Capitalism.

[ktttn]

Continuation from an Off Topic thread.

[Bitcoiner333]

Capitalism is like a cancer its "Growth for the sake of growth" so like a cancer,but TRUE socialism and Anarchism is the Natural order..

[Mike Christ]

To be frank, I don't care if you prefer capitalism, communism, or socialism; any of these systems beneath the state results in a perversion of the intended outcome.  We don't have capitalism in America, for that would imply "government-regulated free trade".  They're not compatible; you either have capitalism, or you have government, but there's no such thing as free trade that isn't free.  What we have here in America is corporatism, and that is wage slavery; it's very rare for people to own businesses anymore, rather, they work for the same businesses, all controlled by a few heads, and most of the money in the world gets redirected to those people who then hand the money back out (in small doses) to the people they employ.  Statist capitalism is no better than statist communism or statist socialism.  Either way you wanna mask it, you're still beneath the thumb of something which has the bigger guns.  Give me anarchy and the rest doesn't matter that much to me, I'll roll with whatever everyone else around me wants to roll with.

OTOH, defining which system works best under anarchism is something we're not gonna answer until we actually get to that point.  Only thing that really separates capitalism from the others is the idea of storing one's labor in a currency and trading that stored-labor for other people's labor.  Socialism is supposedly a step above that (since socialism is a broad subject I have no idea what anyone's specific idea of socialism is) but I'll be damned when a private life becomes a public matter.  I don't want the public to interfere with my life, nor do I want to interfere with others, which is why I'd rather not participate; when enough people say this, socialism ceases to function, and you're back to either basic capitalism or installing government.  Communism, it can work in small societies, provided you're next to everything you'll ever need to live, that being surplus of food and water and all the other goodies we like to live comfortable lives, but if you're one of the many unlucky ones who live in an area which can't adequately supply these things locally, you either have to move to a place which does, or resort to bartering for your goods--in other words, participate in trade, and it's possible to do this in a communistic way, e.g., trading my good for your good, but it'd just be easier to store our wealth in money and use that as a form of trade.  I've yet to see a way to participate in global communism, or how two people from either ends of the world can get each other's goods without participating in the free market, but if there's a way, I'm all ears.  Communism seems to imply that all people are going to be farmers and bakers etc., for I don't see how specialization can occur, when you have a group of scientists who are fed and clothed and given all the necessities they need to work, for we must then figure out who, exactly, ensures everyone gets their fair share of things; is there an anarchistic approach to it?  I saw anarchistic communism in a Spanish documentary and thought it was neat, but I'm having trouble seeing how it'll function worldwide without any help from money.

[hawkeye]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalism

Capitalism is an economic system characterized by private or corporate ownership of capital goods, by investments that are determined by private decision, and by prices, production, and the distribution of goods that are determined mainly by competition in a free market.[

If free trade means no restrictions on trade then clearly that's not what we have.  (certain types of drugs are deemed illegal as one example).
Wage slavery?  What does that mean exactly?  Workers work voluntarily and are paid a wage.
Clearly not exclusively either statist or anarchist. 

And it isn't growth for the sake of growth.  Goods are created to serve humans wants and needs.  If they didn't they wouldn't be produced. 

Unless of course the government says they should in order to keep people in jobs.  Then you have production for the sake of production and huge waste of resources.

[herzmeister]

unlike what most US Libertarians want to believe:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalism

private or corporate ownership of capital goods
[...]
private decision

that's why you need a state in capitalism, because you need an entity that tells you what's private and what's public.

true anarchism does not need property rights. 

[NewLiberty]

unlike what most US Libertarians want to believe:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalism

private or corporate ownership of capital goods
[...]
private decision

that's why you need a state in capitalism, because you need an entity that tells you what's private and what's public.

true anarchism does not need property rights.  

Is it necessary that an entity that tells you what is private/personal and what is public be a state?  

[herzmeister]

Is it necessary that an entity that tells you what is private/personal and what is public be a state?  

The dichotomy is a false one and wouldn't exist in the first place.

[NewLiberty]

Is it necessary that an entity that tells you what is private/personal and what is public be a state?  

The dichotomy is a false one and wouldn't exist in the first place.

Forgive my ignorance as I can not see what you are thinking about.
Do you refer to the state/non-state dichotomy, the private/public dichotomy, or something else?
This is less of an answer than I'd hoped for to a claim that begs the question. 

Let us start again and see if we can get to a slightly less circular reasoning answer.  How does capitalism require a state?

[herzmeister]

How does capitalism require a state?

To protect your property.

[wdmw]

How does capitalism require a state?

To protect your property.

I can save you time; I believe the arguments are all laid out here.
http://www.governmentisgood.com/articles.php?aid=13
(Yes, there is a website called 'Government is Good'.  This is not a subjective website.)

DISCLAIMER - the following is the opinion of Douglas J. Amy, Professor of Politics at Mount Holyoke College, an unapologetic cheerleader for the institution of the state.

Limited Liability Laws - Without limited liability laws, the economy would not have access to the capital it needs to grow and prosper.
Property Rights - Corporate property rights – one of the main legal instruments that insulate business from government power – can be created and maintained only by government.
Law and Order - Without the rule of law, our economy would resemble the “mafia capitalism” that Russia has suffered from in its transition to capitalism.
Bankruptcy Protection - Bankruptcy laws protected otherwise healthy businesses that were temporarily short of funds.
A Stable Money Supply - Widespread commerce and a stable economy both require a stable and dependable money system – one in which consumers and merchants have faith. This can only be provided and maintained by the federal government.
Patents and Copyrights - Bill Gates likes to think of himself as a self-made man, but he would not be one of the richest men in the world if the government did not make it illegal for anyone but Microsoft to copy and sell Windows.
Banking Regulation and Insurance - Banks cannot survive runs because they have loaned out most of the money deposited with them and therefore cannot pay it out to a large number of depositors at once...government was there to guarantee those deposits
Corporate Charters - Capitalism today is corporate capitalism. But the corporation itself is a creation of government. Corporations can come into being only through charters: the legal instruments by which state governments allow businesses to incorporate.
Commercial Transaction Laws - Who would sell goods if they couldn’t be sure they would be paid, and who would buy goods if they couldn’t be sure they would receive them?

[herzmeister]

[...]

Maybe some good points if you prefer a society similar to today, just without 'em damn gubbernment. Then the author explains why it's not possible from his perspective, as a conservative that he seems to be, praising corporations, intellectual property and strict private property.

My viewpoint is quite from the opposite direction and more akin to this:

http://c4ss.org/content/4043

Anarcho-”Capitalism” is impossible

Many anarchists of various stripes have made the claim that anarcho-capitalists aren’t really anarchists because anarchism entails anti-capitalism.  I happen to think this is actually backwards.  If they genuinely wish to eliminate the state, they are anarchists, but they aren’t really capitalists, no matter how much they want to claim they are.

People calling themselves “anarcho-capitalists” usually want to define “capitalism” as the same thing as a free market, and “socialism” as state intervention against such.  But what then is a free market?  If you mean simply all voluntary transactions that occur without state interference, then it’s a circular and redundant definition.  In that case, all anarchists are “anarcho-capitalists”, even the most die-hard anarcho-syndicalist.

Defining capitalism as a system of private property is equally problematic, because where would you draw the line between private and public?  Under a state, state property is considered “public” but as an anarchist, you know that’s a sham.  It’s private property owned by a group that calls themselves the State.  Whether something is owned by 10 people or 10 million doesn’t make it more or less “private”.

Going a bit deeper, there may be issues about how property rights are defined, and the nature of ownership between different sorts of anarchists.  Obviously, anarcho-capitalists do not want the government to decide who owns what property.  So even at their hardest of hard-core propertarianism, they are still effectively anarchists; they just have a different idea of how an anarchist society will organize itself.

But the focus on goals, I think, is very much over-emphasized in anarchist communities, at the expense of looking at means.  Goals sometimes lead people toward certain means, but it is the means that determine results, not the goals.  And if the anarcho-capitalists follow anarchist means, the results will be anarchy, not some impossible “anarcho-capitalism”.

Anarchy does not mean social utopia, it means a society where there is no privileged authority.  There will still be social evils to be dealt with under anarchy.  But anarchy is an important step toward fighting those evils without giving birth to all new ones.

My take on the impossibility of anarcho-capitalism is simply as follows:

Under anarchism, mass accumulation and concentration of capital is impossible.
Without concentration of capital, wage slavery is impossible.
Without wage slavery, there’s nothing most people would recognize as “capitalism”.
The first part of this, that mass accumulation and concentration of capital is impossible under anarchism, has several aspects.

One big one is that the cost of protecting property rises dramatically as the amount of property owned increases, without a state.  This is something that rarely gets examined by libertarians, but it’s crucial.

One reason for this is that large scale property ownership is never all geographically massed.  A billionaire doesn’t have all his property in one small geographic area.  In fact, this sort of absentee-ownership is necessary to become a billionaire in the first place.  Most super-wealthy own stock in large corporations that have many factories, retail outlets, offices and the like all over the place.  Leaving aside whether joint-stock companies are even likely in anarchy for now, this geographical dispersion means that the cost of protecting all of this property is enormous.  Not only because of the sheer number of guardians necessary, but because one must pay those guardians enough that they don’t just decide to take over the local outlet.  You could hire guardians to watch the guardians, but that in itself becomes a new problem…

But the property needs to be protected not only from domestic trespassers, but from foreign invasion as well.  Let us imagine that an anarcho-capitalist society does manage to form, Ancapistan, if we will.  Next to Ancapistan is a statist capitalist nation, let us call it Aynrandia.  Well, the Aynrandians decide “hmm, Ancapistan lacks a state to protect its citizens.  We should take over and give them one, for their own good of course.” At this point the billionaires in Ancapistan must either capitulate, welcome the Aynrandians, and Ancapistan is no more, or they must raise a private army to repel the Aynrandians.  Not only will the second option be ridiculously expensive, for the reasons I’ve outlined above, but a lot of property will get destroyed if the Aynrandians decide to engage in modern total warfare.  Ahh but what about all the middle class people in Ancapistan, won’t they form a militia to defend themselves?  Well yes, but they won’t form a militia to defend a bunch of billionaires’ property.

The anarcho-capitalists often have a nonsensical rosy picture of the boss-worker relationship that has no basis in reality.  Almost no one wakes up and goes in to work thinking “thank the heavens for my wonderful boss, who was kind enough to employ a loser like me”.  When external invasion arrives, the middle classes will defend themselves and their own property.  But they’re not going to risk their lives for Wal-mart without getting a piece of the action.

So, due to the rising cost of protecting property, there comes a threshold level, where accumulating more capital becomes economically inefficient, simply in terms of guarding the property.  Police and military protection is the biggest subsidy that the State gives to the rich.  In some sense the Objectivists are correct that capitalism requires a government to protect private property.

Furthermore, without a state-protected banking/financial system, accumulating endless high profits is well nigh impossible.  The police/military state helps keep the rich rich, but it is the financial system that helped them get rich in the first place, at everyone else’s expense.

First off, state-chartered banking creates a limited supply of sources from which one can receive banking services.  This cartelization allows them to get away with a fairly large amount of fractional-reserve banking, in which more is loaned out than actually exists.  By increasing the in-use money supply in a one-sided manner, this creates a situation where the people who take out loans are effectively stealing from everyone else.  Companies that finance expansion force their competitors to do so or fail, by bidding up the price of resources.  By raising the cost of entry, this limits and reduces the amount of competitors in every industry, driving wages down.

And the current fiat money/central banking regime, by constantly inflating the money supply, destroys the ability of people to save, thus forcing them to borrow in order to start or expand a business, to buy a home or a car.  It literally and directly concentrates the supply of capital in the hands of a smaller and smaller group of people, destroying savings and feeding effective purchasing power to those with higher credit ratings.  This drives down wages and makes people dependent on those who still have large amounts of capital to hire them.

Under anarchy, anyone could lend money to anyone, there would be no special thing known as a “bank” per se (or to put it a different way, anyone could put up a shingle that said “bank”).  Without legal tender and the ability to create large amounts of money out of thin air (the threat of “bank runs” and/or devaluation of bank notes would effectively limit this to a very small level, enough to minimally pay for itself at most), the money supply would no longer be in the hands of a cartel.  Borrowing would become rare, and saving would become widespread, distributing capital more and more widely, rather than more and more narrowly, thus diluting the price of capital.  Under such a system, any shift in demand would be met by a vast array of competitors, driving profits back down to the average.

Obviously, under anarchism, such a thing as “intellectual property” wouldn’t exist, so any business model that relies on patents and copyrights to make money would not exist either.  This would contribute to the dilution I mentioned above.

As the price of capital is diluted, the share of production that goes to the workers increases.  What we would eventually see is essentially, a permanent global labor shortage.  Companies would compete for workers, rather than the other way around.

What is likely, judging from history, is that something like a private syndicalism would arise, where owners of value-producing property would lease it out to organizations of workers, simply because it would be easier for them than trying to hire people on a semi-permanent basis.

Mining was organized like this for quite a while, for instance, until the advent of bank-financed joint stock mining companies, which bought out most of the prospector/owners in the 1800s.

So we see, even assuming an “anarcho-capitalist” property regime, anything recognizable as “capitalism” to anyone else could not exist.  In fact the society would look a lot like what “anarcho-socialists” think of as “socialism”.  Not exactly like it, but much closer than anything they’d imagine as capitalism.

However, under anarchism, even such a strict property regime is not guaranteed.  There is no way to impose it on a community that wants to operate a different way.  I predict there will lots of different communities and systems that will compete for people to live in them and whatever seems to work the best will tend to spread.  There’s nothing the anarcho-capitalists could do to prevent people from agreeing to treat property in a more fluid or communal manner than they’d prefer.  Nor is there anything the anarcho-socialists could do to prevent a community from organizing property in a more rigid or individualistic manner than they’d prefer.

For, just as anarcho-capitalism is impossible, anarcho-socialism is also impossible, depending on how you define things.  In reality all of us who are opposed to the state, as that great fiction that some people have a special right to do things that anyone else doesn’t, are anarchists, and what will happen under anarchy?  EVERYTHING.

[NewLiberty]

How does capitalism require a state?

To protect your property.

If I'm happy to let lex mercatoria suffice for that, have you anything else?  Seems pretty thin grounds for capitalism's need of a state.

Maybe it does require one, but I don't see how.  
If it does, that is a place where work is needed to reduce the burden on that requirement, and thereby lower the costs for human interaction.

The governmentisgood site looks more like arguments for how government has interfered with free trade and made it less effective.  
A list of how government has attacked free trade is not much of a requirement for government from free trade.  

[crumbs]

How does capitalism require a state?

To protect your property.

If I'm happy to let lex mercatoria suffice for that, have you anything else?  Seems pretty thin grounds for capitalism's need of a state.

Maybe it does require one, but I don't see how.  
If it does, that is a place where work is needed to reduce the burden on that requirement, and thereby lower the costs for human interaction.

The governmentisgood site looks more like arguments for how government has interfered with free trade and made it less effective.  
A list of how government has attacked free trade is not much of a requirement for government from free trade.  

Wait, so if lex mercatoria works so well ... what happened to it?  Shouldn't it still be around?  If it's not good enough to protect itself from vanishing, what makes you think it'll be good enough for your property?

[NewLiberty]

How does capitalism require a state?

To protect your property.

If I'm happy to let lex mercatoria suffice for that, have you anything else?  Seems pretty thin grounds for capitalism's need of a state.

Maybe it does require one, but I don't see how.  
If it does, that is a place where work is needed to reduce the burden on that requirement, and thereby lower the costs for human interaction.

The governmentisgood site looks more like arguments for how government has interfered with free trade and made it less effective.  
A list of how government has attacked free trade is not much of a requirement for government from free trade.  

Wait, so if lex mercatoria works so well ... what happened to it?  Shouldn't it still be around?  If it's not good enough to protect itself from vanishing, what makes you think it'll be good enough for your property?

Have you not noticed?
It is pretty much exactly the mechanism used in this forum.
It seems to form almost spontaneously where there is trade without state intervention.

[crumbs]

[...]
Wait, so if lex mercatoria works so well ... what happened to it?  Shouldn't it still be around?  If it's not good enough to protect itself from vanishing, what makes you think it'll be good enough for your property?

Have you not noticed?
It is pretty much exactly the mechanism used in this forum.
It seems to form almost spontaneously where there is trade without state intervention.

I noticed that it used to be much more widespread than ... this forum & this forum ain't even a coon's age yet

[NewLiberty]

[...]
Wait, so if lex mercatoria works so well ... what happened to it?  Shouldn't it still be around?  If it's not good enough to protect itself from vanishing, what makes you think it'll be good enough for your property?

Have you not noticed?
It is pretty much exactly the mechanism used in this forum.
It seems to form almost spontaneously where there is trade without state intervention.

I noticed that it used to be much more widespread than ... this forum & this forum ain't even a coon's age yet

So, how is it working / not-working for you?  Do you need more government?

[NewLiberty]

A Stable Money Supply - Widespread commerce and a stable economy both require a stable and dependable money system – one in which consumers and merchants have faith. This can only be provided and maintained by the federal government.

This one particularly stood out as a bit absurd to be suggested here, and to me.

[crumbs]

[...]
Wait, so if lex mercatoria works so well ... what happened to it?  Shouldn't it still be around?  If it's not good enough to protect itself from vanishing, what makes you think it'll be good enough for your property?

Have you not noticed?
It is pretty much exactly the mechanism used in this forum.
It seems to form almost spontaneously where there is trade without state intervention.

I noticed that it used to be much more widespread than ... this forum & this forum ain't even a coon's age yet

So, how is it working / not-working for you?  Do you need more government?

Can't say fer shoo, but isn't repeating the thing that didn't work out called "batshit crazy"?

[NewLiberty]

[...]
Wait, so if lex mercatoria works so well ... what happened to it?  Shouldn't it still be around?  If it's not good enough to protect itself from vanishing, what makes you think it'll be good enough for your property?

Have you not noticed?
It is pretty much exactly the mechanism used in this forum.
It seems to form almost spontaneously where there is trade without state intervention.

I noticed that it used to be much more widespread than ... this forum & this forum ain't even a coon's age yet

So, how is it working / not-working for you?  Do you need more government?

Can't say fer shoo, but isn't repeating the thing that didn't work out called "batshit crazy"?

When you say "didn't work" what exactly do you mean?
lex merc is the foundation of all contract law worldwide today.  It existed without states and with them equally well.

That would be like saying health care doesn't work because governments also do it.  Weird eh?

[crumbs]

[...]
Wait, so if lex mercatoria works so well ... what happened to it?  Shouldn't it still be around?  If it's not good enough to protect itself from vanishing, what makes you think it'll be good enough for your property?

Have you not noticed?
It is pretty much exactly the mechanism used in this forum.
It seems to form almost spontaneously where there is trade without state intervention.

I noticed that it used to be much more widespread than ... this forum & this forum ain't even a coon's age yet

So, how is it working / not-working for you?  Do you need more government?

Can't say fer shoo, but isn't repeating the thing that didn't work out called "batshit crazy"?

When you say "didn't work" what exactly do you mean?
lex merc is the foundation of all contract law worldwide today.  It existed without states and with them equally well.

That would be like saying health care doesn't work because governments also do it.  Weird eh?

When i say "didn't work," i mean just that.  It failed so badly that it necessitated a whole new layer of laws, states,  etc. -- all the stuff you hate (and i'm not a fan of either).
In other words, it couldn't protect itself from being displaced by new, less attractive & more oppressive law, it failed to protect itself from impingement by governments, states, whatever you want to call "what is."
Edit:  And there's nothing to suggest that this time it'll be any different
Edit2:  Healthcare?  Not seeing the parallels.  If you were calling us to abandon antibiotics, give up on sterilization & go back to using herbs & spices, then the analogy becomes sound