Kinsella: The original left-right spectrum is confused and anti-libertarian.

Well, if you’re going to get all originalist on us, Stephan, the original left-right spectrum ran from ultra-royalist mercantilists who believed that the State was the instrument of God on Earth, to radical free marketeers who favored the abolition of State control in the name of the Rights of Man [sic]. (Bastiat sat on the Left; so did Proudhon.) Doesn’t seem especially confused to me; seems like a pretty straightforward spectrum from statists to anti-statists, with a laissez-faire economist and an avowed anarchist holding down the leftward end.

Anon73,

Rothbard’s plumbline position in “Kid Lib” (1974) and The Ethics of Liberty ch. 14 (1982) is that parents have a right to set household conduct rules, as the proprietor of the household, until children move out and take up living on their own; but that parents have no right to physically aggress against children [*], that children should be able to legally prosecute parents for injuries committed against them in the name of “discipline,” that children have an unconditional right to end their parents’ guardianship at any age where they are physically capable of running away, to strike out on their own or to take up with any foster parents who agree to take them in, and that neither parents nor the State have any right to force “runaway” children to return to the guardianship of any adult against the child’s will.

In “Kid Lib,” Rothbard aims to position his view as a middle-road between traditional coercive parenting and (his notion of) “Progressive” anything-goes parenting, with most of the rhetorical energy being spent on the latter, so he spends a fair amount of time grumping about kids “kicking adults in the shins” and discussing how he thinks that parents should insist on rules of conduct and a certain degree of unilateral authority, but that it must be on a “my house, my rules” basis and not on the basis of using physical or legal coercion to keep the child captive. But the last, which he views as “the fundamental tyranny” of the contemporary parent-child relationship, he denounces as “kidnapping,” and as “enslavement” of children by parents.

In “Ethics of Liberty” most of the stuff about theories of parenting and house-rules is dropped in favor of a more systematic examination of children’s rights, with a long section on the violation of children’s rights by statist law in particular, with highlights on the evils of truancy and other Fugitive Child laws, use of catch-all “juvenile delinquency,” inquisitorial proceedings without basic due process rights, the parens patriae doctrine, etc. to extend and intensify the power of abusive parents over “wayward” children, or to step in if a parent isn’t vigorously abusive enough, etc.

[*] Rothbard talks about “mutilating” and “abusing” children as aggressions and as violations of the parent’s role as trustee for the child’s self-ownership. I think his position logically implies that it’s illegitimate for parents to use any form of corporal punishment at all against children, but as far as I know Rothbard neither confirmed nor denied that in his writing on the topic.

As far as I know, even after his paleo turn, Rothbard never actually declared that his prior position on children’s rights was false. (He actually hardly ever repudiated any ideological positions, no matter how many strategic 180s he did; just swapped out his rhetoric and tended to write a if he had never said the things that he said before.) But by 1992, mainly in the interest of demonizing Hillary Rodham Clinton, he was scare-quote ridiculing any discussion of children’s rights, declaring that children should quote-unquote “get governed by their parents,” and denouncing Tibor Machan for supporting children who sued their parents for damages or for termination of custody. (I haven’t read any of Tibor’s stuff from that period, so I can’t be sure, but from the date and from what Rothbard writes, my guess would be that this was in response to high-profile cases like Kingsley v. Kingsley, in which a child was granted legal standing to sue for a transfer of custody from his biological parents to foster parents. Anyone know for sure?)

Anyway, after the paleo turn, Rothbard was looking to hook up with political allies who took rock-ribbed conservative positions on parental control, so all that stuff about the rights of wayward children and the use of state violence to keep children enslaved to their parents was pretty quickly dropped out, in favor of a line about the state’s meddling in parental rights, with folks like Hoppe throwing in paeans to the authority of the paterfamilias and the order of rank within the family, and the occasional supportive shout-out to the pro-child-beating conservatives from LRC.

Of course, after Rothbard’s paleo turn, there were still plenty of other non-paleo anarcho-capitalists who differed with Rothbard and with his newfound allies on all this stuff, and who generally took something more like the older Rothbard line. (George H. Smith, for example, defends the early Spencer’s position against parental coercion.) And the decline of paleolibertarianism (both as a strategic alliance and as an ideology) since Mr. Bush’s wars and the rise of Red State America has resulted in a pretty significant drop-off.

Most anarcho-capitalists, however, just don’t write about the issue at all. Presumably because they either don’t think about it, or don’t care, or both. Which is unfortunate but not surprising: most political theorists don’t spend much time discussing the status of children. Not because it’s unimportant to them (patriarchal authority is very important to lots of theories) but rather because they have reasons for wanting certain bedrock commitments to be left unspoken so that they cannot be identified, and without any explicit defense so that they cannot be challenged.

Will:

I sense you get pretty frustrated about the fact that you tend not to be persuasive to people with a background in relatively orthodox economics (or mildly heterodox economics).

Maybe. But if you use your sense of sight to read what Kevin wrote, it seems like part of what’s frustrating for him in the current exchange is that his views on benefits of specialization and economies of scale were misrepresented so that the crude cartoon version of his analysis could be waved off as “totally incompetent.” I don’t know about you, but I don’t find that a very auspicious beginning for a conversation.

There are lots of ways to discuss a view that you don’t find persuasive, and lots of people have criticized smaller or larger parts of Kevin’s writing on agriculture and local production. (I have, for one. William Gillis has, from a position arguably to the left of Kevin’s. Etc.) But there’s responsive criticism which attempts to clarify and hone in on the issue, and thee’s non-responsive attacks. What you’re doing in this most recent comment is something like the former. What you led off with is more like the latter.

And so I’m incredibly skeptical of the idea that more than a few people would find it worthwhile to support a restructuring of institutions to shift to a radically different structure of food production.

Well, the suggestion is not necessarily that lots of people would direct their economic activity towards restructuring etc. Some food faddists like that kind of thing, but the main suggestion here is that that would be an unintended consequence of the final prices for the produce of capital-intensive centralized agriculture with long-distance shipping rising relative to the final prices for the produce of more localized, informal, and labor-intensive county-scale, neighborhood-scale, or home-scale alternatives. (Note that you would see this effect even if absolute prices for all kinds of produce were to fall.)

The real price of food is declining. True or false? Real average wages are increasing. True or false? I think the evidence is very, very clear that both are true. And I think this largely explains the dramatic decline in the household production of food. But you apparently don’t. Why not? Would you agree that if the cost of food continues to decline as a percentage of the average wage, then the average-wage worker WILL hit a point where she is better off buying than growing?

1. What’s happening to real wages over time is a lot more complex than that, because, as I’m sure you know, modal workers don’t make mean incomes. When you separate it out by socioeconomic class, you get very different pictures for different kinds of families. Particularly over the last 35 years or so.

2. As specified, you haven’t yet given enough information to determine whether or not a wage-worker will or will not reach an equilibrium point where the trade-off of cash for saved labor is worth making. If tomato prices decline relative to wages for non-food-related wage-labor, then that would tend to favor doing the wage-labor, buying the tomato, and pocketing the difference — if there’s no comparable decline in the marginal time that it takes to grow the tomato yourself. But I don’t think that the antecedent of that conditional has been established.

And if your alleged facts are facts, why are they not exploited to create huge fortunes? If I’m a farmer with x acres, and I would get more output per acre by switching production techniques and substituting labor for capital, why wouldn’t I sell a bunch of my machines, buy a bunch of labor at the average wage or below, and make higher profits?

Well, if we’re just looking at the input side, and not the effects of (say) government action on competition, then Kevin’s alleged fact was that if you hold the acreage fixed, large-scale mechanized agribusiness will produce less total output than soil-intensive horticulture, but it will produce more output per marginal hour of labor expended on the acreage. The question then is whether it’s more profitable for the farmer to economize on the costs of labor or to economize on the costs of land and capital. For people with relatively little access to large, concentrated tranches of land and capital, the trade-off may go one way; for people with better access, perhaps even access that’s facilitated or directly provided by the actions of state or federal government, the trade-off may go the other way.

william:

I’m interested in the rights-ist take on all this. … I’m a long time intuitive supporter of nuclear proliferation into the hands of individuals (albeit hopefully at some as yet undetermined time in the future after everyone has evolved into enlightened anarchs)

Well, either people have an unconditional right to possession of atomic weapons or they don’t. If they lean towards the position that you say you intuitively support, then the rights-based case is pretty easy to make out. (Right to nonviolently possess powerful tools as long as you don’t threaten to use them aggressively against any identifiable victims, etc.)

If you lean more towards a position that would allow forcible disarmament, then the challenge is to come up with a non-strictly-consequentialist argument to the effect that it doesn’t violate the rights of the person being disarmed. That’s a lot harder but I don’t think it’s impossible. (Presumably it would have something to do with the lack of possible non-aggressive uses for currently-feasible sorts of atomic weapons and some conception of a standing threat. And presumably you could make out much the same case against, say, private possession of some killer nanoplague. If we’re imagining near-future-plausible but not-yet-actual situations where there would be some non-aggressive use — e.g. asteroid demolition, low-yield weapons, whatever — then that would tend to undermine the rights-based case for forcible disarmament in those cases. But it’d also tend to undermine the demand for such a case, since those are just cases where it looks like the intuitive demand for forcible disarmament is as weak as the theoretical case for its legitimacy.)

For someone like Roderick, who holds that considerations about what has good or bad results can actually play a role in deliberation about what rights people have (and vice versa, in deliberation about what would count as a good or bad result), there are a lot of further nuances that I haven’t mentioned.

Either way, it seems to me like this issue is probably orthogonal to the consequentialist-natural rights debate. Or if it’s angled a bit, the angle actually would tend to tilt rightsers more towards your own expressed position than it would consequentialists.

Stephan:

Technically, “owners” refers to those who have a claim on state assets (mostly US taxpayers, but others too, I suppose), and “outsiders” to those who don’t.

Well, right, which I think is my point — that the classes of “owners” and “outsiders” here don’t actually line up very well at all with either citizenship or immigration status. Which I would think tends to undermine the extent to which discrimination in favor of use by owners would result in anything looking like an even minimally restrictive immigration policy.

true… but one could argue that IF the basic argument here is correct, then the road-owners can, via their agent (the state), condition the use of public property by outsiders on an agreement to pay taxes–so that the taxes paid by undocumented or even documented “outsiders” don’t count to give them an ownership claim.

1. I don’t think that the state is acting as the agent of taxpayers.

2. I agree that this sort of thing is a possible arrangement in a case of property that is either owned jointly by an association of private individuals, or owned in common by the unorganized public, if you already have a tolerably good idea of who constitutes the association or the public, prior to and independently of the arrangement. In fact, I imagine it’d be pretty common on thoroughfares where they might be able to get some tolls from it.

But as a way of sorting out and settling the rightful ownership claims for a road currently occupied by a criminal enterprise like government, when we don’t yet have an account of who has the rightful ownership claim and who doesn’t, this seems pretty ad hoc. If natural-born citizen Roderick, naturalized citizen Arnold, documented immigrant Hans-Hermann, and undocumented immigrant Juan Maria all start using government roads at about the same time, and all start being forced to pay in taxes at about the same time, what’s the basis for categorizing (say) the taxes paid in by Roderick and Arnold as payments toward a share of ownership, but no the payments put in by Hans-Hermann or Juan Maria, such that Roderick or Arnold’s preferences for the property count towards setting requirements for admission, but Hans-Hermann’s or Manolo’s don’t? Of course, you can’t just cite Roderick and Arnold’s preferences about who should or should not be allowed to buy in, while ignoring Hans-Hermann’s and Juan Maria’s, when the question at hand is precisely who among the possible candidates are going to have their preferences counted and whose are going to be ignored; that would pretty directly beg the question.

(My own view on the matter, for what it’s worth, is that payment just radically underdetermines the question of who has the best claim here, since it’s so universal and run through so many anonymizing centralized slush funds; so what you’ll have to look at is, first, trying to reverse eminent domain seizures to the extent possible, and, after that, looking to something more like payment plus Rothbardian homesteading, which would be determined by who lives on, works on, or otherwise habitually uses the road. But if that’s the standard, then there are lots of communities where lots of undocumented immigrants live on, work on, or otherwise habitually use, U.S. roads.)

I’m not sure there is any armchair libertarian way to figure this out. It’s messy (which is one problem with crime in the first place). …. I tend to think it would be decentralized and ad hoc and catch as catch can ….

Sure, I agree. And doesn’t that make it extremely unlikely that any one-size-fits-all national border restrictions could even remotely approximate what the rightful owners would do with their property in roads, parks, etc. if free to set their own terms? If it actually reflects a decentralized, ad hoc, messy sort of approach, shouldn’t the expected result be decentralized, ad hoc, and messy, rather than a single policy for everyone all across the continental expanse of the U.S. — producing a border sieve rather than a closed border wall?

John,

1. It’s not my case. It’s Kevin’s case. He gives the argument for it in his book and a series of articles which I’m certainly not prepared to reproduce in full here in the comments thread. My point so far has simply been that specific criticisms Will has offered as a reply to the case are in fact crude misrepresentations of the case he’s allegedly replying to.

My own view is that Kevin probably overreaches on the extent to which centrifugal effects on agriculture will result specifically in sustenance kitchen-gardening. But I’m not prepared to wave that off as “bullshit” in the absence of a reply to the evidence he gives, and I’m not about to try and make the case that he overreaches based on the (clearly false) claim that he just denies the existence of benefits from specialization or economies of scale.

1. That said, it’s also simply not true that centralized growing of fruits and vegetables “aren’t subsidized” in the U.S. They receive far less in the way of direct federal subsidies (in the form of domestic price supports and export subsidies), compared to (say) cereal grains, soybeans, sugar, etc. But many vegetables (e.g. potatoes, onions) are bought up heavily through government purchase and donation programs (school lunch program, military procurement, etc.), many are included in government agricultural export financing and promotion programs (e.g. the Market Access Program), the market is just as heavily regulated as the cereal markets in favor of large incumbents by means of USDA and state and local regulations, they are covered by federal crop insurance bail-outs, and — this happens to be awfully important in the agricultural markets near where I live — benefit very heavily (especially with crops like melons, which are now mostly grown in the Southwestern desert) from government irrigation subsidies and engineering projects.

Moreover, Kevin’s point is not simply concerned with the effects of direct government subsidy to producers. It’s part of a larger case which significantly has to do with (among other things) the suppression of potential competitors and substitute goods, either by government-enforced cartelization, direct legal suppression of the product, by direct legal suppression of necessary inputs, or by the ripple-effects of economic distortions that make the inputs artificially expensive compared to how they’d be in a free market, or that make the inputs for centralized business models artificially cheap.

Is all of that enough to demonstrate that there’d probably be a large scale shift towards home food production in a free society? I dunno. In any case, we’re still talking about a really heterogeneous set of products (the economics of tomato growing are quite different from those of cantaloupe farms, and both are awfully different from banana plantations), and all this is no doubt beyond the scope of this comment thread. But it’s certainly a reason for believing that the market we have to look at now is pretty damn skewed, and so that pointing to revealed preferences under those market conditions is not a very reliable guide to what would be economically efficient in a genuinely free market, which was my point in mentioning all this stuff in the first place.

Will,

As you please, but to back someone into a corner you need to actually start with the position that they have, not some a strawman position that’s easier for you to attack. To attribute a claim to Kevin which he does not hold (for example, that there is just no such thing as gains from specialization or economies of scale, and that he is just in “denial,” rather than having given a specific argument with specific evidence as to why there are countervailing costs and diseconomies that are important in the case of a particular set of potential producers and a particular good) and then smugly ridicule this cartoon version of your interlocutor, rather than replying to the argument that was given you, is something quite different. To then describe your interlocutor as “totally incompetent” at economic analysis on the basis of this ridiculously crude strawman, when he has repeatedly and at length set out a more nuanced view, is awfully graceless, not to mention unreliable as a way of getting to the truth.

As for ad hoc rationalizations of prior convictions, I suppose that the charge against Kevin would be just if Kevin hadn’t ever set out in any systematic or comprehensive way to provide evidence for his claims that a shift, on the margin, away from wage-labor (yards, whatever) and towards home food production, might be preferable for some significant number of current wage-workers under free market conditions, or that state intervention systematically tends to favor hypertrophic centralized producers, to subsidize centralized capital-intensive agribusiness (and centralized, cash-lubricated capital-intensive business in general), etc. Or if he simply stopped and then refused to consider any kind of countervailing factors that might tend to push in the opposite direction under the conditions he is supposedly considering. But if he has provided such a systematic investigation and argument ahead of time, and has considered the countervailing factors, then we’re not talking about an argument ad hoc; we’re talking about the application of prior evidence to a specific case. And, well, you know, I hear he did already write some stuff about that stuff, even at some length. Maybe you think that what he wrote about it is underargued, or “terribly unconvincing,” or maybe even that it’s “bullshit.” But you’ve not yet given any reasons that anyone else can inspect or has any reason to care about for finding it so. Because, at the level of principle, I am fairly sure that no competent economist would deny that there are limits to the benefits of specialization and to economies of scale, that those limits are not homogeneous across all goods and all producers, and that large-scale government interventions may have large-scale systemic ripple-effects which tend to skew the trade-offs in some markets towards artificially centralized or capital-intensive equilibrium points. And on the level of detail, Kevin has presented some detailed evidence in favor of his take in many different books and articles, whereas you’ve offered “people like yards” and some contemptuous ad hominem swipes at smug urban eco-asshole basil growers, without any concerted effort to show that Kevin’s wrong on any particular point that he made. Maybe you don’t want to spend the time necessary to respond point by point, or even on one point. Which is fine; everyone’s got preferences and priorities. But if you’re not prepared to present a systematic response, then summary handwaving about what’s “bullshit” and what’s “terribly unconvincing” to you seems like an immoderate way to respond to an argument you’re not actually willing to reply to. And the fact that you don’t like the conclusion of the argument (that revealed preferences on this point under actually-existing capitalism reflect the influence of government intervention and not what people would likely do in a free market) doesn’t mean that citing the premises by way of explaining how Kevin came to the conclusion is an “ad hoc” response.

As for my own prior convictions, you seem to know more about my prior convictions than I do. Try finding anything that I’ve personally written which makes a detailed claim about how much wage-workers would shift towards kitchen-gardens for personal or family use in a free society. Insofar as I’ve argued about any of this stuff, it’s in the form of pretty broad claims about shifts on the margin, ceteris paribus, away from centralization, dependence on cash savings, and employer-employee relationships, in a free society. I’m not an especially good gardener myself, would most likely still be doing web development to pay for my food if laissez-faire broke out tomorrow and would be happy to do it, and generally have a much less detailed set of expectations about what free labor would look like in practice than Kevin does.

I do, however, have a pretty strong prior conviction in favor of playing an argument where it lies. And what I get really tired of is seeing Kevin put as much work as he does into putting out interesting, original, and detailed writing and analysis specifically on the question of economies of scale and benefits of specialization, producing reasoned responses to inappropriate and out-of-context applications of the economics of scale, division of labor, and roundabout production, only to see that work casually misrepresented and ridiculed as if he were simply unaware of, or trying to wish away, elementary pin-factory economics.

Will,

This, for example, is bullshit…

Maybe, but I can’t see that you’ve earned this assertion by means of argument, at least not as presented here.

(1) People like yards.

Sure. And people also dislike their jobs, and like cheap fresh produce.

People also typically like gardening work more than their jobs up to some point of labor-intensiveness, after which they start liking gardening work a lot less.

Given all this, the question is one of trade-offs among alternative uses for land and labor — whether people’s desire for (say) maintaining a grassy yard as a consumption good is strong enough, on the margin, to outweigh the countervailing benefits of small-scale biointensive vegetable gardening on the same land and with the same labor-time.

No doubt this will in fact be different for different people: some people really like yards; other people really hate their jobs; etc. But of course Kevin is not suggesting that, given the choice, all workers will prefer to transform some marginal units of lawn into marginal units of a kitchen garden as a means of reducing work hours. Nor is he even claiming, in the passage quoted, that any workers will withdraw entirely from the wage system in favor of gardening. What he does suggest is that, given the choice, some (significant number of) workers will prefer to trade out some (significant amount of) marginal wage-work, yardwork and yard-land in favor of marginal increases in garden-work and garden land. Of course, it’s easy to throw around isolated bits of data about what people “like” and don’t “like” in the abstract without considerations about opportunity costs, substitute goods, or division of the stock into marginal units, but given that Kevin’s point was about people’s preferences over alternatives on the margin, I can’t see how that gets any serious economic work done by this kind of response.

You might then ask, “Well, why don’t they already do what Kevin suggests? Seems like people’s revealed preferences tell us all we need to know about the trade-offs involved.” Which would be true — (1) if decisions were being made under conditions of adequate information (so that there is no need for, say, “mutualist propaganda” to offer information to people currently dependent on wages for their food about available alternatives which they may not have known about), and (2) if those preferences were revealed in a free market, where (among other things) substitute goods aren’t subsidized by the government, the wage-system isn’t made artificially difficult to escape by government-imposed needs for ready cash on hand, research and dissemination of information aren’t artificially skewed towards the needs and interests of competing business models, necessary inputs (notably, a patch of land, space to compost, etc.) aren’t made artificially expensive by government price-fixing and government-imposed restrictions on use; etc.

But they aren’t.

(2) The claim that it’s cheaper for families to grow their own than to buy from a store amounts to a denial that there are gains from specialization plus a denial of economies of scale (a Carson specialty), …

Well, no, what it amounts to is a specific application of a denial that gains from specialization and economies of scale are (1) unlimited (2) homogeneous across all goods and all producers.

Whether the application is apt or not is something that depends on more data than you can get from a one-paragraph pull quote (and is something that Carson discusses at length throughout his work on questions relating to, e.g., cottage industry and home food production). But the principle being applied is that there’s an equilibrium point at which marginal gains from specialization are outweighed by marginal costs (transaction costs, heterogeneous preferences for marginal labor-time, etc.), and an equilibrium point at which marginal gains from economies of scale are outweighed by marginal costs of scale, and that this equilibrium point may be different for, say, low-wage service sector workers than it is for highly-paid professionals, and may also be different for tomatoes or chili peppers than it is for pickup trucks or jumbo jets. Remembering which is not “totally incompetent,” but rather a prerequisite for actually doing any kind of serious economics in the real world.

I’m pro-gardening, but I’m smart enough to know that my investment doesn’t begin to cover my opportunity cost.

Maybe the kind of gardening that you do, and the alternative uses of your time that you have in mind, are different from the kind of gardening that Kevin has done, and the alternative uses of his time that he has in mind.

Or maybe that’s a bad example because cars would not exist in freed markets because we’d travel attached to inexpensive homemade kites which the corporatist conspiracy has brainwashed us into believing are impossible!

Is this kind of rhetorical broadside at ridiculous cartoon versions of your interlocutor supposed to be funny?

Because it sure isn’t necessary to make the point you’re trying to make, and it’s also neither particularly fair nor particularly reliable as a way to get out a relevant response to the argument your interlocutor actually made,rather than other, different arguments that he didn’t make, but which you find easier to lampoon.

Stephan,

I understand that you don’t necessarily mean to endorse the argument you are presenting. But, just to get clear on the details of the setup:

1. In the argument, as presented, the people who you claim to be the rightful owners of the road system are “U.S. taxpayers” (since it was their money that was stolen to build and maintain the roads). You then suggest that this is a reason why rules of the road could legitimately be adopted which exclude or condition access for “outsiders,” which apparently you read as people who are not U.S. citizens.

But “taxpayer” and “citizen” are not the same category. Not all citizens are taxpayers and lots of taxpayers aren’t citizens. Many citizens are net tax recipients; all immigrants, both government-approved and undocumented, pay at least some taxes to the local, state, and U.S. governments (gas tax, sin tax, sales tax, property tax through markups on rent, often income tax, etc.) and many, probably most, are in fact net taxpayers (since immigrants are ineligible for most welfare benefits that citizens are eligible for). So if you’re considering “taxpayers” to be the class of people who rightfully should have joint ownership of the roads, wouldn’t that suggest that your average undocumented worker has a substantially better claim on having a say in forming rules about who can use of government roads than upstanding citizens like Fritz Henderson, military-welfare recipients like Jim Gilchrist, or milfare administrators like Marvin Stewart?

1. Presuming, arguendo, that U.S. taxpayers (not necessarily citizens) are the rightful owners of government-funded roads (certainly the government is not, so…), do you think it likely that the shares and distribution of rightful ownership would be uniform across all taxpayers and across all roads? So, for example, have I, living on Rochelle Ave. in Las Vegas, earned a vote over what people living and working on Cass in Detroit can or cannot do with their road? Have the folks on Cass earned an equal say to me over who can or cannot use Rochelle here? When we’re trying to figure out what a private property owner would do, do we have to conceive of, say, the policies of a single private proprietor or a single private entity who owned all 2,500 miles of I-10? Or might the patterns of rightful ownership — hence the distribution of use policies — be somewhat more decentralized than that?

Brad,

Thank you for the mention. And for the kind words.

I also have a problem with the “free-market anti-capitalists” assuming that there would be no hierarchical firms in a freed market…

Well, I think the claim is usually not that there will be no “hierarchical firms” in a free market, but rather that firms will be (much) less hierarchical on average, and that hierarchical firms will be (much) less prevalent and (much) less central in the broader economy than they are today under the rigged state-capitalist economy. At least, that’s my view. (Similarly, it’s not that I think a free economy with a rich bed of mutual aid networks and wildcat unions will result in there not being any employer-employee relationships anywhere at all; rather, what I think is that those kind of relationships will no longer be the overwhelmingly predominant means for workers to make a living, and that those workers who do agree to them will be much less dependent on them for their economic survival.)

In any case, these theses aren’t just something that we’re “assuming.” They’re the conclusion of an argument. (Or rather, of several converging lines of argument. Having to do with, e.g., ways in which the state burns out informal-sector alternatives to hierarchical firms, subsidizes hierarchical firms over grassroots alternatives through government-granted monopolies, cartelized captive markets, corporate welfare, “development” policy, etc., privileges politically-connected big landlords, mobilizes tremendous amounts of money to support capital-intensive forms of production, big agribusiness, large-scale resource extraction, and long-distance shipping, etc.) Maybe these arguments don’t go far enough to establish their intended conclusions; but I think that they are at least a pretty substantial line of argument that needs to be engaged with by those who predict business-as-usual to continue, even if with greater competition from the bottom, when the gigantic firms you see running today pretty much all depend very heavily (as in fact they do) on government privileges that would be abolished in a freed market.

Many poor people are pretty much responsible for their own problems insofar as they haven’t made the best of things within the current system.

Well. Everybody makes mistakes. Certainly I’ve made my own, and I have lots of friends who got themselves into all kinds of financial trouble through their own bad decisions. Not least the college-educated kids from well-off families who enter their mid-20s with tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt to repay and no clear plan on how to do it. But I think the interesting thing is how far people have an economic support structure, or available economic opportunities, to cushion the fall and to get back up on your feet after it, once you’ve made your mistakes.

But the situation faced by the economically comfortable, and the situation faced by the poor, in these respects are very different. Things like whether or not you have access to credit, whether or not you have access to alternative housing, what your options are for alternative ways of making a living if your current arrangement falls through, whether or not you are constantly being socked with new expenses that knock you back, whether or not you have access to insurance to cover emergency expenses, etc. And I’d say that in each case, the differences between rich and poor in these respects are in no small part the result of either direct government assaults on poor people’s property rights and alternative survival strategies (as I discuss in “Scratching By”) or else indirect ripple-effects of cartelizing, rigidifying, and subsdizing interventions by the state into the market. Everyone walks a tightrope, and people of all classes fall off from time to time; the real question is whether you’re allowed to work with a net, or whether the government has cut it down and taken it out from under you.