Oddbean new post about login | logout If it's not funded by force & coercion then it's capitalism.
ALL I am concerned about is how things are funded. Are your relationships consensual? Taxes are not consensual. If we were alone in the woods survival would require and infinitely greater amount of work. So having to work isn't anyone else's fault or the result of any sort of force. Jobs & money just give us better options & allow us to work less for greater return. Laissez-faire Capitalism (free markets) include any sort of organization or trade or coopoeration you want it to include so long as you aren't taking shit that isn't yours or otherwise forcing anything on anyone.
*an infinitely greater amount of work*
Capitalism without adjectives, maybe. In Vitro Capitalism. It cannot last in the real world for long. You come up with some LARP or idealized system on paper but it hasn't yet succeeded out in the real world. The Paretto distribution takes effect and the winners use undue advantages over others and the egalitarian ideal collapses. It always corrupts; power always corrupts.
So we shouldn't fight for freedom because freedom is going to turn into the same sort of authoritarianism we have always had... You might as well be arguing that we can't free the slaves because if we don't enslave them someone else will. The pareto distribution is a natural result of voluntary choice. 20% of the men get 80% of the sex because they are what women choose. Introducing some sort of institutionalized rape or coercive distribution of relationships isn't a solution to the problem. Those "controls" & "redistributions" are the silly plans that cannot succeed & ultimately fail over & over. Freedom is a relatively very new idea. People spend 80% of their earnings with 20% of the producers because they produce the best stuff. But that 20% changes all the time. There is far more upward mobility & turn over in a free market than in any other system. Even with all of the govt controls, most of the richest entrepenuers in the US today came from middle class families. Basically all of the largest companies 100 years ago are dead.
How am I supposed to respond to 3 different topics a paragraph each? We're all over the place. Each position is known. I'm calling it here. To be continued... In the meantime you should read things outside your ideology and challenge yourself with views adversarial to your own. I've heard capitalist arguments and propaganda ad nauseum over decades. Start with Hegel.
I literally only responded to your assertions You said before that you want all inheritance redistributed. Do you deny that requires force & govt?
I did not say before that inheritance should be redistributed. I say that nobody should have more than they can build with their own two hands, or in partnership with their neighbors. Nobody should hire anyone for a wage because wage labour is just temporary slavery. Every human being should own everything resulting from their labour and sell it if he chooses.
That's completely retarded. You might as well be saying that people can't work together & can't give things to each other. You want to magically vaporize what a parent earns so that it can't be left to their children?! If people WANT to work for someone else, what then? If you actually understood what it's like to run a business you would also understand why most people would want to work for others. Being compensated at an agreed to rate for your time & effort is just trade, it is literally selling your work directly to another person. It's not even sorta slavery. But when the govt picks and chooses economic winners then the options for employment become limited & that IS a problem.
I work for friends all the time. They employ me under the tabke to do things that no one else can do. I pick & choose the jobs I want & recommend other people when it's not something I am interested in or particularly skilled at doing. Employees with highly needed skills have all the power, they get compensated for jobs while taking on none of the risk of the business they are serving.
People can and should work together, then they should divide the output according to anegotiations before. Renting a human is as wrong as owning one. If a child offered to shovel your driveway you should negotiate the price for the whole job. You SHOULD NOT pay him according to how long it takes. That would be renting a human, which would be slavery.
But if you don't know how to price the whole job, an hourly wage is less risk! If you price a whole job wrong you could lose money, or at least end up earning less than you would at an hourly rate.
sounds like a learning experience
You can just as easliy learn what to charge by pricing things at an hourly rate & making others buy materials until you get a handle on how to predict such things. Micro managing the sort of business relationships people can enter into is ridiculous.
So? I fail to see how is the risk assessment an argument against.
So you want to control with force how people contract with one another in a way that will put the less experienced people at a disadvantage?
This is why "well intentioned" planners always make life harder for everyone. You are somehow very detatched from reality.
Thank you for at least calling me well intentioned. This is an improvement.
Lol, don't thank me too much. I think most of the worst atrocities in human history were rooted in good intentions that ultimately became a deadly effort to refuse to accept being wrong or to give up power.
Who said anything about force? I would never want to control anyone with force unless in defence. I'm an anarchist. The less experienced ones can be mentored by an individual or a group. If you wanted to be an apprentice lineman then I, as a journeyman lineman, could bring you into the fold in a 4 man crew. 2 journeymen, an equipment operator and an apprentice is a typical crew. Well we could say all income could be divided like journeymen take 30% each, equipment operator takes 20% and you the apprentice could take 20%. Or whatever is negotiated beforehand. This way everyone knows all the values and costs. The pay for the work is not secret. No secrets.
You are free to organize your own work crews however you please. Others may not be interested. Bitcoin & Lightning potentially make it possible to be paid by the minute. There are lots of reasons people might prefer that. Slavery is force & coercion & should be opposed by force. Saying that hourly wages are a form of slavery or that "renting people" is slavery would suggest you believe they should be opposed by force. If you want things to be voluntary then you advocate an anarcho-capitalist world whether you like it or not. I could see socialists making the argument that your effort to place % based valuations of people creates an inhumane sort of heirarchy too. Your distinction between what you imagine as some sort of ideal & the wage rates that people agree to is completely arbitrary.
Its not arbitrary because the wage system enables the payer to keep the financials secret. If the inputs and outputs are divided then the whole balance sheet must be transparent. Withholding and omitting knowledge is shady as well.
Anyway, I'm tired. I'm turning my phone off. Here's a parting picture of me. https://image.nostr.build/5352f7d4ed0082dd4127d9217f719bd0b766c6f6e7b5e7bc59d8c3f6f9acfa19.jpg
... And its funny but my Murray and yours knew eachother. Below is an article talking about how yours kicked mine out of his living room in the 1970s. https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/bookchin-rothbard-anarcho-capitalism/
If we create an environment where anyone can start a business (or work to solve some problem in an economically sustainable fashion) without paying anyone else for permission, then we create a world were anyone who wants work has more options. Then arrangements where people are more open about all financial arrangements might out compete everything else. So long as the threat of taxation exists it might be necessary for most dealings to be private though.
You keep arguing against me like I'm making communist assertions. Its like all the capitalist propaganda you're repeating is calibrated against communism and you can't make pro capitalist arguments unless the opposition is communist. Stop repeating the shit you read by rote.
Okay, then take a fucking position & make a solid point. You keep arguing around the issues & making communist assertions against capitalism while claiming you haven't said anything at all. If you don't even know what you believe then there is nothing for us to argue about.
I'm criticising capitalism. You assume any criticism of it is communist. You're stuck. Here's a position: if owning a human being is wrong then renting a human being with a wage is wrong as well. If one of the core tenets of capitalism was the abolishment of the wage system then I could get behind it.
Are people not allowed to sell their labor in any form or fashion they choose? If someone doesn't know how long a thing will take & WANTS to be paid by the hour are you going to tell them they can't do that?
I'm not mindlessly repeating anything. Do you understand that human interactions are either voluntary or coercive?
No human system is going to be perfect, ever, because people have free will and can use that will to do good or bad. But saying Capitalism can't last long in the real world is like saying, a crime free society can't last long in the real world. That doesn't mean anything. We should still always push for that goal, push for a society where allocated by choice, and not under alternatives that usually involve deadly force. Instead of human will being treated like a threat, we need to take advantage of it exactly like capitalism does. Also, lets be careful about what we call Capitalism. For example, what part of free market Capitalism would have the state take the dollar off gold by presidential edict and impose a central bank that effectively prints up money for the elite to go into housing, stock bubbles, and govt spending while the rest of us get saddled with inflation, taxes, and debt? Not to mention all the zoning laws that enhance these housing bubbles, and screw over the homeless, not to mention all the regulations that make health care up 10x more expensive than needed. Yeah, capitalism my ass. The USA is a socialist shit-hole.
My point is true capitalism does stay pure for long. The heirs of the successful ones will either create systems of control (AKA governments) or corrupt and coopt existing governments. Feudalism was an improvement on slavery, capitalism is an improvement on feudalism. Now we need an improvement on capitalism. My contention is Anarchism Without Adjectives could be it. (NOT Anarcho-Capitalism!!) Communism had its chance and it failed because the levers of power were seized by the Stalinists, as predicted by Anarchists such as Bakunin.
