LibertarianSocialist

Okay, so as I now understand it, Ancaps really believe the only right people have is the 'right of might', in that they believe that 'rightness' comes from legal authority, itself derived from physical power. So what really distinguishes our respective schools of anarchism is not our philosophical basis (would you call yourself a stirnerite egoist?), but our personal desires? Is the only difference between your society and mine the personal interests of the holders of power?

I tried to read your empirical study, but did not understand it. I will read the .pdf. I understand that we only have the present, that any future expectations are only expectations, but I disagree that we cannot make probability claims on what the equilibrium will be. For instance, a disturbed vessel of water can be expected to return to its equilibrium given a time that can be estimated from what we know about physical laws and the physical properties of the vessel. This is not to say it cant be disturbed or factors would otherwise prevent this expectation from being true. This sloshing of water clearly a movement over the dimension of time. We might only experience the present, but the present is not static, and moves on a linear progression. Is this what you are arguing or have I mischaracterised you? *Okay, just read the next paragraph, then we are on the same page assuming the future is currently unknowable, yet we can make probability claims that are better than chance. Furthermore theories of value serve as 'physical laws', though not empirically proven as true. For example, the theory of gravity says objects which meet a certain set of assumptions, will always fall, and that this is an inherent tendency of all objects. It does not say all objects must fall if there exists stronger confounding forces, but that they are always subject to gravity. The same is true for a law of value. If the conditions are met, and the law is a true law, we MUST see the situation play out as expected. This is not to say we currently know the future conditions.I disagree with your claim that the future unfolds with indifference to expectations. The future MUST follow exactly the conditions set by the past. Everything is precalculated and inevitable, the future only appears to be unknowable due to our limited comprehension. But on a pragmatic note I will concede your point. When you say "markets are a mechanism that reveal value" what is your definition of a 'market' what are its basic assumptions? Furthermore, what type of value are you referring to? Is it an exchange value or an individual use value, or perhaps an aggregated use value? If value solely on personal utility, what can this tell us about market price? Furthermore, how is such a 'utility value' established within a centralised, top-down economy (such as in the economic calculation problem society)? So when you talk of general optimality, do you mean pareto efficiency? What is the measure of such an 'optimum'? Economic prosperity, aggregate wellbeing, etc.? The two necessary factors of the calulation of the general optimum seem like assumptions only. What are the shapes of the production and utility tradeoffs, and how are they established empirically? Furthermore, what is the evidence or logical basis for the claim that what we understand as 'private property' under capitalism creates the impetus for a move towards 'general optimality'? I dont know what a utility function is, nor why they are the only factor in price formation. Given your quote: "Prices are ‘equilibrium’ to the extent that the model is in equilibrium; they express long-term value to the extent that the utility parameters are not going to change; and they approach equality with (equally variable) marginal costs of production." This sounds like the labour theory of value. Are you suggesting that an indivdual is motivated to purchase commodities up until the point where his marginal utility falls below the exchange value of the good, thus fixing prices at this point? And that the prices tend in the long run towards an equality with the cost of production? I will assume that marginal utility is dynamic and falls towards a static* cost of production, so that it is cost of production, and not utility that is the baseline. So what dictates the cost of production? Are we to assume the market price of capital and labour? But at what level are these set, and why? Looking forward to another great reply.

Those banks accounts pension plans etc. Already have no real value. They are promises for things of value in the future. If I was to tear down the banks, destroy them utterly, the real wealth in the world would remain unharmed. The fruit trees would still bear fruit, the factories would still exist, as would all our infrastructure. All that would change is our behaviour towards what already existed. We might not pick the fruit, we would leave factories idle, the world would come to a halt. We would be so preoccupied with our unquestioning adherence to fictitious legal and social constructs that we might actually believe that the physical world, and not just the web of fiction surrounding it, had collapsed to the ground.

This is something I have been concerned about myself too. Say we have a foreign country such as China who uses state violence to ensure cheap labour, using this to undercut their competitors. This can play out a few ways: 1. The cheap products flood the market, causing the competitors to stop production, leading to an economic dependency, teamed with unemployment and an inability to pay for said imported goods. 2. Local producers accommodate the new price point, resulting in voluntary self-exploitation. 3. Local producers shift production to a new type of product or service whose market price is not suppressed, exporting this to the other country while importing the cheaper good, winning in the process. This last solution would possibly result though in lowered demand by the other nation due to their low wages, and so to either local unemployment or wage/profit increases teamed with greater (involuntary) leisure time, or else an increase in total labour by the low wage country. To summarise, the trade ratios are the same but the amounts may differ. If the low wage country sells its products for half their competitors prices, for example, their trade ratios might be either 1 unit for 0.5 units or 2 for 1 or whatever, it entirely depends on the level of demand for the various products, and the supply of labour. It is important to realise that the low wage workers are being exploited, and would not desire a low wage unless they were forced to by physical or legal or economic coercion. They are certainly not 'winning' by underselling their products.

Well, you can either say the current price is correct, or else say another is. Failure to speculate on true values is, in a practical sense, to accept the current as true, or what amounts to the same. I cant say your argument is wrong, but we are both taking stances that are little more than educated guesses, I that theoretical price is closer to true price, you that current price is. Having said that, i personally believe that even centralised planners are better at approximating 'true price' (that is a true free market price), than are the prices found in an unfree market. For example, take the case of Martin Shkreli, no one would say that the amount he charged was a fair price based on scarcity and utility, and nearly everyone would maintain that the prices he asked would soon (and did) get reduced by market competition. This is the important point. AE makes no attempt to ascertain this 'true price' which market competition is always trending towards in the long run, because it ignores the factors that create scarcity. But we see everyday this tendency towards equilibrium, even if the equilibrium point is sometimes severely distorted.

Using a weather analogy, the austrian theory would simply state that rainfall was dictated by the concentration of moisture in the air. Now, this is true of course, but it doesn't explain why moisture levels are as they are. Was it the natural result of the suns evaporation, or perhaps through artificial intervention by man? If we spend all our time seeding clouds, we cannot say these are natural rainfall patterns. We might not ever be able to predict the weather 100%, but we may get closer to an understanding of natural rainfall levels than by simply refusing to acknowledge anything but the present conditions.

Okay, so I have been reading the theory section of your website. I have little time to check the formulas and it is quite academic and dense, and so difficult for me to understand, but I will ask questions as I go. My major issue with austrian economics is its poor predictive ability. That is, its definition of value formation as a product of scarcity and utility only provides a snapshot of the CURRENT market prices, not of any theoretical equilibrium price. As I understand it, neoclassical economics recognises both the existence of such an equilibrium price and the role of cost of production in this (and value formation). The section on value seems to indicate you believe in such neoclassical assumptions. I also find it hard to find a distinction between the principles behind the labour theory of value such as made by proudhon or marx, and that of adam smith or the later twin scissors of marshall. Surely such an acknowledgement of the dominant role of cost of production within long run price formation must also concede to the principles of the ltv also being true? What is your opinion on this?

I still don't get why you insist on clinging to artificial social constructs like morality? If you want to eat the apple, and you can get away with it, why not? Why would the man support the institutions that would see him starve to death? That is a very irrational slave mentality. If Ayn Rand was a true egoist, she would concede the 'right' action was the one he most desired, and that 'right' as a concept exists distinctly within the mind of each individual only, and not on some 'higher plane'. Again, there exists no 'natural rights' only 'I want' which can be seen through by physical force. Why do you care what Ayn Rand thinks and wants? What do YOU think and want?

I would also be very interested to know how this calculation problem has 'been solved'. Also, I couldn't PM you, but would you care to talk economics? We could continue perhaps in my thread about the reworking of the ltv? I am always interested in sythesising criticisms from other economic schools.

This is something I always felt was a cop-out by Rothbard, and a real inconsistency in his philosophy. Must contracts be honoured, or not? If a person willingly signs a contract that states he will be trapped inside afterwards, or a woman signs an agreement to engage in coitus, are they bound to it or not? If my natural rights are greater than that of contract, why am I bound to ever honour anything? Who decides what contracts must be honoured or not, private arbitration?

I'm pretty sure that guy is just a dick. Actually, the homesteading principle as advocated by Rothbard advocates such a 'righting of wrongs'. Taken to its logical conclusions, we would expect to see nearly all existing private property titles which rested on coercive state violence to be put up to be homesteaded. It is at its heart a revolutionary or 'blank slate' movement. Now, while it is true Rothbard does not advocate 'reparations' for any past injustice, he does not tacitly acknowledge the legitimacy of such historical injustices either.

No one has answered your question, which commonly happens with questions of this nature. If we are to imagine such a theoretical scenario in an ancap society which embraces a Rothbardian concept of property rights (one which expressely rejects aspects of Lockes theory) , then I am afraid our man is at the mercy of his captor. This is because property rights are superior to natural rights in that a man may only express his natural rights (self ownership, right to not be aggressed against etc.) through the medium of property. He has no rights that he cannot bargain for whence the time arises when he must surrender his own natural rights to the superior property rights of the owner. (the bargaining parameters being set, and at least influenced heavily by legal fiction). Now if it is a question of a Lockean understanding of property rights, the Lockean proviso adds an interesting dimension. One may claim that taking all the land makes it impossible for him to have "as much and as good as" entry to his property. That by taking it, you deprive him of a specific type of land which you had no grounds to take in the first place.

Evidence please? Why do people have children? Cultural indoctrination? Biological drive? Yes, but mostly it is for security. The only regions of the world still growing rapidly are third world nations, in which extended families means increased security. All first world nations in which security is not an issue are experiencing declining, stalled or even regressing populations. The whole people will starve because not enough food is bullshit. You probably know from Italy, but growing food takes very little room. Most of the people in my village get by on truly tiny gardens, and keep animals on the otherwise spare scraps of grass. Look close and you will see huge amounts of usable land. It is not any real scarcity of food we have, but a wholly artificial one.

Hahaha. Bernie Sanders getting rid of the 1%, what a joke! I wonder how all the other attempts at 'democratic socialism' turned out? Oh wait, they all reverted to state capitalism, indistinguishable to the cronyism we have now. Yeah, lets try that again -but this time its different. *Side note to Thomasio. Why do you insist on calling bolshevism 'communist'. Call is state socialism or something, but please not the name of a theoretical stateless & classless society.

What isn't religion? Pick any man who calls himself an atheist, and I will show you a profoundly religious man. What man today lives his life completely free from the thick web of social superstitions brought up around him? What is society but an illusory collection of spooks, of arbitrary constructs? What is culture, with all its attendant traditions and mores, but the greatest of religions? What we know as religion, the worship of gods, is only a tiny fraction of religiosity. To truly overcome religion would be to crush out the last petty superstition, the last unfounded ritual, of the most mundane aspects of life. Such an authoritarian measure can never be achieved, should never, lest in trying to eradicate religiosity we erect our own gods. While this pertains to leftism, christian anarchists such as Tolstoy saw no contradiction between their personal religious beliefs and their support of an anarchistic society. In fact, I would go so far as saying anarchism is perhaps one of the most congruent philosophies with the teachings and practices of Jesus.

Hey guys, I've been trying to consolidate Austrian economic arguments with the ltv. During my research into the economic school I have been convinced of certain arguments, most notably of time preference and deferred consumption. Alongside the argument that market price is a product of scarcity and perceived utility, I have been forced to relegate the ltv to a secondary, though significant, factor in value and price formation. Even though I would probably never reject the ltv, being an essential part in understanding economic phenomenon, as it stands it is too simplistic to describe all economic phenomena. Do you guys think inversely that the ltv might play any role in complementing Austrian economic theory? How might you alter socialist theory to incorporate truisms from other schools of thought?

Great posts Thomasio, keep 'em coming. I don't disagree with anything in your last post, just your original assumptions about interest and debt. Aggregate trade balances are a little different to purely monetary balances, the former subsumes the latter. An entire country can be a net creditor internationally and also a net importer of tangible products. When we consider interest it is both zero sum and not. It is zero sum in that interest creates no extra value, that value must be exogenous (deferred consumption a major exception to this). But it is also not zero sum as a simple credit and debit exchange is. Say I loan 100, the debtor gets 100, he gives back 105, that 5 is an exogenous input, it is not zero sum. Furthermore, you have argued yourself that value creation is not zero sum, in that increased wages increase demand thus increasing production thus increasing labour demand in a positive feedback loop. What I am trying to get at is that while households are net savers, they are only so in a monetary sense, and even then only savers in an absolute, but not relative sense. These households (the producers or working class) do not have a net value surplus. They on the whole produce far more value in their lives than they ever receive (generally in the form of surplus labour), and only receive a fraction of it back. These are your debtor class, not the state. The state is a net value consumer. It requires a producing class to support it, and while it may assume a large portion of the monetary debt, the amount of wealth stolen to support itself must always be more than this debt, hence it actually is a creditor (it lives on interest).

Cool, thanks for explaining. But wouldn't such business debt require continuous economic growth? It seems like the limit to such a system would be the producers receiving most of their product, causing a profit squeeze for the capitalists, with its attendant instability, and reverting to a business saving model once near this ceiling once growth slows down. Those businesses only take loans if they think it will give them an overall profit eventually. Sorry, I misinterpreted your point about export oriented countries. I thought you referring to the consequent debt of trade imbalances, not the trade imbalance itself. Yet at the same time you must be if you are talking about how money is removed from circulation? The surplus country needn't cut production to ensure a trade surplus. Debtor countries can increase the rate of exploitation or shift production from domestic consumption to export so as to become net exporters. Meanwhile the creditor country will only accept the surplus goods until the debt is repaid, whereupon they stop buying. Only import dependent countries are forced to accept surpluses that would put them in debt. For example, person 1 sells food in his shop, which both himself and person 2 need to live, while person 2 is a builder. Every day person 2 eats 1 hours food while providing half an hours service for repairs to the shop. After 10 days he accumulates a debt. The shopkeeper demands the debt be repaid, and so the builder does 5 hours work on improving the shop. After this the system returns to the former trade balance. (not saying it couldn't change though, of course).

Countries with a trade surplus do not necessarily lose that surplus when deficit countries go bankrupt. They do so because those countries are no longer willing to honour the debt. They may say they can't because no money, but they could pay back with goods or services (however unlikely), if the creditor country was ready to enforce that request. In essence, the imaginary promise of future goods has been reneged. Good rest of post, really clear. I get what you are talking about now. But seriously, shush up about the whole printing money thing or else we'll never be free! Anyway politicians and big business are too greedy for that, they will pursue their greed unto their own undoing. Also, how does the state stop the deflationary spiral you mentioned? If the state becomes the debtor, wouldn't this be the same? The only difference would be this thing we call the state steals or prints money as a redistributive and anti deflationary measure. Couldn't alternative organizations do that? (Leaving aside that they are arguably also states).

Just because households are net savers does not necessarily preclude a system in which they are the primary debtors in society. As I mentioned before, interest bears many forms, and it is the sum of all these forms (interest on money but one form) that dictates the real balance of interest in society. Even if the majority of households are creditors, a few (though usually quite a significant portion of the underclass)will be financial debtors. This is sufficient for a class of parasites, and needn't entail the entirety of the households, though it would be less than if they were all entailed. It is also important to remember degrees. The working class has a significant portion of its wealth taken through interest as surplus labour, this is vastly more than any amount of interest gained through savings in a lifetime. Even if every working class household had positive savings, and each leveraged interest, they could still be net debtors in other realms of interest. Say for instance group A owns all the gold coins, which they receive 3% interest for loaning, while group B owns all the houses, which they receive 4% rent on. Group A are net savers (at least financially) and also net debtors (on the whole). Group B are the parasite class, if only by 1% (I will forgive them ). What were the conditions which caused businesses to be net debtors? This sounds very interesting, should I watch the video?

Well, when I was 16 I read half of atlas shrugged and got into the ideology, but I could never figure out how capitalist entrepreneurship and meritocratism could be defended against tyrannical economic powerhouses. After that I devolved into my old greens party ideology of my family. Honestly quite a step backwards. I mean, I disagree with capitalist apologists but at least they have a basic (and often quite rational) understanding of the economic and philosophical underpinnings of their positions. I have learnt a lot from the Austrian school (thanks for time preference!), but most of my prejudicial greens propaganda (the state is our friend against evil corps, guns are bad and kill people, hunting is bad and kills people and cute animals, nuclear is bad and kills people, free markets are evil and just an excuse for corps to make money) had to be unlearned.

I wonder if ancaps will ever have insurrectionary anarchists/illegalists?

I'm having a hard time figuring out why it is preferable for the state to own the debt instead of another class (or all classes)? The state in itself only takes that money from the producers anyway, the burden always rests on them.The producers can support a class of people living off interest and also maintain a surplus of wealth, as long as this class is small enough to not be an unsustainable burden. Even if everyone uses their wealth to get interest, it is all relative. A worker may get a 3% return on his savings while the bank gets 4%, the construction company charges 5% interest on their services. That same worker must pay 5% interest on his purchases, he derives interest, yes, but in reality he is still in negative interest. Even if he has money stored up and doesn't need a loan, the owning class still has a sufficient monopoly to charge interest such as through surplus labour, rents and inflated item prices. Profit, rent and interest are one and the same. As long as the receivers of interest spend or lose their fortunes it is sustainable. Also, care to tell me your positions regards political economy? It still eludes me.

Does it have to be a Randian one? What about an egoistic one? Simply state that everything is already yours, that you have merely yet to attain power over it. Insist further that they themselves are your property, and if they should object using moral arguments simply yell at them unrelentingly that morality is a spook and so is property. ??? PROFIT Can't touch a person who simply doesn't give any fuks about imaginary constructs like right and wrong, you can only beat him for being a dick.

Under an ancap society he would have no rights, and could be treated any way the owners of property pleased. This is because a person must abrogate his rights to the owner of the property he passes into. A man in ancapistan has inalienable legal rights such as self ownership, but can only express these through his property. The right of self ownership, the right of the individual, are actually inferior to external property. Man, if Ayn Rand didn't reject the labour theory of value she would so be a socialist. The socialist claim that the producers should own the means of production so as to receive the full product of their labour is crazy similar to her own belief. I always felt like anarchists on both sides of the fence had such eerily similar goals, but just started from different assumptions. (yes I know she wasn't an anarchist, wat evz)