Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.3 4.3bsd-beta 6/6/85; site ucbvax.ARPA Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!ucbvax!mcgeer From: mcgeer@ucbvax.ARPA (Rick McGeer) Newsgroups: net.politics.theory Subject: Re: (micromotives & macrobehavior) Message-ID: <10286@ucbvax.ARPA> Date: Fri, 6-Sep-85 15:28:58 EDT Article-I.D.: ucbvax.10286 Posted: Fri Sep 6 15:28:58 1985 Date-Received: Sat, 7-Sep-85 06:44:09 EDT References: <535@brl-tgr.ARPA> <987@sphinx.UChicago.UUCP> Reply-To: mcgeer@ucbvax.UUCP (Rick McGeer) Organization: University of California at Berkeley Lines: 150 In article <727@cybvax0.UUCP> mrh@cybvax0.UUCP (Mike Huybensz) writes: >In article <3520@topaz.RUTGERS.EDU> josh@topaz.UUCP (J Storrs Hall) writes: >> In article <715@cybvax0.UUCP> mrh@cybvax0.UUCP (Mike Huybensz) writes: >> >In article <3476@topaz.RUTGERS.EDU> josh@topaz.UUCP (J Storrs Hall) writes: >> >> .... What I want in the absence of a political system is, simply, >> >> the absence of any political system. >> > >> >You may also wish for perfect vacuums. The best you could approach is to >> >make political systems as little intrusive as possible. >> >> Most of the universe is a pretty good vacuum. > >By this analogy, you'd have to remove yourself pretty far from the rest of >us atoms to maintain your vacuum. Feel welcome to. :-) The fact is, when >the atoms get close together, there is an emergent phenominon: [political] >pressure. I'll reserve my comments on this matter until the end of this posting. > >> >The market also has its positive feedback growth of economic powers. >> >> Right, like the ones that formed AT&T... > >Oh, did AT&T valiantly struggle to keep from being made a monopoly by those >malicious legislators? No: market forces make growth desirable, and >sometimes politics is the cheaper way to acquire. It would happen without >the politics: look at all the mergers and aquisitions forming megalithic >companies in the past two or three decades. Mr. Huybenz, AT & T maintained its monopoly for decades with the open connivance of the US Congress and Federal Communications Commission. For years, it was unlawful to operate a rival long-distance service or to build or operate telephones not manufactured by AT & T. > >> >Fair? Only by redefinition of the word to meet libertarian standards. >> >> Oh, forgive me, of course in common usage a voluntary exchange is >> considered a heinous crime whereas extortion at gunpoint is ... "fair". > >I'd say quotation out of context is a pretty heinous crime. But I suppose >in the free market of debating tricks, you choose the cheapest. I'd say you just beat it. For the record, I (and I suppose other readers) found JoSH's characterization pretty accurate. > >> >Effective? Only in a few of the large range of social needs. How would >> >the market provide defense against a competing political power, for example? >> >> Why do you assume it wouldn't? Military struggles are generally decided >> on the relative size and economic productivity of the countries involved, >> not on the ideologies thereof. > >Like Vietnam? In any event, you are comparing struggles between political >systems, rather than a struggle between a political and an apolitical system. >I repeat: how would the market provide defense against a competing political >power? In VietNam we gave up because we didn't have the will to continue the struggle. The peoples of the Mekong are still suffering for our refusal to do so. > >> I would absolutely agree that a market >> would never start a war of agression, but then I think this a good thing. > >A market as a whole, no. Individual members or cartels, yes. For example, >if the United Fruit Company hadn't been able to control Central American >nations with the US armed forces and CIA, they would simply have hired >some other mercenaries. No they wouldn't. War was economic for United Fruit because they didn't pay the cost of the war: the US taxpayers, and the peoples of Central America, did. It's almost always cheaper to deal than to fight -- unless, of course, you can finagle the political system into coercing someone else to do your fighting for you. This is a point that Huybenz, Berman, and others rarely consider. It is in a statist economy that the powerful actors can run wild -- AT & T, the railroads, United Fruit -- because they can use the regulatory powers of the state to demolish competition and, on occasion, simply raid the public treasury. The state is *always* corrupted to serve the interests of society's powerful, in a method as automatic as gravitation. The *only* way to restrict this is to keep the state small, and weak, and starved. You know, socialism and welfarism is the ultimate Ponzi scam. Actors are persuaded to put up a small amount (in taxes) on the presumption that the benefits to them in the various transfers of a modern welfare state will outweigh the amount they've contributed to the pot. So far, this is just any ordinary zero-sum scam. But when unwilling actors are forced to play the game at gunpoint -- and, further, when the willing players are told that they "deserve" the windfall they obtain from the pockets of others -- well, then, my friends, you have raised the flimflam to a high art indeed. Let us be candid. Statism is the incarnation of self-righteous greed. > >> >How would the market make preventing starvation or disease in the poor >> >economic? >> >> Look again, it is the totalitarian dictatorships that are starving their >> people. America was, in the words of Will Rogers (during the Depression), >> "the first nation to go to the poorhouse in an automobile." > >Yea, look at all those starving Scandinavian children in those socialist >welfare states there. Pathetic. (Sarcasm.) > >The fact is that the wealth of a nation does not feed the poor. It is the >distribution of the wealth that does. Some political systems produce bad >distributions of wealth: no debate there. But you have yet to produce >any evidence that the free market will provide a distribution of wealth that >will prevent starvation and disease among the poor. > Wrong. There has been only one wealthy nation in history where there has been starvation on any large scale -- the Soviet Union in the thirties. Millions of Kulaks died in the Ukraine while Uncle Joe Stalin exported the grain they grew. Otherwise, you must look to the truly poor nations of the world to see true starvation, and compare their economic systems -- as the Ciskeians say "all African nations have droughts, but only the Marxist nations seem to have *very* bad droughts". Indeed, starvation now occurs in Ethiopia, where communal ownership of land has led to desertification, where Western food aid rots on the docks so Soviet tanks may be unloaded, and where starvation is used as a political weapon by Mengistu against the Eritrean separatists. Final point. In some absolute sense, I'll admit that Libertaria will never be: as Huybenz points out, man as a social animal will always have government, and government will always arise. But in the continuum of governments there are gradations: on the whole, the US Government is pretty good (read small). It is not as small as I and others would like it to be. It is not as small as it needs to be to ensure that the United States will long endure as a just and free nation. To get from where we are to where we need to be requires dreams: all futures are built on dreams. The Socialist Party's 1928 Presidential Platform has now largely been adopted by the United States. The last item, comprehensive medical care, may not be too far away. In 1928, the Socialists and their dreams were sneered at by those who could not imagine that the United States would ever adopt those policies. I hope that in 2040, someone will be writing that the Libertarian Party Platform of 1984 has been largely adopted... If someone does, it will be because people like JoSH Hall and Barry Fagin dared to dream of a free America, and persevered through the snipes of small-minded statist critics. -- Rick.