David B. Shemano wrote: > We are so fundamentally different. I participate in numerous organizations, > including my immediate family, my firm, my temple, etc. There are numerous > diagreements and conflicts among participants in these organizations, but the > conflicts are managed through, for a lack of a better word, "bargaining," not > though resort or appeal to a third-party enforcer.<
In day-to-day life, I see pretty much the same thing (since I live a relatively prosperous life in the South Bay area of L.A.) (But why in heck did someone steal the solar-powered outdoor lights of my across-the-street neighbors?) However, I know that appearances can be deceiving and that things can change, often rapidly. Thus, we have to try to get beyond common-sense empiricism and put matters into historical context. For example, before the Mexican government (under the conservative PAN party’s Calderón) started its “war on drugs” during late 2006, it was relatively quiet. It likely meant that most of “normal” (i.e., middle- and upper-class) life didn’t require third-party enforcement. Then, that policy pushed Mexico over the tipping point, stimulating what’s veering toward a multi-sided war between the government and various drug “cartels,” which seems to have propelled most of the country toward life that is (in Hobbes’ words) “nasty, brutish, and short.” I wouldn’t blame Calderón alone for this: there was something profoundly wrong with Mexican society before the war started – so that he unknowingly was “playing with dynamite.” Looking beyond the safety and superficial appearances of middle- or upper-class day-to-day life could have made this clear ahead of time. The fact that so many affluent people in Mexico have walls around their houses (often with broken glass on top) should have been a tip-off. Dubya pulled a similar trick in Iraq in 2003, unleashing museum looters and then Sunni/Shi’a civil war. Smart guy. > You write as if there is a clear dichotomy -- market exchange in capitalist > societies is based upon greed, while market exchange in non-capitalist > societies is based upon soldarity. This dichotomy seems axiomatic to you. I > don't see it. I see greed 2000 years ago, and I see solidarity in the good > old USA in 2011. I do agree that something happened in the modern project > that, intentionally or inadvertently, freed the greed impulse from religious > and cultural restraint, but that is far off topic from the original point -- > whether self-interested individuals are capable of engaging in successful > human relations without a coercive state.< In day-to-day life in prosperous areas and among well-to-do classes, we often see _both_ self-interest and solidarity. The butcher, the baker, and the brewer are seeking to add to their bank-rolls _and_ there’s a culture of what Smith called “fellow-feeling.” Third-party enforcement of the law (by the cop on the beat, the judge, etc.) is usually not enough to make sure that the letter and spirit of all of contracts is obeyed, so that a sense of solidarity is required as a “force multiplier.” State coercion and “fellow feeling” are thus _complementary_: the sense of consensus respecting established individual property rights reinforces the role of coercion so that less coercion is needed, while coercion forms the back-bone that preserves and reinforces the role of consensus. Among other things, this says that there isn’t any “natural” order, since state coercion is _necessary_ to the mix (as I’ve pointed out many times, so that even I am bored with it). A moneyed libertarian or anarchist effort to get rid of state enforcement would unleash the “dark side of the force” (greed) and it would be revealed that the natural order didn’t exist. Calderón and Dubya inadvertently or intentionally tried versions of this, in their different ways, as noted above. Worse, under capitalism, the happy mix of fellow-feeling and profit-seeking is contradictory. Like modern money libertarians, Smith assumed that we essentially live in a world in which everyone’s a merchant (a baker, a brewer, etc.) and that everyone’s basically equal in terms of power over others (i.e., has no power over others). (We’re all capitalists now, with some owning “human capital.”) But that’s not the capitalism we live in. This system involves _more than_ mere self-interest. Aristotle saw a big difference between mere trading, in which everyone is trying to get the best goods for themselves in exchange for what they have to sell (what Marx called C-M-C), and engaging in economic activity simply for the sake of money (Marx’s M-C-M). Capitalism goes further, allowing continual use of money not just to get money but to get more money than before (M-C-M’ where M’>M). Pure greed – the lust for wealth and the power it implies – replaces mere self-interest, knocking aside the constraints of religion and culture. (It’s not like those constraints went away on their own.) That is, our economic system – as opposed to the simple society that Smith posited – involves the pursuit of more and power, by accumulating more and more wealth: those with wealth can use it to accumulate more wealth, i.e., more power over others, and more income. They can also use it to gain more political power and influence, to get their Reagans, Dubyas, and Greenspans to grant them special-interest tax cuts, freedom from regulation, and thus even more wealth, power, and income. And of course, if they get into trouble, they have the power to get their Reagans, Dubyas, and Greenspans to save them, or at least save the most powerful among them. The fact that some of the less influential (like Lehman Brothers) are allowed to fall through the safety net (or TARP) simply adds to the motivation to accumulate money and power, to emulate Goldman Sachs. In the end, greed trumps not only simple self-interest but also fellow-feeling. To a greater and greater extent, coercion replaces fellow-feeling as the social regulator. > Well, yes, but the fact that you must rush to the hard cases, the reasons > even everyone but anarchists recognizes there must be a state in some form, > supports my point that for the overwhelming number of market interchanges > there is no need for a coercive element.< No, I did not present “hard cases.” Instead, I’m saying that almost no market interchanges are _pure_ market interchanges. They affect third parties or they involve ambiguous property rights and contracts. The MLers assume that market transactions are pure, so that the market always does a good job driven by the forces competition and self-interest. But that assumption is wrong. I wrote: >> Let's do an experiment to see if this theory works: abolish the state and >> its enforcement of contracts and see what happens… << > We do have examples. We have black markets, from the drug trade, to prison > trade, to markets under Soviet style socialism.< None of those work without coercion. Do you really think that the prison trade is ruled by fellow feeling alone? Don’t drop your soap. > We have the example of piracy (i.e. the rules among the participating > pirates), going back to the 17th Century to Somalia today. We have > international trade, for which enforcement of contracts is often all but > impossible. We have international agreements between states, which have no > coercive enforcement mechanism. The mixture of self-interest and trust > permits these agreements to be entered into, followed, resolved, etc. with no > inolvement of a coercive state.< Aaaar!! Have you been seeing too many Johnny Depp movies? “Honor among thieves” (here, pirates) is partly – if not mostly – formed _in opposition to_ the non-pirates. If the pirates didn’t unite, they couldn’t loot, plunder, and rape their victims with the same degree of efficiency as when they unite. (Poor dears! No Rolex for you!) They also couldn’t resist the Powers of Law and Order who try to end the piracy that’s so profitable to them. They couldn’t resist being taken over by _other_ bands of pirates if they didn’t “hang together.” Even then, any pirate who wants to “rat” on his fellows to the Powers will find that coercion isn’t an illusion. This occurs despite the fact that most groups of Somali pirates are linked by kinship and the like. (I haven't read the "libertarian pirate book," but the reviews I read suggested that it's not an argument about pirates not using coercion in their collective organization. Rather, it's that their coercion was organized in a relatively democratic way.) International trade and the like are hard to enforce. (For example, we got ripped off by an Egyptian merchant and found it impossible to get money back while in the U.S.). But much of it is regulated. After all, we have a hegemonic power (the U.S.) and its allies (NATO, etc.) along with a bunch of institutions like the WTO and the IMF to regulate international trade. Much of the trade occurs within the confines of multinational corporations’ bureaucracies. Of course, if the hegemonic power falls and there’s no-one to pick up the torch, the world system would likely fall into anarchy. A version of that happened during the trade war of the 1930s. Almost all national leaders knew that tariffs were bad for world trade – and thus for their countries, but they just couldn’t get it together to stop the war. (Many economists like to flatter themselves and say that it was just a matter of ignorance of the “benefits of free trade,” but they’re wrong.) Me: >> A case can be made that property rights are universal in human society. But >> that's only when there's no civil war or the like going on; it's a mistake >> to look only at ordered societies. All we can say is that a society _needs_ >> property rights to avoid civil war and the like, which is one thing that >> Hobbes said (in effect).<< > Yes, legally sanctioned "property rights" are beneficial because they avoid > the transaction costs of having to constantly argue or fight about > posssession and control of resources. …< Just because something is “beneficial” doesn’t mean that people can always and automatically get it together to “avoid the transactions costs of having to constantly argue or fight about possession of resources.” There is no Invisible Hand that solves collective action problems. One of the lessons of the Prisoner’s Dilemma is that there are many situations where avoiding those transactions costs (and mutual “defection”) requires either (1) third-party enforcement or (2) a deep sense of solidarity. But I repeat myself. >> (Actually, it depends on the kid: many 4-year olds also have a sense of >> solidarity with each other. Toddlers can be annoyingly generous! But at >> other ages, market-style individualism takes hold, especially in a society >> that promotes those values.)<< > Interesting that you advocate the juvenile as opposed to the mature > sensibility. Very Rousseauian< Flattery will get you nowhere. But in fact I don’t advocate the juvenile sensibility (finding it “annoying”). It’s quite possible to combine “mature sensibility” with social solidarity. Adulthood doesn't have to involve acting like Donald Trump. >> But it's easy to think of capitalist societies which have large coercive >> apparatuses…. Look at all of the cops in the US, along with the FBI, the >> National Guard, etc. And that's a rich country. Look at the court system -- >> and the jails -- that enforce the laws. Look at the private security forces >> that corporations have. (Hobbes would add: look at all the locks and >> security systems that people have in their houses and apartments.) The US >> does not rely on the goodness of human beings (their ability to channel >> greed into to pure buying and selling activities the way David seems to be >> doing) to defend property rights.<< > I would point out that most of the coercive apparatus in the US is related > NOT to (1) enforcing contracts, or (2) even enforcing theft and fraud laws, > but to enforcing laws relating to "victimless" market transactions and other > behavior, such as the prohibition laws, etc.< Looking at all the potheads who are in prison, it’s true that much of the contemporary US coercive apparatus is due to the US version of the war on drugs (led by politicians on drugs, it seems). Though it’s quite possibly true, I need to be convinced that keeping prostitution illegal is less expensive to society than the regulation of sex-work that you see in some other countries (including places in Nevada). (BTW, is meth victimless? How about meth labs?) But there’s a heck of a lot of “guard labor” being done to protect the assets of rich people and their corporations from being taken or used by those who don’t own them. (Doesn’t Michael Perelman have an article or book on guard labor?) There are large numbers of supervisors who try to watch every move that rank-and-file workers make – plus a bunch of managers to monitor _them_ and managers to manage them. It would be even more extensive and expensive if the capitalist trend of greed trumping fellow feeling continues. With a shrinking societal consensus, more and more coercion is needed to maintain order – if it can be maintained. -- Jim Devine / "Patriotism is the conviction that your country is superior to all others because you were born in it." -- George Bernard Shaw _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
