Re: socialism historical?
So what label would you use? Fabio I would avoid using the labels capitalism and socialism. Substitutes for capitalism: 1) private enterprise 2) free market; free enterprise; pure market 3) market economy 4) interventionism 5) mixed economy Substitutes for socialism: 1) forced redistribution 2) command economy 3) government ownership 4) worker cooperatives; worker ownership of capital 5) forced collectivism Fred Foldvary = [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Health insurance for kids
Jeffrey Rous wrote: When I was in grad school, my wife's health insurance policy through work allowed an employee to add a spouse for $1000 per year (I cannot remember the exact numbers, but these are close) or add a spouse and children for $2000 per year. And it didn't matter whether you had 1 child or 10. Since she worked for UNC, I figured it was a political decision. I'm pretty sure that it's not. My wife's private insurance works the same way. Unless regulations make the private sector copy the public sector. How can this be rational? At least for male employees, it's plausible that those with more children are both older and therefore more experienced, and more responsible/stable holding age constant. A guy with five kids is going to be very concerned about remaining employed. -Jeffrey Rous -- Prof. Bryan Caplan Department of Economics George Mason University http://www.bcaplan.com [EMAIL PROTECTED] The game of just supposing Is the sweetest game I know... And if the things we dream about Don't happen to be so, That's just an unimportant technicality. Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein, *Showboat*
Re: Wage-Price Controls Under Nixon
Actually, they support state capitalism under the name of progressivism or putting people first or some equally inane goo-goo slogan. Just about every part of the Progressive/New Deal agenda reflected the interests of big business in cartelizing and stabilizing the corporate economy; it was just sold to the public as a progressive restraint on big business. Please bear in mind that what was called socialism by democratic socialists in the 1920s would not have been recognized as such by most of the classical socialists of the nineteenth century. The difference reflects the New Class takeover of the working class movement, by Leninists and Fabians, at the turn of the century. Revisionist historians like Gabriel Kolko and James Weinstein called the phenomenon political capitalism or corporate liberalism. Murray Rothbard agreed with their analysis. Whatever you call it, it is organized capital acting through the state. The court intellectuals of corporate liberalism (Art Schlesinger) like to depict the movement as an idealistic attempt to set countervailing power against the giant corporations. And a lot of big business propagandists like to howl about how anti-business forces have won consistently. But in fact, it is a case of Brer Rabbit hollering Please don't fling me in that briar patch! From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Wage-Price Controls Under Nixon Date: Fri, 13 Jun 2003 21:58:42 EDT I tend to agree with Marc, but it's worth note that while no avowed socialist has ever gotten into the double-digits (Eugene V. Debs peaked at 6% in 1912), the Democratic Party has enacted virtually every plank in the 1928 Socialist Party platform, and the Republicans have come to accept virtually all of it too. Americans don't like to support something called socialism, but they often support socialism by some other name. David In a message dated 6/13/03 7:04:45 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: Well, the average American is not so pro-freedom as, say, Walter Williams, but considerably more so than the average Frenchman or German. Really? How do you measure this? Well, we can start with the fact that in the first-round of a typical presidential election in France, 2/3 of the votes go to candidates so far to the Left they make Ralph Nader look moderate, and about 1/2 of these votes, or 1/3 of the total, go to out-and-out Marxists of one sort or another, candidates who are avowed Trotskyites, Stalinists, etc. In U.S. presidential elections, no avowed socialist has *ever* garnered more than one or two percent of the vote. Marc Poitras _ Help STOP SPAM with the new MSN 8 and get 2 months FREE* http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail
Re: socialism historical?
Socialism is a historical term whose use has evolved over time. I believe it first appeared in an Owenite periodical, the London Cooperative Journal, in 1829 or 1830. The beginning of the classical socialist movement was the Ricardian socialist movement. They were inspired by two arguments of Ricardo's: 1) that the equilibrium value of commodities approximated producer prices when those commodities were in elastic supply, and that these producer prices corresponded to the embodied labor (including past labor embodied in capital); and 2) that profit, interest and rent were deductions from this exchange-value. From these doctrines, the Ricardian socialists deduced that profit, interest and rent derived from the exploitation of labor. The term Ricardian socialist applied most directly to English writers like Hodgskin, Thompson, Grey and Bray; but the same deductions from Ricardo occured to Proudhon, Rodbertus, Marx, and Warren before the middle of the century. Socialism is not by any means necessarily statist. The market-oriented Ricardian socialist Thomas Hodgskin, and the American individualist anarchist Tucker (who resembled each other closely in many ways), believed that the free market was the best route to socialism. They both viewed profit, interest and rent, not as natural outgrowths of a free market, but as the products of state-enforced privilege IN VIOLATION OF the free market. The central defining features of socialism, as Tucker defined them in State Socialism and Anarchism, are: 1) The belief that all exchange value is created by labor; and 2) that labor is entitled to all it creates. Tucker believed that this latter end could be best achieved by removing statist privileges like banking market entry barriers, legal tender laws, and enforcement of land ownership not based on occupancy and use. The resulting free market in land and credit would reduce the return on these factors to the labor value of providing credit and the labor value of improvements on land (plus economic rent, of course). I recently found a relevant statement on the issue by the Marxist Maurice Dobb, in his introduction to Marx's Toward a Critique of Political Economy. As Dobb rightly pointed out, the orthodox Marxist doctrine is that surplus value was a necessary outgrowth of wage labor, even in the freest of free markets. Even in such a laissez-faire environment, the difference between the value of labor-power and the value of labor's product would result from the inherent nature of wage labor. Profits would result, Marx said, even if all products were sold at exactly their values (i.e., the LTV describes how the market works now, not the ideal for a future utopia). His whole doctrine depended on the assumption that exploitation would result even in a free market, where all commodities were sold at value. As Marx said: If you cannot explain profit on this assumption [without bringing in state coercion], you cannot explain it at all. Dobb continues: The point of this can the better be appreciated if it is remembered that the school of writers to whom the name of Ricardian Socialists has been given (such as Thomas Hodgskin, William Thompson and John Bray), who can be said to have held a 'primitive' theory of exploitation, explained profit on capital as the product of superior bargaining power, lack of competition and 'unequal exchanges between Capital and Labour' (this bearing analogy with Eugen Duhring's 'force theory' which was castigated by Engels). This was the kind of explanation that Marx was avoiding rather than seeking. It did *not* make exploitation *consistent* with the law of value and market competition, but explained it by departures from, or imperfections in, the latter. To it there was an easy answer from the liberal economists and free traders: namely, 'join with us in demanding *really* free trade and then there can be no unequal exchanges and exploitation.' In fact, what Warren, Tucker, and market-oriented Ricardian Socialists like Hodgskin did was PRECISELY to take up this last challenge. But the way in which they did so did not please most liberal economists. Benjamin Tucker accepted Most's charge that he was merely a consistent Manchesterian, and adopted that label as a badge of honor. From: Fred Foldvary [EMAIL PROTECTED] Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: socialism historical? Date: Tue, 17 Jun 2003 11:40:43 -0700 (PDT) --- [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: government money, as it predates socialism, probably doesn't rightly fall under the category of socialism. Does the meaning of socialism include a time frame, so that a policy that is socialist after that time is not socialist before that time? What is socialism, what year does it take effect, and why is the time element involved? Fred Foldvary = [EMAIL PROTECTED] _ The new MSN 8: advanced junk mail protection and 2
Re: socialism historical?
--- [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: You seem to confuse the concept of subordinating the individual to a greater human collective to subordinating the individual to the will of the tyrant. But does not the practice of the subordination of the individual to the collective go back to ancient times, indeed to pre-historical tribal practice and belief? Fred Foldvary = [EMAIL PROTECTED]
labor supply
labor supply elasticity is near-zero... Prof. Bryan Caplan Does this take into account when workers can choose to work overtime, take more or less vacation, retire earlier or later, have a second household worker employed or not, have a second job or not, take time off without pay or not? Does this take into account that workers may migrate or change their commute destination? Also, if labor has a fixed supply, does this include the premium for human capital? Fred Foldvary = [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Kolko 40 Years Later
Kevin Carson's remarks on Kolko reminded me that I recently reread Kolko and had some comments to share. Just for background: Kolko's *Triumph of Conservatism* was written largely as a left-wing attack on mainstream liberalism. Kolko's message was that most of the regulations and government interventions of the Progressive Era that supposedly gave capitalism a human face merely made matters even worse for the common man. In his related volumes *Railroads and Regulation*, for example, Kolko argued that railroad regulation was designed by railroads themselves to keep rates UP under the fig leaf of consumer protection. Kolko was subsequently dismayed that free-market economists from Stigler to Rothbard eagerly accepted his thesis, arguing that Kolko had shown that laissez-faire would have been better than what emerged. And indeed that is largely what Kolko showed, though it scarcely occured to him that anyone would actually take the laissez-faire option seriously. Kolko's goal, rather, was to show the futility of trying to tame capitalism, in order to push mainstream liberals towards socialism. But enough background. On my re-read, I noticed the following. 1. Kolko frequently fails to distinguish between government policies that directly helped business, as opposed to policies that directly hurt business, but reduced the risk of socialist revolution. The whole idea of a government-enforced cartel, for example, is to raise profits above the laissez-faire level. This is rather different from business consenting to moderate welfare state policies that reduce profits below the laissez-faire level, but arguably reduce the risk of total elimination of the profit system. Now this point is important because if you take the risk of socialist revolution seriously, then ANY welfare state measure that falls short of expropriation could be said to help business. This in turn makes Kolko's thesis rather trivial - or, more precisely, an expression of his deluded over-estimate of the risk of socialist revolution in the U.S. 2. Kolko frequently fails to distinguish businesses' desire for *standardized* regulation as opposed to *more* regulation. Very often, if you read Kolko carefully, it becomes apparent that businesses lobbied the federal government as a reaction to the costly patchwork of state-level regulation. In other words, while the naive reading of Kolko makes business preferences look like this: federal regulation state regulation laissez-faire His accounts are often perfectly compatible with: laissez-faire federal regulation state regulation 3. Kolko frequently fails to distinguish the do something motive from the cartelization motive. In many cases, he explains that legislators were under public pressure to do something about a perceived problem - say business abuses. Given these circumstances, businesses would naturally lobby to contain the damage - to push for cosmetic rather than substantive changes. Again, this does not mean that business wanted regulation. They could easily have had the preference ordering: laissez-faire cosmetic regulation substantive regulation 4. While Kolko discusses trends in concentration ratios and the like, rarely does he come close to replicating his results for railroads. There we have a clear mechanism for increasing railroad profits - rate regulation - along with a smoking gun - railroads lobbying for precisely that. When Kolko moves to things like the FTC, however, he has nothing comparable. What did the FTC actually DO to reduce competition? Launch some politically-motivated antitrust cases? That is hardly a plausible *mechanism* for setting up a sustainable cartel. 5. Kolko fails to consider (excusable, perhaps, given that his work predates modern information economics) some plausible market failure rationales for how regulation would indirectly help the public BY directly helping business. He goes over meat regulation in detail, for example, and shows how the meat industry lobbied heavily for federal meat regulation. The main debate, says Kolko, was over who would foot the bill for meat inspections. Now if this were a standard asymmetric information story, the meat inspections would raise demand for meat, initially benefiting the meat suppliers. But this would attract entry, and ultimately it would be consumers who would benefit. Tax versus business finance for inspectors would ultimately be an issue not of public-to-meat interest redistribution, but meat-eating public versus non-meating-eating public. Now Kolko gives a number of facts that cut against this story. But the idea that consumers might indirectly benefit from measures that directly benefit business is not on his radar. 6. I still like Kolko's discussion of turn-of-the-century deconcencentration trends, but the rest of his work makes me wonder how trustworthy it is. And the book has other great stuff that I
Re: correction
But in areas where the supply of labor is relatively inelastic, such as scientific-technical workers, the state steps in by socializing the cost of education and training. For example, that program so beloved of progressives who await the second coming of FDR: the G.I. Bill. In a partially analogous situation, where the local supply of manufacturing labor was rendered unnaturally inelastic by the laws of settlement, the state came to the rescue by acting as procurer of labor, selling workers from the parish poor houses in labor-rich areas to those in the labor-poor manufacturing areas. From: Bryan Caplan [EMAIL PROTECTED] Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: correction Date: Wed, 18 Jun 2003 14:26:58 -0400 Of course I meant to say that labor supply elasticity is near-zero, not near-infinte. Thanks to Alex for pointing it out. -- Prof. Bryan Caplan Department of Economics George Mason University http://www.bcaplan.com [EMAIL PROTECTED] The game of just supposing Is the sweetest game I know... And if the things we dream about Don't happen to be so, That's just an unimportant technicality. Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein, *Showboat* _ MSN 8 with e-mail virus protection service: 2 months FREE* http://join.msn.com/?page=features/virus
Re: socialism historical?
In a message dated 6/18/03 2:03:39 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: But does not the practice of the subordination of the individual to the collective go back to ancient times, indeed to pre-historical tribal practice and belief? Fred Foldvar in the ancient world we clearly have a good deal of subordination of the individual to the strongest individual or to the priest-king (the strongest individual?) but I'm not so clear about subordination of the individual to the collective. It became an article of faith in the 19th-century that pre-historic humans practiced primitive communism, but I'm not sure there's much evidence to support that faith. We do know that when Americans came to some of the pacific islands that theory said should be practicing primitive communism that they actually had a complex system of private property, and that Americans imposed primitive communism on them to force them into the right stage of history. David
Re: Wage-Price Controls Under Nixon
From: Bryan Caplan [EMAIL PROTECTED] Kevin Carson wrote: I'd say just the opposite, that SS is an important component of state capitalism; and like most regulations and welfare spending, it serves to cartelize the economy. By acting through the state to organize pension programs, the large corporations effectively function as a state-enforced cartel (with the added virtue of non-defectability), and at least partially remove old age pensions as an issue of competion in personnel costs. This is just silly. If the situation was competitive initially, employers just switch to cash compensation. Indeed, this is just a variation on the popular fallacy that employers really do pay half of SS just because the law says so, when in reality it depends on labor supply and demand elasticities (and since the former is near-infinite, employers pay essentially 0% whether the law says they pay 0% or 100%). Regardless of whether pension costs are really passed on to workers, the supply of pension benefits is nevertheless an issue of competition between employers unless it is cartelized. Are you suggesting that collusion in regard to some aspect of competition is irrelevant to the total competitiveness of the situation? Why, then, the recurring talk of fighting the Canadian national health in the WTO as giving a competitive advantage to Canadian employers against U.S. firms that provide private coverage to employees? And although demand elasticities are quite finite in an oligopoly market, they are nevertheless there. So remuneration of labor remains an issue of competition between firms as far as the consumer is concerned. The principle remains: when the state intervenes in any area of the free market, it is effectively removing that area from the realm of competition, to the same extent as if corporations came to the arrangement by private agreement. -- Prof. Bryan Caplan Department of Economics George Mason University http://www.bcaplan.com [EMAIL PROTECTED] The game of just supposing Is the sweetest game I know... And if the things we dream about Don't happen to be so, That's just an unimportant technicality. Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein, *Showboat* _ Protect your PC - get McAfee.com VirusScan Online http://clinic.mcafee.com/clinic/ibuy/campaign.asp?cid=3963
Re: Wage-Price Controls Under Nixon
Post-modern liberalism didn't spring full-blown into being like Athena from the forehead of Zeus. It evolved rather over time from classical liberalism through several fairly-distinct phases. In the earliest stages of progressivism people still by and large believed in free markets and private property, but believed that left entirely to themselves, free markets produced monopolies which had to be broken by antitrust action. These early antitrust progressive are sometimes known as Brandeisians, and we see their imprint heavily upon Wilson's New Freedom platform. The next stage of progressivism invovled allowing the big businesses to remain unbroken, but regulating them with the federal government, a few we find heavily influencing TR's New Nationalism platform of 1912. New Nationalism contained no explicit calls for cartelization, but it evolved into Hoover's New Individualism (a rather contradicatory name for what it described) in which government would, mostly informally, support the cartelization agreements of Big Business. Hoover's voluntary cartelization finally, by the New Deal, evolved into outright calls for goverment-forced cartelization that heavily animated the NIRA of 1933. It's worth note that the Brandeisians fought the NIRA bitterly, and their influence on the Supreme Court got it declared unConstitutional. Cartelization remained anathema to old Progressives right through the New Deal. David Levenstam In a message dated 6/18/03 12:24:15 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: Actually, they support state capitalism under the name of progressivism or putting people first or some equally inane goo-goo slogan. Just about every part of the Progressive/New Deal agenda reflected the interests of big business in cartelizing and stabilizing the corporate economy; it was just sold to the public as a progressive restraint on big business. Please bear in mind that what was called socialism by democratic socialists in the 1920s would not have been recognized as such by most of the classical socialists of the nineteenth century. The difference reflects the New Class takeover of the working class movement, by Leninists and Fabians, at the turn of the century. Revisionist historians like Gabriel Kolko and James Weinstein called the phenomenon political capitalism or corporate liberalism. Murray Rothbard agreed with their analysis. Whatever you call it, it is organized capital acting through the state. The court intellectuals of corporate liberalism (Art Schlesinger) like to depict the movement as an idealistic attempt to set countervailing power against the giant corporations. And a lot of big business propagandists like to howl about how anti-business forces have won consistently. But in fact, it is a case of Brer Rabbit hollering Please don't fling me in that briar patch!
