A Challenge for Moorobot

[nietzreznor]

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I don't believe there were ACers until the mid 20th century.

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Riddick,

There werw actually a bunch of radical anarchist libertarians in the 19th century who in many ways could be considered ACers (people like Tucker and Spooner). They certainly weren't AC in all ways (since many unfortunately subscribed to the labor theory of value), but they were also in many important respects different from the traditional anarcho-socialists.

[BluffTHIS!]

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1) AC only produces the benefits outlined in the book in question in post-industrial revolution societies. I.E., it is incapable of working in low technology labor intensive economies. I'm sure he is willing to concede this point though in order to have an argument as to why AC was not responsible for the economic and social conditions of the lower rungs and majority of society in 1830.

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Wrong. Capitalism is a fundamental emergent phenomenon of human nature under certain cultural conditions. The fact that the accumulated capital stock was lower in the past than it currently is, and hence so was productivity, and hence so were wages, and hence so were standards of living is merely an obvious consequence.

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Boro,

I'm going to address some of your points in separate posts, so that individual issues don't get lost in 5 monitor screen high Cyrus-like line by line parsing.


I understand that capital stocks grow over time under the right conditions, and that living standards grow with them. However, that still does not explain the great disparity of living standards in a more AC like economy between segments of society relative to each other and not an absolute scale of comparison with other periods when greater capital stocks exist.

[BluffTHIS!]

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Bull [censored]. It's been addressed ad nauseum. "oligarchical collusion by the monied capital owning elite to artifically keep wages below market demand" ? Where do you get this [censored]? In the absence of coercive monopolistic interventions in the law (i.e. government), no such cartelization is possible.

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So what government intervention allowed the monopolies in the US and other countries to form in the late 1800s that produced a percieved need for contravening interventions of anti-trust laws? Did the rail, oil and banker barons depend upon favorable government intervention to erect their monopolies (I'm not talking about true total monopolies but effective ones)?

[BluffTHIS!]

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3) Boro never addresses the possibility, likelihood and provable fact of oligarchical collusion by the monied capital owning elite to artifically keep wages below market demand, and to inhibit capital formation and upward mobility of the lower segments of society.

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How can this collusion occur without government protection?


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Riddick,

How can it be prevented without it is the question. There are plenty of examples of 2 market leaders or commodity producers acting collusively to maintain artificially high prices for their products which do not require governmental intervention to do so (think DeBeers). Also, examples would be collusion to prevent the market from setting prices based upon true demand for commodities, by producers colluding to refuse to pay more than a certain price.

[madnak]

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How can it be prevented without it is the question. There are plenty of examples of 2 market leaders or commodity producers acting collusively to maintain artificially high prices for their products which do not require governmental intervention to do so (think DeBeers). Also, examples would be collusion to prevent the market from setting prices based upon true demand for commodities, by producers colluding to refuse to pay more than a certain price.

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If the prices are artificially high, then a competitor can undercut those prices. Why doesn't this happen with De Beers? Good question. I don't know enough about diamonds to effectively argue that point. But I'll propose the following scenario.

Imagine a large diamond mine is found in Nevada by an American entrepreneur. He begins producing diamonds. Since diamonds are nowhere near as scarce as they "should" be, he has an easy time underpricing De Beers.

How would De Beers respond? For awhile they might get by on brand recognition and exclusive deals with diamond retailers, but that couldn't last forever.

I assume you're going to suggest that De Beers drop its prices so the competitor is forced out? Let's assume they succeed for the sake of argument. But let's also assume that the entrepreneur knows the kind of pressure he's putting on De Beers and has no intention of giving up his mine. He knows that De Beers can't possibly offer him as much as the mine is worth.

So now what? Does De Beers raise its prices again? If the competitor continues to produce diamonds will they keep raising and lowering the costs, shaking the market like an old rug? That will bite into their bottom line hard. And what will consumers think about the fluctuating prices? And once the diamonds originally drop to their normal market prices, are consumers going to put up with the old artificially high prices again? And how long can De Beers run at a loss in the first place?

I imagine diamond sources are fairly limited and that's why De Beers has been able to accomplish what it has. Also, diamonds are a luxury item. People are willing to pay the De Beers price. So why is anything wrong?

[sam h]

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If you dispute what I have said, then take the economy of Victorian Britain in the year 1830 before various reformist laws were passed, and show how that economy and the economic conditions of all levels of society were beneficial examples of AC, or how if they were not, that the economy of that year was hampered by what government regulations to a degree sufficient to keep it from providing those benefits.

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Bluffthis,

This is probably the closest we have ever come to AC in a post-industrial revolution economy, but it was still light years away. The national market economy of the 1830s did not spontaneously emerge in England. It was deliberated created through the actions of the state, which smashed local economies and their vested interests such as guilds and created significant regulatory structures to reduce transaction costs. As Karl Polanyi noted in perhaps the most astute and telling four words ever uttered about economic history: "Laissez-faire was planned."

[HubertCumberdale]

Human beings are flawed creatures. There is no known large scale society that didn't need a significant level of government intervention.

[madnak]

Why is government intervention needed in the first place?

[HubertCumberdale]

The problem I have with libertarianism is this.

Libertarians want the government to intervene in negative rights protection, but stay out of positive rights protection. So if a burglar breaks into my house and the police come, then the government is acting in a coercive way against the burglar. They are not allowing him his right to go anywhere that he wants to. Property rights are meaningless unless there is a power backing them. In our society, it's the government.

[madnak]

I'm not a libertarian per se. I'm an anarchocapitalist. I believe in the elimination of all government. The market can provide for protection of property.