Thanks for the post, and for the link. (Both to Rad Geek People’s Daily and to the essay I co-authored with Roderick Long.) Hope you enjoy the blog!

Kai: I’m very excited, folks. Feels like Christmas! (A male libertarian feminist is great, but I’d really love to find some female ones, too.)

Have you read any of Carol Moore’s stuff? These days most of her writing and activism is concentrated on the anti-war movement but she is also a committed feminist and has written some excellent pieces on libertarian feminism: Woman vs. the Nation State, How Violent Males Co-opt Woman-Initiated Nonviolent Movements, The Return of Street Fighting Man: The Pathology of the New Progressive Violence, etc.

N.B.: I haven’t started producing PDFs of the documents that I put on Fair Use, but I hope to one day. For those who are both impatient and savvy about DocBook and XSLT, the DocBook XML source is already available online, at http://fair-use.org/benjamin-tucker/instead-of-a-book/instead-of-a-book.book

I’d do it myself, but I’m a stickler about formatting, and am currently working on other projects. But if anyone produces a good-looking PDF from the DocBook source, I’d be glad to get a copy of that to post at fair-use.org. The person who generated it would get credit, of course.

Echidne, I’m familiar with the theory of perfect competition. When I say “free markets,” I don’t mean markets in a state of perfect competition. A free market is a condition that can exist in reality; a perfectly competitive market is an idealized model that cannot. If you’re familiar with Austrian theories of entrepreneurship — a la Israel Kirzner — then that may help explain why I don’t hang that much on theories of perfect competition. Economically, I’m far more interested in the dynamic processes by which real-life markets move towards equilibrium than I am interested in behavior of fictional markets that have reached that idealized state.

So I don’t think the question “Would a free market in X lead to better results than government intervention?” should be answered by appeal to whether or not the market in X will be perfectly competitive. No markets ever are. The question should be whether real people’s efforts to muddle through, facing an uncertain future, are going to be most productive when their arrangements about X are voluntary, or when they are constrained by government coercion.

In real-world markets, some externalities need to be internalized and others do not. When they do, there are lots of ways to do this that are consistent with a free market. One way is to change your business model; radio broadcasters provide a non-rivalrous, non-excludable service to their listeners, gratis, but they make money by using that service to provide a rivalrous and exludable service to advertisers. Private lighthouse operators in 19th century England made their money by charging the nearby port merchants rather than the passing ships. When the externalities are significant and negative, one way to address it is to recognize it as a property rights issue; which is why many radical free marketeers (not Chicago privateers) favor restoring a robust version of nuisance tort law in order to address issues like air pollution.

As for barriers to entry, they are certainly a real issue, but natural barriers to entry are far less common than is often suggested. As a rule, government regimentation of markets creates far higher barriers to entry than would exist under a free market, because compliance with the bureaucracy takes a lot of time, money, and lawyers, and because incumbents can often capture agencies and effectively use them to stifle competition.

The Leftist historian Gabriel Kolko has a very good book, called The Triumph of Conservatism, which discusses the ways in which the Progressive Era regulatory state created and sustained robber baron capitalism, more or less at the behest of Morgan, Rockefeller, and the rest, which reversed the previous decades’ progress towards smaller, decentralized outfits. Without government intervention, free markets very often exert a centrifugal force; they usually start concentrating wealth only once the kleptocrats step in and force competitors out of the market.

Anyway, it does seem to me that all this is well within the realm of economic theorizing, so it seems to me that the concept of a “free market” has got a meaningful role in economic theory. Even if the meaning of the term is often perverted or concealed by hypocritical plutocrats who claim to be acting in its name.

swampcracker, I’m glad that your volunteer emergency services provided so well for your town’s needs. I am all for that kind of face-to-face mutual aid. But I don’t see what it has to do with Firebreak or with my comments.

Firebreak is not a public service. It is a private service operated by insurance companies, mostly because those companies can protect expensive houses for less than it would cost to rebuild them.

They are providing a benefit over and above what is provided by the government and the volunteer services. They are not stopping the government from providing similar services to everybody. They are not stopping you or your fellow citizens from volunteering your own money or labor to provide similar services to everybody. If you think that the level of fire protection available through government and volunteer services is inadequate, then that’s a damn shame, and you ought to try to do something about it. But it does not mean that there is anything wrong with Firebreak for continuing to provide the higher level of service to those who pay them to do so.

If your rich neighbor decides to hire some bodyguards, do you expect them to protect you, too, for free?

Fair enough, but then why describe the observation as “Stealth Marxism”? It’s not a distinctively Marxist claim; it’s an observation that anyone watching the show could have come up with, given a passing familiarity with recent American history.

At worst it seems like an example of “stealth banality,” or, perhaps just “observations on topics outside my interests.”

echidne: The book is so chock-full of stuff that a review can’t give examples of all of them.

Well, fair enough. But the examples given so far lead me to think that the book has a lot more to do with government-backed corporate kleptocracy than it has to do with free markets.

For example, I’m also passingly familiar with the forced retirement savings system that Pinochet instituted, as well as the Yet Another Damn Account plans that American right-wingers have introduced along similar lines. I don’t consider these free market reforms, or even transitional reforms toward a free market. They are just a different kind of state interventionism, hypocritically advanced by the kleptocrats and their hirelings under the name of the free market. A free market reform of a conventional government Social Security system would simply be to make contributions voluntary, and let people sock money away where they will. In a free market, the government does not force you to put away savings for retirement, and it does not force you to put those savings in a limited number of government-approved plans offered by an uncompetitive cartel of government-approved financial corporations.

Similarly, the crony-capitalist government auctions that often pose as “privatization” (they would more accurately be described as “privateering”) are, as you yourself mention, not good examples of free market processes. A free market way to turn a nationalized industry over into private hands would be simply to convert the government’s seized title into joint ownership by the people at large (as happened in Czechoslovakia), or by the users of a resource, or by the workers at a shop.

Of course, I haven’t yet given any argument as to whether truly free market reforms — rather than the kind of cock-eyed schemes that keep coming from the Chicago Boys, the IMF, and other professional privateers — would be workable, or whether they would be preferable to the existing governmental schemes. But whether workable or unworkable, they are what they are, and shouldn’t be confused with the pro-corporate interventionism promoted by “pro-business” economists.

echidne: But note that the concept of a “free market” is an ideological conservative one. It has no real meaning in economic theory.

I don’t think that the term is especially “conservative;” in the National Assembly, the advocates of laissez-faire sat on the Left, not on the Right.

I’m also not sure what you mean when you say that “free market” has no real meaning in economic theory. Could you explain some more?

swampcracker,

Would you rather that everybody’s house got equally devoured by the wildfires, just to be fair?

Firebreak is not going around forcing the government firefighters to provide a lower level of service than they were providing. Rather, they are voluntarily offering protection above and beyond what the government offers.

They’re not much different from private firms that sell electronic security or emergency-response systems to homeowners, elderly people, etc. All these goods and services cost money, and they’re usually only sold to people who have the bread to pay for them. It would be a fine thing if everyone could get valuable services regardless of their income level, and it would be noble either for the company or for conscientious people like you to launch a mutual aid or charity campaign to cover the costs of those services for those who cannot pay. But if there is no such effort, and the company does not provide its services gratis to people who do not or cannot pay, that hardly means that the company is actively injuring people, or that it’s imposing unequal burdens on folks.

echidne: I would love to learn more about the long-run effects of the free-market shock treatments.

What free-market shock treatments?

I can’t find one example of a free market reform in the cases you list. Rigged government auctions, subcontracting of nationalized monopolies out to privileged firms, and infusions of government cash from the IMF are certainly not examples of free markets. Let alone bringing in the government goon squad to crack unionists’ and dissidents’ heads. This sort of crap is often misrepresented as “free market” reforms by opportunistic advocates of it, but all these measures would more accurately be described as neo-mercantilism than as free market reforms.

Though the crew, with black Uhura and the Asian Mr. Sulu, seemed to reflect newly enlightened attitudes, the program, like its 1930 relatives, was dominated by brave white males.

Isn’t this an accurate description of Star Trek?

Roxanne,

Given that Ron Paul is currently running in the Republican primary, whom will he defeat if he wins the race?

Seems to me the answer is: Other Republicans.

Do you think that any of his current opponents are preferable to Paul as candidates for the presidency?

Jeffrey,

I look forward to the opportunity to read the book.

I would be interested to know to what extent Garret’s book portrays the local Wobblies as being directly involved in the Non-Partisan League’s activities. After all, it was the N.P.L., not the I.W.W. (which was not an electoral party) which won a majority in the legislature and pushed through the taxes, government-operated mills and banks, etc.

The articles that you cite don’t say much about active collaboration between the two on these kind of political measures, and neither does the (admittedly scattered) reading I’ve done on the topic elsewhere. The first article you link to describes an effort by I.W.W. members to rescue some of their comrades from a state jail, and has nothing in particular to do with the NPL, as far as I can see. The second article details some abortive plans for the agricultural department of the I.W.W. (A.I.W.U. 110) to make a private contract with farmers in the N.P.L., to the effect that the farmers in the N.P.L. would only hire A.I.W.U. workers, and the A.I.W.U. workers would only work for N.P.L. farmers. This is of course a perfectly legitimate labor contract between two independent parties, and disingenuously portrayed as “amalgamation” by government lawyers, who were in the process of prosecuting over a hundred Wobs for the political crime of organized opposition to St. Woodrow’s Holy War. In order to sex up their tyrannical prosecution, they had good reason for trying to portray the I.W.W. as more involved in political scheming than it actually was.

The N.P.L. has often been described as “sympathetic” to the I.W.W., compared with other state governments in the West, but that’s mainly used to mean that the N.P.L. was less aggressive than other state governments about punching their heads and locking them in cages for public speeches.

This isn’t to say that there wasn’t actual collaboration between some of the Wobblies in North Dakota and the state socialists in the N.P.L., beyond the issue of private labor contracts. There may have been; I haven’t read enough on the topic to say definitively. But the materials you cite here certainly don’t bolster my confidence that the North Dakota Wobblies are being fairly portrayed.