Cal:

It’s positing a legal, historical, and current operational difference, expanded in the following sentences of that paragraph. I’m not trying to “prove” anything.

Thanks for clarifying. I agree that you have “posited” this, and I agree that it doesn’t “prove” anything. But you know if your interlocutor asks you to describe the criteria that make it reasonable for institution A to be considered, from an analytical and critical standpoint, as part of the state, while unreasonable for institution B to be so considered — and then the answer you give your interlocutor is “Well, obviously, you can tell that they are different, because I posit that institution A is part of the state, and institution B is not,” then your “posit” is under-argued.

In fact it’s not argued at all. Or even so much as adequately characterized. You can insist on this “posit” all you like, but if you intended it as an answer to Roderick’s question, then it’s not just that you haven’t offered anything that would motivate Roderick to accept that there is an important difference. You haven’t even described what that difference would be. You’ve just re-stated the claim that there is one. It is exactly as if he asked “Well, what’s the difference between taxation and theft?” and you answered by “positing:” “Well, one of them is theft. And the other is taxation.”

No, that’s the empirical definition of the state, meaning it’s the one arrived at by … social scientists … who study state formation and state power empirically and make admittedly theory-laden definitions of the state subject to empirical scrutiny, as opposed to the moral or armchair philosophy about the nature of the state …

Man, it sounds like you’ve got a whole argument in your head ready to go about social philosophy and the (apparently unsavory?) practice of “moralizing.” But I didn’t ask you a question about social philosophy or about moralizing; I asked you in what sense your argument was supposed to be an empirical one when it seemed to be based entirely on definitional appeals. Maybe you think the definitions you appeal to are importantly rooted in a background empirical research. OK; if they are, great, but it seems to me that when Roderick points out all the actually-existing, empirically-observed linkages between the business model of some real-world giant corporation (Dow or Sony, for instance) and the real-world practice of state power, and your response is to start talking about the extent to which this entanglement is or is not a matter of “necessary and sufficient cause” or “unnecessary and partial effects,” etc. then it seems to me that Roderick is the one offering an empirically-rooted argument, and you are the one responding with an attempt at making and insisting on apriori reasoning from a set of conceptual distinctions.

(Now, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with making or insisting on apriori reasoning from a set of conceptual distinctions. But if you’re going to do it, you ought to be out and proud about that, not pretending that it really is an empirical argument after all.)

… the state is just force, the state is just hierarchy, the state is just authority, the state is just society, the state is just the limitation of choice, the state is just a large private property claim, the state is an instrument of the bourgeoise or the capitalists, etc. etc.

I have literally no idea what or who you mean to talk about here. You seem to be confusing particular substantive claims that some people have made about the state (e.g. that it “is an instrument of the bourgeoisie or the capitalists”) and the definitions of the state that they give (nobody in the world has ever tried to define the state as “an instrument of the bourgoisie or the capitalists”); and you also seem to have mixed in a number of claims that aren’t actually about the state, but rather about anarchism (e.g. that anarchism is opposed to all hierarchies, all authority or all use of force in social relations, not merely to political power, coercively-entrenched authority or territorial monopolies on the use of legal force). In any case, I’d like to hear a concrete example of a left-libertarian who defines the state in any of the “is just…” terms that you list here.

Plauche:

Don’t fall into the left-libertarian mistake of treating all big corporations as necessarily a part of the state.

Long:

Can you state a criterion that will have state universities and the post office turn out to be part of the state, and Walmart not?

Cal:

Um yes. Walmart is a private corporation operating in a statist market whereas the post office and state universities are state agencies.

Well, you know, that’s stating (or re-stating) the conclusion that you’re supposed to be proving. It’s not stating the criterion by which you can prove it.

Cal:

… the empirical distinction between …

You keep using that word. I don’t think it means what you think it means.

If your case rests on repeatedly recurring to the definition of the state per se, and the definition of the corporation per se, and how one of them is in-principle compatible with the norms of a freed market (which do not actually exist as an object of experience, although they can be imagined counterfactually); and the other is not (as it necessarily involves the legitimation of centralized force etc. etc.), then what you’ve got here — for good or for ill — looks a lot more like a conceptual distinction than something empirical. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Or if I’ve misunderstood what you meant to say when you called this distinction an “empirical distinction,” then what work did you mean the term “empirical” to be doing?

anarchyvenderblog:

… do still rely on voluntary exchange for their continued existence.

Some do and some don’t. Lockheed-Martin and General Dynamics and Halliburton, for example, don’t. They rely largely on tax-funded government contracts. Time-Warner, to take a different example, largely does not, either: they rely largely on payments extorted through copyright law. Of course, you could say, “Well, but you don’t have to listen to the music or watch the movies that Time-Warner controls.” But that seems a lot like saying “Well, you see the sales tax is voluntary, because if you don’t like it, you can avoid it by not buying anything.”

But isn’t opposing corporations on principle, even if they themselves oppose the corporatist-state structure,

Which corporations would those be?

… similar to blaming libertarians for accepting government healthcare in a single payer system? There is no alternative….

Well of course there is an alternative. Nobody is morally or prudentially obliged to try to run a Fortune 500 company.

It’s one thing to say, “Look, I don’t like this, but I still have to get healthcare somehow or another if I intend to stay alive.” It’s quite another thing, ethically, to say, “Look, I don’t like this, but I still have to get massive amounts of free land and international trade subsidies somehow or another if I intend to keep my company’s profits above of $16,000,000,000 this year.” Of course, you might point out that a CEO of a Fortune 500 company who did not take that attitude would probably not stay the CEO of that Fortune 500 company for very long. And you’d be right about that. But of course there is a smidge of a difference between the consequence “Well, I cannot get adequate healthcare for love or money, so I will die of a preventable disease” and the consequence, “Well, I guess I may have to look for work in some field other than being one of the most economically privileged people in the world.”

The main focus should be corporations that actively lobby for state benefits, don’t you think?

Maybe that should be the main focus; I don’t know. But I don’t see why it should be the exclusive focus. When corporations profit from state privileges — even if they did not lobby for them — I think it’s worth remarking that those business models are a creature of the political regime forced upon us, not an example of voluntary social relationships. Whoever is or is not to blame for the forcing, force it remains.

Be that as it may, what makes you think that isn’t the main focus, anyway? If the claim is that companies like Alcoa (!), Sony (!!), and Dow (!!@$#!) don’t actively lobby for state benefits, then that claim is false. And obviously so.

You know, it strikes me that if your aim is to use visual rhetoric to lodge a criticism of the people at Occupy Wall Street, then an image whose upshot is, roughly, “the activities of giant corporations inescapably pervade absolutely every aspect of your everyday life” … may not actually be as effective a criticism as you think it is.