Comments Elsewhere

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.

Jeffrey Tucker: For those who don’t know, the I.W.W. was the American movement of Reds – hardcore communists of the pure Stalin variety.

This contains several different misrepresentations of the Industrial Workers of the World.

The I.W.W., although much reduced in membership, still exists. You can find them on the web at iww.org. I am am a dues-paying member, as are several other libertarians I could name.

The I.W.W. neither were nor are “hardcore communists.” There were communists who became members of the I.W.W., most of whom left for Daniel De Leon’s Socialist Labor Party within a few years, or for the Communist Party of the U.S.A. some years later. But the economic ideas promoted by the union itself are decentralist and syndicalist, and disavow state confiscation of the means of production. (Incidentally, if you check up on von Mises’s exchanges with Polanyi et al. during the socialist calculation debate, you’ll find that he concedes that rational calculation, while not possible under state socialism, is possible under syndicalism.)

The I.W.W. certainly neither were nor are Stalinists. When the I.W.W. was founded in 1905, Koba was still snitching for the Okhrana back in Georgia. In part because of the many anarchists in their ranks, and in part because of the Stalinist CPUSA’s repeated attempts to take control of U.S. labor unions for its own purposes, the I.W.W. largely detested Stalinism and Stalinists. The Industrial Worker ran anti-CPUSA cartoons, including one from the 1940s in which Communist operatives were depicted as a rat studying a union rule-book.

eric lansing: sure sounds like communism to me, don’t ya think?

No, it doesn’t.

Communism is the belief that all forms of private property, at least in the so-called “means of production,” should be abolished in favor of collective ownership, either by the State or by some central organization putatively representing the workers.

Communists might agree with the selections from the Preamble that you quote, but so would many others, including many anarchists. The Preamble does not specify that the means of production should be owned collectively by the whole community, or revolutionary expropriation by a “workers’ state,” or anything of the sort. Not surprisingly; the I.W.W. rejected those approaches in favor of industrial organizing, direct action, the general strike, and “forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old.”

I’d be interested and willing to pay in the vicinity of $100 for an online seminar sort of course. These are fairly easy to run through a listserv.

One person you might contact for information and thoughts is Chris Sciabarra. A few years ago he ran some “CyberSeminars” on his Dialectics and Liberty series, which usually had about 10-15 students. He may have some insights to offer on this sort of project.

Bjartmarr: Finally, we need medical tort reform. Asking juries to determine whether a doctor was negligent just doesn’t seem to be working out very well, as awards are fairly unpredictable. My friend proposes that patients with grievances instead take them up with a medical grievance board made up of physicians. These doctors would decide if the doctor who performed the procedure was indeed negligent, and would award damages out of a state-supplied fund. Doctors would not pay damages for their own negligence (eliminating the need for medical insurance), but a doctor who erred too egregiously would have his license revoked.

Oh, great.

I’ll bet this would work out just about as well as it does in cities where people have to take their complaints of police misconduct to a “community relations board” which is itself packed with police representatives, and where the costs of civil rights settlements are taken from taxpayers rather than from the offending cops.

If your goal is to get a group of professionals to deal with people in a responsible, accountable way, then it strikes me as foolish to put the sole power to rule on grievance claims into the hands of those who have a professional interest in dismissing or minimizing complaints against themselves and their colleagues.

For deciding these kind of claims, a plain old jury trial is just about the worst system possible, except for all the others.

Myca: If you oppose universal health care and you do not explain clearly by what mechanism you will give medical care to poor people, you will be banned.

Well, I will give medical care to poor people (other than myself) by continuing to do what I already do. I scrape by on about US $13,000 a year and I give about 1/3 of that to groups that provide direct economic and medical aid to other poor people (Direct Relief, abortion funds, Planned Parenthood, battered women’s shelters, rape crisis counselors, etc.). I’m able to give that much partly because I don’t have any children to care for and partly because I have wealthier family members that I know I could ask for help in an emergency. But even without those advantages, I’d be able to give this kind of money more comfortably if it weren’t for the government’s constant draining of my resources through taxes to pay for red tape, corporate welfare and armed thugs. In any case I do think that I, at least, am doing something more to own my beliefs than just waving my hands around. As for explanation and defense:

Myca: I’ve heard over and over again that our current system is not a free market, and that’s cool, but then it’s incumbent on the person claiming that a free market would provide healthcare to those without money to show precisely how that would happen, because I don’t see it.

OK, but that’s not what’s been argued so far. What keeps happening is a comparison between something horrible that happens, or almost happened, under the U.S. state-corporatist system, and what would happen under some other state-socialist system of healthcare. But comparing the characteristics of one tightly-controlled government-regimented system of healthcare to those of another tightly-controlled government-regimented system of healthcare illuminates very little about how a free market would work, because neither of the options under comparison has very much to do with free markets. If you want to argue that state-socialism is better than state-corporatism, fine, but you should leave the free market out of it. If you want to argue that a free market in healthcare would still have features that make it worse than state-socialist healthcare, that’s fine too, but it requires some further argument that hasn’t yet been given in any detail.

As for the beginnings of an argument that you give in this comment:

Myca: Roughly, because the free market has no mechanism in place to provide health care to people who are unable to pay for it.

I’m not convinced. Because, well, of course it does. The “mechanism” is the same mechanism that exists in state-corporatist or state-socialist healthcare systems: people who are unable to pay for healthcare themselves can get it by getting other people to pay for part of it or all of it. The question is what means of getting other people to pay for it are available–and whether these means are voluntary or coercive.

Any State-run system of medical care that you happen to like could, in principle, be provided by voluntary mutual aid on a free market. The State has no special ability to make medical care “free,” or to summon up money from nowhere to pay for it; for the State to cover the medical costs it has to get money, labor, or supplies from somebody else, and whatever the State takes could be given voluntarily. Suppose that you like the way that money is collected and distributed in the French medical system; then on a free market, nobody is going to stop you from creating a nonprofit French Mutual Society for Medicine that uses the same bureaucratic mechanisms to collect, allocate, and pay out money. The only limitation is that, whatever system you cook up, you cannot force people to pay in, and you can’t force people to use your system for their own healthcare costs.

You might claim that unless everybody is forced to pay in, there wouldn’t be enough money to go around. But consider the billions of dollars that are voluntarily pissed away every two years trying to elect a slightly more “progressive” gang of weak-kneed establishment politicians, and what might happen if those resources were redirected towards direct action rather than electioneering and lobbying. Let alone the amount of money that might go to healing people rather than killing them if individual people, rather than belligerent governments, had control over the dollars currently seized in taxes.

You might instead claim that even if there is enough money to go around, this kind of model puts poor people at the mercy of donors for their healthcare. But I could just as easily respond that using the State to cover healthcare costs puts poor people’s at the mercy of the political process, which certainly offers no guarantees that the least powerful and least connected people in a society are going to get what they need, or even get decent human respect. In either case, people who aren’t very powerful need to organize and struggle to protect their interests from people who are more powerful than they are. The question, again, is what means of struggle are (1) morally preferable, and (2) strategically effective.

I don’t think it’s crazy to see voluntary, bottom-up mutual aid as both morally and strategically preferable to top-down political regimentation. Voluntary mutual aid may not actually produce a healthcare system that looks much like the nationalized healthcare systems common in western social democracies, but I think that the differences would largely be for the better: less bureaucracy, more alternatives, and more control in the hands of the patients themselves. Unlike the corporatist system in place today, medical costs would be drastically lower, thanks to the removal of the government-created monopolies and cartels that currently control every aspect of the insurance, medical, and pharmaceutical industries. And unlike the corporatist system in place today, medical costs might be covered not only by charities or churches or bosses (gag), but also through grassroots associations such as mutual aid societies and labor unions. (There is some actual history here; lodge practice medical arrangements in the U.S., U.K., and Australia used to provide healthcare to working-class folks at a rate of about one day’s wages for one year of healthcare, before the growing trend was halted and obliterated by the politically-connected medical establishment, with the backing of the State.)

Hope this helps.