"

‘Right-libertarianism’ is in fact almost entirely the creation of [Marxist state socialist] G.A. Cohen, who both came up with the labels ‘right-libertarianism’ and ‘left-libertarianism’ and an enormously influential reading of Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State and Utopia that greatly exaggerates the role and the fundamentality of self-ownership within that work and within natural rights libertarianism at large.

… Cohen says that Nozick makes the ‘blithe assumption’[4] that the earth is naturally unowned. But surely there is nothing irresponsible about beginning with non-belief in a natural right to the earth. Just as rights of self-ownership cannot properly be assumed to exist, so also original rights over extra-personal raw stuff cannot properly be assumed to exist.

Moreover, our pre-theoretical judgments on behalf self-ownership are much more powerful and inescapable than any pre-theoretical judgments that can be mustered on behalf of an original and equal right over raw extra-personal stuff. Pre-theoretical judgments on behalf of self-ownership powerfully answer to or articulate our sense that it is not merely a very bad thing for any (innocent, non-aggressing) individual to be killed, maimed, enslaved, and so on; they answer to our sense that such harmings deeply wrong those who are subject to them and that each individual has a distinct moral claim against herself being subjected to such treatment. … These pre-theoretical judgments seem to be inescapable within any rights-oriented approach.

"

Eric Mack, philosophy prof at the University of Rochester writing an essay on land rights for the ongoing symposium at Bleeding Heart Libertarians (2012)

"In the long run there is no such thing as a rent, only returns on initial endowment, effort, and luck. Any “rent” that would accrue to the landowner after he discovers and brings to market any properties of the land are really a ‘quasi-rent’ (Marshall 1920): while superficially similar to a rent, the reward of charging P > MC for, say, natural resources discovered on the land are a necessary incentive to search for these resources."

A most excellent paragraph from Gochenor & Caplan’s most excellent new paper on the economics of land ownership and taxation, ‘A Search-Theoretic Critique of Georgism’ (2012). ‘P > MC’ means a price higher than the marginal cost.

Are people who make money from owning land exploiters of the rest of us? Useless, evil landowners? Not so much.

Combine with ethics of land ownership de Auberon Herbert, who was also responding to Georgists in Property Rights in Land: Mutualism vs. Libertarianism. And also the econ answer to the question: So why shouldn’t everything be organized into individual private property units?

I see economic ignoramuses

anti-stateaaron:

rogue-philosophy:

Profit is theft incentive.

There, I fixed it.

Right-conflationism, profit is only possible when a monopoly is held and is a reflection of the current political economy. In a free market products would be sold at the cost of production (labor value) in order to compete.

Hmm no. You are conflating economic profit with accounting profit, and you are confusing the long-run equilibrium tendency according to labor theories of value with the real world. Since nobody other than a few partisan cranks accept the labor theory of value as sound social science, it’s hardly a safe implicit premise left unargued. And even based on your labor theory of value, economic profit being zero would only be a long-run equilibrium tendency and never actually the case. And you would never want all accounting profit (which is what everyone means by “profit” in normal context) to be zero as that would destroy the economic incentive to produce anything or allocate production efficiently.

You also seem to think that “labor” is the only cost of production, and that it has some determinable “value” prior to price formation through interpersonal exchange based on subjective valuation on the margin. Both of those are left unargued and are demonstrably false.

You are further employing the vacuous lingo of partisan “left”-libertarianism where it’s not even appropriate on its own terms: Long says “right-conflationism” is conflating the actually-existing mixed economy with a pure free market… which has nothing whatsoever to do with your economically illiterate assertion about profit.

Even Studies in Mutualist Political Economy was not this bad. 

(Source: anticapitalist)

Conceptual history of ‘socialism’ vs. ‘individualism’ in Western thought

It will be better next time.

—slogan painted in 1989 on a statue of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels in East Berlin

The fact that ‘socialist planning’, in the original sense of a rational economy which replaced market relationships by direct calculation and direct product exchange, has nowhere been established, reflects not the malevolence of this or that social group, not the backwardness of the countries concerned, but the theoretical inadequacy of the traditional conception.

—Michael Ellman, Socialist Planning (1989)

By the second half of the twentieth century, the word ‘socialism’ had become associated with a huge variety of doctrines.

Read more

Property Rights in Land: Mutualism vs. Libertarianism

Auberon Herbert, founder of the libertarian school of voluntaryism, refutes the proto mutualist claims along the lines of “land belongs to everyone” that his Georgist friend R.W. raises in the August 1898 issue of the journal The Free Life:

I will take the points in order as my friend raises them.

We both agree that property is sacred because it is the product of faculties. But land is not the product of faculties, says the writer. Now let us distinguish. We must look at land under two different sets of circumstances. (1) Land already owned and become marketable; (2) Land as it first came under ownership, as it first fell under occupancy.

Read more

Second reply to an obscurantist

weneverjumpship:

fuckyeahemergence:

I already addressed everything you said here in my reblog of your response to me, so I don’t know why you avoided those points and posted this half-ass attempt without reference to the argument that preceded it.

Because it was turning into a cluster fuck, and I wanted to address the issue in a single post. Not everything is a conspiracy against you I promise.

It’s not a conspiracy against me, it’s just that your post raised points which have already been explicitly addressed in reply to your previous response…

No it is not “arbitrary.” That is an incredibly stupid thing to claim. That would entail, for instance, the difference between rape and consensual sex being “arbitrary.” As I explicitly explained and you avoided:

If an action is coerced, then the choice is not free—it is replaced by an interpersonal imposition: a proactive threat of physical force if you don’t do what the coercer wants. Thus a coerced action only reveals on net whether the individual would rather be hurt/caged/killed or obey.

There are intertemporal and informational uncertainties in voluntary interaction—thus it being voluntary is necessary but not always sufficient to say that it was in fact mutually beneficial. However in coercive interaction, we can say with much more certainty that the interaction was not mutually beneficial because the coerced party was proactively forced to comply and couldn’t reveal their marginal values beyond the options proactively imposed by the coercer.

(Furthermore, empirically speaking, the coercion itself (regardless of the particular options imposed) is considered an extremely significant cost in itself by most people. You may happily sell me your cocaine for $500 upon my request, but if instead say “here’s 500 dollars, now give me your coke or I’ll kill you,” then it rather drastically changes your subjective perception of the interaction.)

For instance, someone may immediately regret the consensual sex they just had with their ex and it may be quite psychologically painful, not individually beneficial on net. However that is still very clearly conceptually distinguishable from being raped. We can say with very high certainty that on net rape is not mutually beneficial because it is proactively coerced by one party.

You are missing half the equation regarding slavery/statism. You’re omitting the most important part of the interaction—the very thing that conceptually defines those terms: coercion, the proactive threat of physical force.

Slaves indeed often receive housing, food, medical attention, education, and other things from their masters. So do non-slaves often receive these things from employers, family, friends, charities, etc. The difference for the slave is that the interaction is coercive; slaves are proactively forced by the masters to stay on the plantation, do the work, obey. The things they receive and accept are irrelevant (even if the master gave the slaves opulent palaces to live in on the plantation or something). They don’t make the interaction mutually beneficial because the slaves did not freely choose to work in return for those things. In the same way, if a rapist puts 100 dollars in his victim’s pocket during the rape, and the victim keeps it and later spends it, this doesn’t make the rape mutually beneficial.

The rape example doesn’t have anything to do with the issue because they are physically restrained (different than coerced) and incapable of choice. Your definition works better for short term violence than it does long term relationships with coercion.

Uh no. You are ignorant. Consult any dictionary or legal lexicon or other relevant reference source.

Definition of COERCE

1. to restrain or dominate by force
2. to compel to an act or choice
3. to achieve by force or threat

 Merriam-Webster

Definition of RAPE

1. an act or instance of robbing or despoiling or carrying away a person by force
2. unlawful sexual activity and usually sexual intercourse carried out forcibly or under threat of injury against the will usually of a female or with a person who is beneath a certain age or incapable of valid consent

Merriam-Webster

Sexual violence includes rape, defined as physically forced or otherwise coerced penetration - even if slight - of the vulva or anus, using a penis, other body parts or an object. The attempt to do so is known as attempted rape.

World Health Organization

And there is no short-term vs. long-term dichotomy here. Slavery, statism, theft, and rape all entail proactively coercive interpersonal interaction. The length of the interaction is not relevant.

I’ll find it hard to believe if you can’t understand this conceptual distinction.

But we can also think of a third situation. Imagine that a person is in a prison cell, and I slide some bread through a hole in the door, and the prisoner chooses to eat it. This satisfies both criteria for the vulgar libertarian’s standard of mutually beneficial 1. Both parties benefited and 2. we know it because preferences were expressed thought action.

You are completely missing the point. If you’re too dumb to get this conceptual distinction, you should really stop trying to write about political economy… is the interaction interpersonally voluntary?

So you “slide a piece of bread into a prisoner’s cell.” You’re omitting exactly the question that is relevant. Did you coerce the prisoner into that cell? If not, then the interaction between you two is indeed voluntary very likely mutually beneficial. If yes, then no it does not satisfy the criteria for mutual benefit and is very likely not mutually beneficial.

OK, I am just going to stop it here because he misses the point.

Looks to me like you “stopped it there” because you can’t respond to anything actually stated, not because I “missed” anything.

I am not ignoring coercion in the relationships. I am explaining why it shouldn’t matter to your criteria. The only reason why voluntary action is important (to your criteria) is because it allows people to express preferences through action so that we know that they actually prefer it. The reason why it’s arbitrary isn’t because “there is no deference between sex and rape” but rather it is arbitrary to your criteria of determining mutual benefit because many (although not all) coercive relationships leave room for satisfying preference.

Do you have a reading comprehension deficiency or something? I already explained why coercion is relevant to the criteria, and that addresses this specifically. That a coercive interaction can conceivably be mutually beneficial has already been addressed. The point is that this would be impossible to determine given the interpersonal imposition of a choice to either do what a coercer wants or be hurt/caged/killed. The coercion will always be at least spurious given that if an action would have been net beneficial, the coerced individual would have likely taken that action voluntarily anyway. Furthermore, the coercion itself is an extremely significant cost. Nothing can be said with absolute metaphysical certainty, but if an interaction is coercive, it is very much less likely mutually beneficial while a voluntary interaction is very likely mutually beneficial (the uncertainty is informational and intertemporal).

Your claim that this distinction is “arbitrary” is still not justified and entails, for instance, the distinction between rape and consensual sex being similarly “arbitrary.”

The preferences that can be satisfied in slavery, statism, and in a prison cell are just much more limited.

Here is a more precise wording of your definition of mutually beneficial 1: each party has to benefit (even if its next to nothing) and 2: each party has to express preference through action so that we know that they actually prefer it.

No, that is not more precise, it is more vague and less comprehensive… which is why I didn’t write that. If you’re going to keep trying to respond, respond to what is actually written.

Now you can argue that the actual process of being enslaved, or imprisoned isn’t mutually beneficial, but you have to accept that the relationship as a whole is mutually beneficial under this criteria.

What? You have made no argument whatsoever for the interaction of slavery being mutually beneficial by any metric.

Because if there is any room in a relationship to satisfy a net benefit and express a preference for it though action then your criteria is satisfied.

No, if the interaction is coercive, such as slavery, then that interaction is not mutually beneficial by the revealed preference criteria regardless of what other interactions occur. Similarly, if a pervert kidnaps a girl and locks her away in a cage, the interaction does not become mutually beneficial if he gives her candy or money or food or anything else.

And for clarification. I think that voluntary action is very important for maintaining mutually beneficial relationships, in fact it’s essential. It’s just not the whole story, and your criteria for satisfying it sucks.

You are seriously confused and you are confusing others.

(Source: un--man, via un--man)

Reply to an obscurantist

I already addressed everything you said here in my reblog of your response to me, so I don’t know why you avoided those points and posted this half-ass attempt without reference to the argument that preceded it.

weneverjumpship:

The general libertarian argument is as follows, “If interactions are voluntary, then they are mutually beneficial.” More specifically 1. There must be some benefit to both parties (even if it is next to nothing) 2. The action must be voluntary so that we actually know that both parties have a preference for what they are getting out of the interaction.

So basically anything is mutually beneficially in which both parties gain any net benefit. But how do we know that each party is benefiting? Well, If someone chooses to do something and no one is forcing them to do so, then well we can assume that they are doing it because they value the result. Thus each party is benefiting because each is able to achieve the value they are seeking, and is thus mutually beneficial.

Now I don’t have a problem with this definition if it is used in a technical sense. Sure, if I gain ANY benefit from something then I guess we can call it mutually beneficial. But the problem arises because no one uses the term “mutally beneficial” to refer to anything that benefits both parties at all, in the same way no one uses the term healthy to refer to anything that will keep you from starving to death. Under such a definition a Big Mac is healthy.

You haven’t made an argument here, and you should have actually responded quote-by-quote to the response to your post, as that would have made your post at least less unproductive.

You just assert that “no one used the term ‘mutually beneficial’ to refer to anything that benefits both parties at all.” You would need to make a case for that claim given it contradicts the definitions of “mutual” and “benefit.” Consult a dictionary. You can’t just ignore definitions and replace consensus words with your own political concepts at whim. That’s not how language works.

Also, the addition that “as long as it is voluntary” is actually arbitrary. All that is really necessary is that preference is expressed though choice and action, so that we know that someone actually prefers it. If I offer someone some bread and they take it, we can clearly determine that they wanted it, whereas if I have some one chained to a chair and I shove it down their throat, well then we can’t be sure if they actually wanted it and if it is benefiting them or not.

No it is not “arbitrary.” That is an incredibly stupid thing to claim. That would entail, for instance, the difference between rape and consensual sex being “arbitrary.” As I explicitly explained and you avoided:

If an action is coerced, then the choice is not free—it is replaced by an interpersonal imposition: a proactive threat of physical force if you don’t do what the coercer wants. Thus a coerced action only reveals on net whether the individual would rather be hurt/caged/killed or obey.

There are intertemporal and informational uncertainties in voluntary interaction—thus it being voluntary is necessary but not always sufficient to say that it was in fact mutually beneficial. However in coercive interaction, we can say with much more certainty that the interaction was not mutually beneficial because the coerced party was proactively forced to comply and couldn’t reveal their marginal values beyond the options proactively imposed by the coercer.

(Furthermore, empirically speaking, the coercion itself (regardless of the particular options imposed) is considered an extremely significant cost in itself by most people. You may happily sell me your cocaine for $500 upon my request, but if instead say “here’s 500 dollars, now give me your coke or I’ll kill you,” then it rather drastically changes your subjective perception of the interaction.)

For instance, someone may immediately regret the consensual sex they just had with their ex and it may be quite psychologically painful, not individually beneficial on net. However that is still very clearly conceptually distinguishable from being raped. We can say with very high certainty that on net rape is not mutually beneficial because it is proactively coerced by one party.

You are missing half the equation regarding slavery/statism. You’re omitting the most important part of the interaction—the very thing that conceptually defines those terms: coercion, the proactive threat of physical force.

Slaves indeed often receive housing, food, medical attention, education, and other things from their masters. So do non-slaves often receive these things from employers, family, friends, charities, etc. The difference for the slave is that the interaction is coercive; slaves are proactively forced by the masters to stay on the plantation, do the work, obey. The things they receive and accept are irrelevant (even if the master gave the slaves opulent palaces to live in on the plantation or something). They don’t make the interaction mutually beneficial because the slaves did not freely choose to work in return for those things. In the same way, if a rapist puts 100 dollars in his victim’s pocket during the rape, and the victim keeps it and later spends it, this doesn’t make the rape mutually beneficial.

I’ll find it hard to believe if you can’t understand this conceptual distinction.

But we can also think of a third situation. Imagine that a person is in a prison cell, and I slide some bread through a hole in the door, and the prisoner chooses to eat it. This satisfies both criteria for the vulgar libertarian’s standard of mutually beneficial 1. Both parties benefited and 2. we know it because preferences were expressed thought action.

You are completely missing the point. If you’re too dumb to get this conceptual distinction, you should really stop trying to write about political economy… is the interaction interpersonally voluntary?

So you “slide a piece of bread into a prisoner’s cell.” You’re omitting exactly the question that is relevant. Did you coerce the prisoner into that cell? If not, then the interaction between you two is indeed voluntary very likely mutually beneficial. If yes, then no it does not satisfy the criteria for mutual benefit and is very likely not mutually beneficial.

Don’t like that example because the prisoner’s only choice is starvation? Fair enough (I don’t think it should matter, because the criteria is satisfied but anyways) how about slavery? A slave can choose to eat less than what is given to them, or sleep in or out of shelter provided to them. Or perhaps the slave meets fellow slaves and chooses become friends with them. The choices are limited yes, but they still exist. So, once again, preference is expressed though action and is therefore “mutually beneficial” by their definition.

No it obviously is not. See above, and the same applies to all the rest of your examples where you obscure clear concepts to equate voluntary employment with mass coercive states. I don’t get it… are you intellectually dishonest or just rather intellectually deficient?

When libertarians tell me that my wage labor is “mutually beneficial” I fail to see how this can’t be applied just as well to the state. You benefit from public roads, water, waste management, etc… and we know it because you choose to use them. Therefore you must call our relationship with the state mutually beneficial. And sure, in some sense of the term, it is. I certainly use these things because they improve my life over not using them, but that doesn’t mean that we should be satisfied with them.

See above.

When people talk about mutually beneficial relationships, they are referring to relationships where peoples interests aren’t subjugated to someone else’s.

Assertion that contradicts lexicography without argument or evidence.

And it isn’t just aggression and violence that are capable of such subjugation.

Some things other than aggression are bad and can lead to all kinds of more bad things. Maybe that means aggression in some instances is justified because it prevents these other bad things. That is indeed a sound argument for statism if there are such bad things worse than those caused by state aggression which can be remedied by state aggression. Either way, there is an important conceptual distinction you are obscuring.

Privilege, and power disparities of all sorts create such problems by putting one party in a special position to make their interests more important in negotiation than the other party. Even in personal relationships, intimidation, and manipulation can be forms of subjugating someone’s interests to your own.

Just because a “power disparity” that involves coercion is pernicious and opposed (e.g. rapist vs. victim, slavemaster vs. slave, state vs. subject, mugger vs. grandma, extortionist vs. businessman, etc.) doesn’t mean at all that a “power disparity” which doesn’t involve coercion is similarly pernicious or should similarly be opposed (e.g. mother vs. child, popular girl vs. loser, football coach vs. player, lab instructor vs. student, widely respected scientist vs. crank, efficient flower shop vs. inefficient flower shop, customer vs. plumber, etc. etc.). It does not mean that the latter restricts choice or in at all the same way as the former. Indeed the operation of the latter is sometimes necessary for “maximizing mutual benefit.” 

If you have more money than me then you ceteris paribus have more “bargaining power” in a marketplace than me. A business with high net asset value has more bargaining power in merger than a business with less. A more popular, taller, and richer guy may have more bargaining power than you with the girls at a frat party. If some guy is short, has an unattractive face, a genetic predisposition to obesity, a dull personality, and was born to a poorer, dysfunctional family… then his bargaining power with girls or potential employees or a basketball recruiter may therefore be much less than someone else.

Life is often unfair in a grand sense. We don’t choose the circumstances of our birth, our genetic makeup, the cultural values of the society we live in, the average preferences of consumer blocs, the emotional reactions of members of the opposite sex, the functioning of our internal organs, or the astronomical mechanics of our little solar system. These things have profound effect on everything we do. These things are a given. Liberty is dealing with these givens unrestricted by the impositions of other people. It is within this macroreality out of our direct control that we can be free to choose our own individual actions (when not the subject of interpersonal coercion). It is within this that we either voluntarily interact or are proactively forced.

Interpersonal “disparities” of different kinds of “power” and “authority” are inevitable in human society… and many such disparities are quite desirable (by common metrics) for many diverse reasons. An obvious example is the bankruptcy of market firms that fail to efficiently satisfy customers vs. the thriving of firms that succeed. The opposite ideal—equality of “power” and “authority” among all people—is conceptually nonsensical and empirically impossible. Attempts to politically implement such nonsense ideals have resulted in consequences ranging from boring stagnation (e.g. Kibbutz) to incredible human tragedy (e.g. revolutionary communism).

Treating coercion as the only meaningful form of subjugation is non-sense, and libertarians will never be taken seriously until they acknowledge that.

Straw man. See above x2. Plus, “subjugation” is vague and you need to define how you are using it.

If we are supposed to be happy with anything that has ANY mutual benefit, well then that just about justifies everything now doesn’t it?

Only if you don’t understand the basic argument…

And I feel like that’s the point. Libertarians have come up with a criteria that they can use to dismiss problems as actually existing.

Straw man. Libertarians don’t say other problems “don’t exist.” They conceptually differentiate aggression from patriarchy or pornography or homosexuality or ageism or emotionally abusive gf-bf relationships or whatever thing someone thinks is bad. They then argue that most of these bad things are exacerbated, rather than remedied, by state aggression. Your useless obscurantism prevents this argument from being articulated.

Some have claimed that mutualism muddies clear concepts, or deviates from the principles of libertarianism. I think that is is more likely that vulgar libertarianism over simplifies issues to justify the status-quo. 

You specifically in your articulation of mutualism muddy clear concepts (libertarian and otherwise) to forward a personality cultic partisan aesthetic, as I’ve pointed out directly a number of times now.

(Source: un--man)

Freedom in the context of reality vs. "Mutualism" →

fuckyeahemergence:

weneverjumpship:

“Anarcho-capitalists like reciprocity, community, family, charities, “social” organizations of all kinds. Unlike communists and most “mutualists,” however, anarcho-capitalists don’t try to fallaciously…

 

If your definition of mutually beneficial is merely that each party has to benefit in some way that they choose (or have a preference for) then your addition of “as long as it is voluntary” is arbitrary. Slavery and statism provide benefits that people clearly choose to take such as “food” or “welfare”. Slaves would choose to eat food that was provided by their “owners”, people choose to get welfare, and yes they “benefited” from those choices, and were still able to obtain some of their subjective preferences.

Do you see how this is begging the question?

 

No, you’re completely muddling the concepts here. An interaction is mutually beneficial if each party involved benefits on net from the interaction. Such an interaction is by definition mutually beneficial. So that’s the concept: mutual benefit.

How do we know whether an interaction is mutually beneficial? Costs and benefits (valuations) are individually subjective and revealed marginally by uncoerced, voluntary, conscious, deliberate human action. An interaction being accepted or rejected by free choice - being individually voluntary - is epistemically necessary to say whether the interaction is beneficial in the first place. If an action is coerced, then the choice is not free—it is replaced by an interpersonal imposition: a proactive threat of physical force if you don’t do what the coercer wants. Thus a coerced action only reveals on net whether the individual would rather be hurt/caged/killed or obey.

There are intertemporal and informational uncertainties in voluntary interaction—thus it being voluntary is necessary but not always sufficient to say that it was in fact mutually beneficial. However in coercive interaction, we can say with much more certainty that the interaction was not mutually beneficial because the coerced party was proactively forced to comply and couldn’t reveal their marginal values beyond the options proactively imposed by the coercer.

(Furthermore, empirically speaking, the coercion itself (regardless of the particular options imposed) is considered an extremely significant cost in itself by most people. You may happily sell me your cocaine for $500 upon my request, but if instead say “here’s 500 dollars, now give me your coke or I’ll kill you,” then it rather drastically changes your subjective perception of the interaction.)

For instance, someone may immediately regret the consensual sex they just had with their ex and it may be quite psychologically painful, not individually beneficial on net. However that is still very clearly conceptually distinguishable from being raped. We can say with very high certainty that on net rape is not mutually beneficial because it is proactively coerced by one party.

You are missing half the equation regarding slavery/statism. You’re omitting the most important part of the interaction—the very thing that conceptually defines those terms: coercion, the proactive threat of physical force.

Slaves indeed often receive housing, food, medical attention, education, and other things from their masters. So do non-slaves often receive these things from employers, family, friends, charities, etc. The difference for the slave is that the interaction is coercive; slaves are proactively forced by the masters to stay on the plantation, do the work, obey. The things they receive and accept are irrelevant (even if the master gave the slaves opulent palaces to live in on the plantation or something). They don’t make the interaction mutually beneficial because the slaves did not freely choose to work in return for those things. In the same way, if a rapist puts 100 dollars in his victim’s pocket during the rape, and the victim keeps it and later spends it, this doesn’t make the rape mutually beneficial.

I’ll find it hard to believe if you can’t understand this conceptual distinction.

 

True, violence limits peoples ability to have mutual benefits, and  voluntary relationships open up choices and peoples ability to maximize mutual benefits, but this begs the question, how does this not apply to all power disparities. Violence limits peoples bargaining power, but then again, so does every disparity in power and authority.

 

Can you please google “begging the question.” You keep using that phrase incorrectly. It’s annoying. You mean “raising the question.”

The issue is not “violence” as such—libertarianism is not pacifism or Jainism. Libertarians are talking about something specific: aggression i.e. coercion = proactive, interpersonal threat of physical force. “Power disparity” as such is extremely vague and can mean a thousand different things. “Authority” as such is even worse. Using these terms undefined just muddies the conceptual waters.

Just because a “power disparity” that involves coercion is pernicious and opposed (e.g. rapist vs. victim, slavemaster vs. slave, state vs. subject, mugger vs. grandma, extortionist vs. businessman, etc.) doesn’t mean at all that a “power disparity” which doesn’t involve coercion is similarly pernicious or should similarly be opposed (e.g. mother vs. child, popular girl vs. loser, football coach vs. player, lab instructor vs. student, widely respected scientist vs. crank, efficient flower shop vs. inefficient flower shop, customer vs. plumber, etc. etc.). It does not mean that the latter restricts choice or in at all the same way as the former. Indeed the operation of the latter is sometimes necessary for “maximizing mutual benefit.” 

If you have more money than me then you ceteris paribus have more “bargaining power” in a marketplace than me. A business with high net asset value has more bargaining power in merger than a business with less. A more popular, taller, and richer guy may have more bargaining power than you with the girls at a frat party. If some guy is short, has an unattractive face, a genetic predisposition to obesity, a dull personality, and was born to a poorer, dysfunctional family… then his bargaining power with girls or potential employees or a basketball recruiter may therefore be much less than someone else.

Life is often unfair in a grand sense. We don’t choose the circumstances of our birth, our genetic makeup, the cultural values of the society we live in, the average preferences of consumer blocs, the emotional reactions of members of the opposite sex, the functioning of our internal organs, or the astronomical mechanics of our little solar system. These things have profound effect on everything we do. These things are a given. Liberty is dealing with these givens unrestricted by the impositions of other people. It is within this macroreality out of our direct control that we can be free to choose our own individual actions (when not the subject of interpersonal coercion). It is within this that we either voluntarily interact or are proactively forced.

Interpersonal “disparities” of different kinds of “power” and “authority” are inevitable in human society… and many such disparities are quite desirable (by common metrics) for many diverse reasons. An obvious example is the bankruptcy of market firms that fail to efficiently satisfy customers vs. the thriving of firms that succeed. The opposite ideal—equality of “power” and “authority” among all people—is conceptually nonsensical and empirically impossible. Attempts to politically implement such nonsense ideals have resulted in consequences ranging from boring stagnation (e.g. Kibbutz) to incredible human tragedy (e.g. revolutionary communism).

Also, even if we accept the voluntary aspect under that definition we can think of situations that have the exact same consequences yet you would have to consider one “mutually benefically” and the other not. For example:

Situation one: Person with a gun demands $100,000 

Situation two: Person with a boat demands $100,000 for the rescue another person they found drowning.

The consequences are the same, yet one is mutually beneficial and the other is not? That seems odd to me.

Person 1 is proactively threatening someone else with death if they don’t give them money. The result is an aggravated theft (or assault or murder) and person 1 is a violent thief.

Person 2, having responded appropriately with assistance to someone else’s dire plight, is now making unreasonable, unusual demands and person 2 is a dick.

The “consequences” are not the “exactly the same” (even if the rescued person does in fact pay person 2 the $100,000). The consequences of 1 will either involve “murder” or “aggravated theft.” Withholding assistance or demanding payment after assistance, though indeed potentially immoral or even criminal, is not the same as proactively threatening someone else with death. Those are different “consequences.” If the rescued person agrees to pay the boat person $100,000 for having been saved, it is indeed mutually beneficial, though not necessarily an optimal or ethical arrangement. (And realistically such an agreement would likely not be legally enforceable.)

It’s true that if you reduce the situations to a certain accounting metric, they’re the same.

• Situation 1: One person gains $100,000, another person avoids death.
• Situation 2: One person gains $100,000, another person avoids death.

Consider situation 3; a man is rescued from drowning by a sailor and out of sheer gratitude he gives the sailor $100,000. The accounting is the same.

• Situation 3: One person gains $100,000, another person avoids death.

And the accounting would be the same for many other different scenarios. You could change the accounting to read person more powerful in situation X gains $$ while personal more vulnerable in situation X merely avoids death and the results would be the same. Situations 1,2, and 3 all have important differences and conflating them is not productive. The consequences are significantly different between situations 1 and 2 just as they are between 2 and 3.

Consider an exceptionally-skilled heart surgeon who alone can save the lives of anyone with heart disease. If he does not work 18+ hours a day doing heart surgery for free for the rest of his life—and thus withholds life-saving assistance from some people—is he then the same as a murderer? If he decides he doesn’t want to do heart surgery anymore and instead retires to surf Costa Rica at age 40, is this the same as committing mass murder? Are the consequences (dying of your heart disease vs. dying of being shot in the head by a thief) really “exactly the same?” 

No, quite obviously not.

Extreme example? Yes. But it demonstrates that the issue isn’t just violence vs nonviolence specifically but rather power relationships in general. Whether it be the government, racism, family, or what have you.

No it doesn’t. At all… It doesn’t really “demonstrate” anything… it is a stretching hypo indicating that someone can do something immoral or dickish without it being proactively coercive (in this particular instance, it’s still possible to be a dick after helping someone else who was in a dire position not the fault of the dick.) Not news to anyone. And extrapolation to “power relationships in general” does not logically follow at all, as millions of counterhypotheticals covering benign “power relationships” can show.

When I talk about mutually beneficial relationships the issue isn’t if anyone benefits at all, or gets any kind of subjective gain (which applies to pretty much every relationship coercive or voluntary)

No, with very high certainty it doesn’t apply to coercion. See above. And again mutually beneficial interaction means each individual perceives net benefits i.e. (benefits - costs) >0.

but if people are able to maximize mutually beneficial relationships due to equality of authority, in which there isn’t one party that can defer costs while maintaining most the benefits of an exchange due to an imbalance of power. Or if you would rather an imbalance of negotiating power.

See above. “Imbalance of negotiating power” could only be eliminated by replacing human beings with absolutely uniform robots or worker ants. “Equality of authority” is meaningless unless you specifically and technically define “authority” and “equal” and then you need to make some actual argument for why this thing will lead to “maximizing mutually beneficial relationships.” Also you need to clarify the variable you’re maximizing—are you maximizing the number of mutually beneficial interactions or maximizing total mutual benefit in each interaction or maximizing the minimum individual benefit in each interaction or what.

I agree that costs and benefits are subjective to individuals, and for that reason I don’t advocate “equality of exchange” necessarily (depending on what you mean)

In your mutualist lexicon, “equality of exchange” is different from “equality of authority” and “equality of power” how specifically?

and that is also is a big reason I favor markets, it helps peoples subjectivity benefit from one another.

Right, good, agreed.

I just think that privilege and hierarchy undermine peoples ability to match such subjective costs and benefits to their own individuality.

Great. Two more vague and loaded terms: “privilege” and “hierarchy.” Regardless, you can be opposed to the state/in favor of individual freedom, markets, civil society, etc. and be opposed to whatever you mean in particular by power disparities, privilege, hierarchy, authority, negotiating power imbalances, racism, sexism, speciesism, heightism, Miley Cyrus music, and whatever else too. The real problem comes when mutualists conceptually conflate the latter with former and pretend that other libertarians are hypocrites for not doing the same.

Last of all, the problems that libertarians recognize with violence apply to all power relationship because violence is simply one form of a power relationship, the value that they see in liberty apply to reciprocity in general because liberty is merely a form of reciprocity.

Violence is not “simply one form of a power relationship.” The defining characteristic of violence is physical harm. To reduce violence to “a power relationship” is to confuse your language.

Individual freedom in human society usually requires for maintenance some interpersonal respect for freedom. In this sense, liberty is functionally reciprocal (and like all words and morals, it’s socially defined etc. etc.) but liberty is not conceptually reducible to “merely a form of reciprocity.”

I’m seeing a pattern in your reasoning here. You keep reducing the meaning of words to only your vague and fuzzy concepts with no logical or lexicographical justification for doing so.

Libertarians are free to reject the wider context of their beliefs, just as someone devoutly opposed to racism can be a full blown sexist. But that doesn’t mean it makes sense.

Conflating the “wider context” with specific concepts or beliefs is nonsensical and no way to communicate. Racism and sexism are not equivalent “because they are both merely degrees of denying social justice” or whatever vague thing. Proactive coercion and unreasonable negligence are distinct concepts and not equivalent “because they are both just simply really about doing the right thing and can result in physical injury” or something. Coerced rape and consensual sex do not lose their conceptual differentiation “because life is unfair” or “because we don’t control the circumstances of our birth” or anything else.

None of this is productive. Just vague language and muddled concepts.

(Source: un--man, via un--man)

We Never Jump Ship: Value Theory and Ethics →

weneverjumpship:

“Anarcho-capitalists like reciprocity, community, family, charities, “social” organizations of all kinds. Unlike communists and most “mutualists,” however, anarcho-capitalists don’t try to fallaciously moralize economic value theory. That’s it.”

-whakahekeheke

 

My “moralizing” of the labor theory of value is done on Stirnerite grounds (“union of egoists”). I think that morality is an institution of reciprocity with the implicit goal of maintaining mutually beneficially relationships. 

If someone takes the vast majority of the benefits of an exchange while the other person maintains the vast majority of the costs, I think it’s clear why that would have moral implications based on what I said above. It undermines the entire reason of human interaction to begin with, which is to have mutually beneficial relationships.

Liberty isn’t valuable in a vacuum, and individual rights mean nothing by themselves. We value these things because we value other things that are more fundamental. Probably something along the lines of independence, individuality, or reciprocity.

 I’m not sure why you think some armchair musings about the empirics of metaethics are relevant here (Stirnerite or Jacobite or otherwise)… interactions are “mutually beneficial” whenever all parties who voluntarily interact believe they will benefit (on net) from the interaction. Benefits and costs are epistemically subjective. This means I don’t know what you value better than you know what you value. This means I don’t have logical justification to prevent you from voluntarily engaging in BDSM sex, wage employment, rent contracting, or joining a commune on the grounds that some other involved party will benefit more than you.

If party A benefits by 1 net point from X interaction and party B benefits by 10,000 net point from X, then X is still mutually beneficial for parties A and B. It’s very “unequal” in terms of subjective benefit, but mutually beneficial nevertheless. If the perceived costs for party A were greater than the benefits, party A would not voluntarily engage in the interaction.

The LTV is supposed to be a scientific theory that explains empirical observations regarding economic value. It is not itself intended to be prescriptive or normative or ethical. Marxian economists and other LTVers believed that entrepreneurs, investors, owner-managers, etc. (“capitalists”) were by their very class nature taking undue economic value created solely by lower-tier workers (prols). They believed this because they believed that economic value was objectively created by proletarian “labor” alone. Capitalists = essentially just thieving parasites. That’s exploitation theory. It’s easy to see how this leads to moralizing (against theft, essentially) if the LTV holds true as premise. But it does not, so the entire conceptual construct falls apart.

Carson does not attempt to reargue the LTV. He adds a bunch of unnecessary, pointless ad hoc theorizing and quasi-Marxist language to the standard subjective theory of economic value in order to semi-justify the claims made by economically illiterate people like Tucker and Proudhon (who believed in the original crude LTV). His “subjectivist recasting of the labor theory of value” does not explain the empirical observations of economic value any better than marginalism - rather, it is much more clumsy and confusing. It has not and will never be used by any economist for that purpose because it’s not useful for that purpose, yet that is exactly the purpose of economic value theory.

Finally, I don’t see any actual point in your last paragraph. You may well value “reciprocity” over “liberty” or whatever. Doesn’t mean anyone else does or should. Libertarians argue that individual liberty (uncoerced choices, voluntary action, etc.) is a prerequisite for revealing subjective value and therefore for the knowing whether an interaction is “mutually beneficial” in the first place. Furthermore, libertarians argue that greater human freedom and less statism will logically lead and has empirically led to less poverty, more economic growth and development, more productive and rapid technological innovation, etc. etc. which will mean wider capacity for more individual self-management (if the individual wants that particular independence) and so forth.

So you have made no substantive point regarding the subject and have not engaging the discussion among libertarians as it actually stands. Mutualism just throws mud at clear concepts.

(Source: un--man)

Ryan Faulk vs. Marxists and Mutualists: The Diamond-Water Paradox of Labor →

fringeelements:

I’m trying to put myself in the mindset of the advocate of a labor theory of value, and obviously LTVers don’t think everyone’s labor is equally valuable. Maybe some think that with the right environment almost all people will become essentially the same, or believe that the current differences between people within the US is primarily a result of environment, but these beliefs don’t proclaim that all have equal value of their production.

Of course the Marxist LTV argument implodes very quickly, as the value of one’s labor is determined by socially necessary labor time. See, the mud pie isn’t valuable because, while there was in fact much labor time put into making it, it doesn’t have much socially necessary labor time. And what is socially necessary is that which produces something that satisfies the subjective desires of others. Oh, no, wait, aaah!

Attempting to make some syllogistic argument for the LTV fails very plainly. So I think their pathos is analog: clearly, so they think, John D Rockefeller’s labor isn’t a billion times as great as a subsistence farmer in the Congo. Maybe ten times, maybe 100 times, but not a billion. And all of the argumentation for the LTV is just after the fact rationalization for something they “know” to be true.

Now why does a diamond sell for so much more than water? Water is much more vital than diamonds. We can live without diamonds, we cannot live without water.

And direct labor is much more vital than indirect labor. We can live without capitalists and the captains of industry, we cannot live without people actually working the fields, factories and workshops.

But water is abundant, diamonds are rare. People who can fill an assembly line, take your order, stock shelves, deliver things, are abundant. People who can create an innovation that saves more resources than it costs and is willing to risk it all for it and is able to manage whatever operation needs to be done to implement the plan, are rare.

If you were in a desert and had a shortage of water and were about to die, you would probably value a bucket of water more than a bucket of diamonds. If an area had a shortage of direct workers and people were about to go hungry, a person would make more money farming than starting a shipping company. Why, because in that situation people value the simple production of food more than a more efficient supply chain.

The capitalist-welder paradox is solved just as easily as the diamond-water paradox. And like a diamond being perhaps a million times more valuable than a drop of water, a successful capitalist can be a million times more valuable than a janitor.

Excellent explanation of a fundamental (though understandable) error committed by many leftists.

(Source: fringeelements)