New Posts on ObamaCare and Immigration
At Mises Canada I have two new posts:
==> This one is fun. I just walk through a NYT article on New York state’s experience with ObamaCare to show how it is screwing certain people. Oh yeah, the article was singled out by Paul Krugman to show how great ObamaCare is.
==> In this one I take on Mean Gene Callahan on immigration. You will need to follow the link if you want to see the meat of it, but let me quote a tangential issue that I think people often miss in these debates:
No individual has the power to actually form current government policy. It is not a “cop out” for me to say that the best thing would be to privatize land, get rid of the welfare state and government schools, etc. etc., in which case “unrestricted immigration” by the federal government would be A-OK. Regardless of what I say on immigration policy, the government is going to do whatever it’s going to do. Once we realize that the purpose of our pontificating is to say what the ideal outcome would be, we can stop tying ourselves in knots by talking about “politically possible” options.
Cute, but you miss the point that from Krugman’s point of view, none of the things you quote sound like bad ideas. Krugman fully supports depriving people of their freedom because he fully believes he is the smartest guy in the room. Smartest guy in every room, even a room full of the top NY liberals who need a great intellectual hero to explain to them how well its all going.
“… Mean Gene Callahan”
Haha. How fitting. 😉
All of the sudden I’m worried that you’re going to start calling everybody “brother”, that your stamina will be proportionally related to the amount of sound that reaches your vigorously hand-cupped ear, that you’ll start referring to, “all of the Murph-a-maniacs out there”, and that you’re going to be going through a lot of shirts. You’re just testing the waters …
He’s busy enough being Bob “RoboCop” Murphy (“My friends call me Murphy”).
Bob,
I have a concern about the libertarian position that is represented in this post that has always bothered me:
Your say in the linked to post:
“The same is true with respect to the rules according to which people are allowed to cross a border. There is no problem in allowing individual land owners to make these decisions based on whatever criteria they want”
You later quote (approvingly) Walter Block saying
“Just as we have no right to limit new births on the grounds that when they grow up the new children will go on welfare, be criminals, vote badly, etc., so too do we have no right to limit immigration now on this basis”
Putting these 2 things together I assume that landowners would have the right to limit births on any grounds they wanted as long as these rules only applied on their own land . Is that correct ?
My concern is this : If all land was privatized couldn’t the landowners (who might be a small minority) get together and impose all sorts of harsh rules on the non-landowners, not only on immigration but on a wide range of other issues as well ? As long as landowners respect the right to self-ownership of people on their land it seems they have the right to run fairly authoritarian regimes.
If such a scenario emerged why should non-landowners respect the property rights of the people who (in any objective terms) are oppressing them ?
They won’t. Once you have sufficiently large numbers of non-landowners who find they are not benefiting under the current system, those people will voluntarily agree amongst themselves that it is time for a change of ownership.
That’s how you end up with Democracy.
But even with its many de-optimizations isn’t democracy potentially better than autocracy (backed by “property rights”) for the non-landowners here ?
Never having been an autocrat, I find it difficult to know what I’m missing out on, so I’ll reserve judgement on what is “better”.
Democracy is what prevents the policy from being put in place. The outcome is very obvious. If you are wealthy, you rule. If you are not, you serve.
“Putting these 2 things together I assume that landowners would have the right to limit births on any grounds they wanted as long as these rules only applied on their own land . Is that correct ?”
Yes, and that’s a good thing because if there is a demand for, say, an apartment complex with “no kids/babies allowed”, then those landowners should have a right to provide that service for their paying customers.
“My concern is this :………..”
Parents and want-to-be-parents are paying customers, and most probably constitute quite the substantial market. Why should they have a problem finding a place to live where they are welcomed?
Why should they have a problem? In the hypothetical, he said the land owners form a cartel in order to push a social agenda. If you are engaging in behavior they want to prohibit, you are in trouble. Bill of Rights does not apply to the private sector. There is no limit on private govt.
There is a limit. It’s called profit and loss.
I would gladly pay above market premiums to live in a “no kids allowed” apartment complex.
I’m still trying to pitch my business plan for a grocery store where everyone under 16 and over 65 is banned. I would gladly pay above-market rates to shop at such a store, and I assume many others would as well.
That store already exists, it’s called an online store. The people under 16 don’t have credit cards, and those over 65 find it too difficult to use.
For Tel
http://img.tapatalk.com/d/14/04/17/syha3u2a.jpg
If all land was privatized couldn’t the landowners (who might be a small minority) get together and impose all sorts of harsh rules on the non-landowners, not only on immigration but on a wide range of other issues as well ?
First of all, tons of land is claimed by the general government and is not permitted to be developed, so already you have to answer why it is that in the absense of a free market results in the very thing you’re worried about.
Second, cartels in a free market don’t tend to last very long due to competition. Governments cause monopolies, not the free market.
Here are some videos covering the issues of Monopolies, Cartels, Robber Barons, and Predatory Pricing:
Anti-Trust and Monopoly (with Ron Paul)
[www]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8C4gRRk2i-M
Dominick Armentano: The Case for Repealing Antitrust Laws
[www]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xBT-fnJsfo0
The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History, Lecture 8 | Thomas E. Woods, Jr.
Myths and Facts About Big Business
[www]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGeA1Sbd4XM
If you’re only inclined to watch one, I ask that you watch the last one (It’s audio, so there’s not much to see).
Dan/Guest,
The libertarian argument seems to be: Free markets are guaranteed to drive good outcomes so we don’t need to worry about bad consequences of unlimited privater ownership of land.
I am a big fan of free markets and to some extents agree with this argument.
But (as a thought experiment) assume a small group of families controls all the land in the world. They do not need to compete with anyone in order to maintain a luxury lifestyle. They impose harsh rules on the rest of the population and cause them to live in poverty. The landowners claim to be libertarians merely exercising their property rights.
The non-landowners eventually rebel demanding that the land be distributed more fairly and a true free market introduced. .
Would an-cap libertarians support the landowners in this scenario or the rebels ?
“…They do not need to compete with anyone in order to maintain a luxury lifestyle. They impose harsh rules on the rest of the population and cause them to live in poverty…..”
Sounds more like government than a private property system. I mean, if your argument is basically – what if the free market turns into a State, then I would say that you have, ipso facto, just argued against the State, not private property.
But the situation that Transformer is envisioning wouldn’t involve violation of the Rothbardian non-aggression principle at all, because Rothbard would say that property owners can refuse access to their homesteaded natural resources to everyone who doesn’t agree to their rules.
Yes, the landowners (or their ancestors) got their land legitimately through homesteading or purchase.
They just decide to introduce free market feudalism as its easier than competing under free market capitalism.
“They just decide to introduce free market feudalism ”
No such thing as free market feudalism. That’s like saying – they decide to have a free market that in not a free market.
He is saying they form a cartel and agree to not compete with each other. They are few and own all land and waterways. Why is this logically impossible?
The answer is not that cartels cannot be sustained.
Historically, voluntary cartels have repeatedly fallen apart for the very simple reason that any individual is better off undercutting the cartel every time he/she thinks there will be no repercussions.
Those cartels that keep going are where the members have some stick to wield and apply penalties.
If you want a practical example, take a look at the union movement. The most basic definition of a union is a cartel that attempts to limit the supply of labour in order to drive up prices.
A lot of individual workers can get better deals by not going on strike and by negotiating with employers directly. However the union will not allow this and will come down hard on any “scab” who attempts to take matters into his/her own hands. The union goes to great lengths to ensure no one works below the approved rate, or longer than the approved hours, or outside approved conditions.
All property owners join together and renounce profits, the very thing that gives their property market value in the first place, which provides them with the “power” you claim they will have to set arbitrary harsh rules. Do you see a problem with this form of reasoning?
Who said they renounce profit? They renounce competition. In his example this is possible as they are few and control all the land.
They renounce competition, but the incentive to compete never goes away.
They do not need to compete with anyone in order to maintain a luxury lifestyle. They impose harsh rules on the rest of the population and cause them to live in poverty.
So they are willing to pay the rest of the population enough to work for them to maintain their luxury lifestyles, but somehow this doesn’t result in innovations among the poor that make some more profitable than others, worthy of being bid away from another family?
The rich’s lifestyle would have to be dependent on the poor’s labor, in your scenario, so it’s not in their interest to give them an incentive to leave.
If you say that the rich have machines that do their work for them, then I’d respond by saying that someone has to build and maintain the machines, as well as mine the materials to make them.
Here is another good response to this issue:
The Vampire Economy and the Market
http://mises.org/daily/5963/The-Vampire-Economy-and-the-Market#CommentTab
Comment ID:
http://mises.org/daily/5963/The-Vampire-Economy-and-the-Market#IDComment322898997
Let’s also look at an imaginary heir to a British noble title, and many thousand acre estate dating back to the Norman Conquest in 1066.
Though his wealth may have been gained as a result of a massive act of armed robbery, unless he wants to live at a pre industrial revolution level on the produce of his estate (pretty grim!) he’ll have to spend some money to buy goods like a car, petrol, gas, electric, a tv, a fridge, food that doesn’t grow on his estate, cotton clothes and so on.
Unless he is content to live by selling off the capital assets of the estate one by one, a farm here, a wood there, some shooting rights and some fishing rights (some do that, and the next generation and all after that have to work for a living), he’s going to have to find ways to make himself useful to others, – ways they’ll pay him for, and do it efficiently, or he’ll make a loss.
…
Let’s say the young noble goes for organic sheep farming, and as luck would have it, his late mother left him a flock of prize pedigree brokkengobs, and another flock of pedigree lumpybags.
The noble youngster is of course far too good to get his hands dirty with sheep, so he employs a farm manager, who comes with the best possible references and recommendations from his uncle, the Earl of Chinlessness (that’s somewhere in Scotland).
How long before his new farm manager has got him entirely cleaned out to fund his one true love (his seat by the fire in the snug at “The cow and Veterinarian” – and a pint glass of “Olde Hotwetfarttes” on the table beside him)?
…
Even if wealth is massive, and ill gotten, it has to be invested productively or, it is not long in being redistributed to those who will use it productively.
That re-distribution can be little by little, or, if things go badly wrong for the young noble, all at once in a massive creditors auction.
Who decides what is productive
Thee and me, voting with every cent we spend.
Well, if you own a lot of land I see no reason why market forces will necessarily lead you to use it ways that are socially beneficial.
If you own 1m hectares of grazing land you could inefficiently farm just a small part of it and still make enough money to live in luxury. I see no market force that would compel you to either efficiently farm all of it, or cause you to slowly lose your land over time.
Who is providing the luxury goods?
I own all the land, all the sea, all the air. Everyday I shoot a trespasser. He has aggressed. Have I violated the NAP?
How did you pay for all the land, sea, and air? And to whom?
Seems like there’d be quite a bit of property you would have had to trade with someone in order to get anywhere near owning the whole planet.
But for argument’s sake, no, you wouldn’t be violating the NAP if you shot someone for trespassing on the planet you own, but somehow didn’t have to work it or trade with anyone for it.
(You can’t homestead air or the sea, by the way, unless you’re pumping it into a building or through pipes.)
Define “socially beneficial”.
Define “own”.
This is a thought experiment.
Just assume:
1. A small group of people end up owning all the land and other natural resources through legitimate means
2. This small group then introduces very draconian rules for what the rest of the population must do while they remain on the land. None of these rules actually violate people right to self ownership.
The issue isn’t “how likely is this scenario to happen?” but “if it did happen and the population rebelled against the landowners and called for land reform which side would you be on ?”
No-one has addressed that question.
If I’m assuming they acquired everything through legitimate means, I also have to assume that the rest of the population got wealth from it.
So there’s no way to legitimately own something without paying for it or going through the process of homesteading the whole planet. A small group of people cannot accomplish this without trade.
Your scenario is internally inconsistent.
But, again, for argument’s sake, if you own something, then you have a right to prevent people from being on your land.
Guest has, in response to my version of the same question just a few comments up. Guest is on the side of the plutocrats, who may shoot trespassers at will. So will be all the rest.
For them morality is what follows from their simple minded premises. If you present a reductio ad absurdam they will embrace the absurdity.
So there’s no way to legitimately own something without paying for it or going through the process of homesteading the whole planet.
Homesteading is just stupid. It’s making a claim to property instead of actually justifying said claim. If some lone nut tries to “homestead” public lands, I say boot his arse out for squatting.
Samson, with all due respect, you are not yet at the level to even engage in such discussions. It’s best if you just refrain from posting your ramblings and observe, it only makes you look other than intelligent when you post your thoughts.
I’m not trying to be an asshole (but I am), I’m just telling you that you aren’t at the level.
I’ve noticed that you post a lot at Gene’s blog. I like Gene, I consider him a friend, as does Bob. However, even though I know he’s being nice, 9 times out of 10 I would bet that he’s approving your comments so readily because he wants somebody like me or Bob (or any libertarian really) to engage in a lively debate with you. But the simple fact is that you aren’t worth it to me or anybody (ever wonder why nobody ever responds to your comments?).
I had my chance to confront you on certain topics in the past, but I deferred. Like I said, you just aren’t at the level yet, so it isn’t worth my time to do so.
Sorry, but that’s the honest truth.
It probably goes without saying that if you respond to what I’ve just said, that I most likely will not reciprocate. Sorry, I’m a busy man.
Governments cause monopolies, not the free market?
Hahahaha.then you link a bunch of free market propaganda to support that claim, including a book with the word “incorrect” in the title.
So the best way to fight monpolies is to get rid of the anti-trust laws. In other words, govt enacted anti-trust laws to create monopolies. They did not exist before govt started to fight them.
Wonderful.
They did not exist before govt started to fight them.
First of all, the definition of “monopoly” is a government grant of privilege, not “a small amount of sellers”.
Second, government regulations protect certain businesses from competition – that is their effect, regardless of their intent.
Anti-Trust laws NECESSARILY create cronyism, because it involves picking winners and losers.
I can’t make you watch the videos.
“First of all, the definition of “monopoly” is a government grant of privilege, not “a small amount of sellers.”” I don’t think that’s the standard definition.
It was the original definition.
The original definition of nauseous is apposite here.
It’s the historical and correct definition, until the progressives did what they always do and changed the language.
Monopolies are almost impossible on a free market, as has been demonstrated by numerous Austrian economists.
Rothbard redefined monopoly to a violently imposed advantage because its more accurate to the real world.
Matt M, meet Hank. Hank, Matt M.
I have no problem with the idea of a natural monopoly. If a company can, through voluntary, non-violent and non-coercive means become the world best at something, then good luck to them.
This is very rare.
China for example had a long time monopoly on silk, but this was not natural, they needed to enforce it by killing people who attempted to transport silkworms.
Apple are the only company making iPhones, so they have a monopoly on the iPhone market (and all the spinoff markets like the iStore, etc) but this is not natural because people are forbidden (by threat of violence) from copying iPhones.
Try hard, it’s very difficult to think of any monopoly not backed by violence (usually government sponsored violence).
Microsoft. They are the best at selling bug fixes.
Microsoft gained extensive advantage by writing contracts that tied software sales to hardware sales. That is to say, they got the hardware retailer to agree that every unit they sold would deliver a Microsoft license fee regardless of whether a Microsoft operating system was installed.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tying_(commerce)
It was concluded by court that Microsoft’s tie-in contract was illegal and unenforceable, and yet they managed to persist with in up until recently.
Very slowly the market managed to wedge out Microsoft, mostly because of very cheap computer hardware coming from China and Taiwan, and also because slowly mobile devices are becoming the dominant sales item (e.g. Google’s Android tablets and phones which are linux).
Thus in conclusion, I happen to believe that MS took advantage of contract law in a way that it was not designed to operate. In other words, the outcome was non-voluntary.
By the way, notice that tablets are designed to prevent the OS from being modified by the user.
If anyone was wondering how, in the absense of IP laws, coders would be able to make money, this is it.
I think you have missed the subtle elegance of my jibe Tel.
Global open borders would be acceptable if all welfare were abolished and property rights were equal.
Get rid of the welfare state and government schools, open the borders to allow cheap labor to flood into the country. You wind up with millions of starving, desperate workers who will do anything for a buck. But of course if its a free market, the garden of Eden is assumed. Since the kids are not in school, might as well get rid of the child labor laws as well. The families are going to need everyone working in order to pay for food and shelter when they’re working for a quarter a day.
Joe,
If you get rid of the welfare state, labor would not be so cheap.
People will not work for free, Lincoln abolished slavery.
“Lincoln abolished slavery.”
Hoo doggy, this could be FUN!
“You wind up with millions of starving, desperate workers who will do anything for a buck.”
This is already the case in most of the world. And it isn’t because India is an anarcho-capitalist society with not nearly enough regulations…
>Get rid of the welfare state and government schools, open the borders to allow cheap labor to flood into the country. You wind up with millions of starving, desperate workers who will do anything for a buck.
You just described the beginnings of the US. The people produced more and more with that freedom…which you hate and fear.
You wind up with millions of starving, desperate workers who will do anything for a buck.
…
… might as well get rid of the child labor laws as well.
Funny you should mention that they would do anything for a buck, because it’s actually child labor laws that cause children to go into prostitution, in poor countries.
Property taxes aren’t helping the poor, either. You can’t accumulate as much wealth when the government is stealing it from you.
As far as being desparate, all that means is that the cost of not doing some jobs is higher than doing them, and the marginal utility of that buck has risen, for you.
Besides, there are competitors out there who want to take workers from other businesses. The more people who want to make a profit off of you, the better your chances of having your wages bid up.
Here is a video on these issues:
Applying Economics to American History | Thomas E. Woods, Jr.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-LJ3wZjD4I
Is the idea here that the perfectly free market envisioned on this site won’t result in the concentration of wealth and power in a few people, who will by dint of their economic strength have magnified ability to obtain outcomes they like, including keeping the costs of labor low by cooperating with each other in some circumstances and using various forms of coercion to enforce their wills? One of the commenters mentioned an advantage of child labor. I assume in the perfectly free market, child labor, very very long hours, very low wages, and other features of the early industrial revolution would return. Is there some reason to believe they actually would not? Also, is there any empirical reason (as opposed to theoretical reasoning) to believe they would not? Do we care?
The video is 37 minutes.
In response to the issues of concentration of wealth and child labor:
From the video “Applying Economics to American History”:
And so the thought experiment runs like this:
Let’s suppose all the machinery that we use to produce things is just suddenly destroyed, like, there’s some mad unabomber who’s got this incredible bomb that can destroy all productive machinery, and it goes off.
So, we’ve got nothing. We’ve got to make everything by hand.
Well, what would happen, in that economy? How much stuff could we create? Well, not a lot, right? We’d be sitting there with our bare hands saying, “I’m not producing very much over here”.
So, what would that look like?
Well, we would have scarcity of everything. Everything would exist in far, far lower quantities than we’re accustomed to.
There’d be plenty of goods we couldn’t produce at all. I mean, try producing a trolly car, from beginning to end, by hand. Get all the raw materials and resources; do all that by hand. It can’t be done, right?
So, let’s imagine, though: we lose all the machines, but we all decide, “You know what? I think I’m just going to keep working forty hours a week.”
Now, let’s compare how much stuff we could produce, working forty hours a week, with our bare hands, with no machines, no capital goods to help us; and compare that to what we could produce with these machines in forty hours a week.
Well, obviously, in forty hours a week, with these machines, we could produce, basically, the abundance we see around us, today.
But if we’ve got forty hours with these crummy hands of ours per week, how much stuff are we producing? A tiny, tiny sliver; the tiniest sliver of what we used to produce.
So, when you get your paycheck in that situation – the non-machine economy situation – when you go out to spend it, what are you going to find? Everything’s very expensive, because everything’s very scarce and so is commanding a very high price. You have to work very hard, and very long, to earn the purchasing power necessary to buy the things you want.
Now, would that situation be the fault of the “terrible exploiter” who’s employing you? Would that be his fault that you can’t get much stuff with your paycheck? Do we need Labor Unions to get your pay to go up ten times?
What would that help if there ain’t no stuff to buy, anyway? What if we payed you 100 trillion Zimbabwean Dollars? Would that help the situation?
If there ain’t no stuff to buy, it doesn’t matter: Your wages can keep going up and up and up. The problem is the stuff isn’t there.
So, this is not the fault of the “exploiter”, so-called, who’s employing you. It’s the fault of reality. It’s the fault of the fact that the economy is so freaking primitive it can’t produce the physical stuff necessary to give you the standard of living you’re accustomed to.
Well, that is exactly the economy that people living in the early Industrial Revolution were living in. A very primitive economy with very primitive machines and still a lot of goods produced by hand.
And people are sort of of the opinion that the reason workers weren’t being paid very much in those days was that evil capitalists were keeping all the wealth to themselves.
But the problem was there wasn’t much wealth in the first place.
What that economy needed wasn’t more government wealth redistribution. It needed more machines so that we can produce more stuff, so that the stuff will exist in greater abundance so that it’s not so expensive, and therefore my paycheck can stretch farther and farther to be able to purchase more and more stuff. That’s what that economy needed.
Whereas, if we were simply to persist in this situation where we’ve got very few machines, very primitive production process, and just hope that through agitation – or legislation: “Let’s pass a law saying that everybody gets a TV set and a new hat and whatever.
Well, again, the reason that the workers in that situation don’t have TV sets and hats is not that the relatively very few rich people are hoarding all the television sets, it’s that there aren’t any television sets.
It’s not that the relatively few rich people are hoarding all the furniture and all the meat. It’s that there is relatively little furniture and meat being produced, so that even if we took all the stuff of the guys with the white mustaches and the sacks of money; even if we took all their stuff and redistributed it, the result, for the average person, would be completely negligible, you wouldn’t even notice the improvement in your standard of living. OK, you’d have and extra one penny; That’s it.
…
… we just simply need more investment in capital goods that can produce more stuff – make the economy more physically productive.
That’s what happens in a market economy When you’re not looting and stealing and condemning people as exploiters, what they are instead doing, what they are allowed to do, is take their profits and pour them into investment, in machinery that makes the production process more productive, can produce more stuff, and the greater abundance leads to lower prices and higher real wages for everybody.
There is absolutely nothing, whatsoever, the government can do to assist in that process. All it can do is hamper that process by taxing these people, by taking their wealth away, and thereby depriving us of the funds that society needs for the capital goods to allow us to be able to produce more stuff. There’s nothing the government can do to make this process any better. All it can do is make it worse.
…
Now, what I’ve just described here is also relevant to the issue of child labor. This is another thing they throw against the market economy. You know, “Can’t have a free market because kids have to work, and if we had a non-market economy the kids could just skip through meadows all day, and that’s the difference.”
…
… in Bangladesh, the British charity, Oxfam, pointed out that when a bunch of Americans and Europeans were griping and complaining about child labor in Bangladesh – …
So what happened? Did child labor go away when Bangladesh got rid of it? … No, what happened was, as Oxfam reported, the children either went into prostitution, instead … or they starved. …
Well, nice going, geniuses. Way to solve that problem.
…
Even the International Labor Organization, which doesn’t concede anything like this, admits that, OK, the reason the kids are working is that the society is so poor that they’re contributing at least a quarter of the family income. And when you’re living in a society like that, if you lose a quarter of the family income, that’s it, you’re dead. …
So, what they need is more Capitalism. And that would sound like … No one would take this seriously on MSNBC … But that is obviously, when you think about the logic of it, that is obviously what they need. There is no other physically plausible solution.
In response to the issue of the concentration of power:
The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History, Lecture 8 | Thomas E. Woods, Jr.
Myths and Facts About Big Business
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGeA1Sbd4XM
You mean the garden of eden before they ate that darn apple?
That’s an outrage you know. God acted all pissy, but Eve mingled her labor of picking and biting with that apple.
Here’s what I’m struggling with. From an empirical perspective, these arguments seem problematic. By that I mean, when Hammer v. Dagenhart was decided in 1918, I don’t think there’s really a lot of dispute that the condition of child laborers in the US was abominable. Yet this was also a time when some Americans were accumulating vast wealth, as were some companies, who were merrily employing child labor and defending it. I’m not sure there’s really any basis to say that the reason child labor was common was because there wasn’t enough “stuff” around, or that that had anything to do with the issue. After Hammer was overturned in 1941, Congress was able to impose child labor restrictions, and the condition of children in America by all accounts greatly improved. There was hardly a sudden rise in child prostitution. I understand arguments that the market wasn’t perfectly free in 1918, etc, but it was pretty damn free. I mean, I just wonder how we can square the historical experience of the great western capitalist democracies with the super hard core libertarianism that says we need do nothing to stop child labor.
That being said, if you guys can really explain why even if I don’t pay taxes there will be schools, roads, police, etc, I am definitely listening.