We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.

Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]

Samizdata quote of the day

The overwhelming tendency of markets is to bring people together, break down prejudices, and persuade people of the benefits of cooperation regardless of class, race, religion, sex/gender, or other arbitrary distinctions. The same is obviously and especially true of sexual orientation. It is the market that rewards people who put aside their biases and seek gains through trade.

This is why states devoted to racialist and hateful policies always resort to violence in control of the marketplace. Ludwig von Mises, himself Jewish and very much the victim of discrimination his entire life, explained that this was the basis for Nazi economic policy. The market was the target of the Nazis because market forces know no race, religion, or nationality.

Jeffrey Tucker

20 comments to Samizdata quote of the day

  • Mr Ed

    market forces know no race, religion, or nationality

    Tsk, tsk. There are no market forces, only market choices. Markets (and prices arising in them) may oblige people to sell lower than they might wish, or buy higher, but that is not force. The state is force.

  • RRS

    NO, it is the coming together of individual motivations that create the conditions or situations we identify as “markets.”

    Markets are a result of human actions, as such, they don’t DO anything. It is their individual motivations that bring people together for particular, sometimes symbiotic, objectives. They are the scenes of human actions.

    However, there are motivations that bring people together for other objectives; power, plunder, possession, envy, forms of self-gratification not readily found in market transactions.

    Then there are the intervenors who appear in those gatherings, with motivations of their own. They intervene in market transactions. They intervene in conjoining those other motivations for purposes of their own.

    It’s complex.

  • During the NAZIera in Germany they purged theUnis of Jews. Most fled to the USA and UK. We got the A-bomb and they got third-raters picked entirely on their Germanic heritage. Oh, and we won.

  • Simon Just

    There are no market forces

    Sure there are, it’s just short hand for “the aggregate effects of many exchanges driven by individual choices”.

  • JohnB

    Yes, it’s those short hands that lead to inaccuracies. We all do it in order to be able to think without performing like lawyers the whole time.
    But it is lazy thinking and leads to inaccuracies.
    “The market” is indeed the sum of the actions of those engaged in it.
    It all comes down to people.
    Saying Germany did this or America did that is also inaccurate.
    It is the people that do/did things.
    Sometimes they work together as “a group”.
    And there are so many different, devious, and sometimes destructive motivations that often hide within those collective identities.
    Without inaccuracies the devil cannot hide.

  • RRS

    @John B

    The Great Satan –

    Perhaps “he” can not hide; but, “he” (which are all those motivations) can still be effective.

  • Mr Ed

    Simon J,

    Sure there are, it’s just short hand for “the aggregate effects of many exchanges driven by individual choices”.

    i beg to differ. The aggregate effect is simply a price, and the signals that come from it. No market ever forced me to sell my house, nor could it. A price affects you only if you are trying to meet with or compete with it. Market forces do not change neighbourhoods, or close businesses. If people are unable to compete, and if needs be, innovate, then running oeut of money and closing is not a force acting, but simply reflecting the economic necessity for costs to be covered.

    What Mr Tucker is saying strikes me as a reflection of the ‘harmony of rightly understood interests’ found in trade, benefitting both or not occurring at all. To impose rules on whom one may trade with, and legal penalties for not making choices, is morally wrong and absurd.

  • Paul Marks

    Good quotation.

    For example, it is often forgotten that the “Jim Crow South” was a government creation.

    Businessmen did not wake up one morning and say “let us discriminate against blacks – their money is not as good as the money of other people”.

    The States passed laws MAKING business enterprises discriminate.

    In some ways the much attacked “Gilded Age” of President Grant was the peak of American liberty.

    In the early 1870s there was no slavery or compulsory discrimination.

    In 1876 (the hundredth anniversary of American Independence) yes there was corruption and so on (and where and when has there not been corruption?) but the United States was basically a free country – for white and black.

    And a young Woodrow Wilson was filled with HATED for the United States of 1876 – and for the Constitution itself (his first piece of writing, to survive, dates from this year).

    The young Mr Wilson hated the world were the “Dollar was King” and where black people used the same toilets (and so on) as white people.

    He was determined to create a society where GOVERNMENT (not the free market) ruled – and the government would be controlled by pure people.

    Such as himself.

    Remember that Woodrow Wilson is (more than anyone else) the creator modern American “liberalism”.

  • Bell Curve

    No market ever forced me to sell my house, nor could it.

    Then you misunderstand the term. Its a force like the wind is a force. It doesn’t ‘force’ you to sail here rather than there, but prevailing ‘trade winds’ do make some places easier to sail to that other places. Market forces are real, like the force of wind is real, but neither ‘force’ you to do anything, they just make some thing easier or more likely than others things.

  • Mr Ed

    Bell Curve,

    I would hope that a reading of my posts would have indicated that there is a distinction between a choice, be it Hobson’s Choice, or the submission to the necessity to lead an economic existence, which is a feature of life itself, and the use of force.

    My beef is that the term ‘market forces’ disguises the nature of market transactions, and perhaps more importantly. The nature of the force (or menace of force) of the state.

    That is a vital distincrion many seek to obscure.

  • Veryretired

    There’s a line in the movie “Outlaw Josie Wales” from Chief Lone Wadi, after he is caught trying to ambush Wales, when he says, “I was trying to gain an edge”.

    Whenever you hear someone crying that markets are cruel, or unfeeling, or are forcing people to do x or y, what you are actually hearing is a complaint that true markets don’t give exceptions to their rules based on non-economic factors.

    People who complain about the cruelty of markets are people looking for an edge, usually political, which will short-circuit market processes and let them avoid the natural consequences of their decisions.

    This is a very common human trait. It is universal in human culture to seek some form of connection with “other” forces or powers that can magically circumvent reality and deliver wishes, or avoid bad things, by use of non-natural means.

    The furious reaction to empiricism and free choice economics by the collective is due to their anger that magical thinking can never control the results of either a validly designed experiment, or a free market outcome.

    There is a very powerful reason the Mystics of spirit are natural allies of the Mystics of muscle—they are both seeking an edge to get around reality. When you hear someone wonder why progs are so supportive of Islamic fascists, regardless of their supposed differences, that’s the reason.

    They are natural partners in magical thinking against the empirical and the free.

  • staghounds

    Most importantly, free markets have no masters. That’s why the would be masters hate them so.

  • Mr Ecks

    “There is a very powerful reason the Mystics of spirit are natural allies of the Mystics of muscle—they are both seeking an edge to get around reality. When you hear someone wonder why progs are so supportive of Islamic fascists, regardless of their supposed differences, that’s the reason”

    What absolute Randian piffle. The scum of the left hate freedom and they see allies in the islamics who they hope to use as shock troops to disrupt society so they can take over in the chaos. A puny and pathetic plan since –in an Islamic takeover–the left would be leading the line to the nearest crane. Their ideologies are totally opposed–leftists being atheist (prob like VR) and the islamics not.

    As for what is “reality”–well reason is the best guide we have–but that depends on the premises you start from. VR’s statement above reeks of an arrogant certainly that does not exist–but it does show a kinship with those–like the left and islamics– having a conviction of their own absolute rightness. Rand was right about most things but was an arrogant dogmatist who also proclaimed an absolute knowledge she did not possess. A woman who tried to order (as she did to Walter Block) a man to dump his wife because said wife was a Catholic was clearly short of a kick up the arse or two.

  • Mr Ecks

    Sorry –my mistake–not Walter Block–he tells the anecdote–it was Murray Rothbard.

  • Watchman

    With all respect to Mr Ecks, I think Veryretired may have a point there – the mystics of mind and muscle (and both are present as far as I can see in Islamic and left-wing groups) naturally ally against freedom, which is all the market is, as it is a threat and affront to all of them.

    Note that both left-wing thought and Islamicism tend to focus on leaders who can direct or justify the muscle. This is the same tendency that gets us accused of being Fascists or followers of Ayn Rand, because it is difficult for those reliant on their mysticism to understand that their oponents are without leaders and develop their own ideologies. If you reject the market, you have to have something else, and it is a very rare person who has the self-confidence to reject the view that people make the best decisions (even if they are often bad ones…) without having some form of intellectual prop, be in socialism, Islam, Buddhism, social democracy or even Randism. And this intellectual dependence on others means that they are unable to cope with free markets, rather than those they can control.

  • Veryretired

    Well, I guess I’ll just have to abandon everything I thought I knew, since the eminent and all-knowing Mr Ecks says it’s just arrogant piffle. Can’t argue with logic like that, especially when it’s so well reasoned and argued with such eloquence.

    After all, Mr Ecks knows something Murray Rothbard said once! The debate is over, then, right mr Ecks?

  • Julie near Chicago

    Briefly:

    Mystics of Muscle: People who replace reason with force in an attempt to override the will of others.

    Honest businessmen are not Mystics of Muscle; “businessmen” who commit either fraud or extortion in their dealings, are. Same goes for governmental officials or employees.

    Mystics of Mind: People who allow “revelation,” or something other than reason, to guide their will, their actions, or their understanding of How the Universe Works.

    Nota bene. “Reason” is taken in the broad sense of logic or rational — “reasoning” — based on empirical evidence, which has been scrutinized as carefully as the particular human being can for errors in observation and in evaluating observations.

    . . .

    As for that story about Miss Rand’s dumping Rothbard because he was married to a Christian, it is almost certainly a lie ginned up either by Rothbard himself or one of his sycophants. There are various discussions on the web about this. Try searching on the string

    Rothbard Rand Joey Christianity [—or, Christian]

    or

    Rothbard Rand wife Christianity [—or, Christian]

    The section headed “Rothbard Pulls the Christian Card” deals with just this story. (Note: Mr. Peron writes “Frances” in this section, but he means Sam Francis, whose name he does get right in the preceding section. He also gives a fast, rough sketch there of Mr. Francis’s place in the story.)

    It is part of a 4-part essay by Jim Peron entitled “Is Objectivism a Cult?” and is found at

    http://www.noblesoul.com/orc/essays/obj_cult2.html

    By the way: The whole page constitutes Part 2 of the essay. It’s entitled “Rothbard Unmasked.”

    The entire noblesoul site was put together by Richard Lawrence, and it’s an excellent compendium of articles and links to other sites concerning Ayn Rand. Unfortunately, I think Mr. Lawrence quit updating the site in 2009, and quite a bit has been published since then. See “The Objectivism Resource Center” at

    http://www.noblesoul.com/orc/index.html

  • Julie near Chicago

    Important correction to a typo:

    ‘“Reason” is taken in the broad sense of logic or rationale — “reasoning” — based on empirical evidence,….’

  • Julie near Chicago

    Very, July 2, 9:36 p.m.:

    Well said. All of it, and I am particularly taken with your last four paras.

  • Julie near Chicago

    By the way, I shouldn’t have said “Mystics of Mind”; Miss Rand’s phrase was “Mystics of Spirit.”