Political and economic history

[Einherjar86]

I haven't abandoned this thread, just too busy to reply to everything right now. I say that if Sap and Ein can't see "that how a good family works" has absolutely nothing in common with anarcho-socialism, when it is glaringly obvious, that is disturbing.

First of all, that's not what we're (or at least, what I'm) saying; I'm saying comparable relationships are necessary. A social organism like the family is comprised of specific relationships (which, in their own ways, have been culturally conditioned), and there are small communities in the world which function in very similar ways. It's not "disturbing" to suggest that a large-scale society would thus require similar internal relations.

Second of all, the more appropriate response would be to explain why you find this "disturbing" rather than resort to theatrics.

In my view, This is contradictory & anti-individual.

What's anti-individual about allowing individuals to volunteer their labor? I'm not saying there's a justifiable way to make people participate; I'm saying that with proper education, explanation, and implementation of the system, people might actually want to participate.

 

[Rick Parry]

This guy should be look at more carefully with what he said to Aaron Russo.




http://infowars-shop.stores.yahoo.net/adinlela.html

 

[Jimmy... Dead.]

What's anti-individual about allowing individuals to volunteer their labor? I'm not saying there's a justifiable way to make people participate; I'm saying that with proper education, explanation, and implementation of the system, people might actually want to participate.

Because you don't have the authority to allow voluntary action & that idea also assumes you or someone else has authority to deny voluntary action.

 

[Einherjar86]

I'm not claiming authority. The system itself is that which provides the opportunity for voluntary action. In a coercive system, there needs to be hierarchies of power; but I'm suggesting an equality of power among those in the collective. A collective system, composed of willing and volunteering individuals, is not a coercive system, nor is it a contradictory system.

The "anarchist" addendum allows for the free secession and abstinence from such a system, if one chooses.

 

[Dak]

Let's see if we can spare me some research right now and try to reason through this with a few basic assumptions (which you will hopefully agree with).

Assumption #1: there will always be children in orphanages, because some kids are "mistakes" or the parents turn out to be too irresponsible to take care of them.

Assumption #2: there will always be some orphanage caretakers who (under the conditions of the early Industrial Revolution) are greedy enough to be tempted into selling kids, or dumb enough to be fooled into thinking that selling the kids will give them a better life (i.e. living under a factory owner who can provide for them).

I think this covers the root causes of a lot of these cases of factory kids, and thus i maintain that you can't do away with laws and government by deregulating your way into some Lockean society where the better part of human nature takes care of everything bad.


Also, regarding your claim that taxes and regulations drove people to urbanize during industrialization: doesn't that assume that most pre-industrial people owned their land in the first place? My impression was that Europe was very feudal up until then, with the nobility basically owning everything and administering the 'privilege' of working the land to the average people. If that's the case, industrialization was really more of a migration of the lower classes from one "cage" to another.

There haven't always been orphanages, and there doesn't need to be. However, state regulation or assumption doesn't stop the mistreatment of underprivileged/abandoned children, it exacerbates it, as the current CPS/Juvi systems bear witness. "Who watches the watchers". If there are bad people who use force to take advantage of adults or children, and we give the monopoly of that force to government, who will seek to wield that force?

I am much less familier with the details of transition to industrialism in Europe, but I agree with your analogy of "one cage to another", but would submit that the analogy would fit in most cases for America as well.

Why not what? Why not say that you have a full property right in your shirt such that I am prohibited from taking it from your closet and that this property right is justified by self-ownership? Well, I would want to say "Because taking the shirt from your closet is not a violation of your self-ownership." It seriously just doesn't look in any clear way to be that sort of violation. I have never seen a convincing explanation for how property rights in external things are connected to (i.e., justified by) the concept of self-ownership.

It is though. If I own myself I own what I do, and the product thereof. If you take the shirt, you take my time/life spent to acquire. If you steal my time/life, how am I not a slave? How does this not violate self ownership?

I see this all the time; parents today, both bourgeois and underclass, constantly pressure their kids into working. That whole "instill a work ethic" thing.

Work how? What ages? I did chores around the house growing up, that's certainly not what I meant, but I only knew a handful of other kids who had to even do chores.

I'm sorry, but I don't see where you're argument is going. According to you, poor labor conditions for children are a symptom; but a symptom of what? Not government intervention or anything of the sort, because these regulations only came about after NCLC and others in the "worthless class" began clamoring for reform. Are you arguing against industrialization?

And then what happened to all the unwanted kids? They now reside in prison/juvi/the foster system. You cannot regulate problems away. Just like the minimum wage merely reduced the amount of paying jobs available, leading to higher unemployment for low-skilled workers, and a greater drain on society through "safety nets".

I'll jump on the Zabu bandwagon here. That's pretty much exactly how I feel about him; he is absolutely long winded. I do like, conceptually, "anarcho-socialism", because that is how a good family is run, imo. There has to be a fair division of labor (chores in a family setting, with mom, dad, and all kids participating) along with a roughly equal distribution of capital (my children actually receive more of my money than I do because I'm providing them "welfare"). I don't see why small communities can't operate this way without being under the thumb of a central government.

A family as you described, is fairly idyllic and roughly how I grew up. The problem of comparing this to "anarcho-socialism" is that there is no comparison.

Families are inherently capitalistic in terms of economics. Families are created a voluntary pooling of capital (marriage/moving in together/etc, excluding forced or arranged marriages) both human and material, and time/material capital is invested and enjoyed mutually amongst the 'family owners'. Sometimes time and material capital is invested in more hours working to increase material capital, and sometimes it is invested into human capital (kids). It is not welfare (that is given to kids), which is money stolen from one person by a different person to give to a third person. It is a direct, voluntary investment of material capital into human capital for the enjoyment of the investors and hopefully of future benefit to society as a whole, just like any good business.

 

[King Richard]

I'm not sure what anyone is arguing anymore so before we all get too bored with this topic let's try something else.

Do you think black people who voted for Obama solely because he's black is racist?

 

[Jimmy... Dead.]

No, but I do think most are uneducated & marginalized.

 

[Einherjar86]

And then what happened to all the unwanted kids? They now reside in prison/juvi/the foster system. You cannot regulate problems away. Just like the minimum wage merely reduced the amount of paying jobs available, leading to higher unemployment for low-skilled workers, and a greater drain on society through "safety nets".

You keep side-stepping the question. Yes, government regulation on child labor created a plethora of children who couldn't work and whose families couldn't afford to feed them. What was the problem that led to this shortage of resources and forced child labor in the first place?

Families are inherently capitalistic in terms of economics. Families are created a voluntary pooling of capital (marriage/moving in together/etc, excluding forced or arranged marriages) both human and material, and time/material capital is invested and enjoyed mutually amongst the 'family owners'. Sometimes time and material capital is invested in more hours working to increase material capital, and sometimes it is invested into human capital (kids). It is not welfare (that is given to kids), which is money stolen from one person by a different person to give to a third person. It is a direct, voluntary investment of material capital into human capital for the enjoyment of the investors and hopefully of future benefit to society as a whole, just like any good business.

Your post make me want to propose a thought experiment (I'm addressing this to everyone). Please ignore the implausibilities of this scenario, since its plausibility is not the question. The question appears at the end of the experiment:

Imagine a society of one million individuals. In this society, every individual participates and fulfills his or her duties. Among these individuals, a certain number are designated the responsibility of collecting voluntary donations from every member of the society (including themselves). It has been previously agreed upon, by every member of this society, that each individual must donate at least one dollar, but may donate as much as he or she volunteers beyond that. These donations are then dispersed equally among the individuals of the society.

How would you define such a society: capitalist or collectivist?

 

[Jimmy... Dead.]

Before I answer I want to ask a question and make a quick statement/suggestion.

When you say every individual participates and fulfills his or her duties, do you mean his/her individual duties to themselves or duty to society?

Also:

It has been previously agreed upon, by every member of this society, that each individual must donate at least one dollar, but may donate as much as he or she volunteers beyond that. These donations are then dispersed equally among the individuals of the society.

Let's lose this.

 

[Dak]

You keep side-stepping the question. Yes, government regulation on child labor created a plethora of children who couldn't work and whose families couldn't afford to feed them. What was the problem that led to this shortage of resources and forced child labor in the first place?

Government ownership and delegation of land usage was a primary culprit.

Your post make me want to propose a thought experiment (I'm addressing this to everyone). Please ignore the implausibilities of this scenario, since its plausibility is not the question. The question appears at the end of the experiment:

Imagine a society of one million individuals. In this society, every individual participates and fulfills his or her duties. Among these individuals, a certain number are designated the responsibility of collecting voluntary donations from every member of the society (including themselves). It has been previously agreed upon, by every member of this society, that each individual must donate at least one dollar, but may donate as much as he or she volunteers beyond that. These donations are then dispersed equally among the individuals of the society.

How would you define such a society: capitalist or collectivist?

Who is going to collect the one dollar and then redistribute it back out to the payers, for free? You have created an unfunded, mandated beaurocracy, not to mention a pointless one at that, to collect a dollar from each individual and then hand it back. If someone wants to voluntarily give to one or more persons of the society around them, let them also personally fund the cost of distribution, as a necessary part of the act of giving, or some person may form a private organization which works to distribute charity to the desired target elements of society.

Why is the unfunded, mandated beaurocracy needed, and the needless hassle of shifting the money right back into the original hands?

 

[King Richard]

That's a really good fucking question.

edit: My answer is both.

 

[Einherjar86]

But as I already said, plausibility and practicality aren't my concern. I want to know how we can define it.

 

[Dak]

There's not enough information to determine whether it is capitalistic or not. If the donations are voluntary, it assumes at least the principle of personal ownership of what is donated, yet duties is vague and there is very little other information given.

Inconclusive.

 

[Jimmy... Dead.]

It's a pseudo Democracy with a confused mixed economy

 

[Einherjar86]

There's not enough information to determine whether it is capitalistic or not. If the donations are voluntary, it assumes at least the principle of personal ownership of what is donated, yet duties is vague and there is very little other information given.

Inconclusive.

This is the portion I was aiming at, and was really the entire point. In one of your earlier posts you kept using the word "voluntary" (as I have been); I think it's important to see that a society operating in the fashion I described (whether or not it's a plausible scenario is beside the point) could be defined as "capitalist." However, there are many who would term such a community "collectivist." The attempts by contemporary thought and common sense to demonize collectivism do so by positing it as the antithesis to voluntarism and liberal action, when in fact it needn't be.

 

[Dak]

This is the portion I was aiming at, and was really the entire point. In one of your earlier posts you kept using the word "voluntary" (as I have been); I think it's important to see that a society operating in the fashion I described (whether or not it's a plausible scenario is beside the point) could be defined as "capitalist." However, there are many who would term such a community "collectivist." The attempts by contemporary thought and common sense to demonize collectivism do so by positing it as the antithesis to voluntarism and liberal action, when in fact it needn't be.

The problem with voluntary is that it is, until it isn't. You don't need gun of the state for voluntaryism, you [supposedly]need them for defense. So just stay out of people's business. It is incredibly difficult for those who enjoy the vantage(and in some cases disadvantage) point of ivory towers of philosophical thought, but it is a necessity for freedom. That doesn't even address the implausibility of the scenario.

 

[Jimmy... Dead.]

Collectivism is the subjugation of the individual to a group - it is the antithesis of the good.

 

[zabu of nΩd]

I'll try to get back to you sometime dak, just losing steam a bit for now. You've probably given me some good questions to work on for a while. I still think you jump to way too many conclusions, so for some of these things we're debating i'd rather just research them myself than parry words.

 

[zabu of nΩd]

One thing i want to add - i think for a lot of this shit about libertarian vs. authoritarian society, it can be said that authoritarianism has a much better track record of "producing results" in a way that can scale to meet the needs/goals of a national or global society than libertarianism does.

I know there's a lot of conspiracy theory around the apparent lack of success of libertarian initiatives (and probably a few real conspiracies too), but at the end of the day it's just not clear that a large-scale libertarian society could even exist in the first place, let alone bring about all the cool-as-shit advances that have happened alongside (and sometimes due to) our authoritarianism.

Granted, a lot of valuable experimentation is being denied to libertarians by governments right now, but i think there are loads of workarounds to that, and the extent to which those workarounds are exploited just depends on what the world's talented/superintelligent people are interested/motivated to do. Obviously the ones with the salt to become "technocrats" (bankers, businessmen, engineers, etc.) have a huge incentive to shape the world to better serve whatever their entrepreneurial vision may be (which is sometimes benevolent, sometimes corrupt). So i guess what i'm saying there is "control the world's talent, and you control the world"?

 

[Dak]

I'll try to get back to you sometime dak, just losing steam a bit for now. You've probably given me some good questions to work on for a while. I still think you jump to way too many conclusions, so for some of these things we're debating i'd rather just research them myself than parry words.

Which is a great direction to take. I hope no one is "convinced" by any of my arguments, for a more skilled debater than I can surely sway you into another direction.

Much reading, and contemplation in reason and logic are a better path to finding personal positions. I use arguments to test my conclusion's foundational logic/reasoning/educational foundation.