessment. Maybe instead the worker should secure the materials, secure the capital, build the product, sell the product, and deliver the product. Now all this work makes the worker not only the producer but also the purchaser, the accountant, the salesman, and the delivery truck driver.
All of this work would require not only a great deal of skill in multiple areas but it would also require him to split his workday to accommodate all these tasks. And for his workday to be equal to his workday from when he was only a laborer, he is going to have less time allotted to produce the actual product. In this sense, do you feel he should still only charge $100 for his product? He'll quickly fall behind a normal standard of living he might have enjoyed if he settled for $70 and was just a laborer because he is only getting paid for the time spent producing, not the time spent purchasing the materials, selling the product, distributing the product, and finally accounting for all the sales for taxes.
If all those tasks take an equal amount of time, then he's only making $14 for a day's work of working for himself instead of the $70 a day he made simply working for someone else. So the worker has one of three options. He can work much longer hours to produce more, he can raise his prices substantially to make up for his income gap, or he can simply settle for a paltry wage that he probably wouldn't be able to live on because if the entire economy operates that way then the prices remain high while income remains low. This is tantamount to self-imposed serfdom.
In the last example you provide, I can imagine a system by which there exists producers, distributers and sellers, all of whom are paid a wage for their efforts and the consumer shoulders the cost of those wages built into the price of the product.
ReplyDeleteI just don't see any real justifiable reason why anyone who doesn't contribute to the value of a good, other than putting up the money deserves anything at all, the person who simply puts up the money and then sits back and does nothing deserves absolutely nothing, for if that person is getting something then the whole system will eventually crash because the output of value exceeds the input of value.
Also, and here's where my socialistic tendencies kick in, I firmly believe that no one deserves nor has the right be wealthy. Accumulation of wealth does not happen in a vacuum, that is, if one person has significantly more than they need, then someone else has significantly less.
Though, I can see the value of say an administrator in a free market system, someone who doesn't directly add value but who oversees the running of large scale operations, this person ought to draw a wage proportional to the time and effort they put into the system, facilitating it, but not more than that. I believe that it is impossible for anyone to do any amount of work to justify some of the ridiculous salaries that are being paid out.
Given these concessions, though, the troubling aspect of capitalism is that the goal of the individual is to put themselves in a position by which they can accumulate wealth without having to do virtually anything, via usery and speculation.
So I can imagine a system very similar to your example of the island and the painters being a just system, so long as usery and speculation are forbidden as they are the bricks that pave the road to mass inequality and human suffering.
This is Mr. Pfister. I've been meaning to put together a blog myself for some time and this has actually been sort of the kick in the pants I needed to see it through. Besides, posting under my livejournal name kept generating errors, so maybe this will work a lot better. I'll address your thoughts in the next post.
ReplyDeleteFirst off I'll address the value of goods argument. A person who just sits back and collects money for a company while other people toil away for his benefit isn't going to be collecting money for long. An entrepreneur, a *good* one, is working long after his workers who make an hourly wage go home to their families. The successful entrepreneur doesn't clock out at the end of the day, he lives and breathes his business. At the inception of the business, the entrepreneur will be taking home far less money than even the people he employs, because he will make sacrifices in order to have the chance to experience what he feels is the ultimate freedom, being self-employed.
ReplyDeleteIf you take the idea of wealth away from him (more on wealth in a minute), you remove the incentive to even pursue this path in the first place. Why make such sacrifices and take huge risks if the government takes everything you have? Why innovate or create? Why apply creativity to any pursuit if you cannot make a living from it beyond what you could make just working for someone else?
Now let's talk about wealth. Where does one draw the line from being "not wealthy" to "wealthy"? It is an entirely arbitrary definition and even in the best of cases highly relativistic. To a worker sewing clothes in a factory in Calcutta, the McDonald's cashier is pretty wealthy. To a McDonald's cashier, me being a home-owner and owning a nice new car is wealthy. To me owning a home and having a nice car, a lawyer with an even nicer car and nicer house is wealthy, and to a lawyer with the big house and the fancy car, a Fortune 500 board member is pretty wealthy. So where would we even begin to define what is "wealthy" and what is "good enough"?
ReplyDeleteInstead let's address the last statement in that paragraph; for one person to be "wealthy" does not mean other people have to be poor. To look at it again relativistically, someone is always going to seem less wealthy than other people. Even if you remove currency from the equation completely, there's always going to be some sort of difference that someone will consider to be an advantage that someone else doesn't have. In a totally socialist society, where the bulk of the population is "equal" (equally destitute, in my opinion), there are those in the government who have a great deal more wealth than the average citizen. A small sector of people haven't made everyone equally wealthy, they have simply created a system in which they can funnel the majority of the wealth to themselves under the guise of egalitarianism. Kim Jong Il, for example, is certainly living a better life than any of his citizens. And he lives that way through the most unjust means necessary, through state-sanctioned larceny.
To delve even further into it, a socialistic society has to allocate it resources into things that the state sees as useful and adding value to it. For example, while I know nothing of your career path, I do see that you are seeking a PhD in Philosophy. A statist could make the argument that the function of learning philosophy formally is only to create people who teach other people how to teach philosophy. If you were to quantify that into "societal value", it wouldn't be seen as a worthwhile pursuit to a statist because you aren't creating a valuable product that can be allocated to the masses. Instead they would tell you that they need more people to build roads or harvest turnips or any number of jobs that command economies dish out to fulfill needs that *they* mandate, not the citizens themselves actually desire.
To me, as a capitalist, that kind of scenario is nightmarish. Someone who has the intellect and critical thinking ability to be able to make sense of Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason" has no business just being someone who picks lettuce, puts shingles on government buildings, or cleans Castro's toilet. That's a waste of productive ability, talent, and skill unless you truly wanted to do that. More importantly, you should be free to pursue whatever career or goals you wish and delve into whatever subjects you desire as the PURSUIT of happiness should be paramount.
In a command economy, you simply don't get that option.
@Reverend Floyd:
ReplyDeleteOne big hole in your argument here is the assumption that a socialist economy must have a centralized government which is also a system of exploitation. From what I've perceived in many cases the government body naturally fuses with the economy. The hold that the government class has is fairly analagous of the previously stated exploitative occurances of entrepeneurs. While leaving government outside of your argument for free market capitalism, I would assume that the same should apply to the socialist argument. With that said, this is to take the point of a socialist economy devoid of a commanding body.
Well, then we're arguing for anarcho-syndicalism vs. anarcho-libertarianism and that's a whole new set of structures and circumstances.
ReplyDeleteI don't have a dog in that fight. I don't think anarchy is viable enough to even ponder on my side of the fence. I think in either of those systems lots of people are going to be suffering. I certainly don't want to champion a cause where more people are struggling or suffering.
I think, in the concept of anarchism, or specifically anarcho-syndicalism, Hakim Bey's concept of the Temporary Autonomous Zone is the only viable situation where anarchy "works".
This is delving into a whole new territory, though, but the basic premise is that all anarchist systems eventually evolve into some kind of hierarchy. To be a true anarchy you have to have no ruling class whatsoever but without a ruling class you have no one to protect you from establishing one. So in that sense anarachies are always temporary.
So to me, that just isn't a viable option because it lacks sustainability and it does nothing to prove the lives of people overall.
I wouldn't attach to phrases such as "true anarchy" or "total anarchy" when describing most anarchist paradigms. It seems like a huge misconception as far as how these ideas and practices exist or are thought to exist. Mostly there are forms of rule but with consideration for direct democracy.
ReplyDeleteIn regard to your last comment on the previous post, I would agree that the larger a collective becomes the harder it is to hold true to autonomy, however, should communities not function autonomously to the ability that they can and communicate with other sections of society at there own accord?
For now I'll leave this conversation to say that I think that the spread of autonomy not hindered by bureauocracy leads us toward a better egalitarian society. Anyway you put it, capitalism still creates disproportionate classes and sustains through the existance of these classes. Other socialisms may not seem sustainable the way our capitalism has been, but surely it is worth our time to move toward less exploitative endeavors.
|Sorry Andy! Hopefully this didn't shift too far off your original topic!|
No worries, I believe that discussions are organic entities, they ought to have a life of their own.
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