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RE: Can Capitalism Exist Without a State?
Good post. To me, there would have to be a mechanism/s which would ensure that there really wasn't coercion and exploitation happening but I'm just a commie bastard...opps, comrade. How does one go about making sure everyone is 'consenting' to any given transaction.
Child labour has been a part of the human condition for some time and our modern mores of saying no to that mode of exploitation is the correct preference, IMO.
One also has to factor in pathology. Psychopaths and sociopaths--scum rises to the top of the pond.
These and many more issues need to be addressed.
Don't you think that's setting the bar kind of high? It would be impossible under any system to guarantee that no coercion or exploitation was happening anywhere at any time. The most that can be done is to set up a system where honest behavior and respectful treatment of persons is incentivized and/or rewarded, while dishonest behavior, coercion, and exploitation are disincentivized and/or punished. I think a free market does both of those things better than any other system yet devised.
In the absence of a state, one does not go about 'making sure everyone' is doing or not doing anything. That's kind of the point. I do not claim that nothing bad will ever happen in my preferred system of stateless capitalism, or that no one will ever be harmed, or that society-wide problems will never arise. All I am claiming is that there would be less harm and fewer ways for bad people to operate. Again, it goes back to incentives and disincentives.
Child labor has been a part of the human condition for as long as humans have been scuttling along on the crust of this planet, and only in the past eighty years and in very specific minority regions has anyone thought something ought to be done to stop it. Understand that throughout our human history, child labor has been necessary until this particular time, in these particular places. None of our ancestors would have survived if children had not worked. The only reason why it got to the point in western nations that children could go to school or loaf about while the adults did all the work is because those nations amassed so much wealth, so fast, during the industrial revolution. Now that same thing is happening in other regions, particularly China and India. Within a couple of generations the level of prosperity in those regions will have increased to the point where people no longer need their children to work. And then it will happen in other regions, and then others, until the entire world enjoys the kind of wealth that means your kids can go to school and until it is cheaper to buy robots than to employ eight year olds to run the textile machines. That's how that works. There is not currently enough wealth in the world to sustain all of the earth's children and all of its future children without child labor, but as regions build wealth it becomes possible. And if anything, modern states have slowed down and hindered the process.
Exactly. Which is why we shouldn't give them such a convenient vehicle through which to have power over us. Think about it. McDonald's has no power over you. The grocery conglomerate can't force you to shop in its stores. Your local gas station can't extract money out of your paycheck. Amazon can't draft you to fight in a war. It is only possible to do those things on a wide scale and get away with it within the auspices of a government.
Thanks for the reply,leslie...Time will not allow me to address everything here. And no, I'm not a 'statist' per se. But the nation-state developed side by side to modern economies and is very much like a virus and in that sense, it will be near impossible to eradicate. Having said that, I don't think it's 'the state' in any normative sense that is the issue today. The state is now CORPORATE OLIGOPOLY run via a transnational plutocracy of about 1000 billionaires! So these guys are the 'state' now so I'm not sure ANCAPS have their arrows pointed at the right target. The mode these billionaires use is a mafia ethos and they've co-opted the state via violence and cultural propaganda instantiated by Wall St. mechanisms (see Bernays et al)... I'm of the opinion that it's a fallacy to assert that a 'state' has to be toxic...
But the toxicity in modernity is enmeshed via the banking cartels so it's a bloody mess that's intractable and I'm not convinced by Mises, Hyack or any other alt.-right thinkers who espouse that the 'market' has the solutions. I call such thinking 'Casper Economics'...The free hand and all. But in an overarching sense, I'm still much more for you than against.
I'm what's called a spiritual Gnostic so we may part ways there although politically we are fighting (anarchy) the same archons even if you don't buy 'who they really are.'
If a thousand billionaires, out of all the hundreds of millions of capitalists in the world, have become the state, then it hardly seems like capitalism itself is the problem. And I agree with you that this has occurred. Where we differ is that I think the state was custom designed, from its very beginnings, to be run by the worst people with the worst motives. As you said, the scum rises to the top. In times past it was entitled royalty; under state communism it's the Party; in the modern industrialized world it's corporate oligarchy. Either way, the state itself is the vehicle (the only vehicle) that can be used by a small group of psychopaths to control entire populations of people. Rulers have generationally tricked us into consenting to be ruled, and it's going to take a lot of deconditioning to ever break out of those shackles. And I do think states are necessarily toxic, because in order to function, they must violate the core rule of morality, which is to not initiate force. No other type of human institution necessarily violates that rule. Not businesses, not churches, not neighborhood covenants; nothing except the state.
Thanks for your comments. I appreciate the discussion.