Comments Elsewhere

Tristan,

Thank you for the mention, and for the kind words.

For what it’s worth, I agree with you about “real socialism,” for reasons that I discuss at [1] and [2] (which are basically just riffs on Tucker’s “State Socialism and Anarchism”).

meika:

The reality in Tasmania is that we have a free market corraled by an alignment of interest which, for example, sees a puported private company (Gunns Tasmania, I suppose the profits are privatised) bankrolled by Tas Government pension money …

So, in other words, you don’t actually have a free market?

Markets in which purportedly private companies are bankrolled by big government slush funds aren’t free markets. At most what you have is an example of state-capitalist privateering. And consistent free marketeers are against that as much as they are against any other state-controlled or state-manipulated mode of production.

If we, the market, are stupid (Tasmania is an island all the bright ones leave or are left on the dole) then the ‘real left’ is also stupid, mediocre and falling into a hole.

Well, if everyone is stupid then widespread stupidity may lead to stupid outcomes on the aggregate. (Although this isn’t guaranteed; to infer that individual-level stupidity must lead to aggregate stupidity would be to commit a fallacy of composition. Sometimes a process can counterbalance individual stupidities in order to get a smart aggregate result. A lot of “wisdom of crowds” research tends to show that this happens more often than you might think, and that even when individual answers stand a good chance of being wildly wrong, on aggregate the results tend to converge around the right answer.)

But, in any case, I don’t see how this is an objection to free markets. If most people are stupid, then presumably democratic politics will also produce stupid results (indeed, stupider results, since unlike markets, majoritarian democracy provides no way for the minority to try out alternative experiments on a small scale). And anti-democratic politics will only produce non-stupid results if you have some reliable method for making sure that the ruling elite will tend to come from the few who are non-stupid rather than from the majority who are stupid. If it fails, then non-democratic regimes will tend to produce even stupider results than democratic regimes, since they allow one stupid person, or one select class of stupid people, to magnify their peculiar stupidities without any means for others to check, neutralize, or countervail against them. But I would submit that no reliable non-democratic method for filtering out stupid rulers has ever been devised in the history of world politics.

So if people tend to be mostly smart and good, then it seems like statist “solutions” are unnecessary. If people tend to be mostly stupid or wicked, then it seems like statist “solutions” are far too dangerous. In either case, freedom is preferable.