Re: How do I convince New Agers that not everybody should get the same wage?
[Note--I believe I sent this to John Hull instead of to the list. I apologize. If it's already been posted, my apologies for the duplication as well] I think they're operating on the same variant of the labor theory of value that inspired the labor note systems of the Owenites and Josiah Warren. One of the best critics of this variant, believe it or not, was Karl Marx. According to Marx, the law of value worked *through* the market price system, and depended on it for its realization. It was only through the feedback of prices that the producer could determine whether his labor was socially necessary; it was only through the entry and exit of market actors, in response to price signals, that price was caused to approximate labor-value. The labor theories of both Marx and Ricardo did not merely implicitly assume price fluctuation, but depended on it. It was only through the process of competition over time, and the response of suppliers and buyers to the fluctuating market price, that continually caused equilibrium price to gravitate around labor value. And Marx said as much explicitly. Marx and Engels were in complete agreement with the classical political economists on the role of competition in regulating the law of value. Engels, in his Preface to Marx's Poverty of Philosophy, ridiculed the utopian socialist notion of making labor the basis of a medium of exchange. The market forces of supply and demand were needed to inform the producer of the social demand for his product, and to establish the normal amount of social labor necessary for the production of a given commodity. So the deviation of price from value at any given time was not a violation of the law of value, but its driving mechanism: In modern capitalist society each industrial capitalist produces on his own account what he likes, how he likes, and as much as he likes. The quantity socially demanded is for him an unknown magnitude, and he does not know the quality of objects demanded any more than their quantity Ultimately demand is satisfied in some fashion, ill or well, and generally production is definitely regulated by the objects demanded. How is the reconciliation of this contradiction effected? By competition. And how does that arrive at this solution? Simply by depreciating below their labor value the commodities which are by reason of their quality or quantity useless or unnecessary, ...and in making the producers feel, ...that they have manufactured articles absolutely useless or unnecessary, or that they have manufactured a superfluity of otherwise useful articles. From that two things follow: First, the continual deviation of the price of commodities in relation to the value of commodities is the necessary condition by which alone the value of commodities can exist. It is only by the fluctuations of competition, and following that, of the price of commodities, that the law of value realizes itself in the production of commodities and that the determination of value by the labor time socially necessary becomes a reality In a society of producers of exchangeable commodities, to wish to determine value by labor time by interdicting competition from establishing this determination of value in the simple form by which it can do this--in influencing its price, is to show, at least in this connection, the habitual utopian misunderstanding of economic laws It was only by the market price system, and its laws of supply and demand, that the production of isolated producers [was] accomodated to the total social demand Marx made very much the same argument in the main body of The Poverty of Philosophy: it was market price that signalled the producer how much to produce, and thus regulated price according to the law of value. It is not the sale of any product whatever at the price of its cost of production which constitutes the relation of proportion of supply and demand, or the proportional quota of this product relatively to the whole of production; it is the variations of demand and supply which fix for the producer the quantity in which it is necessary to produce a given product in order to get in exchange at least the cost of production. And as these variations are continued, there is also a continual movement of withdrawal and of application of capitals with regard to the different branches of industry Competition realises the law according to which the relative value of a product is determined by the labor time necessary to produce it. Neither the classicals nor Marx, however, were very clear on *why* labor should create exchange-value: the subjective disutility of labor for the laborer.A lump of coal does not have to be persuaded to bring its services to market, by being offered a price that (in its estimation) makes it worth while. A laborer does. I have dealt with these issues fairly intensively in the (very rough) draft chapters of Mutualist Economics at From: john hull [EMAIL
Re: recycling
In the town where I used to live, (Lowell, Ark.), the sanitation company left a recycling bin at every house. At the same time, it introduced an optional program where you paid a fee of $1 per month plus $1 per trash bag. I recycled because it was convenient and worth my while. I put all my newspapers, glass jars, etc., in the bin, and composted my kitchen scraps for the garden. After that, I only had to buy two or three bags a month. Whether the program was a net gain for the garbage people, I don't know. It significantly cut down on landfill use, I think. I'm now living in an apartment with a dumpster, so I don't pay a sanitation fee. But most Fayetteville city residents are covered by a program similar to that in Lowell, with a free recycling bin. Here they get 52 bags up front for a flat fee, and have to buy extras. Believe it or not, the people around here are whining that it's not fair that they have to pay for the bags they use after the first 52. But I've noticed, driving around, houses with six bags out front, only half-full and loosely packed. And the bins are usually nowhere to be seen. So what these people really want is for the frugal to pay higher rates to subsidize their laziness. I won't recycle unless I get paid for the materials or it saves me some money, as in the previous instances. But in this case, it was virtually no trouble at all, and cut my trash bill down to almost nothing. It infuriates me that a bunch of Snopeses who aren't smart enough to take advantage of such a program want to ruin it for the rest of us. From: Jason DeBacker [EMAIL PROTECTED] Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: recycling Date: Wed, 5 Nov 2003 21:45:35 -0600 Hi all, Recently, I was listening to a radio program about garbage. It was an NPR program, so I was surprised to hear them talking about how recycling may not be worth it. However, they did say that while recycling glass and plastic may not be an efficient use of resources, the said that recycling paper is. What got me, is that I never remember seeing recycling centers that pay for pounds of paper. They pay for aluminum and other metals and even glass, I think, but not for paper (or plastic). If recycling paper is worth it in terms of saved energy and raw material usage, wouldn't someone be paying for scrap paper? What are the major factors determining the value of goods in the recyclables market? Another question might be, why do people pay for a service that picks up recyclables at their door- why doesnt anyone offer to take them for free (or even pay) so that they can then cash the used good in at the recycling center? People dont pay for the Salvation Army volunteers to pick up things Regards, Jason DeBacker _ MSN Shopping upgraded for the holidays! Snappier product search... http://shopping.msn.com
Re: Kolko 40 Years Later
From: Bryan Caplan [EMAIL PROTECTED] Kevin Carson wrote: They are indeed two entirely different cases. The latter case, of welfare state concessions, is productively examined in Piven and Cloward's *Regulating the Poor*. To a certain extent, the welfare state is something forced on the ruling class from above, rather than a positive good for it. Then again, maybe the ruling class is the median voter, and the welfare state neither raises its income nor appreciably reduces largely imaginary dangers of political instability. I'm pretty dubious of both public choice and interest group pluralism models of the U.S. political system. G. William Domhoff, a power elite school sociologist, pretty effectively demolished them. The elite does indeed sometimes respond to electoral pressure, but it is the governing class that shapes the set of alternatives the electorate decides between and decides the form the policy will take. And the final form is one designed to coopt or deflect as much popular pressure as possible while preserving the essential interests of the governing class. Mills and Domhoff have shown how high the degree of organizational interconnection is between oligopoly corporations, the regulatory state, and all the other centralized institutions that dominate our society. And the actions of the state most structurally central to the existing system never become political issues because, having bipartisan acceptance among policy elites, they are never articulated as issues. A majority of the public opposed NAFTA, but only fringe elements in both parties articulated that opposition. The mainsteam of the political class, in both parties, saw it as self-evidently good. And the Uruguay Round of GATT was so universally supported by the corporate/foundation/political classes that it didn't even appear on the radar screen. The two parties are half an inch to the left and right of center, respectively, and share about 75% of their views in common. These views include all the structural bases of state capitalism. They differ mainly on cultural/lifestyle issues like abortion and gun control, and on the proper size and role of the welfare state in making the existing state capitalist system more stable or tolerable. But the structure of state capitalism itself is not an issue. And (at the risk of being dismissed as rather silly), it partially cartelizes the portion of the wage package that goes to providing against absolute destitution and removes it as an issue of competition. Yes, this is even sillier. Subsidizing unemployment reduces labor supply and therefore raises wages for the employed. But both things (the cartelization of the unemployment premium portion of wages, and the encouragement of unemployment) might be true, ceteris paribus. The question is which tendency is stronger. It seems like no matter what exists you are going to put a interventionism is a plot by corporate interests to advance its material interests spin on it. It seems pretty commonsensical to me that the policies of a state will reflect the institutional power structure and the groups controlling it. But corporate interests are not by any means inevitably the dominant group. In American state capitalism and in the main European mixed economy variant, I think they are. But corporate interests have arguably been reduced to the junior partner in Swedish-style socialism, in favor of the social engineers and planners. And even in America, the content of corporate interests is modified quite a bit by the fact that the corporation and the corporatist economy are organized around the culture of professionalism/planning. What I doubt is that any kind of genuine democracy can exist except direct and participatory democracy (with some room for loose federation with recallable delegates, etc.). Once an organization is large enough to exclude face-to-face control by the governed, and to rest on some kind of representative system, it will serve the interests of those actually controlling its machinery. So if by corporate interests you mean those controlling the machinery of the corporatist system, I'd have to say you're right. But this includes educrats and social workers as wel as coupon clippers. -- Prof. Bryan Caplan Department of Economics George Mason University http://www.bcaplan.com [EMAIL PROTECTED] Infancy conforms to nobody: all conform to it, so that one babe commonly makes four or five out of the adults who prattle and play to it. --Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance _ Tired of spam? Get advanced junk mail protection with MSN 8. http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail
Re: Wage-Price Controls Under Nixon
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] 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. You're right on this. But it might be more accurate to say that at any given time progressivism was a mix of relatively libertarian, modified laissez-faire liberal types (the Brandeisians and J.A. Hobson across the pond) and more authoritarian types like the Fabians and their American counterparts. The libertarian end of the spectrum, certainly, there were things like the recall and public initiative. But this same good government movement, from the very beginning, also favored city-wide school boards, larger wards or at-large aldermen, etc., as a way of placing government policy safely under the control of professionals and keeping the great unwashed from meddling in the business of their betters. It was the same kind of petty lust for control that Hilaire Belloc and William English Walling described in their critiques of Fabianism. And it tied in pretty closely with the authoritarianism of the public education bureaucracy, the deskilling of blue collar labor under Taylor's scientific management, in a much broader phenomenon of the rise to control of the white collar professional class in the late 19th century. Even when progressives were more sympathetic to the relatively libertarian part of the mix, the increasing centralization of the corporate economy and the state made it likely that their movement would succeed only in those areas where centralized bureaucracies benefitted. 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! _ The new MSN 8: smart spam protection and 2 months FREE* http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail
Re: Kolko 40 Years Later
From: Bryan Caplan [EMAIL PROTECTED] 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. Chomsky has a similar blind spot today. He points out, rightly, that what neoliberals call free trade is really a form of corporate mercantilism that is heavily dependant on state intervention on a global scale. But then he turns around and says that we have to strengthen the state and act through it to break up concentrations of private power. It seems to me a pretty common sense conclusion that, if these concentrations of private power depend on the state for their existence, the solution is to *reduce* the power of the state. 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. They are indeed two entirely different cases. The latter case, of welfare state concessions, is productively examined in Piven and Cloward's *Regulating the Poor*. To a certain extent, the welfare state is something forced on the ruling class from above, rather than a positive good for it. The main good it provides is a negative one, that of keeping homelessness and starvation to a low enough level to prevent political instability. The point they make is that, even when political pressure from below is the main cause of a policy initiative, it is the ruling class that actually carries it out. And the ruling class implements it in a way that, as much as possible, produces side benefits for itself and is as harmless as possible to its interests. The welfare state provides some second-order benefits for the state capitalists: it provides a system of social control for the underclass, similar to that of police/prisons/parole officers. It provides some minimal floor for aggregate demand, to the extent that the corporate elite still take a Keynesian view of such things. And (at the risk of being dismissed as rather silly), it partially cartelizes the portion of the wage package that goes to providing against absolute destitution and removes it as an issue of competition. But these negative and positive benefits fade into each other to the extent that the New Class of social engineers have been incorporated as junior members of the corporate ruling class. If you take a Millsian power elite view (or even Christopher Lasch's neo-populism) of the parallel significance of Taylorism in industry, progressive paternalism in the welfare bureaucracy, the rise of the public educationist complex, and the professionalization of all aspects of life, it seems that big business depends on this New Class of managers, engineers and helping professionals to manage and plan society. As Mills put it, the capitalist class was reorganized along corporate lines. To a large extent, our society is run by interlocking directorates of state and corporate oligarchies, with the lines between them blurring. For these junior members of the corporatist elite, especially the ones in the state bureaucracy who live off of tax revenue, the welfare state is purely a positive benefit. 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
Re: Kolko 40 Years Later
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] In a message dated 6/19/03 6:28:26 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: The main good it provides is a negative one, that of keeping homelessness and starvation to a low enough level to prevent political instability. This of course presumes that the welfare state reduces homelessness and starvation rather than encouraging it. Of course. But what it's proponents intend and what it actually does may be two different things. Then too, although non-statist alternatives might reduce destitution, they might also carry unacceptable costs to the ruling class. What's efficient from the perspective of the general welfare may be quite inefficient for those currently benefitting from the state. Tolstoy had a little parable along these lines that beautifully describes the mindset of the corporate liberal: a humane farmer took extraordinary measures to make life more comfortable for his cattle. He had his hired hands take them out of the pen for walks; he played music for them; he bought better food, etc. He was asked, But wouldn't it be a lot less complicated, if their welfare is your main goal, to just knock down the fence? The farmer replied: But then I couldn't milk them. _ The new MSN 8: advanced junk mail protection and 2 months FREE* http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail
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: 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: 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: soviet economists
So Gosplan economists independently discovered Mises' rational calculation problem? That's almost as amazing as Comrade Stalin inventing the airplane! From: john hull [EMAIL PROTECTED] Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: soviet economists Date: Thu, 26 Sep 2002 12:30:15 -0700 (PDT) Howdy, Here's an interesting quote on one of the diffuculties of a planned economy, from Robert Conquest's Reflections on a Ravaged Century, W.W. Norton, 2000, pg 102-103: Soviet economists, as soon as they got the chance, pointed out that the problem of setting prices was insoluble. Twenty-four to twenty-five million industrial prices alone per annum, each backed by thousands of pages of documentation, had to be handled by the State Commission on Prices. What a pickle! -jsh __ Do you Yahoo!? New DSL Internet Access from SBC Yahoo! http://sbc.yahoo.com _ Chat with friends online, try MSN Messenger: http://messenger.msn.com
Re: insurance quotes
One possible answer might be that these helpful companies are less honest than they claim to be. I called Progressive for a quote, and the lowest quotes they gave me for strict liability auto coverage was in the $50/month range, roughly in the same range they were offering. They didn't mention Nationwide, which was less than $30 dollars. So they get to earn your good will by appearing to be helpful, without informing you of any really competitive prices. From: john hull [EMAIL PROTECTED] Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: insurance quotes Date: Thu, 5 Sep 2002 12:48:49 -0700 (PDT) Howdy, It seems like I've seen advertisements for insurance companies who'll offer quotes from their competitors, even if their competitor's quotes are cheaper. I can think of two reasons why a firm would do this. First would be the warm-fuzzy model, where the company is banking on goodwill resulting from helping the consumer shop around. They can't be all bad if they help me out rather than just make a buck. The second would be the better-actuary model, where the firm is betting that its actuaries ( their models) are better than the competitors', so the firm believes that the competitors are actually making bad bets and will ultimately go out of business or adjust so that their prices go up. Do these sound reasonable, or do you think there is a better reason. If so, what? Curiously yours, jsh = ...for no one admits that he incurs an obligation to another merely because that other has done him no wrong. -Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy, Discourse 16. __ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! Finance - Get real-time stock quotes http://finance.yahoo.com _ Chat with friends online, try MSN Messenger: http://messenger.msn.com
Re: [Fwd: how to eliminate unemployement]
From: Bryan Caplan [EMAIL PROTECTED] For some reason this didn't seem to post on Friday. Incidentally, while staying in a Lake Arrowhead hotel room this weekend, I noticed the incompatibility of mutualism with renting hotel rooms. The alternative would be to have people buy their hotel room, then re-sell it when they leave. Same basic result as you have today, but highly inconvenient if you need to get a $50,000 loan just to sleep overnight somewhere. Like speculations on seizing land left fallow or whose owner goes away on a 2-week vacation, this requires putting the most inconvenient spin possible on mutualist rules. Actual mutualists might not be so accomodating to their discreditors. Lockean homesteading theory, if taken to a reductio ad absurdum, can likewise produce a lot of howlers. A mutualist system of property ownership, like a Lockean one, would require social consensus on the rules of the game, and I doubt most communities would be averse to some kind of guest-hostel cooperative. Ironically, many anarcho-capitalists I've discussed these issues with are much less averse to mutualist occupancy tenure than to Geoist rent collection, viewing the former as having a plausible claim to being a genuine form of private property. Kevin Carson wrote: I meant slum occupants would simply become de facto owners, and stop paying rent--was that your understanding? That's what it sounded like, but it was hard to believe anyone would say it. You did author the Anarchist Theory FAQ, didn't you? So you must be aware that the proposal is not original with me. It was shared by Proudhon, Tucker, and many of the other thinkers you dealt with there. In the transition to a mutualist society and the expropriation of landlords, I'd be willing to negotiate some settlement in which landlords were paid up to the equivalent of what they could have saved from wage labor during their lifetime. Many wage earners are frugal and put their savings into small rental properties as a form of retirement investment, and I'd hate to see anyone robbed of the actual proceeds of his labor. But big slumlords and owners of vast tracts of land would be SOL. So your proposal amounts to the following: 1. Partial expropriation of existing landlords. 2. A legal maximum rent of 0 forever afterwards. After all, no one would ever build new rental property after your proposal was implemented. The second part of the proposal just amounts to a much more extreme version of New York rent control. People would get around the policy by switching to owner occupancy, and anyone lacking in current resources who doesn't qualify for a loan would be homeless. Wonderful. One reason people have to rent under the current system is that land ownership has been preempted by absentee landlords and real estate speculators, and they have to pay tribute for access to it--instead of homesteading it. Of course, if landlords had any warning, they would evict all of their tenants and sell outright ownership - once against mimicing the long-run response to rent control. A landlord occupying, say, a hundred family dwelling units, would have a hard time establishing his occupancy and use based ownership to the satisfaction of a mutualist community. Most likely, he'd be recognized as owner of whatever unit he occupied, and the rest would be homesteaded. Frankly, this is one of the silliest ideas I've heard someone advocate in a long time. Thanks, but I can't take all the credit for myself. As you surely know from editing the Anarchist Theory FAQ, these ideas aren't original with me. They were shared by some of the people you treat as right anarchist precursors of anarcho-capitalism, in fact. _ Join the worlds largest e-mail service with MSN Hotmail. http://www.hotmail.com
Re: how to eliminate unemployement
From: Bryan Caplan [EMAIL PROTECTED] For an occupant, the incentive to build on one's own land would be the same as always. Since there would be no restriction on the right of the actual occupier of a piece of land to charge a price before quitting it Does quitting have to mean selling full title? It sounds like it rules out leaving but renting to the next occupant. That's right--under mutualist rules of appropriation, ownership is established and maintained by occupancy. So quitting the land and transferring occupancy would be a full transfer of ownership. The upshot is that only people who can afford to buy property outright in full can use it. Technically true--but without the ability of absentee owners to exclude homesteaders from unoccupied land, the full purchase price would be a lot cheaper. There would be no obstacle to simply homesteading vacant land, including vacant lots in the city. The price of land, according to Tucker, would fall to a combination of the value of improvements plus economic rent. Capital markets can partly solve that problem, but a big problem remains. Or do I misunderstand your remarks about slum occupants taking over their buildings, etc? I meant slum occupants would simply become de facto owners, and stop paying rent--was that your understanding? In the transition to a mutualist society and the expropriation of landlords, I'd be willing to negotiate some settlement in which landlords were paid up to the equivalent of what they could have saved from wage labor during their lifetime. Many wage earners are frugal and put their savings into small rental properties as a form of retirement investment, and I'd hate to see anyone robbed of the actual proceeds of his labor. But big slumlords and owners of vast tracts of land would be SOL. _ Join the worlds largest e-mail service with MSN Hotmail. http://www.hotmail.com
RE: how to eliminate unemployement
From: Fred Foldvary [EMAIL PROTECTED] In which case you yourself are 80% Georgist, because if taxes there be not, then landowners will bear the major cost of infrastructure now paid for by the taxation of labor and capital. That will deflate their land value, now puffed up by the capitalization of neighborhood benefits they don't pay for. The rent would be collected by the private providers, but such rent-based public finance is Georgist nonetheless. This is how condominiums, homeowner associations, hotels, and other real-estate complexes operate today, so this is not just hypothetical. We're on the same page here--a great deal of what is called differential rent or economic rent is simply the effect of government spending, public goods that could be internalized. Even so, there would still probably be a lot of economic rent resulting from differences in fertility, site advantages in urban areas, etc. Where Georgists and mutualists differ, I think, is in the relative importance of economic rent versus absentee landlord rent. Tucker believed that eliminating absentee landlordism and making occupancy and use the basis of property claims would be sufficient to eliminate most of the inequities, and that economic rent should be tolerated as a necessary evil. I think the absentee ownership of land seriously exacerbates economic rent in urban areas. If the tenants (not only apartment dwellers, but small business people) of slumlords, real estate speculators, etc., ceased to pay rent, and if vacant lots could be homesteaded by the first occupier, that would be a massive change for the better, even if occupants were able to draw unearned benefits from advantage of site. Presumably you do not disagree with the central aim of Georgism, free trade. Oh, you got that right! _ MSN Photos is the easiest way to share and print your photos: http://photos.msn.com/support/worldwide.aspx
RE: how to eliminate unemployement; land tax user-fees
From: Grey Thomas [EMAIL PROTECTED] User-fees are an excellent idea, but I don't think incompatible with a Lib-Georgist land value tax: Who supports the judiciary? Who supports the Dept. of War? er, Defense? -- property owners, who need/use local police and international police, as well as courts, to defend their property rights. If, hypothetically speaking, all public goods could be internalized, and paid for with user fees, what public domain would be left to fund with land taxes? In the case of law enforcement, decentralize it to the smallest local level, place it under direct democratic control, and make its services voluntary and based on user fees. I suspect the need for any kind of law enforcement in a heavily armed society would be much less (look at the anecdotal evidence about Kennesaw, Ga.). And a decentralized, cooperatively-controlled police force could be combined with aspects of the current neighborhood watch system, posse comitatus, etc., in ways that would drastically reduce cost. As for defense, a decentralized, stateless society would present few concentrated targets of value to foreign predators; it would have no central government to surrender; and local citizens' militias, federated as needed, would make any enemy so clueless as to invade pay rent in blood for every square foot of land occupied. Let maritime merchants pay the cost of their own convoy systems against piracy. The rest of the foreign threats the U.S. military defends against, it seems to me, all involve what some power on the other side of the globe might do within a few hundred miles of its own border. I personally support smaller, annual fee-taxes, rather than less frequent, much larger transaction fees (eg. house ownership transfer fee of some $40 000), for such night watchman state funding. BTW, I like the comparison of a minarchist night watchman state with the current, and increasing, nanny state. (If you want to get infected with that linguistic meme.) Words and phrases are important, I doubt that we can change public schools into gov't schools, but if that gov't label had been given earlier, it might have stuck, and would certainly be easier to reform now. That's the word I like to use, but it gets me labelled as one of them militia nuts--odd, since I have an IWW sticker on my car. Finally, I also favor user-fees on pollution. I think that land-tax and pollution tax can, and should, replace all personal income tax. My desire for companies to pay for the benefit of corporate limited liability makes me hesitate to elliminate the corporate income tax altogether, but reducing it, certainly. Interesting--how would the pollution-fees be assessed, and pollution measured? Through some kind of libertarian tort law? On the issue of limited liability, Rothbard argued that it could be established (vis a vis creditors) without any state, simply by including it up front in the terms of the contract. Limited tort liability, he said, was of relatively minor importance. In the case of a few industries, of course, (the nuclear power industry in particular), they almost certainly couldn't survive without the state's intervention to limit their liability. Good riddance! _ Send and receive Hotmail on your mobile device: http://mobile.msn.com
RE: how to eliminate unemployement; land tax user-fees
From: Fred Foldvary [EMAIL PROTECTED] As for defense, a decentralized, stateless society would present few concentrated targets of value to foreign predators; it would have no central government to surrender; Tell that to the American Indians. OK, adding the proviso that the defenders have better than neolithic technology. The civilian population of North America has more small arms than all the regular armies in the world, I read somewhere. And there's a lot of folks in places like the northern Rockies states (and here in the Ozarks) with HAM radio networks, night vision equipment, and lots of how-to stuff by Kurt Saxon. and local citizens' militias, federated as needed, OK, but federated implies unified. Ultimate authority is decentralized, as the lower units may secede, but the militias are unified into a federated whole that then can indeed provide continent-wide defense. But how does a loose federation of local militias, organized from the bottom up, alter my point about the need for taxation? _ Chat with friends online, try MSN Messenger: http://messenger.msn.com
Re: North on ideology
And free market anarchists like Tucker, who also identified themselves as libertarian socialists, saw the state as the central, defining characteristic of capitalist exploitation (and all other forms of exploitation). Exploitation, defined as the use of force to enable one person to live off another's labor, was the central function of the state, and was impossible without it. For Tucker, free market capitalism was an oxymoron. It's interesting you refer to Leninism, Social Democracy, and Fabianism as allied phenomena--because in fact, they all reflect the rise of the New Class of professionals and planners, who began to take over the labor and socialist movement in the late nineteenth century. In fact, Nazism itself was prefigured in many ways (including extreme antisemitism, eugenics, etc.) in Fabian thought. Socialism in the U.S. persisted, though, as a largely self-organized, working class movement until WWI. It was at that point that the progressives and Crolyites in the Wilson administration, under the pretext of war hysteria and the Red Scare, liquidated most of the genuine working class left. Before WWI, the main electoral support for the Socialist Party was among Oklahoma oil workers, Montana miners, Milwaukee brewery workers, etc. After WWI, socialism's main demographic base was either academia or yuppie hog heavens like Burlington, Vt. From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] I suspect that Von Mises' insight refer more to the brands of socialism popular in his era, such as communism, social democracy (Austria, France, Germany), Labour Party socialism (Britain), and of course Nazism, rather than to all socialisms throughout modern history. As Elizabeth Tamedly points out in _Socialism and International Trade_, most forms of socialism historically have not advocated an abolition of private property. Most have advocated some mixture of private property and government control. If you want to argue that the more the government control, the less the substance of private property ownership, I'd certainly agree, noting that there's something of a spectrum of government control, with communism on one extreme. Not all government control is created equal (thankfully). David Levenstam _ Chat with friends online, try MSN Messenger: http://messenger.msn.com
RE: North on ideology -- Free Markets, Marketeers -- tunneling
Interesting. Your remarks on tunnelling dovetail nicely with an excellent article by Sean Corrigan at LewRockwell.com: http://www.lewrockwell.com/corrigan/corrigan13.html Corrigan refers to privatization, as part of IMF-imposed structural adjustments, as a carpet-bagger strategy for enabling international financial classes to buy up taxpayer-funded assets for pennies on the dollar. This discussion reminds me of something I heard second-hand about the Austrian economist and anarcho-capitalist Hans Hermann Hoppe. I've yet to read it myself, so take it for what it's worth. Anyway, he argued that the ex-Communist states were the one proper area for implementing syndicalist control of industry, since the original ownership was hopelessly muddled or moot, and the state industry thus qualified as unowned property in the Lockean sense. It was therefore quite logical to treat the workforce as occupiers or homesteaders, and place it under their collective ownership. Anyway, it sounds to me a lot better than turning the product of seventy years stolen labor of the Russian people over to domestic and international elites at fire sale prices, and then turning the country into a big sweatshop. On a related note, in the Tranquil Statement of the YAF's Radical Libertarian Caucus, Karl Hess argued that radical student occupations of even private universities wasn't a violation of any valid private property right, because such nominally private institutions were almost entirely dependant on the state's subsidies. Therefore, they should be treated as unowned, and homesteaded by students or faculty--in many ways a return to the original medieval idea of the university. I've also been told that Rothbard, at one point, (in the late 60s, I think, at the height of his affinity for the New Left) called for the expropriation of any corporation that got more than half its profits from state capitalist intervention, and its being placed under workers' control instead. The agorist Samuel Edward Konkin, another Austrian radical, speaks of a period of restitution in which the property of statists will be seized to pay back what they consumed through robbery of the producing classes. For privatization in this country, there's a lot to be said for what Larry Gambone calls mutualizing state property as an alternative both to corporate capitalist privatization and to state ownership. It entails devolving social services, police, schools, etc., to the local level, and then placing them under the direct democratic control of their clientele--sort of like transforming them into consumer co-ops. The ultimate goal, of course, is to fund them on a user-fee basis and make consumption voluntary. It's quite a bit like what Proudhon called (in *General Idea of the Revolution*) dissolving the state within the social body. From: Grey Thomas [EMAIL PROTECTED] Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: '[EMAIL PROTECTED]' [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: RE: North on ideology -- Free Markets, Marketeers -- tunneling Date: Thu, 8 Aug 2002 11:22:22 +0200 quoth Tom Grey: . . . For instance, the need for government to prevent tunneling of newly privatized companies by the managers. . . . Define please? It's basically asset stripping, in any of sundry ways. Asset stripping has occurred in almost all newly privatized Slovak firms. A few ways I know of: 1) The new manager, often part owner, creates a new brand name for the product the newly privatized company is making. This brand name is owned by a little company wholly owned by the manager. The production company pays millions for the brand name. -- production company has losses, the little company is quite profitable, but prolly off shore and untaxed. 2) The new owner's wife or son writes up a strategic or marketing plan, some 5-20 pages of BS to lay a shelf; to get millions in fees. 3) Older but working, high-market value production equipment is sold at almost zero book value (near end of depreciated life). 4) The production company builds a mansion, pays millions; sells it to the owner's little company at a huge loss. Similarly with luxury cars. Here in Slovakia, accounting form requirements are rather strict; but the first three above are entirely legal. I'm not sure on the details of (4) in order to make it legal, but I strongly suspect certain perpetrators have legal opinions on how to do it legally -- in accordance with required form based reporting. The failure of the Klaus voucher privatization plan was that the mostly minority owners had no real way of stopping the top managers from asset stripping. Ownership got dispersed, but it became ownership of debts without assets; select (mostly ex-commie) managers ended up with most of the assets. That's one of the main reasons so many ex-commie countries have voters unhappy with the free markets. ... and then they vote tough ex-commies into office :( (The problem with democracy? People
Re: Republican Reversal
Voter attitudes generally reflect a conventional wisdom that is shaped by the corporate media and statist educational system. A whole series of buzzwords comes to mind--ideological hegemony, the sociology of knowledge, reproduction of human capital--but they all boil down to the fact that a fairly centralized cultural apparatus is effective at creating the kinds of public opinion the existing system of power needs to survive. Concerning the real issues involved in our politics, and the contending groups that are actually represented in the state's decision-making, I'd say Thomas Ferguson and William Domhoff were closer to the mark than the interest group pluralists are. From: Fred Foldvary [EMAIL PROTECTED] Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Republican Reversal Date: Tue, 16 Jul 2002 17:31:43 -0700 (PDT) These are all good comments on the Republican reversal. Thus, I take it that the list agrees that democracy works pretty well in reflecting the wishes of the voters. Alex I don't agree. What about the large literature on voter ignorance and rent seeking? Does the typical American agree, for example, that it is good policy to spend billions on farm subsidies, or are they just ignorant and apathetic? Fred Foldvary = [EMAIL PROTECTED] __ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! Autos - Get free new car price quotes http://autos.yahoo.com _ MSN Photos is the easiest way to share and print your photos: http://photos.msn.com/support/worldwide.aspx
Re: Silent Takeover
I think you're underestimating the massive effects of state capitalist intervention not only individuallly, but the synergy between them. Regarding transportation subsidies alone, Tibor Machan wrote a good article for The Freeman (August 99, I think) against not only transportation subsidies, but against the use of immanent domain for highways and airports, as well. He admitted that this would almost certainly involve a massive decentralization of the economy, but responded by questioning whether that was necessarily a bad thing. As for patents, can we seriously doubt that the pattern of control over productive technology would be a lot different without them? By no means are these the only forms of state intervention--I just stuck to them for reasons of length in my original post. Tucker's big four--besides patents, the money, landlord and tariff monopolies--are at the foundation of the legal structure corporate power depends on. Then there's the subsidy of primitive accumulation--enclosures, expropriation of copyholders, slavery, colonial conquest, etc.--without which the concentration of ownership and economic power would almost certainly be much less. Transnational agribusiness certainly wouldn't exist on anything like its present pattern, without something like an enclosure movement occuring in the Third World this century. The military-industrial complex has a lot to do with what the high tech industry looks like now. It is also probably responsible for the very existence of the jumbo jet industry--without government demand for heavy bombers, the demand for jumbo jets alone wouldn't have paid for the specialized machine tools. And while we're at it, the value of plant and equipment in the U.S. almost doubled during World War II, mostly at taxpayer expense. In the specific case of antitrust laws, which you mentioned, the main cases that come to mind are Standard Oil, ATT and Microsoft--in all three cases, centrally important resources or infrastructures on which the whole corporate economy depended, where price-gouging could hurt corporate interests in general. It reminds me of Engels' prediction of the mixed economy in Anti-Duhring. When corporate capitalism reaches a certain level of complexity, capitalists will act through their state to plan and stabilize the corporate economy--which will entail, among other things, nationalizing infrastructures of central importance to the entire economy. In this country, it was done through antitrust instead. Most of the progressive and New Deal regulatory state were part of the same phenomenon--what Kolko called political capitalism, Weinstein called corporate liberalism, and the Frankfurt school people called planned capitalism. Gabriel Kolko argued that oligopoly markets wouldn't even exist without federal regulation. Most of the trusts at the turn of the century were over-leveraged and losing market share to smaller, more efficient competitors. The Clayton Act's unfair competition provisions, however, made price war much less likely and in effect created a state-sponsored trade association for each industry. From this time on, market share largely stabilized, and the world was finally safe for oligopoly. The liberal goo-goos in the public school system sell all these statist measures as populist-motivated countervailing power against big business. But bleeding hearts like Upton Sinclair were just useful idiots to help sell the measures to the public--they were really rent-seeking measures on behalf of corporate power. From: Bryan Caplan [EMAIL PROTECTED] Frankly, this strikes me as quite unlikely. There are lots of big government policies that encourage firms to be smaller than they would be in a free market. Double taxation of corporate income is the most obvious. Antitrust laws tend to be used against large market leaders. A lot of regulations only kick in if you have more than 50 or 100 employees. And once you are talking multinational corporations, there are other government policies discouraging cross-national integration. Protectionism, most obviously, tends to preserve the firms in each nation that aren't efficient enough to compete with the world's market leaders. You're right that there are some government policies pushing in the other way (any time regulations impose a fixed cost, firms' minimum efficient scale mathematically shifts to the right), but on balance I think you're wrong. Under laissez-faire, big corporations would be bigger than they are now. But to quote Seinfeld, Not that there's anything wrong with that. -- Prof. Bryan Caplan Department of Economics George Mason University http://www.bcaplan.com [EMAIL PROTECTED] He wrote a letter, but did not post it because he felt that no one would have understood what he wanted to say, and besides it was not necessary that anyone but himself should
Re: take-in/eat out
I considered the online book dealers a positive development from the beginning. The mail-order and internet vendors are, in some ways, a throwback to the days of the Sears Roebuck catalog, when the alternative to local mom and pop retailers wasn't the big box store, but rather a network of distribution centers that dealt directly with the customer. The main competitor of Amazon.com, etc., is not the locally-owned bookstore downtown, or the used bookseller who has all the old and unusual stuff you can't find anywhere else. Rather, it's BN, Borders, and their ilk. So if nothing else, the online folks make communities a lot more human-friendly. From: Bryan Caplan [EMAIL PROTECTED] The same goes for mail order vs. brick-and-mortar stores. The Internet crash makes it seem like mail order can't afford to discount 40% below brick-and-mortar. But why not? It sure seems like a website must be vastly cheaper to run than a physical store, especially when one website can do the work of thousands of local stores. -- Prof. Bryan Caplan Department of Economics George Mason University http://www.bcaplan.com [EMAIL PROTECTED] He wrote a letter, but did not post it because he felt that no one would have understood what he wanted to say, and besides it was not necessary that anyone but himself should understand it. Leo Tolstoy, *The Cossacks* _ Send and receive Hotmail on your mobile device: http://mobile.msn.com
