Re: Free Market Anti-Statism
- From: J.H.Boersema
- Date: 25 Jul 2007 12:58:42 GMT
radav <radav@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
[...]
THE BEDROCK OF STATISM
Take away all the methods of undermining the markets such as taxation,
tariffs, subsidies, licenses, patents, etc., and there are still two
major impediments to their efficient operation. They are
LAND MONOPOLY
MONEY MONOPOLY
Historically, land-grabbing and the bestowal of land titles is
coextensive with the growth of state power. Favoritism, corruption,
and fraud are the invariable concomitants of property in land. But
"ground rent seeking" which represents the actual or anticipated
(speculative) yield from ownership of land works counter to the
operation of free markets. The landowner can, and often does, get rich
in his sleep. He is rewarded for the unproductive effort of holding,
which may be for decades. The seller of goods, merchandise,
commodities (i.e wealth) must find customers fairly promptly or end up
with losses and sometimes bankruptcy. For details of the process see
the link-POLITICAL ECONOMY PRIMER-below.
Despite the paeans to "free enterprise" and "free trade", the state
system of land tenure and the state imposed money monopoly inexorably
leads to increased statism. The state and the free market are
irreconcilable.
Your analysis is correct, land monopoly and money monopoly (private
investors who use large sums which by definition are a monopolized
money-making mechanism) run contrary free markets. However your
solution - presumably the abolishment of the state - will only rob
the free markets of a legal framework in which it can flourish.
It is for instance profitable to use slave labor, the free markets
will therefore ask for the use of slaves. It is profitable to dump your
waste in the nearest river, free markets will therefore promote it to
some degree; without Government and police there is nobody there to
stop it from happening. It can even be profitable to hire yourself as
a mercenary, for some people it could be their only marketable skill
(or the only one they care to market). Quite obviously a system of
law is necessary, to put a frame around the markets. In theory varies
market actors might be insulated except for their trade, however that
situation only occurs over long distance trade, such as between walled
cities or over seas. Much trade occurs not in an insulated setting,
but market actors influence each other in all kinds of ways, from
the charitable to the criminal.
Not everything that is profitable is therefore good. To prevent
investor parasitism, to prevent land-monopoly parasitism, you need
laws, and alternatives (what laws do you need). When you need laws,
you need someone to debate and enact them: Government. You need judges,
and when you have judges you need a police. When you like the free
market, you need a Government to take care of it.
Then there are some things that free markets will not do well,
primarily issues that do not afford competition between market
actors. Such issues are, at least at the highest management level:
infrastructure. You can not have several competing infrastructures
doing the exact same thing and not have the costs become extreme.
Leaving it to a free market would in principle produce a monopoly. As
it is, infrastructure is a business that is easily managed, it
is therefore predictable enough for the Government to oversee it
adequately. There is not a lot of market pressure necessary to keep
the rails straight, it is a standards business, the standards to be
met are obvious, easily agreed to and objective. Having many different
sovereign nations in the world, the Governments can be compared to
each other, which would introduce back a kind of market pressures
(competition, comparability) between them. Lost some market pressure
in nationalization, gained some by dividing the world into sovereign
(potentially diverse) management areas (not managed by any central
authority).
The free markets would probably end in chaos without a well functioning
body of law and pro-trade Government. The Government itself can be
seen as a non-profit business: it taxes the people and maintains a
currency, in return for this profitable privilege the Governments
supplies the free markets with services it can not (practically)
produce itself, such as law and order. Because the Government is a
monopoly business, it has to be overseen by its costumers directly:
democracy. Democracy at the management level turns a monopoly around,
back to the needs of the People. This also holds for infrastructure
monopoly businesses, which can have their own more or less independent
from the state democratic management, likewise that would turn them
back to the needs of the costumers.
You said the free markets comprise voluntary actions, and you
praised that part. But it isn't the free markets that produce the
lack of violence, it is primarily the police and the law. Take out
the law and the police, would friendliness go up or down ? How do you
settle disputes without courts ? Who fractures the land-monopoly,
who distributes the resources if not the Government and its law. Who
fractures the money monoply, who takes over the task of necessary
finance in the economy, if not the Government under democratic
pressure ?
Free Market = Pro-Statism
Free markets left alone without a democratic state, will degenerate
into dictatorship, under the pressures of private Capitalist finance.
Once you are in a dictatorship, you wished you had a democratic state.
Removing the state, its democracy and law-potential, will only get you
a worse state. To really "be free of the state," the world would need
to be free of all crime, people would need to be knowledgeable to
follow necessary law voluntarily. That is not going to happen all of
a sudden.
The question is not whether there should be a state or not, the
question is what kind of law it should have, and what would be
favorable policies for that Government. Such law would need to do
something about >LAND MONOPOLY >MONEY MONOPOLY.
--
http://www.xs4all.nl/~joshb/constitution.html <- Law that does that.
.
- References:
- Free Market Anti-Statism
- From: radav
- Free Market Anti-Statism
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