“It has always been one of libertarianism’s insights…..that massive concentrations of government power are more likely to be used to benefit other huge concentrations of wealth and power than help the needy or downtrodden…the powerful few who benefit from government action are more highly motivated to work the mechanisms of democracy to their benefit than are the masses who all pay a little – often too little in each specific case to feel it worth fighting, or even knowing about – and thus win in the democratic game of shifting property and wealth from person, or group, to another. If a government were restricted to its libertarian minimums of protecting citizens’ life and property from force and fraud, all a corporation could do is to try to sell us something and we could decide whether or not to buy. It couldn’t tax us for its benefit, raise tariffs on its competitors to make their products more expensive, subsidize bad loans or overseas expansion, or take formerly private property on the grounds that it will make more lucrative use of it than would the former owner.”
Brian Doherty, Radicals for Capitalism, page 589.
But…But…But….what if the corporation wants the money “for the children” ???
What a corporation or government says it wants money for and what it actually wants money for are two completely unrelated things. Look at MP’s expenses for example. The Gov’t says it wants to tax us more to fund some worthy cause or other, when in fact it uses said money to line its own pockets. When called on this discrepancy it hold its hand up and claims to have good intentions, when nothing could be further from the truth.
I’ve spent much time trying to boil down into a simple statement why real capitalism and free markets are not used and instead we have, at best, hybrid socialism on up to hardline socialism. The best I can contrive is that there are plenty of people willing and able to exploit the masses’ lack of desire to face reality.
Quotations such as this are inspiring up to a point, but tends to fall flat when compared to the reality of the situation. We can blame the Merchants of Force all we want for their self serving behaviors while placating the people, but it is the masses who are generally made up of people who want to be told lies. When presented with such overwhelming evidence of government incompetency, the bulk of the masses choose to look away. If they do in fact identify a failure on one hand they give a free pass on the other, depending on their a priori sentiments. And even if they find a failure in a program they support, they just shrug their shoulders and admit defeat in a particular case, but sill have Faith in the whole.
On occasion I have commented how people are superstitious. It used in a clinical sense in that people derive a sense of well being by contriving removed Good and Evil from the everyday experiences of their lives. Instead of dealing with the clear reality that surrounds them, they create devils and angels far removed from their everyday lives. It is easier deal with figments of Good and Evil than it is to deal with the absurd situation of having a life handed to them, unasked for, stave off pain and death, only to stumble painfully and ultimately die. They’d rather impute a Grand Meaning, a transcendental Truth, into the situation, make curious personal choices in the actual conduct of what they can control, and invent fears instead dealing with truly fearsome events. They’d rather igoner the solid reality they can see with their own eyes and prefer to hold onto some abstract mental concept in their head.
And of course the more removed the fears are, the more removed the angels must be. That’s how we create States that have the seat of power vast distances, on average, from the citizenry. People don’t want to live in a material world that surrounds them and out of which the struggle to survive, they’d rather invent some other reality to which they will ascend, whether it is up above in some Ether or here on Earth.
Essentially pure capitalism is an economic system in which people freely interact with the resources that surround us, making enhanced goods from these resources through mental and physical labor. It understands that someone will have decide how to use scarce resources best, and those decisions are made by making a profit – the consumer electing their preferences and signaling to those in control of production the next course of action of allocation. It’s an ongoing function without any guarantees. It is a system that exists squarely in the reality of people having to interact with each and resources without force – allowing for fluid entrance and exits from the various sub-processes of production. Again without hard guarantees.
But people WANT surity. They WANT guarantees. But there are none. There are no guarantees in the chaos that surrounds us. There are just snatches of stability through monumental efforts. And so that is where the superstition comes in. Instead of working with the reality of controlled chaos, they would rather have leaps of faith and calcified beliefs systems to rule them. In the crazy world view based upon superstition, the Liar Leaders result from DEMAND. They simply fulfill the twisted “market forces” asked for. There is demand first, and so they supply.
That is why the “new boss is the same as the old boss”. Regardless of which thread of superstition they have followed, once they are given the keys to the halls of power, they function exactly the same. They are meeting the demand of the masses. It doens’t matter that once those who have been elected from among us use the halls of power for their own interests first. The actions involved are too far removed to scrutinize, so the masses can go right along believing Good of some sort is being done.
That is why libertarians/minarchists are marginalized. There are 6 Billion people on the planet and 99.9 % belong to some kin or creed that demands the unleashing of Force to meet their figmentary conceptions of Good and Evil. Granted they are constantly at odds with each other, but of the brew is the ever advancing mechanisms of State control. I think the days of libertarians trying exist in the calmness brought about by offsetting demands, the tensions in all directions creating a realitively stable environment, are over.
The massive misallocations brought about by coerced markets are now ready to snap back. The realities of the situation, the immutable economic laws like gravity to physics, are about to manifest themselves. And I don’t think people are going to take to it very easily. Scarcity without a real allocation process (like pricing) is going to manifest itself very soon and the results are going to be individual hardship not seen for some time. Unfortunately, the result will be to drive them further into their superstitions. Zealotry and radicalism are on the way. The antebellum period of soft left and right Statism keeping each other in some sort of check are over.
I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but what we have now is “real capitalism”. Capitalism isn’t free markets and never has been. The subsidies, bail-outs, protectionist tariffs, anti-competitive legislation, and cozy business-government regulations are as essential to capitalism as the politiburo is to Stalinism.
There is a recent article at the Library of Economics and Liberty by Anthony de Jasay (hat tip to yesterday’s ASI blog) which I found interesting and think is of some relevance to this thread, and to Brad’s comment at July 13, 2009 04:17 PM.
Best regards
Such is merely the alternate universe the collectivists have created by the sorceries of context-dropping and concept-stealing.
Capitalism rightly belongs in the context of self-interest, but collectivists have lifted it from that context, and grafted it into the context of mob-interest.
Socialists are always plagiarizing and bastardizing individualist ideas. Capitalism being one of our foremost ideals, we shouldn’t be so quick to concede it. We must take it back!
“If a government were restricted to its libertarian minimums of protecting citizens’ life and property from force and fraud, all a corporation could do is to try to sell us something and we could decide whether or not to buy. It couldn’t tax us for its benefit, raise tariffs on its competitors to make their products more expensive, subsidize bad loans or overseas expansion, or take formerly private property…”
All very well from some half-moral Archimedean summit until a legislature is either appointed or democratically elected – from that moment on freedom would have to be constantly fought for every month of every year by anyone who gave a monkey’s uncle. And then eventually you get your Clixons and Obamushes, and then you’re… in a difficult position.
“…the powerful few who benefit from government action are more highly motivated to work the mechanisms of democracy to their benefit than are the masses who all pay a little – often too little in each specific case to feel it worth fighting, or even knowing about – and thus win in the democratic game of shifting property and wealth from person, or group, to another.”
Who are these ‘masses’? Do they all think exactly the same friggin’ thing every minute of the day? Are they all correctly presumed to be equally stupid? Is anyone but the author and his mates a member of ‘the masses’? Does that include me? Because I’ll tell you what – I certainly don’t feel I pay too little – I rue every single penny I spend that goes to anyone in government which isn’t to watch them eat a box of bollocks a minute.
For anyone who isn’t aware of the cost of government in the U.S., multiply what mandrill said by the breathtaking scale remarked upon at the end of that link.
“…but it is the masses who are generally made up of people who want to be told lies. When presented with such overwhelming evidence of government incompetency, the bulk of the masses choose to look away.”
I think that’s… not quite right. Do you really believe these ‘masses’ of which you speak are so inherently immoral that they want to be told lies? Don’t you think it more likely that they are merely unable to abstract the implications of government incompetency beyond any immediate lost-info-database-train-wreck context to their (and their children’s) long-term prospects for you know, stayin’ alive? I don’t know anyone who wants to be told lies about his or her chances of hanging around on the planet. Take a look at all those AGW fans – yes it’s their ‘new cool’, but the reason they get all fanatical is that (some of them, at least) actually believe reducing CO2 is necessary to achieving tolerable odds for their own or at least their children’s survival.
“There is demand first, and so they supply.”
How do you presume to know that, at the beginning of every human settlement, there is the demand to be ruled by some utter c*nt? How do you actually know this? I can well imagine people in some early human settlement wanting to be left alone to get food, water, shelter, clothes etc for themselves first and then continually so until the day they shuffle off.
“I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but what we have now is “real capitalism”
The only bad news in that statement is your inability to link the conditioner ‘real’ to what is conceptually essential to capitalism (i.e. freedom). Merely listing facts is not a substitute for being able to conceptually differentiate them.
Joshua, all that your comment tells me is that you don’t understand capitalism. The subsidies, tariffs, etc., that you cite are no more a necessary component of capitalism than is the “judicial jackpot” system of medical malpractice litigation a necessary component of a health care system. Unfortunately, though, both are a logical (and perhaps inevitable) manifestation of human psychology, which contains significant elements of both greed and laziness.
This leads me back to Brad’s lengthy post, to which my response is “yes and no, and so what?”. Lots of people are supersititious, but that doesn’t totally explain the rise of the modern uber-state. I think a better explanation is something I said recently in another thread: in all human societies there are few people who lust after power, and the vast majority are followers who are content to be lead as long as the rule isn’t unbearably oppressive. “Supersition” is less a factor than simple inertia.
Those who seek power will use whatever form in which it manifests itself in the current society. In previous days it was in royal courts or powerful churches; today it is in secular government and, increasingly, in trans-national quasi-governmental entities such as the EU. But the form it takes is irrelevant; ambitious men will use whatever tools are available to seize, hold and exert power over others. You can tear down an insitution of power (a king, a general, a Pope) but the power itself isn’t diminished, merely transferred into another vessel.* So the object should be to have many smaller vessels rather than a few large ones, because all will be constantly contesting with the others to increase their power.
* This is what I call the “Law of Conservation of Power”. Power can neither be created nor destroyed, only its form changed
A little off topic, but not too far.
The class action laws in the US were supposedly enacted to allow a class to recover damages from a corporation even when each member of the class had only a small loss not worth suing for.
The corporation would thus behave better in the future.
What happened?
Well, the corporations analytically decided whether to settle fast for a little payoff or fight and risk a huge settlement.
The plaintiff’s lawyers made the same calculation. Whether to take a nice profit fast or buy a lottery ticket promising immense wealth or nothing.
Usually the lawyers got very substantial payoffs. In every case the numerous plaintiffs got virtually nothing.
Thus the lawyers, who were never damaged to begin with, were rewarded by money transferred directly from commerce. Those who had been damaged got nothing.
And businesses knew a new risk and cost had been imposed upon them by law. They expect such from time to time and adjust as best they can.
“This is what I call the “Law of Conservation of Power”. Power can neither be created nor destroyed, only its form changed”
You could always call it Laird’s Law, it’s snappier 🙂
Lurker in the Midst.
I thought about that, Lurker, but it seemed a bit presumptuous. But hey, if the name catches on that’s fine with me! It can actually be “Laird’s First Law” (assuming, of course, that I can some up with some more of them). Puts me in the same category as Newton. (If I’m going to be presumptuous I’m going whole hog!)
“Capitalism is not the free market, capitalism is ……” – O.K. then we do not favour “capitalism” we favour private property free enterprise.
What really is interesting is the fact that the vast majority of the left (not all of it, but the vast majority) that had denounced “corporate welfare” for years, went along with corporate welfare when their false God Barack Obama told them to.
Even the Republicans in Congress (not exactly an extreme free market crew) did not mostly go along with George Walker Bush’s TARP bailout last year – he had to rely on Democrat votes.
“Power can neither be created nor destroyed, only its form changed.”
That is a political reflection of Nietzsche’s basic thesis.
Laird, you misunderstood Joshua. He called it ‘real’ capitalism, in the same sense that Leninism was ‘real, existing’ communism. Ideal Capitalism is all about competition, but we live in the real world, not the ideal.
And what would ‘pure’ capitalism look like? Could you say that a casino is ‘pure’ capitalism, since it deals with money directly?
I have always preferred the term ‘Free Enterprise’ since it is broader than, and includes, Capitalism.
I’m not at all sure that’s true. Power manifests as a differential quantity, like voltage in electrical terms. We are only aware of it when one actor has more power than another, and by how much. If both actors have the same power, there isn’t any power differential and power has thus vanished, just as two points at the same voltage have no potential difference and there is no voltage to be measured or found.
So power isn’t a conserved quantity. Some societies have greater power differentials than others- for instance a society where everyone but one master is a slave has a very high power differential compared to a more egalitarian society. Since power is not conserved, we may conclude that it can be arbitrarily reduced towards zero. The slaves may kill their master, divide the land equally among themselves and institute a liberal society of property rights. At that point, the power in the society will be zero (though differentials may arise later of course).
There’s no reason to presume that serfdom is an inescapable natural law.
Ian B, we’re getting seriously off-topic here, but while I understand the point you’re making about power differential, I disagree with it. Equality of power does reduce the total power in a society to zero, any more than the potential energy of two bricks balanced on poles is zero since they’re the both size and height above the ground. If, in your scenario, the slaves kill the master, the total power becomes equally dispersed but it is still there, in potential form. Someone with physical strength, or personal magnetism, will arise and assume more of it than other people. But that was my original point: ideally, we want power widely dispersed (in “smaller vessels”), which helps to balance it out better.
“Lots of people are supersititious, but that doesn’t totally explain the rise of the modern uber-state.”
Indeed. Let me posit another theory for the rise of modern intrusive government — increasing wealth.
The growth in intrusive government (no, peon, you are not allowed to spend your own money buying a top-loading washing machine) exactly parallels the vast increase in the use of fossil fuels since World War II. Of course, we have also benefitted from the simultaneous (and related) growth in knowledge of the properties of materials — from computer chips to Teflon. Societies have become richer, and richer societies can afford more wasteful overhead (such as the washing machine code enforcement department).
The paradox of government enthusiasm for alleged Anthropogenic Global Warming is that it will make societies poorer. Poor people cannot afford the burden of such excessive overhead, and so the uber-state is killing itself. As some would say, modern intrusive government is simply not sustainable.
If a corporation wants money ‘for the children’, well, that’s alright, then! Which meanhearted capitalist could object to that?
If you want an example of the naked rapacity of the State, look no further than a comment today from Dame Suzi Leather, Chair of the Charities Commission, explaining how she intends to use charities law to take control of privately-funded schools:
See BBC for full story.
“Let me posit another theory for the rise of modern intrusive government — increasing wealth.”
Wealth is to the State merely what fuel is to a fire – yes it facilitates growth (when they can get their hands on it), but it can hardly be said to be a cause. One does not find fire wherever one sees a bit of wood.
“The growth in intrusive government (no, peon, you are not allowed to spend your own money buying a top-loading washing machine) exactly parallels the vast increase in the use of fossil fuels since World War II.”
There were some ‘intrusions’ by government into the lives of large numbers of French people somewhere between 1789 and 1793.
The decision taken by British prime minister Lloyd George in 1908 to institute a system of national insurance for all men of working age was an intrusion on the lives of more than half of Britain’s population.
The conscription of men into the armed forces of Britain during World War 1 was an ‘intrusion’ on their natural rights to life and liberty.
(One could mention 1917 as consequential to 1789 to press the point about ‘growth’, but I don’t want to sidetrack.)
Each of those three intrusions predates World War Two and does not have any obvious connection with fossil fuel use.
A major lurch forward was the nationalisation of the telegraph in 1868. The change of national mind towards acceptance of a benign state controlling things seems to have largely occurred in the early 19th century. You can also look at the rise of public morals committees etc in the late C18 as another early staging post on the road to serfdom.
That may be so Ian, but the point here is that our current descent into totalitarian chaos was not caused by a mere increase in wealth, the use of fossil fuels, or any default immorality among ‘the masses’. It has been caused by a combination of ignorance (‘ejukayshion’) and human depravity. To exist in a depraved condition is a matter of choice: the choice to think and act like a man, or to think and act like a predatory insect.
Milton Friedman cited an historian (I can not remember which one) as saying that the most important change in the 19th century was that state education went from being a rare thing – to being almost universal.
Not only was this not inevitable (see E.G. West’s “Education and the State” about how state education did not speed up the spread of literacy in England and Wales), but it was also a very dramatic change.
People think that state education was the norm in certain places at the start of the 19th century – but this just is not so.
Even in Scotland the writ of such schools did not really run in places like Glasgow (and Scotland had no poor law welfare system) and the government schools of New England had been in decline for many decades.
It was not till the middle of the 19th century that H. Mann made government schools the norm in the United States – and it was even later in England and Wales.
Of course once it is considered normal for the government to take control of the education of the young, the acceptance of government taking over just about everything else is considered normal also.
Paul Marks writes:
I’m interested in a truly unpartisan examination (really) of that assertion.
If true, it is seriously worrying.
Nigel I’m not sure you could get a truly “unpartisan” discussion of that (or anything else, for that matter!), since we all bring our intellectual prejudices to the debate. Still, it’s worth considering that every communist/statist theoretician of which I know (Marx, Mao, Lenin, and of course people like Antonio Gramsci) were explicit in noting their belief that taking over the education system was a crucial first step in building the all-powerful State. Clearly the communists believe this, and act upon that belief, which to me counts for a lot.
It’s hard for me to imagine things could work any other way.
I do not do non-patisan stuff – I like people to know where I stand.
However, the historian that Milton Friedman mentioned (name, I can not remember the name) did not think that the state domination of education was a bad thing – his position was that it was very important in building our modern society where government does X Y Z as well. Both on precedent grounds and because people educated by the state would be used to ………
I have the same judgement – just from the other side.