Comments Elsewhere

Me:

Well, OK; but do you think that the only possible or effectual constraints on people's behavior, or countervailing powers that might check recklessness or cruelty, are legal constraints? If so, why?

Dan:

Because I think there are lots of people who are not very cooperative, and not much moved by the forces of consensus and team play.

OK; but, again, why think that appeals to "consensus" and "team play" are the only alternatives available to (1) not having any checks at all on other people's conduct; or (2) employing legal force to make people stop?

I'm all for consensus and team play, but I can think of lots of other means that people have used historically when they weren't forthcoming -- there are positive financial incentives (corporations and government agencies are not the only forms by which people can pool their resources); there's social pressure; cultural activism; scurrilous verses; protest songs; preaching; boycotts and "pro-cotts;" strikes; pickets; sit-ins; teach-ins; ogle-ins; and a whole host of other non-violent social and economic things that people can and have and will continue to do, all of them perfectly compatible with a free market. (It was, just to pick one example, sit-ins and boycotts, NOT antidiscrimination laws, which desegregated lunch counters and gas station bathrooms in the Jim Crow South. Not because white store owners were just all about "consensus" and "team play" with their Black neighbors; but because Black people got together, organized, and -- long before there was any legal sanction for doing so -- made it perfectly clear that they were willing to act, socially and nonviolently, in such a way that the stupid racist-ass policies of Woolworth's et al. would no longer be socially sustainable.)

Indeed, there's good reason to think that in free markets they would be far more effective -- insofar as the regulatory methods and direct subsidies by which governments insulate big players from market pressure and competition would no longer be in place. When markets are dominated by political decision-making, they have to worry only about pleasing politicians, not about what the neighbors think of them. When there are no big institutional contracts to be had, no legally guaranteed monopolies, no bail-outs, etc., they depend on the neighbors' consumer spending, and have a lot more reason to care about the social and economic pressure that ordinary people can -- without any political action at all -- bring to bear on them.

On your earlier point, all corporations are hierarchical and all of them represent concentrated wealth.  Yet most have them are not much involved in the bailouts, military-industrial complex or state-enabled monopolies.

No, not "most [of] them;" just the largest and most important ones. (I would maintain that basically every corporation within the top 10-20 of the Fortune 500 is a direct and obvious beneficiary of government bail-outs, major corporate-welfare programs, for-profit eminent domain, the military-industrial complex, or one of the Four Monopolies -- the Money Monopoly, the Land Monopoly, the Tariff Monopoly and the Patent Monopoly -- outlined by Benjamin Tucker. Indeed many are beneficiaries of several of these at once.) But there are many other forms of government privilege we could discuss beyond the biggest ones that go to the biggest corporations; and most forms of government privilege have ripple effects that go beyond their direct beneficiaries. Corporations typically deal best with other corporations, and where government privileges prop up one, they tend to indirectly nourish a lot of others.

> Capitalism is what happens when government and bullies leave people alone. OK, if that's what you're using the term "capitalism" to mean, then I'm for that. (The leaving-alone, I mean.) > You can call it whatever the fuck you want. OK. Just as long as you keep in mind that people might also use the word "capitalism" to refer to other things; and if so, then when they say that they are against "capitalism," what they are saying is not necessarily that they are in favor of government or bullies trashing people's stuff. (Some -- Marxists, say -- *are* in favor of that. Others -- mutualists, for example -- are not.)

**ttk2,** Well, I don't know why you think definitions 2-4 that I suggested are any more "twisted," as meanings, than definition 1 is. Certainly, they are not more *novel* meanings -- using "capitalism" to mean, say, the wage-labor system dates back to 1840, in Louis Blanc's Organisation du Travail, can be seen in Proudhon's La Guerre et la Paix, etc. Tucker (writing from the late 1870s up to the early 1900s) generally used the term either to refer to pro-business political privilege, or to the wage-labor system, depending on the context, etc. Definitions 2 and 3 of the four that I give are both *older than* definition 1, and have remained in continuous use all the while that definition 1 was being used. Definition 4 may be somewhat more novel -- it's really not a definition that anyone *gives* in systematic or theoretical work, but it seems the best I can do to systematically explain a certain kind of sloppy popular usage of the term. In any case, though, it's probably the single most common usage that you're likely to encounter in every day life, unless you spend all day arguing with libertarian economists, anarcho-syndicalists, or academic Marxists. But. Even if these other uses *were* obviously novel uses, and capitalism-as-the-free-market were obviously the original use -- well, what then? Words sometimes change their meanings; glasses used to be called "spectacles," "silly" used to mean holy and "snob" used to mean "a member of the working class." Not to put too fine a point on it, but "Anarchist" used to mean something different from "an advocate of a peaceful, stateless social order;" the term originally meant someone who advocated lawless violence or civil war. But we now use words like "Anarchist" ("market Anarchist," "Anarcho-Capitalist," whatever) to describe ourselves because the meaning of the word was (deliberately) changed by a group of libertarian theorists, beginning with Proudhon. Anyway. When words take on new meanings, you can complain about it, or you can try to document the different shades of meaning, take them into account and try to understand what people mean by them, rather than insist (or simply presume) that they must *really* mean what you would mean by it. The latter seems like mainly like a good way to make sure that you spend a lot of time miscommunicating, and bickering at cross-purposes with your conversation partner, rather than getting to the substantive issues at stake. (That is, for example, why I don't spend all day complaining that Ayn Rand or Ludwig von Mises changed "capitalism" away from its Real Original Meaning, even though the definitions that they give are really quite different from the definitions given in the work of Tucker or Swartz or whoever. *Given* that I know what they mean by it, I'm willing to work with that, even if *I* wouldn't make the same word choice personally.) > The last person to try and draw a line was Ayn Rand, she tried to save the word "selfish" .... I think Rand was actually pretty clear that she was *deliberately redefining* the term "selfish." That's fine; there are good reasons to redefine terms (her reason was that she needed a term that was more *precise* in order to express what she wanted to express; rather than invent a new word, she set out to reclaim an old one. Which seems fine, to me at least, as long as you're clear about what you're doing. (I disagree with Rand about "selfishness," but not because she chose that word; I disagree with her because I disagree with the ethical theory that she used the word to express.)

Author here. > He didn't even address the actual definition of capitalism, which is an simply economic system where the means of production are privately owned. Anything else is just a redefinition. You know, part of the reason I put up this post is because I'm getting tired of seeing people throw out these completely unsourced declarations about "the actual definition of capitalism," "redefinition," etc., as if they had in front of them some stone tablets where God Himself wrote out the Real Definition of the term in letters of fire. If you think this is The Real Definition of the term, you need to realize that it's not necessarily obvious to everyone else that it is, and you'll have to tell me at least where you *got* that definition from and why you think that that source is so especially definitive, compared to all the others that I've reviewed from 1840 to the present. Because that definition may or may not (on which, see below) be the definition given by Louis Blanc, when he coined the term in 1840 (in the Organisation du Travail); it's certainly not the definition given by, e.g., Proudhon (in La Guerre et la Paix) in the 1860s, etc. If you've got the Actual Definition and these other usages are "just redefinitions," then they are "redefinitions" that are *as old as, or older than* the Actual Definition you've got. Which would seem odd. Anyway, that said, I probably should have included a note about the definition of capitalism as (say) "private ownership of the means of production;" my excuse for omitting it (not necessarily a good one) is that the piece already clocks in at about 3,000 words as it is, and my take on the P.O.O.T.M.O.P. definition, if I had included it, is that the definition is itself subject to the same confusions as the term "capitalism" is. Here's what I mean: "private ownership" may be used to mean one of two things. First, "private" may be used to mean ownership which is private in the sense of being civil rather than governmental. If that is the case, than private ownership of the means of production is simply encompassed by the meaning of my first definition, "capitalism" as meaning simply "the free market." (What it is for a market to be free is, in part, that people are free to earn and keep property, without any de jure limits except those imposed by the need to respect the equal liberty of others. Government ownership, to the extent it happens, undermines the free market to that same extent, because government as such is a coercive monopoly, and what it takes, it takes at the expense of peaceful people's property rights.) This is, importantly, the sense of "private ownership" that libertarians usually mean when they talk about the importance of private property, etc. But on the other hand, "private ownership" may be used to mean private in the sense of solitary rather than common, or personal rather than social, meaning that the titles and the profits accruing from ownership go to a relatively few people, rather than being widely dispersed. But there are many senses of "social ownership of the means of production" which are *perfectly compatible* with free markets -- worker and consumer co-ops, for example, are a sort of distributed social ownership, and non-governmental common or public property (of the sort discussed by Roderick Long in, e.g., ["A Plea for Public Property"](http://freenation.org/a/f53l1.html)) are perfectly possible -- and, historically, perfectly common -- exercises of free association and individual property rights, just as much as are personal property, sole proprietorship, corporate ownership, et cetera. For a number of anticapitalist writers (including pro-market anti-capitalists, such as Proudhon), the specific reason they spend a lot of time writing against "private ownership of the means of production" is because they are concerned about the social and economic effects of ownership being concentrated in a few hands, rather than broadly distributed, so that, e.g., the people who work in a shop are generally not the people who own it, the owners of a hospital are generally not the people who depend on its services, etc. -- that is to say, they are concerned about something that they call "private ownership" not necessarily because they're opposed to free markets (most are, but many aren't), but because they're opposed to "capitalism" *in my third sense*, to the wage-labor system and closely related phenomena like landlordism and the predominance of corporate ownership in general. A free market with ownership that is *non-governmental*, but *widely distributed* rather than *concentrated* would satisfy their stated "anticapitalist" norms -- although only some (Proudhon, Tucker, Swarz) explicitly recognize this, and others (Marxists, Progressives) do not, generally because the former understand something about market economics and the latter do not. Anyway, if "private ownership" means capitalism-1 in some mouths, and capitalism-3 in others, and is often (as I think it is) used confusingly to conflate the two and try to take a position for against the conflation, then it suffers from the same basic problems as the term "capitalism" itself, and does not help as a clarification of it. Hence, I didn't offer it as one of the meanings to be distinguished; but I probably should have added a note explaining why. For more on the same issue, cf. Roderick Long's [Pootmop!](http://aaeblog.net/2008/06/27/pootmop/) and [Pootmop Redux!](http://aaeblog.com/2009/06/22/pootmop-redux/) posts. Hope this helps.

Roderick:

… by a “John J. Ray, M.A., Ph.D.” (Yes, he’s one of those.)

Maybe he believes that your post is part of the development of a tragic tale tending unswervingly to nothing less than a moral apotheosis. Had our demented diarist gone, in the fatal summer of 2011, to a competent psychopathologist, there would have been no disaster; but then, neither would there have been this blog.

Sartwell: "jefferson and madison and washington were all slave-owners who expressed their opposition to the institution of slavery and hoped that it would end."

Well, you know this is a different claim from the claim that 'the Founding Fathers "worked tirelessly" to end slavery.' Most people are aware of the idle wishes that some of the slaving founders expressed that slavery might end some day in the sweet by-and-by. (Although for Washington and especially for Jefferson even this is complicated; see Notes on the State of Virginia e.g.) Similar sentiments -- and similarly idle wishes -- are constantly used to make the (completely absurd) claim that General Robert E. Lee was some kind of abolitionist. But wishes are not the same as work. (*)

And it is not as if work were impossible; as you know men like Washington and Madison and Jefferson were all in positions not just to hope but to do some considerable things when they were, like, commander in chief of the continental army or writing the Declaration of Independence or writing the U.S. Constitution or being President of the United States of America. But they didn't. They just kept hoping. I'll bet Barack Obama hopes that some day Guantanamo will be closed, too.

(* It's not that none of the Founders actually worked instead of just wishing; Hamilton, e.g., and Rush were activists in northern manumission and abolition societies and played important roles in the abolition of slavery in New York and Pennsylvania. But the kind of "Founding Father" that folks like Bachmann typically want to claim as "working tirelessly" against slavery are always spectacularly bad examples, like Washington or Jefferson; probably mainly because that is the sort of "Founding Father" who went on to achieve executive power.)

Carlton:

I don’t think anyone gives two twits about illegals who aren’t selling drugs, robbing stores or collecting welfare.

There’s nothing wrong with selling drugs or collecting welfare. Neither selling drugs nor collecting welfare violates the rights of a single identifiable victim.

Selling drugs is in fact a productive activity which provides desired goods to willing customers, in defiance of the invasive prohibition of the state. Drug dealers are in fact class heroes, and deserve to be honored. Again, if the upshot here is that we should join Anarchists for State Drug Prohibition, fuck it, I want out.

Robbing stores is, of course, another matter. But I hear they already have some laws against that; I have no idea what it’s supposed to have to do with immigration status.

Incidentally, undocumented immigrants cannot collect welfare. Most documented immigrants can’t either. This has been the case for about 15 years now. I would have mentioned this earlier, but I don’t think it’s particularly relevant. (If all immigrants were collecting welfare, that might be an argument against government welfare programs, but it’s not an argument against free immigration.) However, if “anyone” is giving “two twits” about undocumented immigrants “collecting welfare,” then “anyone” is apparently not only wrong, but in fact an ignoramus who ought to look a couple things up before opening his yap.

Carlton:

Methinks the author not to be true to his anarchist hype. Perhaps a socialist in disguise?

For opposing state government laws and police surveillance?

If being true to one’s “anarchist hype” requires joining Anti-Statists for State Government and National Borders, then I want out. (Fortunately, I’m not sure that it does. But then, I am a socialist in disguise.)

Gene:

So, if we found some regime where anti-theft laws were enforced by summarily hanging starving people who stole a loaf of bread — and such regimes have existed! — then defending *any* laws against theft would be a “moral obscenity”?

I suppose you intend this as a reductio. But if so, you haven’t understood the argument you’re trying to reduce. My complaint had nothing essentially to do with the severity of the government violence inflicted on immigrants, or with the disproportion between the violence and the “offense.” If you’re wondering what it did have to do with, let me suggest that the bit about storming private homes and dragging people out of them; so is the bit about “political inversion of reality.” The appropriate question to ask in this context is, “Who are the real trespassers?”

Hope this helps.

Gene Callahan:

Property rights are social creation[s] in the first place….

As is systematic geometry. Does it follow that it is “ridiculous” to suggest that “society” may not “have a say” in whether the sum of the internal angles of a triangle are equal to two right angles?

In any case, what people here were discussing was not whether or not “society” should “have a say.” They were discussing whether governments should. I have quite a few friends and neighbors who are undocumented immigrants. They are admittedly no part of the United States government; but they are part of “society” ’round here. (A far more peaceful, productive and pleasant part of the society, as it happens, than Metro, ICE, or most other agents of the government.) If you intend to support government border laws, then your suggestion is that a substantial portion of society ought to be stripped of its “say,” and silenced by the dominating will of a tiny, politically-privileged minority of the population. If that’s how your theory of political representation works out, O.K., but you’ll need to actually provide some argument for accepting that theory, and you ought to drop the pretense that you’re talking about what “society” says or wants or does. What you’re actually talking about is drowning out a large segment of society with the amplified bellowing of political marching orders.