03
May
2021
Bob Murphy Triple Play
==> Here’s my recent article for mises.org, explaining and criticizing one of the important contributions of the late Nobel laureate, Robert Mundell.
==> BMS ep. 196, in which Stephan Livera interviews me on the economics of Bitcoin. (There’s some new ground I cover in this one, if you’ve heard me talk about Bitcoin before.)
==> BMS ep. 197, in which I interview David Beckworth on the logic of NGDP targeting, and what the Fed is up to. Audio here, video below:
On your Mundell article : I’m not sure I understood your point. First it seemed you were going to describe Mundell’s trilemma and then show how Austrians destroyed it. But from how you described the Austrian response, it seems they agreed you indeed can’t have all three because the classical gold standard (preferred option) also only had 2 of the 3,namely free capital flow, fixed FX, no monetary policy freedom.
If you look at what they mean by “monetary policy freedom” they mean ability of central bank to fight recessions. So in Austrian view that’s not a constraint, it prevents them from causing biz cycle.
1960 was the year Congo gained independence, at least on paper. (Not so much in actuality, given their democratically elected leader was removed from power by the CIA and then assassinated by the Belgian version of the CIA.)
Anyway, you mention banks needing to maintain “adequate gold reserves”, and apparently one of the ways the Belgians did that, pre-1960, was forced labor in the Belgian Congo. Jules Marchal exposes the practice in great detail in, “Forced Labor In The Gold & Copper Mines: A History Of Congo Under Belgian Rule, 1910-1945, Volume I”,
There’s no “recent comments” list on the front page, anymore. That’s unfortunate.
Anyway, were some bombshell things Bob had to say about bitcoin in BMS Ep. 196 that I, for the life of me, could not understand why bitcoiners could not seem to see, and I’m happy to learn that at least Bob *sees* it (just interprets it differently) and I feel like there is more hope of turning Bob to the dark side than before.
I’ll want to take some time to address these bombshells, but I don’t have that time at the moment.
Briefly, though, when Bob basically says that there’s no meaningful difference between someone pricing a good at one percentage of a bitcoin versus another *THAT IS ABSOLUTELY HUGE*!
Looking forward to explaining the logic of that position to its logical conclusion.
Also, Bob says that he thinks Mises and Rothbard were wrong when they said that money had to have first emerged from the valuations of barter goods. I’ve always (almost always) said that pro-bitcoiner Austrians *had* to logically hold this position as a matter of logical consistency because “you don’t need a regression theorem to explain a made up value” (paraphrasing myself).
More on this later.
It’s still there for me; perhaps it was merely bugged at the precise moment you checked?
guest, oh, I didn’t realize some of you used that comment feature. I’ll look into putting it somewhere.
If you get a chance, I’d like to hear more about the “bombshells” I released. 🙂
guest, the New Comment is still on the blog page, doesn’t that work?
It is still there for me too.
I see it, too, now. Yes, that works fine. Thank you.
(I expect my response to include time stamps, so it might be awhile, and I’ll have to re-listen to the episode.)
Ok, regarding BMS Ep. 196 and its bombshells.
[5:17] Bob’s commentary on what Friedrich Hayek’s, “The Denationalization of Money” did for bitcoins. (This is not one of the bombshells.)
I’m just going off of what Bob said about this article, since I haven’t read it. But I don’t think it will be necessary to read it in order to make the point I want to make about what it supposedly means for bitcoins.
According to Bob, Hayek’s argument that there could exist a legitimate “fiat money” created in the private sector (“fiat”, here, in the sense that its value does not derive from use-value, or even a claim to something with use-value) is based on his otherwise correct assessment that when the government tries to help the economy, it always messes up because it doesn’t get its money by providing something that is voluntarily purchased and so it doesn’t have access to profit and loss signals that tell you if people like or dislike a good or service.
But there are private sector Ponzi Schemes. These schemes are not any less fraudulent for happening without government intervention.
And such is the case with bitcoins, I am claiming.
The reason what Mises said about fiduciary media leading to the business cycle isn’t primarily because the bank issuing it has insufficient backing for them – because if someone *else* happens to discover a use-value for that particular form of fiduciary media then it doesn’t matter what the motivations are for the banks that created them as a fraud.
For example, if the best way for a banker to cheat people out of gold is to create its bank notes – that will be created to represent more gold than it actually has on hand, which is fiduciary media – in such a way that the paper can cure cancer when mixed with something else, then who cares that there’s not enough gold backing this form of fiduciary media, which has now become a good because of its newly discovered use-value.
So, it’s not the *fiduciary* nature of fiduciary media that leads to the business cycle. Rather, it’s the fact that fiduciary has no link to use-value.
And this is why I said, some time ago, that fiduciary media aren’t claims on anything:
Contra Krugman Ep. 124
[www]https://consultingbyrpm.com/blog/2018/02/contra-krugman-ep.-124.html#comment-1881824
Bob and I have a fun and frustrating exchange, there.
The frustrating part is that Bob appears to be equivocating on the word “claim”.
Yes, everyone who accepts a bank’s fiduciary media is being told by the bank that it’s a claim to something, and they believe it. But since it’s the nature of fiduciary media to be *unbacked*, it’s actually a claim to nothing – as I said.
Bob quotes Mises saying that fiduciary media is a claim and thanks me for playing. But he’s missing Mises’ point, which is basically that it’s not enough to be *just a claim*:
[Block Quotes] “What is significant for us lies in the fact that such claims to money, if there is no doubt whatever concerning either their security or their liquidity, are, simply on account of their equality in objective exchange-value to the sums of money to which they refer, commercially competent to take the place of money entirely. …”
“… Since nobody wants money except in order to get rid of it again, since it never finds a consumer except on ceasing to be a common medium of exchange …”
“… The obligee can expect that these claims will remain in circulation for so long as their holders do not lose confidence in their prompt convertibility or transfer them to persons who have not this confidence. He is therefore in a position to undertake greater obligations than he would ever be able to fulfil; it is enough if he takes sufficient precautions to ensure his ability to satisfy promptly that proportion of the claims that is actually enforced against him.”
I’ve said before that I concede that both Mises and Rothbard believe that unbacked free-market money could be legitimate (I do not), but notice that pretty much anywhere Mises talks about money, he has in mind a commodity that has a use-value that happens to have *become* a money.
That’s why Mises says, above, that when a money loses its “moneyness” (my word, not his), it can still be consumed. Because money was already a good, in Mises’ mind, before it also became a money.
And then notice that money substitutes are only as legitimate as its convertibility to money.
Here, Mises seems to accept that as long as people don’t convert their claims into actual commodity-money, then the monetary system is functional. I reject this – to print claims to something you don’t have is fraud, and not only when people realize that they’re being defrauded.
This fraud – which provides people using the fraudulent currency with misinformation about the true nature of supplies and demands in the economy – is responsible for the business cycle.
[9:44] Vijay Boyapati populariing the idea that Bitcoin is going to move through stages. Stephan Livera says he discussed this with Guido Hulsman, who says that Jevons mentioned that money moves from collectible, store of value, medium of exchange, unit of account, in that order. Stephan considers it to be an incredibly high bar to say that money has to be all of these things at once.
The reason it has to be all three is because what gives each stage its legitimacy is the stage before, all stages being linked, fundamentally, to an individual having a desire he perceives that he will be willing and able to act upon to see its satisfaction.
Further, the concepts involved in every stage are implied, and are – at least in some sense – already available to a single acting man like the thought experiment of Crusoe.
Every deliberate action has a cost, and therefore involves exchange (of one set of circumstances for a more favorable one). Every action is future oriented in that an act has to occur before a desire is satisfied (if it’s to be relevant to economics, that is) and also in that effects follow temporally from their cause, and so there’s always a time element – there’s the root of interest rates.
All of the stages are already implied by the nature of action. The later two stages are just the logic of human action playing itself out among many individual humans.
I haven’t read the Jevons quote, so I’m going to charitably interpret the word “collectible” to mean a good that is acquired to satisfy an end in the immediate future. I find it difficult to believe, from what I’ve read from Guido Hulsman and what I’ve heard from him in videos, that he would believe that people collecting things just to collect them is a sufficient foundation for the emergence of money.
I’ll quickly add that art always qualifies as a sufficient basis for something being a good. Someone wants something nice to look at, and art satisfies that end. The reason that the bitcoin-as-art argument, from when bitcoins first got started, fails is because the art value of bitcoins are based on its perceived future value as a money. Since, in my view, bitcoins can never be money (no matter how many people try to use it as money – and yes, there’s more to money than wide acceptance), it also means that the foundation of bitcoin’s art-value is flawed, meaning that there’s no real art involved, and therefore no art-value-basis for bitcoins’ supposed moneyness.
(Aside: You could say that art is subjective, but unless you want to have to say that anything is art so long as someone says it is, then you’re going to have to restrict your definition of the word “art”. If anything can be art, then that word loses any meaning.)
At any rate, about those stages.
Collectible. People collect/acquire goods because they satisfy ends. The value of the end desired is imputed to the good. The good is a proxy for want-satisfaction; The good is what satisfies the want.
Store of value. People store collected/acquired goods because they expect to be in a state of dissatisfaction in the future, and, as the saying goes, if you fail to plan, you plan to fail. Notice also that there is a time element involved.
Medium of exchange. When *other* people want something in the future, and they have something that you want, you can store goods for indirect exchange. Notice also that, effectively, you’re “storing” *other people’s* value when acquiring a medium of exchange. Your stored indirect barter goods are a proxy for other people’s subjective values.
Unit of account. When a good so efficiently permits the enabling of a double-coincidence of wants – through other people’s desire for its use-value – you don’t even have to think about its use-value for accounting purposes, anymore. So long as this link to use-value is maintained, the unit of account acts as a proxy for other people’s subjective valuations of goods.
The deviation from this link to use-value is the fundamental cause of the business cycle, but you have to have other circumstances in place for it to manifest as a business cycle (like an economy where most businesses use the same flawed monetary system which misinforms them all about real supplies and demands).
I don’t think I need to say this, but I’ll add it just in case: My arguments don’t rely on the concept of intrinsic values for goods. There’s no such thing.
[21:10] Stephan asks Bob to discuss whether something can be used only as a money or, as Peter Schiff suggests, does money have to have another use in order to be legitimate money. Bob responds with two points.
But he sets up his two points with the following. Bob concedes that there’s a sense in which the fundamental value of bitcoins are zero, and that there’s no rhyme or reason why it should be 63,000 vs. 2 or vs. 30 million.
This is one of those bombshell statements. The implications are brutal for digital currencies (as well as for all fiat monies, I would add).
Bob says that, while this is true of bitcoins, he believes that this is also true of gold when far more people trade it as a money rather than for its use-value.
This is because he believes that money has a separate function from barter goods – to enable a double-coincidence of wants – whereas, I submit, the function of money is derivative of the function of barter goods. The value *for* the barter goods that money buys *is* the information that is supposed to be conveyed through the money.
(And this latter view is actually consistent with the fact that all economic value is subjective and that Methodological Individualism is the correct paradigm for analyzing economics. If all economic values originate with the subjective ends of individuals, then that includes money. So you have to have an end goal from which to impute values into everything that is economically relevant.
(True, there’s nothing wrong with speculation, but your speculation has to be grounded in subjective ends in order to be “sound”. Sure, you *could* be right that others would fall for any Ponzi Scheme you might dream up, but there’s nothing keeping it going except the pure speculations of investors. There’s no substance to the buying and selling in a Ponzi Scheme, and that’s why its destructive to fall for them.)
Bob appears to believe that the function of money is to elicit a desire for trade, with trade having economic benefits through specialization of tasks involved in a production structure.
Bob, believing the function of money to be fundamentally separate from that of barter goods, naturally interprets the vastly more employed use of money as money to be of a “greater value” than that of barter goods.
I would concede that there are economic benefits to specialization and trade, but I would say that the benefits only occur when those activities are done in the pursuit of satisfying wants. Just because you *can* trade doesn’t mean it will be beneficial to do so, and just because you *can* specialize doesn’t mean that it will be beneficial for you (or others) for you to do so in certain tasks or in certain structures of production versus others.
(Joe Salerno, in at least one of his videos titled “The Birth of the Austrian School”, exposes the error of socialist central planning by pointing out that even if the central planners knew how to produce everything that was needed or wanted in an economy, they still wouldn’t know *what* they should produce without a price system that informed them that one good was more valued than another. Same here.
(Specialization and trade are economically beneficial, but not for their own sakes.)
OK, so the reason this is such a bombshell statement by Bob is because it’s an admission that what pro-bitcoiners believe about money is that all that’s necessary to keep a monetary system going is agreement among the people using it.
Except that in order for money to be said to “correctly” represent the values for the goods it will buy, you have to first believe that there is such a thing as correct or incorrect values of money. What “correct” valuation could a currency possibly deviate from when the value in terms of a money can be 63,000 or 2 or 30 million? That makes no sense.
Whereas the view that money’s soundness of value is derived from the money-good’s non-monetary use-value makes perfect sense when talking about the “soundness” of money or of its ability to communicate information about people’s preferences.
Notice also that you cannot speak about errors in monetary systems without a belief, in some sense, that a money “should be this value and not that value”. The value that money “should be” is when it conforms to subjective values for goods – but the money, itself, has to have a link to use-value in order to correctly convey those values.
[24:28] Bob’s second point, to go along with his first point above in response to Peter Schiff’s argument that money has to have a non-
monetary use in order to be real money.
Bob brings up the Regression Theorem, saying that if the reason bitcoins can’t be money is due to the Regression Theorem, then bitcoins
would have to fail the money test by not becoming a medium of exchange, which Bob believes it has become and therefore that the
Regression Theorem does not rule out bitcoins as money.
But, as was mentioned above, money can’t be said to be conveying information if there’s no such thing as a “correct” price, in some
sense. So, while people may be playing pretend with bitcoins, that cannot logically convey information about subjective values for
goods. Bitcoins are, therefore, not performing the function of money. Pro-bitcoiners have just been lulled into a false sense of
security by the FRN fiat money bubble that has taken generations of domestic, and then increasingly foreign, fraud to maintain.
People trade their bitcoins for the FRN, but the FRN isn’t money, either. The reason the Fed has to keep increasing the money supply,
and make deals with other countries to price their goods in FRNs, is because the natural thing for people to do with fiat money is to
increasingly *devalue* it, such that prices go higher and then expected price inflation leads to higher interest rates.
The economy *wants* to destroy fiat currencies, which is why the government points a gun at you and forces you to use fiat money to pay
taxes instead of voluntarily handing your money over for a service you actually value.
(Aside: The concept of “free riding” is based on the faulty belief that if somebody else benefits from something you value enough to
produce or pay for, yourself, then somehow other people owe you something. If having that thing produced is more important to you than
having other people pay for something they didn’t ask for, then you are voluntarily producing that thing with the understanding that it
will result in some free enjoyment by others; And if withholding free enjoyment is more important to you than the use of that thing,
then don’t produce it. There is no free-rider problem.)
That’s the reason the FRN has seemd to last for so long – and don’t let the length of time it has seemed to last fool you into thinking
that the FRN is money.
Bob also says that the reason I know that a money is valuable tomorrow is because of its value in the immediate past. But that doesn’t make sense (and here I’m disagreeing with Rothbard a little bit on his particular version of the Regression Theorem), and elsewhere in Man, Economy, and State Rothbard seemed to understand this:
“There is no question about the fact that we are not interested in historical analysis, but rather in an economic analysis of the complex economy. In particular, acting man has no interest in the historical origin of his resources; he is acting in the present on behalf of a goal to be achieved in the future.[12] Praxeological analysis recognizes this and deals with the individual acting at present to satisfy ends of varying degrees of futurity (from instantaneous to remote).”
This contradicts Rothbard’s yesterday-value theory for the foundation of the value of money tomorrow.
It’s true that future prices can kind of be inferred from past prices if you’re recognizing a trend in consumer demand, but past prices are not the *reason* a money has value tomorrow.
I submit that Rothbard made a mistake, here, and rather than a yesterday-price being the foundation of tomorrow’s price, it’s rather that real money has a link to use value through someone in the economy that values the money for its use-value as a commodity – with the money value arising out of all the arbitrage opportunities made possible because some people values it as a commodity.
We have discussed this before, but not to either satisfaction, I think. Or at least not to my satisfaction.
It is often helpful in these situations to construct a logical argument, a syllogism, with premises and a conclusion. If the argument is valid, that is the conclusion follows from the argument, then the only way to challenge the argument is to challenge one or more of the premises.
Are you aware if this has been done? If not, maybe we could work out such an argument that money must have a use value. I think that would illustrate areas of disagreement.
We have to start with a definition of money that does not beg the question. As a starting point, what is your preferred definition of money?
“We have to start with a definition of money that does not beg the question. As a starting point, what is your preferred definition of money?”
I’m not finished responding to this episode, yet, but yes, I believe that might help.
The function of money is to “carry” the values you place on the goods you sell, over to the values you place on the goods you buy, and it has to do this while “carrying” the valuations of the *other guy’s* sold goods over to the goods *he* intends to buy.
These subjective values are the information that money is providing. One purson’s set of valuations bears on the costs of another, and vice-versa.
(And notice that, in order to say that money is information is to say that there is a right and wrong valuation for money. That can’t happen if the value of the money is made up in the sense that the number of money units doesn’t matter for the values you place on goods.)
That can only happen if there is a link between the buyer’s and seller’s use-values for the goods they’ve sold and the goods they will buy.
It might also help to say that money isn’t the cause of coordination of use-values, but the result of the attempt to coordinate through arbitrage opportunities.
I see that I can reduce the opportunities I have to forego with direct barter if I trade for this other good first and then trade that away to fulfill my ultimate goal of acquiring goods in exchange for the costs I was willing to bear.
(We work to ultimately buy goods, not to hold money; Holding money allows us to buy goods.)
Money is the result of people discovering that they are using the same intermediary good to enable a double-coincidence of wants. And then, over time, people notice that some intermediary goods are better than others.
Money isn’t losing its use-value through this process, but rather providing arbitrage opportunities to increasingly more people *through* its existing use-values for it.
“These subjective values are the information that money is providing.”
I would also add that these are the subjective values that, if the money is not correctly conveying those values, causes the business cycle.
And, again, to say that the money *has to* convey certain values versus others is to say that it has to have a link to use-value.
I am not sure if this is your definition of money. It is not entirely helpful to me.
Money is information is a little different from money changes convey information.
Believe it or not, I find *that* to be interesting and helpful to *me*.
That’s an important nuance you’re noticing.
I would say,, what information could changes in money convey that a revaluation of the money couldn’t – “higher prices” can be restated as “i don’t have enough money”.
And what information would a change in money of 1% convey that a change of 20% couldn’t, if the money, itself, didn’t convey information?
The money, itself, has to mean something, in order to be economically meaningful.
“what information could changes in money convey that a revaluation of the money couldn’t?”
Don’t we have to know what money is to answer the question? Which brings us back to the start.
“Don’t we have to know what money is to answer the question? Which brings us back to the start.”
No, not if you’re claim is that it doesn’t matter what is agreed upon as the money, and that it’s the changes in the supply that control its value.
That could be anything you arbitrarily decide it to be. No need for a definition of money, there.
My claim is that, in order for money to “carry” value (be a “medium”, conduit of exchange), then it has to have its own separate connection back to use-value through a chain of arbitrage opportunities.
Incidentally, the sugar regions of the transatlantic forced labor trade are another example of when machinery failed to help the forced laborers escape deadly brutality, as explained in part here:
https://academic.oup.com/ahr/article/121/2/403/2581844?login=true
The sugar regions, for at least a portion of their history, relied on a very industrialized version of forced labor.
If you don’t want to read the whole article, this paragraph in particular is illuminating.
A lot of economists talk about money coming into existence because barter was allegedly inconvenient, but Congolese history tells of people being brutally forced to adopt European currency, forced by means of whipping and other brutalities to accept jobs they didn’t want in order to pay taxes which benefited Europeans.
It really makes me thing that barter — or whatever the Congolese might have done prior to being forced to accept European currency — might not have been all that bad after all, if it took so much brutality to get them to abandon their previous ways.
You can read a lot about this in books by Jules Marchal… not so much about whatever the Congolese did prior to European conquest, but at least about what the certain Belgians and other Europeans did to them.
“… but Congolese history tells of people being brutally forced to adopt European currency …”
But that doesn’t solve the insurmountable question of how such a money is carrying value.
Money doesn’t convey value just because it sits between two sets of barter goods – what would the numbers mean?
Now, it’s true that anti-bitcoiners, like myself, have to answer the same question for bitcoins and FRNs because people are, at least, *attempting* to use these as money.
We have to answer why they would do this and why for so long.
There’s an answer for that consistent with our position that neither bitcoins or FRNs are really money.
The answer is the same answer as why, when someone breaks a window, the glass-man gets some work, and why its worth hiring security to not have your store burgled.
In the case of the broken window, the act of breaking does not increase wealth, even though it stimulates economic activity. It’s a net loss.
You don’t hire the glass-man to increase your profits, you hire him to prevent further losses. It’s the existing stream of wealth that you’re weighing against a potential reduced stream of wealth, and in order to preserve a greater stream of wealth, you have to take the loss of hiring the glass-man.
Same with security. If you don’t have to hire security, you will have more wealth. It’s only when not having security is perceived to result in a greater loss than if you hired security, that you decide that its worth taking a loss to hire some.
With the FRN, the government is basically threatening you so you’ll pay protection money. They *allow* you to keep more wealth than they would allow if you didn’t pay them.
But if the government wasn’t stealing from you in the first place, you wouldn’t need the FRN. You’dd be far better off without having to use it.
So, even though the FRN is traded as if it were money, it’s really just a wealth confiscation scheme. So, the FRN isn’t trading because the FRN has value, but because the goods you’re *allowed* to keep has more value to you than the incredible theft you’d have to endure by not using it.
The FRN is not money, is constantly destroying wealth, and it has to be constantly printed in order to attempt to cover up the price signals that, other things equal, would alert everyone to the fraudulent nature of the paper-as-money scheme.
And with bitcoins, I submit that, were it not for people willing to hand over their government-enforced non-money FRNs (and other fiat currencies), that bitcoins would fail rather quickly. As I’ve said, bitcoins are just riding the FRN bubble.
So, just because a “money” is generating economic activity doesn’t mean that it’s really the money that’s doing it, and it doesn’t mean that weatlh is necessarily increasing due to circulation of such “money”.
At this time of night, with specific regard to the situation of the Congolese being forced to use European currency against their will, my thought is that the European currency had very little value to the Congolese: they could see that what they could buy from earning wages from Europeans and using those wages to buy things was far less than what they could earn if the Europeans would just leave them alone.
The “value”, from the Congolese perspective, was the value of not being whipped or otherwise brutalized… I guess you must be thinking along the same line of thought when you talk about, “the government is basically threatening you so you’ll pay protection money.”
But since the Europeans in question (specifically, the ones who violently colonized the Congo) were the ones forcing the Congolese to use European currency, I do not think the question can be fully answered without asking, what was the value to them?
The Europeans wanted Congolese labor and resources, but at first glance at least they were fairly arbitrary about what they were willing to pay for it (though generally far less than would have been necessary to convince the Congolese to work voluntarily). Jules Marchal talks about how the same companies who forced the Congolese to work for them also ran the stores where the Congolese could spend whatever small portion of their wages they didn’t owe in tax, and set the prices fairly arbitrarily.
This quote from page 435 of Forced Labor in the Gold and Copper Mines by Jules Marchal is interesting:
So, as far as the Congolese were concerned, the value of the European money was backed by these European stores (at least in the example quoted). But, since not all stores charged the same prices, a Congolese franc might have been worth a lot more in one part of the Congo than the other, depending on the prices of the local store.
I feel that, due to tiredness, I haven’t adequately explored this line of thought, so I guess I will get back to you when I am awake and have more time.
“I feel that, due to tiredness …”
I hear you.
“But since the Europeans in question … were the ones forcing the Congolese to use European currency, I do not think the question can be fully answered without asking, what was the value to them? …”
“… Jules Marchal talks about how the same companies who forced the Congolese to work for them also ran the stores where the Congolese could spend whatever small portion of their wages they didn’t owe in tax, and set the prices fairly arbitrarily. ”
It’s entirely possible to have a sound monetary system and still exploit people to do forced labor for reduced compensation – for a time, at least.
Governments have always debased even otherwise sound money (by mixing in some base metals) in order to try to escape the discipline forced upon even them by sound money. Recently, they’ve called a gold-coin monetary system “the golden handcuffs” and a “barbarous relic”.
But that’s all irrelevant to the question of what makes something a money.
Just because people can be robbed of their gold coins and exploited doesn’t mean there is anything unsound about the use of gold as money.
(Aside: Let me say, while I have it in mind – because it will come up later at some point, I think – that, due to gold and silver *not* being money right now (it’s capable of serving as money, but it is not currently doing so), any attempt to use gold and silver as money without its trade value being based on an existing link to use-value will be as speculative a valuation as I criticize bitcoins for being.
(So, obviously, that’s going to be an issue.
(The answer is that while, yes, there is some speculation as to what a “sound” valuation of gold and silver will be during a period of price discovery, what makes this speculation different from the speculation in bitcoin is that gold and silver actually do have use-values on which to base its trade values.
(And their use-values will force corrections of their trade values until the trade value more or less conforms to the valuations of the arbitrage opportunities made possible by the metals’ use-values.
(Their trade values will always be changing because preferences always change.)
I mean, to the extent that having a sound monetary system (whatever that means) is insufficient to abolish forced labor, you’re right.
But I don’t think the Belgian currency system was sound. Consider the title of the book, “Forced Labor in the Gold and Copper Mines.” A significant portion of the book is devoted to the topic of forced labor in the gold mines, and if you read other books on the topic of forced labor as well, you can see that the Belgians (specifically, those Belgians involved in the violent colonization of the Congo) are not the first ones or last ones in history to be involved in using forced labor to obtain gold. (Jules Marchal, for his part, seemed rather oblivious to the history of forced labor outside the Congo. He had a great deal of expertise about the history of forced labor in the Congo itself, but from time to time he suggests that the situation in the Congo lacked parallels elsewhere in history, which is incorrect.)
Several examples of other times and places when gold has been acquired by means of forced labor include:
* modern day Ghana (see “Blood and Earth” by Kevin Bales, Chapter 6)
* historical Brazil, e.g. around the 1860s as well as the early 1700s (see “Children of God’s Fire” by Robert Edgar Conrad, pages 143 to 147, and also pages 394 to 397)
* modern day Brazil (see “Disposable People” by Kevin Bales, Chapter 1, page 4 of the revised edition)
* the ancient Romans practiced “condemnation to the mines” as part of their legal system, and some of these mines would have been gold mines. People “condemned” thusly included religious dissidents.
* modern day Peru, see:
https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/peru-gold-mining-forced-labor
(Note that the “debts” described in the article are likely fraudulent debts. In his own books, Kevin Bales describes a number of methods that ens***ers use to perpetrate fraud and claim that other people owe them. E.g., such a criminal might bestow gifts on newly hired workers, and then later, after they have already accepted these gifts, retroactively change the terms and demand repayment for the gifts, even though that is not what the workers initially agreed to when accepting the gifts. Some of these gifts might have been in the form of food that was already eaten, so it’s not as if the workers can simply return them. Another common strategy is, upon the death of a worker, claim that his wife, children, or other family are now obliged to pay his debt, even though they never agreed to any such thing.)
In order for gold to truly be sound money, it would have to meet certain minimal ethical conditions, namely:
1. It must not be mined by means of forced labor. Forced labor is a means of underpaying workers, that is, of compensating them less than whatever would be necessary to persuade them to work voluntarily. Since the people acquiring the gold (by means of forcing other people to mine it) are not paying the full cost of labor, this distorts the exchange value of the gold. If they paid the full cost of voluntarily labor, then, in order for gold extraction to be profitable, the exchange value of gold would need to be high enough to cover those labor costs; otherwise, if the exchange value of gold were not high enough, it would make sense for them to abandon or reduce gold mining.
2. The wages for paying the gold miners should be obtained without forced labor or theft. Jules Marchal notes that in the Belgian Congo, the Belgians used forced labor not only in the mines, but also forced other Congolese outside the mines to grow food for the miners. So, not only were the Belgians paying the Congolese less for mining efforts than would be necessary to persuade them to mine voluntarily, but what little they did pay them involved a lot of stolen food, grown with forced labor. Again, if the Belgians had to pay the full cost of obtaining all this labor voluntarily, they might well find that the whole venture was no longer profitable.
3. The gold miners should respect the local farmers and other landstewards, and refrain from poisoning the land with mercury and/or other toxic stuff without the consent of said local landstewards.
When these things are not respected, it results in an excess of gold being mined, compared to what would be mined if these ethical standards were followed. It also results in gold continuing to be mined at lower exchange values than whatever exchange values would be high enough to motivate gold mining which met the stated minimal ethical standards.
I think one of the mistakes I made with the comment I wrote while really tired, is fairly to distinguish between the relatively “natural” value of money (i.e. whatever properties it might or might not have to persuade people to use it voluntarily), and the imposed value (those properties that inspire people to use it only out of fear of violence, e.g. threats of whipping and/or imprisonment and/or other brutalities if people do not get jobs to pay taxes).
One of my points, that I was trying to get at, is that when the Belgians imposed European currency on the Congolese, by means of extreme violence, the currency had very little natural value to the Congolese (that is, they had little interest in adopting it voluntarily) but it did have imposed value (the value of not being whipped and/or imprisoned and/or otherwise brutalized). But also, the brutal colonizers had their own messed up ideas of “value”. (In murder mysteries, the characters of the book or movie or whatever speak of discovering the murderers’ motives. In the Belgian Congo, the violent colonizers had motives for the raping, pillaging, torturing, murdering, etc that they went around perpetrating against the Congolese peoples.)
fairly -> failure
(sorry for typo)
“I think one of the mistakes I made with the comment I wrote while really tired, is fairly to distinguish between the relatively “natural” value of money (i.e. whatever properties it might or might not have to persuade people to use it voluntarily), and the imposed value (those properties that inspire people to use it only out of fear of violence, e.g. threats of whipping and/or imprisonment and/or other brutalities if people do not get jobs to pay taxes).”
By this, I mean I was trying to distinguish between them, i.e. I made the distinction in my head, but because I was tired, I was struggling to find the words to express that distinction in writing.
“In order for gold to truly be sound money, it would have to meet certain minimal ethical conditions …”
As Austrians, we disagree. We consider morality to have nothing to do with economics. We say that econimics is value free. Economic laws are just facts of life that can be leveraged for good or for bad.
Like chemistry. We don’t say that there’s something unsound with chemistry when terrorists use it to commit mass murder. Morality is irrelevant. Chemistry is what it is.
Same with economics. What makes a money sound is its link to use-value. All the different ways to exploit people while using a sound monetary system has no bearing on the money’s soundness.
“… When these things are not respected, it results in an excess of gold being mined, compared to what would be mined if these ethical standards were followed.”
The way gold-money is extracted can’t affect the money’s soundness because gold’s use-value exists whether or not anyone is exploited.
And because people value goods on the margin, we say that markets always clear. So, there’s never a problem with “over production”, and there can never logically be “excess gold”. The gold’s trade value just changes to reflect demand for a given supply.
“It also results in gold continuing to be mined at lower exchange values than whatever exchange values would be high enough to motivate gold mining which met the stated minimal ethical standards.”
True, the gold will be mined at increasingly lower exchange values, but this fact is what makes it increasingly cost-prohibitive to use slave labor to mine it.
If you need more gold to have the same purchasing power, you need more slaves and/or more machines. Eventually, you run out of people to exploit before having to give these slaves some machines to work with, thereby reducing some of the pain of slavery.
So, economic law forces even these exploiters to have to lighten the slaves’ load in order to make a profit.
There’s only so much you can do with slave labor. So, everyone else in the world who is not a slave and is free to earn profits has a negative effect on the profitability of slave labor, elsewhere.
Everyone else is free to invest in labor-saving devices, thereby increasing production, while slave labor is locked into however much profit can be gained through manual labor.
There’s a lot here to reply to, so I’ll write a more thorough reply later, but for now, I’d like to point out that labor-saving devices do not always make lives easier for people in forced labor. This is in reply to, “Eventually, you run out of people to exploit before having to give these s****s some machines to work with, thereby reducing some of the pain of s****ry.”
An example from U.S. history of a labor-saving device that made life harder for people in forced labor was the cotton gin.
This is from “The Half Has Never Been Told” by Edward Baptist.
And elsewhere in the book, Edward Baptist goes into greater detail on how the pushing system involved “calibrated torture”.
Also note that while there is some truth that “Eventually, you run out of people to exploit,” in the case of the Congo, it’s estimated that King Leopold II and the Belgians / other violent colonizers killed approximately 10 million people — half the Congo’s population — before realizing that if they didn’t adopt much less violent methods, they would run out of people to exploit. I think murdering 10 million people in the pursuit of profit is genocide. The eventual reforms came too late for millions of people, and even when enacted, were very unstable. The Congo is ultimately still suffering greatly from the aftermath of colonialism. (Even after granting Congo “independence” at least on paper, Belgium did not really let the Congo be independant. Nor did the United States, and in particular the CIA. The Congo’s first and arguably only democratically elected leader was assassinated by the Belgians after less than a year in office, after the CIA removed him from power and sent him to a military prison. After some years of fighting in the Congo, the CIA eventually put Mobutu in power, who turned out to be a brutal dictator. With CIA assistance he ruled for about 30 years. Since Mobutu was a CIA-installed dictator, we could call this “neocolonialism”. Mobutu handled the Rwandan refugee crisis terribly, which lead to the Rwandans, and Uganda for some reason, sponsoring his overthrow, as an excuse to slaughter the Rwandan refugees. But Kabila, the revolutionary who overthrew him with Rwandan and Ugandan assistance, also turned out to be incompetent, and something of a dictator himself, though it didn’t help that the international community wanted to hold the Congo liable for Mobutu’s debts. Kabila was overthrown and replaced by his own son, also a Kabila, and the situation devolved into Rwanda and Uganda going to war against each other on Congolese soil, which further devolved into a bunch of violent militias running around fighting over resources and raping, pillaging, and ens***ing the people. Note that the Congo is a huge country, so this is not what happened in all of the Congo, just parts of it.)
“I think murdering 10 million people in the pursuit of profit is genocide.”
Question: Is it OK if I point out that focusing on the millions of people that died in the past in the pursuit of profit doesn’t help us deal with the problems we’re facing today, since we’re *not* facing genocide at this point in time?
Loaded question …
Douglass Adams was onto something. “Belgium is the rudest word in the Universe, yet by a strange coincidence, also the name of a country on Earth. In the Secondary Phase of the radio series, it is stated as “completely banned in all parts of the Galaxy, except in one part, where they don’t know what it means, and in serious screenplays.”
I would like @”random person” to answer my loaded question.
According to a quick Google search, Michal Kranz on Business Insider alleges that there are at least 5 genocides currently ongoing today: the Rohingya in Myanmar, the Nuer and other ethnic groups in South Sudan, Christians and Yazidis in Iraq and Syria, Christians and Muslims in the Central African Republic, and Darfuris in Sudan. Note that this is not necessarily an exhaustive list. It could just be five examples that the author happened to be tracking.
https://www.businessinsider.com/genocides-still-going-on-today-bosnia-2017-11
Another point is, that while there is great dispute over how the term “genocide” should be defined, in large part because the definition of the term as coined by Raphael Lemkin is very different from the definition of the term as defined by the Genocide convention, it is, with some exceptions (such as when people talk about “cultural genocide”, etc) only applied to situations of mass murder, and only when the body count exceeds a certain number of victims, based on what a particular author feels is sufficient to justify using the word “genocide”.
Since a situation of mass murder is only labelled as genocide once the body count reaches a certain number (and again, people might disagree on what that number should be), and even then, people might still not call it genocide if they are sticklers for sticking to the definition of the Genocide Convention (which was basically written to let governments get away with things that would be considered genocide as Raphael Lemkin used the term), there are a large number of situations which are similar to genocide, and yet which might not be classified as genocide, either because not enough people have died yet, or else because people are sticking to obscenely narrow definitions.
Consider this: if some scholar believes that a mass murder event shouldn’t be classified as genocide until there are at least a million victims, that means, that, for example, the first million victims of the Holocaust would only be classified as genocide victims retroactively (at least by that particular scholar), once the body count exceeded one million, and not while they were actually being killed.
Another point is that genocides tend to be aggressively covered up while they are occurring. Historians living in other countries might only uncover them some time after they have already finished. And even if people know something is happening, the debate over whether to call it a “genocide” might continue for decades.
In short a) there do seem to be genocides occurring today, at least if we use the term as intended by Raphael Lemkin and b) even if we use an obscenely narrow definition of the term, there are certainly mass murder events occurring which bear a remarkable similarity to genocide. Additionally, we could add c) that a genocide is an abstract term describing numerous smaller atrocities. Every act of murder, rape, and torture is it’s own smaller atrocity, and these smaller atrocities may be very similar to other small atrocities that are not classified as part of genocide.
A, B, and C, are all reasons why lessons from past genocides are still relevant to us today.
One thing that makes the Congolese history very interesting (for people interested in the nature of evil, forced labor, and other atrocities) is that the Belgians and other colonizers employed a wide, wide variety of different forms of forced labor and other tools of oppression, and the tools of oppression they used changed over time. Studying Congolese history thus helps illustrate to abolitionists what a complex issue we are fighting.
Many Americans have a very narrow idea of what s****ry is. When you say “s****ry” to an American, many of them will instantly envision racial plantation s****ry. They may also have a very limited idea of what racial plantation s****ry involved. (As Edward Baptist explains in “The Half Has Never Been Told”, even racial plantation s****ry was often very different from what many Americans might envision.)
But the international legal definition of s****ry is, with good reason, much more broad that the vision that many Americans might get in their head. It can take many different forms. And in the Congo, it did take many different forms. (Even in the United States, it took more forms than most Americans are aware of. See, for example, Douglas Blackmon’s book “S****ry by Another Name”.)
One very peculiar feature of forced labor in the Congo, which I haven’t spoken of much here, because quite frankly it is very difficult for me to process, is that some of the soldiers enforcing s****ry were themselves ens****d. Now, the concept of forcing people to be soldiers is not unique to the Congo. Even the United States has the draft. But I believe that whatever they were doing to these people was much worse than what was done to draftees in the United States. A lot of times the people forced to be soldiers were taken as children. Many of them seem to have been orphans, whose parents had been killed during King Leopold II’s brutal colonization. Presumably, they were subjected to some form of brainwashing, which I don’t fully understand. Then they were used to commit atrocities against other Congolese people. They might have been told to commit atrocities against people not of their own tribe, so they would object less than if asked to oppress other members of their own tribes. (Similar to how an Irish child who was being brainwashed might object less to hurting Germans than to hurting other Irish people.)
And, while I don’t fully understand it, it is very very significant, because not only were these soldiers used as tools of oppression (while themselves being oppressed) during King Leopold II’s and Beglium’s colonization, but they also played a very significant role in the Congo’s failure to achieve lasting independence.
The groups these soldiers were part of was called the “Force Publique”. In 1960, shortly after the Congo gained independence, the Force Publique had a mutiny. Now, if you realize that many of the Force Publique had been forced to be soldiers, then this was, essentially, a s***e revolt.
The immediate cause of this mutiny was a white Force Publique officer named Émile Janssens, who wrote on a whiteboard something that translates into English as “Before Independence = After Independence”. It seems that, before this, the Force Publique soldiers had real hope that the decolonization of the Congo would include include the decolonization of the Force Publique. Émile Janssens’ actions infuriated the soldiers under his command, who within hours mutinied and began attacking European residents of the Congo. From what I have read, this mutiny did not involve murder (or at least, I can’t recall reading about murders), but it may have included a few rapes, and it definitely included a number of cases of assault and battery.
In response, many European residents of the Congo fled to other cities, including one across the river from the Congo. (To a different Congo… there’s actually more than one, but anyway. The main Congo was colonized by the Belgians, a smaller Congo was colonized by the France). The Belgians apparently deployed paratroopers to rescue their citizens from the s***e revolt.
Significantly, the CIA chief of station in the Congo, Lawrence Devlin, aka Larry Devlin, was one of the white people assaulted during the mutiny, and this happened shortly after his arrival in the Congo. Larry Devlin was told to kiss the foot of one of the soldiers, and, when he refused, they played Congolese roulette with him. Apparently Congolese roulette is like Russian roulette, except with no bullets. But they made him think there was a bullet, so it was a sort of psychological torture thing were he thought he was going to die. Once the gun had been shot six times or so and it was clearly empty of bullets, the soldiers laughed uproariously, offered Larry Devlin some wine, patted him on the back and treated him as a friend, and dropped him off near a hotel. Peculiar behavior to be sure, but perhaps not so peculiar when you consider what might have been done to these soldiers as children in order to force them to be soldiers. One wonders what the full psychological impact of this was on Larry Devlin, and if it might have had anything to do with his decision to remove Lumumba from power.
Another significant thing: Mobutu, who eventually rose to rule over the Congo as a brutal dictator for about 30 years (with CIA assistance), had been forced into the Force Publique as a child. So, eventually, he became a brutal dictator, but before he was a brutal dictator, he was an ens****d child soldier.
Daniel Pipes, who has studied the phenomena of military s****s in the context of Islamic cultures, estimates that a system of military s****ry must be in place for at least 30 years before the ens****d soldiers have a significant chance of taking power. He writes,
Now, the Belgians wanted to put down the mutiny / s**** revolt with military force. However, since the Congo had been formally granted independence, under international law/custom, they apparently needed Lumumba to make a formal request for their assistance. Lumumba refused. (I don’t think he was wrong to do so, since Belgian troops would have likely committed atrocities against the Congolese people.)
Instead, Lumumba attempted, in good fait, to negotiate with the soldiers to end the mutiny. Ludo de Witte hypothesizes that this may have been the main factor in the decision of the Americans and Belgians to assassinate Lumumba. (Note that although a Belgian officer ultimately gave the firing orders for the assassination, Belgian intelligence was not as powerful as the CIA, and they likely wouldn’t have been able to carry out their plans if the CIA hadn’t first gotten Lumumba sent to a military prison. Also, the CIA had their own plans to assassinate Lumumba, although Larry Devlin, as an individual, did not wish to carry out these plans, and instead stalled and removed Lumumba from power instead.)
Significant to Mobutu’s rise to power was that, being someone who had been forced into the Force Publique himself, he was better than Lumumba at relating to the soldiers and giving speeches to calm them down.
Mobutu was also more willing to collaborate with Americans and Europeans than Lumumba was. Susan Williams has hypothesized that the reason the CIA took such as interest in the Congo was because of the uranium mines in the Congo, and notes that Lumumba told the Americans that if they wished to continue to receive uranium from the Congo, they would need to renegotiate new terms.
Considering that Union Minière had obtained uranium using forced labor, Lumumba gave the correct response. Even ignoring the question of whether it was ethical to export uranium to a nuclear bully like the United States at all, at the very least, the forced labor in the uranium mines should have been abolished and reparations paid before the Congo continued exporting uranium.
Note that the vast majority of the radioactive material in the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki came from Congolese mines, where forced labor was used, but the US OSS (precursor to the CIA) and the Belgian Union Minière had gone to great lengths to keep this secret from the public.
You can read what Daniel Pipes has to say about military slavery within the context of Islamic culture here:
http://www.danielpipes.org/448/military-slaves-a-uniquely-muslim-phenomenon
You can read about Larry Devlin’s experience with Congolese roulette during the Force Publique mutiny / s***e revolt here:
https://www.publicaffairsbooks.com/titles/lawrence-devlin/chief-of-station-congo/9780786732180/#module-whats-inside
Be sure to click the “Read more” button if you are interested.
Mobutu discusses being forced into the Force Publique as a child during his interviews with Jean-Louis Remilleux, published in “Mobutu: Dignity for Africa”.
This passage from King Leopold’s Ghost by Adam Hochschild gives at least some limited insight as to how certain Congolese children were forced to become soldiers and subsequently oppress other Congolese in the 1890s.
Note that Mobutu’s experience of being forced into the Force Publique would have differed, since his experience occurred at a much later date.
Of relevance to the topic of modern genocide, Thailand was caught in some cases ransoming Rohingya refugees from the genocide in Myanmar, and in other cases selling them to human traffickers (modern day s***e traders).
Reuters released a report in 2013.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-thailand-rohingya-special-report/special-report-thailand-secretly-supplies-myanmar-refugees-to-trafficking-rings-idUSBRE9B400320131205
According to a Thai-based trafficker, prices range from 5,000 to 50,000 baht, the equivalent of $155 to $1,550 USD, depending on the skills of the refugee in question.
“A, B, and C, are all reasons why lessons from past genocides are still relevant to us today.”
Excellent. This is more or less what I was looking for.
So, back to your point about millions of people being murdered:
“I think murdering 10 million people in the pursuit of profit is genocide.”
Because it is important to learn about past genocides to avoid making the same mistakes, we will not be ignoring the multiple tens of millions (some say hundreds of millions) of murders committed in the pursuit of equality of outcome under socialist and communist governments.
Not that your point about millions being murdered in the pursuit of profit doesn’t need a response, but so far, the free market wins even on your own terms.
A hundred million murdered is more than 10 million. And you don’t get to ignore the murders that occurred in the pursuit of equality of outcome under socialism / communism.
“After some years of fighting in the Congo, the CIA eventually put Mobutu in power, who turned out to be a brutal dictator. With CIA assistance he ruled for about 30 years. Since Mobutu was a CIA-installed dictator, we could call this “neocolonialism”.”
First of all, the CIA is a usurper of US government authority. Its creation was prohibited by the Constitution, as any authority not expressly delegated to the General Government by the states is also prohibited.
The CIA was a move *away* from free markets, and toward increased central planning.
This is the kind of organization you get when you believe that the Constitution is a “living document”, and you don’t have to adhere to the original intent of the ratifyers.
Constitutionally – how the ratifyers understood the constitution – the US government has no interests outside of the lands belonging to its member states.
So, installing of puppet dictators – even if that could end well – is not authorized by the constitution.
You can blame central planners and socialist-minded people for the creation of the CIA and the FBI.
And second, consider this article by Walter Williams:
South Africa after apartheid
[www]https://townhall.com/columnists/walterewilliams/2002/01/09/south-africa-after-apartheid-n901392
“Moral crusaders have the habit of heading off to their next crusade without bothering to see whether anything went wrong on their last one. …”
“… There’s no longer apartheid and there’s black rule in South Africa, but what’s the story there now? …”
“… Kenny asks, “Is South Africa doomed to follow the rest of Africa into oblivion?” He says no, but I’m not as optimistic because of the pattern nearly everywhere else in sub-Saharan Africa. The tragic fact of business is that ordinary Africans were better off under colonialism. Colonial masters never committed anything near the murder and genocide seen under black rule in Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda, Nigeria, Mozambique, Somalia and other countries, where millions of blacks have been slaughtered in unspeakable ways, which include: hacking to death, boiling in oil, setting on fire and dismemberment. …”
“… Liberals saw South Africa’s apartheid and other human-rights abuses as unjust because blacks were suffering at the hands of whites. They hold whites accountable to civilized standards of behavior. Blacks are not held to civilized standards of behavior. From the liberal’s point of view, it might even be racist to expect blacks to adhere to civilized standards of behavior.”
—–
“An example from U.S. history of a labor-saving device that made life harder for people in forced labor was the cotton gin.”
What you’re describing isn’t the labor-saving devices making the lives of slaves harder, but enslavers (I do actually like that term better than “slave owners”) increasing the slaves’ loads.
I wish I could find this one article I’m thinking of, I think by Thomas Sowell. where, although it was rarely tried, there was this one plantation owner who vastly outperformed other plantations simply by offering his slaves the opportunity to buy their freedom – and he treated them relatively well.
The slaves were basically turned into indentured servants for 7 to 10 years, I think.
Everyone around him was surprised at how well his plantation did.
Slavery is wrong, but my point is that the more we move *toward* freedom to make profits, the better off more people become.
You should never attack the profit motive to seek justice, because the profits are not causing the injustices.
Leave all of the legitimate business aspects of criminals alone, and go after them for specific crimes.
Going after the mafia’s money-laundering schemes = bad. Decriminalizing the sale and consumption of alcohol so that competition eats away at the profits of the mafia = good.
guest wrote,
I mentioned above that in the case of King Leopold II’s and Belgium’s brutal colonization of the Congo, approximately 10 million Congolese had to die before the Belgians got serious about switching to less deadly methods of forcing labor out of people. (Though this was a gradual process, not an overnight thing, but anyway.)
Another historical example of when many, many forced forced laborers died prior to meaningful change is the transatlantic forced labor trade. One thing that a lot of US Americans don’t know about racial s****ry is that only about 4% of the Africans kidnapped from Africa and taken across the Atlantic were taken to the United States. The other 96% went to the sugar lands. Part of this was because massive demand on the part of culturally European people for sugar; part of it was because the systems of forced labor in the sugar lands were so brutal, that the forced laborers were dying much faster than they were having children, so the system relied on constant importation of more forced laborers.
There’s a Youtube video of a lecture on the topic here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jEkOmCkJf9Q
This is from the book, “Children of God’s Fire: A Documentary History of Black S****ry in Brazil”. The book presents translated versions of a number of primary source documents from the relevant time period. It is edited by Robert Edgar Conrad. The original author of this particular passage is Dr. David Gomes Jardim, and it is titled, “There Are Plantations Where the S****s Are Numb with Hunger” : A Medical Thesis on Plantation Diseases and Their Causes”
Dr. David Gomes Jardim was not an abolitionist, but he did apparently make attempts to convince s****holders to reduce their brutality, without much success. That’s actually a passage from a longer document which goes on at length about the overwork, the lack of adequate food and nutrition and the resulting diseases and health problems, and the lack of adequate clothing.
I put this comment in the wrong place, it should go here.
https://consultingbyrpm.com/blog/2021/05/bob-murphy-triple-play.html#comment-2039897
guest wrote,
Okay, well, I’m a socialist, not an Austrian, so yeah, I disagree.
And for that matter, I am not sure your statement entirely makes sense to me. If economics can be leveraged for good or for bad, then it clearly does have to do with morality.
I really don’t see how it’s possible to judge whether money is “sound” or not without reference to morality. If morality were off the table from debate, they we may as well state that money exists for whatever reason and we aren’t going to argue about whether it is “sound” for the same reason weird reason we were avoiding judging if it were moral.
guest wrote,
This sounds like saying, well, it’s not the fault of the chemicals, so morality is irrelevant to chemistry. But chemistry isn’t just what chemicals do. Chemistry is the human study and use of chemicals, and what humans do can be judged in moral terms. So while the chemical maybe be innocent by virtue of lacking free will or any kind of thought, the chemist who uses the chemicals to commit mass murder can be judged as evil.
When people are violently exploited, as in the case of forced labor, the use-values that the violently exploited people prefer are given a much lower priority than the use-values that the people exploiting them prefer, and this causes distortions.
In Congolese history, this resulted in a number of famines under King Leopold II and later under Belgian rule. Essentially, the European colonizers forced the Congolese, against their will, to prioritize making things the Europeans wanted from them, rather than making the things they wanted for themselves. So, things like ivory, rubber, copper, gold, and palm fruit (for making soap, not for eating) were prioritized over food production, resulting in malnutrition and outright famine, as well as over other things that Congolese people wanted for themselves.
I think that is a situation worthy of moral judgement. We should say that is was evil for the European colonizers to force the Congolese to produce luxuries for said Europeans instead of growing food for themselves and whatever else they wanted to do when left alone. And that moral judgement should extend to saying the Belgian gold policy was unsound.
Guest wrote,
If the Europeans who chose to press the Congolese into forced labor were going to let cost-prohibitiveness stop them, many of them never would have gone into business to begin with.
In “Colonialism in the Congo Basin: 1880-1940.” Samuel Nelson argued that, “Despite the assertions that Africans were lazy and needed a Western-style work ethic, free trade by Africans ultimately was restricted by the colonial state because of the inability of European enterprises to compete with Mongo entrepreneurs.”
Alright, so, Samuel Nelson is, understandably, being a person of Western origin, viewing Mongo society through Western lenses. (The Mongo were a cultural group within the Congo, whom Samuel Nelson chose to focus on because the Congo is a very big place containing many cultural groups.) But basically, what he’s saying is, prior to colonization, the Congolese, including the Mongo people, weren’t just loafing around, waiting for Europeans employers to come save them from poverty. They were doing things, like farming and hunting and gathering and fishing and weaving and smelting iron and making pottery. They built comfortable homes for themselves. They were successful in achieving some standard of living for themselves.
In order to be competitive in such a labour market, without resort to violence, prospective European employers / traders would have needed to offer high wages or pay high prices.
However, many prospective European employers objected to this. Consider this quote from an October 1912 Union Miniere report drafted by Eugene Halewyck, general manager of Union Miniere, as quoted by Jules Marchal in “Forced Labor in the Gold and Copper Mines: A History of Congo Under Belgian Rule, 1910-1945”:
(Note: Censorship of the n-word was mine.)
Jules Marchal notes that,
The “direct incentive” that was used appears to be the head tax. Essentially, the employers who wished to use forced labor split the profits of that brutal theft with the colonial state: the Belgian colonial government received payment in form of the head tax (and whatever other taxes they chose to enforce), and the brutal employers kept the rest of the profits of their thieving ways.
Note that it was sometimes (but not always) company recruiters who collected the taxes on behalf of the colonial government, with said government merely providing a legal framework to allow for the atrocities. Take, for example, this quote from Jule’s Marchal’s “Forced Labor in the Gold and Copper Mines” book:
(The Exchange was a coalition of depraved European employers, including Union Miniere, who together conspired to establish maximum wages recruit forced labor to avoid exceeding those maximum wages.)
Forcing people to mine gold, and mine / collect / gather / produce other things people of European origin wanted, even at plummeting exchange values, seems to have been one of the goals of many of these systems of forced labor.
Right-wing authors have also noticed the proliferation of certain “cheap goods” under the capitalist system. You mentioned you are Austrian, so here’s a quote from an Austrian book, “Human Action” by Ludwig von Mises. I do not agree with it, because he fails to mention the problem of forced labor, and fails to distinguish between the (culturally) European masses and the African masses, or, perhaps more generically, since forced labor doesn’t always fall along the standard racial or cultural lines, the masses of people not in forced labor and the masses of people who are in forced labor.
However, I do agree that there has been a proliferation of certain cheap goods. Anyway, here’s the quote:
Alright, so, in his analysis, Ludwig von Mises focuses on the assistance that factories had in turning raw materials into finished goods, and the benefits this had for non-enslaved wage earners, which he refers to as the “masses”, although I believe these are only a portion of the masses, and a relatively well-off portion at that, in so far as non-ens****d people are generally much better off, statistically speaking, than people in s****ry.
What he leaves out of his analysis is where did all those raw materials for the factories come from? What about the people who produced the raw materials? What about the people in forced labor (regardless of whether they receive a wage for said forced labor)?
Also, he fails to mention that, while it may have been in some cultures, prior to the industrial revolution, that little, other than necessities, was produced for the common people, this wasn’t the case in all cultures. It seems, for example, that a number of Africans cultures didn’t have wage labor systems, and were not accustomed to having to work for people wealthier than them, rather than for themselves and their family / cultural groups, hence part of their resistance to European employers. (See above discussion of how European enterprises couldn’t compete with Mongo entrepreneurs, and instead resorted to forcing the Mongo and other Congolese people to work for them.)
A big problem here is that while a factor may make it much easier to turn a raw material — e.g. cotton — into a finished product — e.g. clothing — factories seldom produce raw materials. They need inputs in order to function. (And yes, I realize their are various stages of production, so there isn’t always a clear line between a “raw material” and a “finished product”, but the point still stands that the factory only helps for part of the production process, not the entire production process.)
So, for example, in the case of cotton, the increased ability to process cotton into finished goods, with the help of machinery, lead to greater demand for there to be a supply of that raw material, which was often done without machinery. I mentioned above the “pushing system” of torturing labor out of people. Of course, it is possible to grow and harvest cotton without forced labor, but the fact remains, as history stands, that a significant amount of cotton was produced by means of forced labor.
We have a similar story with sugar — while machinery helped produce more sugar, it also drove an increased demand for forced labor to perform the parts of the production process not handle by machines.
And we saw the same with the early decades of car production. After the air-filled tire was invented, it prompted an increased demand for rubber, and during the early decades, this demand was met almost entirely by forced labor, in the Congo, in surrounding regions of Africa, and also in Latin America.
The improved (from the perspective of people who wanted more cars to be built) production capabilities of car factories may have done much to help the people actually working in those factories, but it was a great tragedy for the people who were raped, kidnapped, tortured, and killed to force them to gather rubber in the name of gathering rubber.
And we see this in modern day Congo with people in forced labor to gather minerals used to make a variety of things for Western consumers, including cell phones.
This phenomenon — innovation in the parts of the world where power resides leading to forced labor and other atrocities in places where people are less powerful — is so common, that it has been named the “resource curse”. When machinery and technologies are created to turn raw materials into finished products, people without the military power to protect themselves are often forced against their wills to provide the raw materials required for the machinery and technologies to function.
For details on forced labor for gathering rubber in the Congo, see “King Leopold’s Ghost”, by Adam Hochschild. For a somewhat more worldwide perspective on the history of rubber, including forced labor in places like Peru as well, see “The Devils Milk: A Social History of Rubber” by John Tully.
Forcing people to mine gold, and mine / collect / gather / produce other things people of European origin wanted, even at plummeting exchange values, seems to have been one of the goals of many of these systems of forced labor.
Right-wing authors have also noticed the proliferation of certain “cheap goods” under the capitalist system. You mentioned you are Austrian, so here’s a quote from an Austrian book, “Human Action” by Ludwig von Mises. I do not agree with it, because he fails to mention the problem of forced labor, and fails to distinguish between the (culturally) European masses and the African masses, or, perhaps more generically, since forced labor doesn’t always fall along the standard racial or cultural lines, the masses of people not in forced labor and the masses of people who are in forced labor.
However, I do agree that there has been a proliferation of certain cheap goods. Anyway, here’s the quote:
Alright, so, in his analysis, Ludwig von Mises focuses on the assistance that factories had in turning raw materials into finished goods, and the benefits this had for non-ens****d wage earners, which he refers to as the “masses”, although I believe these are only a portion of the masses, and a relatively well-off portion at that, in so far as non-ens****d people are generally much better off, statistically speaking, than people in s****ry.
What he leaves out of his analysis is where did all those raw materials for the factories come from? What about the people who produced the raw materials? What about the people in forced labor (regardless of whether they receive a wage for said forced labor)?
Also, he fails to mention that, while it may have been in some cultures, prior to the industrial revolution, that little, other than necessities, was produced for the common people, this wasn’t the case in all cultures. It seems, for example, that a number of Africans cultures didn’t have wage labor systems, and were not accustomed to having to work for people wealthier than them, rather than for themselves and their family / cultural groups, hence part of their resistance to European employers. (See above discussion of how European enterprises couldn’t compete with Mongo entrepreneurs, and instead resorted to forcing the Mongo and other Congolese people to work for them.)
A big problem here is that while a factor may make it much easier to turn a raw material — e.g. cotton — into a finished product — e.g. clothing — factories seldom produce raw materials. They need inputs in order to function. (And yes, I realize their are various stages of production, so there isn’t always a clear line between a “raw material” and a “finished product”, but the point still stands that the factory only helps for part of the production process, not the entire production process.)
So, for example, in the case of cotton, the increased ability to process cotton into finished goods, with the help of machinery, lead to greater demand for there to be a supply of that raw material, which was often done without machinery. I mentioned above the “pushing system” of torturing labor out of people. Of course, it is possible to grow and harvest cotton without forced labor, but the fact remains, as history stands, that a significant amount of cotton was produced by means of forced labor.
We have a similar story with sugar — while machinery helped produce more sugar, it also drove an increased demand for forced labor to perform the parts of the production process not handle by machines.
And we saw the same with the early decades of car production. After the air-filled tire was invented, it prompted an increased demand for rubber, and during the early decades, this demand was met almost entirely by forced labor, in the Congo, in surrounding regions of Africa, and also in Latin America.
The improved (from the perspective of people who wanted more cars to be built) production capabilities of car factories may have done much to help the people actually working in those factories, but it was a great tragedy for the people who were raped, kidnapped, tortured, and killed to force them to gather rubber in the name of gathering rubber.
And we see this in modern day Congo with people in forced labor to gather minerals used to make a variety of things for Western consumers, including cell phones.
This phenomenon — innovation in the parts of the world where power resides leading to forced labor and other atrocities in places where people are less powerful — is so common, that it has been named the “resource curse”. When machinery and technologies are created to turn raw materials into finished products, people without the military power to protect themselves are often forced against their wills to provide the raw materials required for the machinery and technologies to function.
For details on forced labor for gathering rubber in the Congo, see “King Leopold’s Ghost”, by Adam Hochschild. For a somewhat more worldwide perspective on the history of rubber, including forced labor in places like Peru as well, see “The Devils Milk: A Social History of Rubber” by John Tully.
For a modern example of the resource curse leading to slavery, see:
https://longreads.com/2016/03/08/your-phone-was-made-by-slaves-a-primer-on-the-secret-economy/
There’s a 2018 documentary called “Expedition Congo” that gives some clue as to what the world might have missed out on by demanding, by means of brutal force, that the Congolese export ivory, rubber, copper, gold, uranium, palm oil, etc, rather than engaging in non-violent forms of trade.
The documentary tales the story of a team of herbalists, working for a pharmaceutical company, travelling to the Congo to discover new healing plants (new to Europeans, at any rate) and document indigenous Congolese healing practices.
The Congolese jungle is very harsh, and they find themselves unprepared for the swam of bees, but fortunately, no one dies.
They press on, and eventually meet a super knowledgeable blind medicine man who knows tons about using the local plants in his part of the Congo for medicinal purposes. And apparently his tribe doesn’t discriminate against him for being blind, which is cool.
I watch this, and I think, how many medicine men and women were killed in the violent colonization of the Congo? How many lived, but forgot their art or failed to pass it on to the next generation because they were busy doing forced labor for brutal Europeans?
So, I’m thinking, that without all that forced labor, the mass production of things like cars, electric wires, soap, etc etc, might have been greatly delayed, but medical technology might be like 1000 years more advanced than it is. Or more. Cancer might be a worry of the past, a problem that rarely occurs and is easily treated when it does occur.
And HIV/AIDS likely never would have gone global to begin with. It turns out that the globalization of HIV/AIDS has been traced back to 1920s Kinshasa, plus or minus a decade, with the help of a field of science called viral archaeology. Kinshasa, a part of the Congo, was under a brutal forced labor regime at the time.
“A, B, and C, are all reasons why lessons from past genocides are still relevant to us today.”
I responded to this, but it looks like it didn’t go through.
Last I saw, my comment was awaiting approval.
Anyway, my main point was to draw out an acknowledgment that past genocides are relevant in order to prevent them in the future.
The reason I wanted you to write it out is so that when I mention that multiple tens of millions (some say more than hundred million) were murdered in the pursuit of equity and central planning, that you couldn’t just waive those murders off due to them happening in the past.
Short version: CIA and FBI are unconstitutional, and are the result of central planning, not of free markets.
Stop ignoring Original Intent and you’ll have vastly fewer of those sorts of problems.
I saw that you mentioned you disagreed that economics is value free:
You said:
“This sounds like saying, well, it’s not the fault of the chemicals, so morality is irrelevant to chemistry. But chemistry isn’t just what chemicals do. Chemistry is the human study and use of chemicals, and what humans do can be judged in moral terms.”
So, you believe chemistry works differently when chemicals are used to clean dishes, than when they are used to melt someone’s skin while torturing them?
You believe there are different laws of chemistry at work when a fire is used to cook a pig over an open fire versus when a “witch” is being burned at the stake?
Chemistry, itself, has nothing to do with morality.
Same with economics, and that’s the reason why your point about the cultural differences between Europeans and Blacks is irrelevant.
Economics works the same everywhere, under all cultures, and in all times, whether anyone likes it or not.
That you’re a socialist may mean you care, but your caring is completely meaningless when it comes to economics. The world works in certain ways, and there’s nothing a good heart or a wicked heart can do about it.
The reason economics is the same everywhere is because it is grounded in the fact that humans take deliberate actions to satisfy wants (or, “humans act”), and every deliberate action is intended to do so, without exception.
Economics follows logically from that basic truth.
There’s nothing that a different Black experience can offer to the study of economics that is not already present in every person’s versions of deliberate actions.
Equity is one of those words politicians like because it sounds nice but is vague and means different things to different people. But politicians, most of the ones with any real power lie through their teeth constantly, to the point that the easiest way to keep track of what they are doing is to ignore everything they say, and instead listen to reporters like Abby Martin who tell you what they are actually doing. (However, if you want to prove that they do indeed have command responsibility for the things done in their name, you might have to go back and comb through their speeches, or anything else they said or wrote that you can find a record of.)
So for example, I have no idea what Biden says in his speeches. Evidently words come out of his mouth and a bunch of people are convinced that he’s not racist. But I know he is racist, because I listen to Abby Martin, and Abby Martin informs me that he is bombing third world countries. (Granted, if I wanted “proof beyond reasonable doubt” that he was definitely responsible for the bombings, it would help if I could find a speech of him saying he is bombing third world countries, or a signed order from him, or something to prove that he definitely ordered the bombings and that the people allegedly under his command aren’t just running around doing their own thing… but I’m not taking Biden to international court, and I don’t consider it likely that the US military is just dropping bombs without instructions from Biden.)
As another example, King Leopold II said he was helping to abolish s****ry in the Congo. But about 5 minutes of Google searching will show a bunch of evidence that he was actually killing millions of people in a brutal forced labor machine. (Plus, I’ve spend a good deal of time reading King Leopold’s Ghost by Adam Hochschild and other material on the subject.) So, when King Leopold II said he was fighting s****ry, he was lying through his teethy teeth. This doesn’t mean that abolishing s****ry is a bad idea; it just means we need to be careful of fake abolitionists like King Leopold II, and instead, particularly when it comes to people in power, pay less attention to what they are saying and more attention to what they are doing.
Chapter XVIII of Machiavelli’s “The Prince” is most instructive about how most powerful politicians think. Note that this is not moral advice. It is very immoral advice. But it is an accurate description about how most politicians (and CEOs and other business leaders, for that matter) who actually manage to gain significant amounts of power think:
Central planning is an abstract concept used to describe how some people persuade large numbers of other people to do their bidding.
So, for example, King Leopold II never actually set foot in the Congo. He killed approximately 10 million Congolese people, and tormented even more, by means of command responsibility.
Part of the problem is that to counter that sort of power, countless people working together to achieve evil goals, you need some power of your own. A single Congolese person could not hope, without assistance, to overthrow King Leopold II and all his agents.
Consider Spartacus. If he had tried to rebel against the Romans by himself, it is doubtful that he would have made enough impact that history would even bother mentioning him. But he didn’t rebel by himself. He got other people to follow him, at least to some degree. Although, allegedly at least, there were some disputes between Spartacus and his some of his followers. Perhaps I should have picked a more modern example, because a lot of the details about Spartacus’s rebellion are disputed. But my main point is it wasn’t just Spartacus, it was Spartacus plus a bunch of other people, and, while the rebellion failed, they were at least able to make a big enough impact to be recorded by the history books.
Of course, a revolution needn’t be violent. See, for example the 2003 women’s peace moment in Liberia, which actually was successful in ending the Second Liberian Civil War and establishing a democracy. The women’s peace movement was organized by Crystal Roh Gawding, Leymah Gbowee and Comfort Freeman. The type of power that these three women held was very different than the type of power that King Leopold II held, and was used for very different purposes, but in both cases, the leaders had to persuade a lot of people to cooperate with them in order to achieve their goals.
So, while central planning can be a tool of mass destruction (see King Leopold), you need central planning of your own in order to mount a resistance (see Crystal Roh Gawding, Leymah Gbowee and Comfort Freeman).
Just condemning central planning would be like if Sun Tzu, rather than proposing strategies for countering enemy armies, simply suggested that the enemy armies should disband themselves. As nice as it would be if they did that, it’s not a viable strategy. You need tactics. They can be pacifist tactics, as we can see from recent Liberian history, but still, some sort of tactics.
Here is Abby Martin’s video about Biden bombing third world countries.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4hLfURevxc
Bombs are racist. (Or, more precisely, the people dropping the bombs are racist.)
There’s an old New York Times interview here in which King Leopold II lies through his teeth.
https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/98/09/20/specials/congo-denies.html
If you don’t want to read the whole thing, this lie is particularly ludicrious:
Here’s a quote from King Leopold’s Ghost, by Adam Hochschild, in which Hochschild talks about one of King Leopold II’s lying lobbyists in the US.
And this is why people should spend less time listening to politicians speaking and more time investigating what they actually do.
There’s an old New York Times interview here in which King Leopold II lies through his teeth.
https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/98/09/20/specials/congo-denies.html
If you don’t want to read the whole thing, this lie is particularly ludicrous:
Here’s a quote from King Leopold’s Ghost, by Adam Hochschild, in which Hochschild talks about one of King Leopold II’s lying lobbyists in the US.
And this is why people should spend less time listening to politicians speaking and more time investigating what they actually do.
Guest wrote,
Yes. The soap (or other chemicals) used to clean dishes probably never would have even found their way on to the dishes if it hadn’t been for the choice of some human being to put them there and use them for cleaning the dishes.
Likewise, the chemicals used on someone’s skin for the purpose of torture likely never would have found their way on to that person’s skin if some person hadn’t intervened and put them there.
In both cases, the free will of human beings causes results that would not have otherwise occurred.
Quantum physicists have found that even observing reality has the power to change it.
Consider, for example, the “double slit” experiment.
http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20170215-the-strange-link-between-the-human-mind-and-quantum-physics
If even photons behave differently when observed, imagine the impact of the camera on someone like King Leopold II.
Photographs actually were a powerful tool in Edmund Dene Morel’s campaign against King Leopold II. Not that he took the photos himself. Other people sent him the photos.
You can see some of the photos here.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/wd4vqm/colonialism-on-camera
Guest wrote,
Yes. The soap (or other chemicals) used to clean dishes probably never would have even found their way on to the dishes if it hadn’t been for the choice of some human being to put them there and use them for cleaning the dishes.
Likewise, the chemicals used on someone’s skin for the purpose of torture likely never would have found their way on to that person’s skin if some person hadn’t intervened and put them there.
In both cases, the free will of human beings causes results that would not have otherwise occurred.
Quantum physicists have found that even observing reality has the power to change it.
Consider, for example, the “double slit” experiment.
http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20170215-the-strange-link-between-the-human-mind-and-quantum-physics
If even photons behave differently when observed, imagine the impact of the camera on someone like King Leopold II.
Photographs actually were a powerful tool in Edmund Dene Morel’s campaign against King Leopold II. Not that he took the photos himself. Other people sent him the photos.
You can see some of the photos here.
www [dot] vice [dot] com/en/article/wd4vqm/colonialism-on-camera
“So, while central planning can be a tool of mass destruction (see King Leopold), you need central planning of your own in order to mount a resistance”
Coordinating willing participants is not central planning. An owner of a business is not centrally planning his business.
Central planning is attempting to force people against their will to do things the central planner wants.
That’s the method of socialists, and is the reason they so often result in mass murders or poverty and starvations.
Mass murder follows logically from the socialist method because if all you do is *tell* people to redistribute their wealth “more equitably”, then everyone will just tell them to go pound sand because the pursuit of equity is the denial of the inherent differences in human desires and aptitudes – which logically lead to unequitable outcomes.
So, socialism is an enemy of humanity and logic. It is *not* a response to all the evils of “capitalism”, but a childish refusal to accept reality for what it is, and then leverage that reality for profit.
There is no possible version of a “new socialist man” where humans do not have unique preferences and aptitudes.
And so socialists will *always* be trying to use force to try to solve a problem that doesn’t exist.
There’s an excellent blog post here that goes into great detail about King Leopold II’s extensive lying campaign.
https://www.moltensulfur.com/post/the-lies-of-leopold
Guest wrote,
“Forcing people against their will to do things the central planner wants” is something most businesses engage in to some extent, but to start with some of history’s more obvious, extreme examples:
* IG Farben, who used forced labor from Auschwitz during the Holocaust
* King Leopold II’s International Association of the Congo, responsible for killing approximately half of Congo’s population in a brutal forced labor regime
* The East India Company, responsible for taxes of genocidal proportions in Bengal around 1770
* Union Miniere, responsible for using forced labor in copper mines and uranium mines in the Belgian Congo, and also for supplying most of the radioactive materials for the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
* Lever Brothers, responsible for using forced labor in the Belgian Congo to acquire palm oil, used in the production of soap.
* Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad, and other similar companies mentioned by Douglas Blackmon in “Sl***ry by Another Name”, responsible for using forced labor in coal mines in the post Civil War US southeast, in places like Alabama.
* Shell, responsible for murdering Nigerians by means of gas flaring
* Nestle, responsible for child forced labor on cocoa farms in the Ivory Coast, and recently given a license by the US Supreme Court to continue doing so with impunity.
Because there are a lot of companies like the ones I listed above, and because most of us do not even know how to avoid buying products from all of those companies, the capitalist system makes nearly all of us complicit to some extent, although of course there are varying degrees of complicity. But I think legal literature relating the topic of “receiving stolen goods” is relevant.
The following story from “Blood and Earth” by Kevin Bales discusses a lesser form of exploitation, and shows how that lesser form of exploitation makes a person vulnerable to more severe forms of exploitation, such as forced labor.
Alright, so, in the beginning of the story, the man tries to “earn the land”. He doesn’t want to “get a job”, he wants to “earn the land” and work for himself. But then a capitalist comes along and claims that he owns the land. Note that this occurred in Brazil, a country known for a particularly unjust distribution of land, dating back to the transatlantic forced labor trade. Also note that the man has no way of verifying whether the capitalist legally owns the land, even under Brazil’s unjust system. But he decides to take his word for it, and goes along with wage earning, even though he would prefer to work for himself. It’s unjust, but people frequently put up with unjust things because it can be preferable to fighting.
Note this is not classified as s****ry, at least not by the definition used by Kevin Bales and by international law, since the man is still free to leave. He is simply being exploited, that is, required to work for a wage, if he wishes to stay, rather than to work for himself, even though he worked to “earn the land” and the capitalist simply alleged to have legal ownership according to a corrupt government, a claim which was not even verified.
Then someone from the Ministry of Labor comes along and makes things even worse. Tells them they have to leave, rather than continue in an exploitative situation where at least he is free to leave. After that, he is tricked into forced labor by a “gato” who cons him. Fortunately, he eventually manages to escape.
Guest wrote,
A socialist is simply a person who believes that workers deserve human rights. If you agree with the statement, “Employers should not hit their employees,” then you are probably at least a little bit of a socialist. Now, since different people have different ideas of what human rights are, and about what should be done to fight for human rights, there are many different kinds of socialists.
However, since even a minimal definition of human rights should include the right to not be murdered without at least a trial by jury (or similiar procedure), committing mass murder is, by definition, not socialist, just as ens***ing millions of Africans is, by definition, not abolitionist. I have no doubt that there are mass murderers who have claimed to be socialists, just as King Leopold II claimed to be an abolitionist, but that does not mean they were actually socialists, it just means either they were liars or other liars had them so confused that they didn’t know what the term meant.
Guest wrote,
For thousands of years, violent people have raped, looted, and ens****d other people in the pursuit of wealth. Those people have moral responsibility for what they did. I suppose, in some cases, we might judge torture victims who later went on to commit atrocities less harshly, on the grounds that the torture made them insane, but sane or not, they should still have their power to commit atrocities taken away.
Socialism is a natural response from people who are tired of being raped, robbed, ens****d, and otherwise brutalized, but don’t necessarily want to become the oppressors themselves. Not the only natural response… different people respond to trauma in different ways. Wanting revenge is an alternative natural response, and there are many bloody s**** revolts to demonstrate that. The Haitian revolution comes to mind. The Haitian revolution was very bloody. I do not think that is socialist, but I do understand at least a little of the psychology. When people have been brutalized that badly… some of them do not want utopia, probably can’t even visualize utopia. (I can’t visualize utopia either.) Some of them want revenge. Want their nightmare to be over. And so, some of them will turn around and inflict nightmares on others. Not all. The 1804 Haiti Massacre was controversial even among Haitians of the time.
King Leopold II and people like him are enemies of humanity and logic.
Socialists are among the enemies of people like King Leopold II.
Guest wrote,
I don’t want to be like King Leopold II. Nor like any of the numerous other people who helped him carry out those atrocities.
That’s not childish. That’s having moral standards.
Guest wrote,
The goal is not to stop humans from having unique preferences and aptitudes. The goal… or at least my main goal, and I suspect a lot of other people would at least partially agree with me … is to stop maniacs like King Leopold II from enforcing their preferences on others by means of extreme brutality. (Not that I hope to single-handedly accomplish such a thing. But at least, that is an optimistic future I am capable of vaguely envisioning, and if it happens to come even partially true, that will make me happy.)
Once upon a time, almost all girls in China had their feet bound. Many people probably believed it would always be like that, that there was no possibility that parents would stop binding their daughters’ feet.
Then a moral revolution happened. And, over a period of decades, people decided that binding the feet of girls was ridiculous and dishonorable.
Once upon a time, in Italy, it was the custom to require rape victims to marry their rapists, if they wished to avoid dishonoring their families. The requirement was cultural, but it was supported by a law, Article 544, that protected rapists from prosecution once they had married their victims.
Then, the day after Christmas in 1965, Franca Viola, aged 17 at the time, was raped by Filippo Melodia, who had approximately 12 accomplices. Filippo Melodia expected Franca Viola to marry him to save her family from dishonor, and then for Article 544 to protect him from any legal consequences.
However, Franca Viola chose to resist Italian custom. She decided she would not marry her rapist, and, furthermore, that she would press rape charges. Her father also resisted Italian custom. In response, they were cancelled, to use the modern term, by their pro-rape neighbors. Franca Viola’s family was ostracised. Her father faced death threats. Pro-rape arsonists set the family’s barn and vineyards aflame.
However, the prosecution went ahead and the rapist and seven of his accomplices went to prison. After three years, Franca Viola married her childhood sweetheart, Giuseppe Ruisi, who felt the need to carry a gun to the wedding to protect them.
National media covered the ceremony. The president of Italy sent them a wedding present. The Catholic Pope gave them an audience.
In 1981, Article 544 was repealed.
Moral revolutions do happen. And they don’t even need to be particularly bloody, and in fact, recent literature says that moral revolutions have a higher chance of being successful when they aren’t bloody. (Bloody revolutions have a higher chance of being subverted, which can lead to atrocities, see for example the Armenian genocide.)
The following passage from “The History of Torture” by Daniel P. Mannix gives some clues as to the psychology of what torture does to the person. This is very relevant to forced labor, since by forced labor, we often mean tortured labor.
Alright, so, the servant was innocent. We know he was innocent, because the judge set him up. However, he decided he preferred the gallows to continued torture. That death was preferable to continued torture. So he confessed, and refused to retract his statement for fear of torture.
Dr. Bohenzan of Erfert had some similar experience,
And it’s also worth noting that it’s well documented that torture can cause a person to act against their own conscience in order to avoid continued torture.
This is one such example from Daniel P. Mannix’s book,
And it’s also worth noting that torture can make people just plain crazy. Daniel P. Mannix writes,
If a person would rather die than continue to be tortured, it’s not a stretch that he or might think, “but if I can make my torturers die instead of me, that would be even better.” And so revolt makes sense — if he or she loses, then he or she escapes torture by dying. If he or she wins, that’s even better.
And it’s not such a stretch to think, considering the damage torture does to a person’s sanity and ability to follow their own conscience, that some such people might not be particularly careful to separate the guilty from the innocent during their revolt. The horrors of torture of such severity that a person would rather die than continue suffering it make murder seem a relatively minor crime by comparison, and I would guess that is probably the train of thought that was going through Dessalines head when he insisted on massacring the whites of Haiti — regardless of individual guilt or innocence — in 1804. (Note: This is an educated guess. I do not claim to have telepathic insight into the mind of Dessalines.) However, not all torture victims think this way. Dessalines’ actions were controversial even among his fellow Haitians of the time period.
The fact that sometimes revolting torture victims commit massacres doesn’t prove that they deserved to be tortured to begin with. The timeline is wrong, since in the cases we are discussing, they were tortured prior to committing any massacres. Thus, as of the time they were tortured, they were innocent. Furthermore, torture damages people psychologically, to the point of being a severe impediment to free will, and is thus responsible causing for the massacres to the extent that it impaired the free will of the torture victims. Therefore, the best way to oppose massacres like the one in Haiti in 1804 is to oppose the torture that lead up to them, or in other words, to continue to seek to abolish the torture of workers.
Different people define “free market” differently. However, if you idea of a “free market” doesn’t include the CIA and FBI, then it must be some utopian ideal you are talking about, not the world as it is.
When socialist Edmund Dene Morel wrote Red Rubber, and other things against King Leopold II’s brutal colonization of the Congo, he was very clearly critiquing capitalism as he found it existing in the world, not some utopian ideal.
Incidentally, he concluded that what he saw occurring was not free trade. On pages 187-188 of “Red Rubber”, he explained how forced labor was a much worse violation his conception of “free trade” than a tariff was.
When Marx wrote Das Kapital, he was likewise critiquing capitalism as he found it existing in the world, and not some utopian ideal.
For example, in Volume 3, Chapter 47, he explains how certain kinds of taxes can function in a very similar way to ground rent payable to an unjust landlord.
So, basically, what Marx is saying, as I understand it, is that governments can be exploitative capitalists too.
In both the cases of an unjust landlord, who has done nothing to “earn the land” but still demands rent, the case of an unjust government who has done nothing to “earn the land” but still demands land taxes, labor is exploited by capitalist thieves.
And in Volume 3, Chapter 6 of Das Kapital, Marx gives an example of how government and manufacturers can conspire together to exploit workers,
“Because there are a lot of companies like the ones I listed above, and because most of us do not even know how to avoid buying products from all of those companies, the capitalist system makes nearly all of us complicit to some extent …”
No, it’s not the fault of the buyer of a good when a producer uses slaves to make that good. The buyer is not an enabler of slavery.
A private road builder is not enabling robbers to rob people by making it easier to travel to places to rob.
And, in fact, to the extent that the use of slave labor involves free exchange of the goods produce, free markets create an incentive to keep labor around in sufficient condition to keep producing, thereby making their lives just a little bit better.
(Aside: I prefer to use the term “free markets” to “capitalism” because it meant something different to Marx than it does to most people. Most people generally think of capitalism as free markets, where you don’t have to actually own capital to be a capitalist.)
Get rid of the *rest* of the road blocks to freedom of exchange (tariffs, regulations, taxes), and a free-er market in trade will tend to take away market share from enslavers, just like the end of Prohibition ended a lot of the violence of the Mafia that took place under Prohibition.
The following short video may help with what appears to me to be an implied equivocation, on your part, between slave labor and low-wage labor (or what you might call “slave-wage” labor):
How Can Sweatshops Help The Poor Escape Poverty? – Learn Liberty
[www]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NxBzKkWo0mo
Or this segment of video talking about how Oxfam cared so much about the oppressiveness of child labor, that they cared families into prostitution and starvation (but they cared, so it’s OK):
[Segment from 14:50 to 17:05]
Applying Economics to American History | Thomas E. Woods, Jr.
[www]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-LJ3wZjD4I#t=14m50s
(This is my second response to your latest batch of comments, my first is awaiting approval.)
“And in Volume 3, Chapter 6 of Das Kapital, Marx gives an example of how government and manufacturers can conspire together to exploit workers,”
And such conspiracies can only succeed when the government is involved.
Get rid of would-be central planners, and such conspiracies will fail on the free market:
Myths and Facts About Big Business (Lecture 8 of 15) Thomas E. Woods, Jr.
[www]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGeA1Sbd4XM
(There’s a great section that smashes the predatory pricing boogie man that goes from 12:02 – 22:15.)
Business, on their own, cannot conspire to exploit workers, if the government isn’t stealing from them or preventing them from accepting employment elsewhere.
Karl Marx wasn’t writing about some utopian world with no government, at least not in Das Kapital. Das Kapital is clearly about capitalism as it exists in this world. Marx didn’t shy away from critiquing governments when he saw them doing exploitative things, but he acknowledged that they existed, and wasn’t, at least in Das Capital, off daydreaming about a world with no governments.
Anyway, one way to conceptualize a powerful government is that a powerful government is simply a corporation that excels at the business of military domination. But as a disclaimer, this conceptualization doesn’t work so well for weaker governments.
Both government and corporation are abstract concepts used to describe how people organize together. There’s no fundamental difference. King Leopold got his International Association of the Congo, a private company, recognized as the government of the Congo, and this was possible because “private company” and “government” are just abstract terms describing human interactions, and simply labelling human interactions with those terms does nothing to limit what those people are capable of doing.
Power to dominate over others comes from the power of the hands to beat and to strangle, as many women who have experienced domestic violence could tell you.
It comes from swordsmen, as Pompey could have told you as he ran around with his private army, proclaiming, “Do not quote laws at men with swords”.
It comes from people firing machine guns, like the ones who put down the revolt of the Pende in the Belgian Congo.
It comes from generals and strong military tactics, as seen at the Battle of Canae, when Hannibal’s army, through the use of strategy, crushed a much larger Roman army.
I think you might have linked that Youtube video before. But… well… this quote here seems rather lacking:
This is a false distinction.
If King Leopold II’s colonization of the Congo is too large a topic of conversation to easily visualize, consider something smaller: a shoplifter who sells stolen goods at a discount relative to the retail prices.
The shoplifter sells a product at a cost that is welcomed by his customers and makes them better off, so maybe he’s a market entrepreneur? Wait, no, because he didn’t actually *produce* the product, he just stole it. And even if he’s making his customers better off, there’s a good chance he’s harming the retail stores from which he steals and their customers.
Maybe he’s a political entrepreneur, then? Except no, because he’s not asking the government for permission to shoplift. The government would probably arrest him and throw him in prison if they caught him. So his shoplifting ways aren’t a privilege granted by the government. He granted himself the privilege by deciding to shoplift. (Actually, in some cases, a person may be forced to shoplift by a third party, but I’m trying to present a simper scenario, not a more complicated one.)
Criminals don’t need a government’s permission to be criminals. Sure, a government’s help could make it easier for them, but it’s not essential. If they really want to be criminals, then they become criminals, with or without government assistance. Sometimes they form a corporation first to make things look nicer on paper. Sometimes, if their corporation is really successful at oppressing people, it is recognized as a government, as in the case of the International Association of the Congo.
My third response.
“He is simply being exploited, that is, required to work for a wage, if he wishes to stay, rather than to work for himself …”
A wage worker is not being exploited since labor is not the source of value. The consumer is not your slave, and he can spend his money how he sees fit. If he does not value how hard you worked to produce something enough to pay you as high a price as you’d like, then that means that *you* are producing the wrong thing.
This is true of everything bought or sold. No one owes you anything except to leave you alone.
You choose to earn a wage because it’s easier than starting a company of your own, and you’re leveraging the business owner’s need for employees. The business owner (absent government privileges) is limited in the amount of money he can make off of selling products by the demand from consumers.
The profits he wants to make off of consumers is what determines how many employees he wants to hire and how much to pay them.
Since, as an employee, you’re not producing something on your own, and since you’ve obviously decided that you don’t want to plant a garden and make your own clothes when it costs you less in terms of opportunities foregone to go work for a business owner, then that means you have *voluntarily* chosen to work for a wage. That is not exploitation.
Exploitation would be if you try to underbid other workers so you can at least make something, and then the government says that’s illegal because of the Minimum Wage.
Oh, wait! That’s socialism!
“A socialist is simply a person who believes that workers deserve human rights.”
BS. A socialist is someone who believes that workers are logically exploited by employers because socialists believe that labor is the foundation of value – in effect, socialists believe they have rights to other people’s stuff.
As it turns out, other people have their own valuations of what you produce, and they don’t care how long you worked to produce it because it’s the good they value and not your labor – *you* value your labor, and so *you* should stop working so hard to produce something that others don’t value as much.
Same with wage labor. If other workers *are* willing to work for a lower wage, and there are enough of them, then there’s no reason to pay *you* more. There is zero exploitation in this arrangement. Only consent.
“The goal is not to stop humans from having unique preferences and aptitudes. The goal… or at least my main goal, and I suspect a lot of other people would at least partially agree with me … is to stop maniacs like King Leopold II from enforcing their preferences on others by means of extreme brutality.”
First of all, as a socialist your use of clear moral atrocities to make a point is misleading, since you *don’t* believe that it’s necessary to commit these kinds of atrocities – you actually believe that non-equitable outcomes are evil in and of themselves.
Second, if you try to prevent people from expressing their unique preferences and aptitudes, then you are fighting what it means to be human; Yet, if you permit the expression of unique preferences and aptitudes, then you logically allow unequitable outcomes, because differences create arbitrage opportunities that are logically available to some and not to others.
Socialists throw out humanity with the bathwater. Focus on *actual* crimes, and otherwise leave people alone to trade amongst themselves, no matter how unequal the outcomes are.
“For thousands of years, violent people have raped, looted, and ens****d other people in the pursuit of wealth.”
For thousands of years violent people have used air, water, food, and roads to enable them to enslave other people in the pursuit of wealth.
Until you can find a way to protect these victims while denying everyone air, water, food, and roads, your selective denial of “the pursuit of wealth” means nothing. *Everyone* pursues wealth, and in fact that’s all that any deliberate action has and can ever do.
Every deliberate action is a pursuit of wealth. And again, since humans are unique, there’s logically going to be non-equitable outcomes.
At any rate, great wealth is not responsible for the atrocities you’re talking about, and neither is the pursuit of wealth.
““Employers should not hit their employees,” then you are probably at least a little bit of a socialist.”
The case of “employers hitting their employees” is a subsumed in the case of “people hitting other people” – an employer is a person and an employee is a person. I don’t have to be a socialist to agree that employers shouldn’t hit their employees, I can just be a consistent advocate for individual rights.
Further, an employer doesn’t own the employee – the employee is offering his labor in trade just like the employer is offering his money in trade. The logic of supply and demand determines who is able to lose more.
No one owes an employee a living, and no one owes an employer market share (mom and pops go out of business for this reason)
Fourth response (third is awaiting approval).
“The shoplifter sells a product at a cost that is welcomed by his customers and makes them better off, so maybe he’s a market entrepreneur? Wait, no, because he didn’t actually *produce* the product, he just stole it.”
You’re missing the point.
Attacking *profit* or the hiring of wage labor is to attack something that, itself, is inoccuous.
*That’s* why you leave every voluntary sale alone and instead go after the act of theft.
You are harming people by setting up roadblocks to trade, even if you intend to stop the sale of stolen goods.
Such roadblocks are also pre-crime regulations that *assume* that someone is going to commit a crime. *That* is, itself, a form of slavery, where the government thinks it has a right to interfere in a transaction *before* they know for certain that a crime has been committed.
I have a nuanced set of beliefs about what it means to be a legitimate corporation, but suffice it to say that a government is different from a corporation in that citizens under a government *do not* agree that the government should do such and such, which is why they vote to violate other citizens’ rights to their own property.
(Like taxing others to pay off municipal bond holders, whether the tax victims wanted the sale of bonds or not.)
Shareholders can sell their shares and go home to their property without being forced to interact with the corporation if they don’t want to.
Governments think that your property is part of their property, even though the government has to take money from an already existing economy in order to function (or they have to confiscate wealth through the creation of fiat money – take *that* MMT).
Fourth response is awaiting approval. Third one is, too.
I think Sun Tzu does a far better job explaining how predatory pricing works, than Thomas Woods does.
Note that Sun Tzu is giving very immoral advice. But there are a lot of immoral people in the world, and this gives insight into how immoral people think.
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/132/132-h/132-h.htm
The way companies get away with pricing things below production cost is by stealing things (or buying from thieves).
This doesn’t stop their competition from doing the same, but it does make it very difficult for ethical producers to compete.
Fifth response.
“The way companies get away with pricing things below production cost is by stealing things (or buying from thieves).”
Pricing things below cost is not predatory. Trying to raise prices after you’ve priced your competition out of the market is what’s predatory.
But, as Tom Woods noted, that didn’t happen, and is not a problem, because of how economics works.
The Mafia, during Prohibition, literally stole or bought from thieves – and then that started going away when the government stopped making it illegal to consume and purchase alcohol.
There should be some great information in Rothbard’s posthumous book about the Progressive Era that talks about how businesses were upset that they didn’t have government protections for their profits.
I heard it mentioned in passing on Tom Woods’ show, I’ll look it up.
Sixth response:
Well, that didn’t take long.
I looked for the word “profits” (because of a quote I heard Tom Woods mention about businesses’ profits not being protected) and I found this from The Progressive Era by Murray Rothbard:
“In 1965, while heavily researching American history and writing Conceived in Liberty, in his seminal article “Left and Right: Prospects for Liberty” Rothbard had already laid out his general framework for understanding this transformation, using the historical work of Gabriel Kolko:
“In The Triumph of Conservatism, Kolko traces the origins of political capitalism in the “reforms” of the Progressive Era. … Despite the wave of mergers and trusts formed around the turn of the century, Kolko reveals, the forces of competition on the free market rapidly vitiated and dissolved these attempts at stabilizing and perpetuating the economic power of big business interests. It was precisely in reaction to their impending defeat at the hands of the competitive storms of the market that big business turned, increasingly after the 1900s, to the federal government for aid and protection. In short, the intervention by the federal government was designed, not to curb big business monopoly for the sake of the public weal, but to create monopolies that big business (as well as trade associations of smaller business) had not been able to establish amidst the competitive gales of the free market ”
So, it’s free market competition that smashes the collusions and cartels you imagine happen in an unhampered market.
(Seventh response. Waiting on my other comments to be approved before I stop numbering them.)
Again, from the Forward by Andrew Napolitano to The Progressive Era (for which there’s an audio book, it turns out):
“Many people view the Progressives as reformers who fought against corruption and modernized our laws and institutions. Rothbard proves to the hilt that this common opinion is false.
“The Progressives aimed to displace a 19th-century America that respected individual rights based on natural law. They claimed that natural law and a free economy were outmoded and unscientific ideas; and argued that through applying science to politics, they could replace a corrupt and stagnant old order with a State-ordered more prosperous and egalitarian one.
“Rothbard dissents:
“”Briefly, the thesis is that the rapid upsurge of statism in this period was propelled by a coalition of two broad groups: (a) certain big business groups, anxious to replace a roughly laissez-faire economy by a new form of mercantilism, cartelized and controlled and subsidized by a strong government under their influence and control; and (b) newly burgeoning groups of intellectuals, technocrats, and professionals: economists, writers, engineers, planners, physicians, etc., anxious for power and lucrative employment at the hands of the State. Since America had been born in an antimonopoly tradition, it became important to put over the new system of cartelization as a “progressive” curbing of big business by a humanitarian government; intellectuals were relied on for this selling job. These two groups were inspired by Bismarck’s creation of a monopolized welfare-warfare state in Prussia and Germany.””
Guest wrote,
I disagree with your definition of predatory. Look at what predators do in the wild. They hunt, and they kill, and they win a living off of successful hunting and killing. They don’t need to push all the other predators out of the ecosystem, and in fact, doing so would probably spell the extinction of their species. They just need the density of predators hunting the same prey as them to be low enough that they have enough food.
What did King Leopold II do? He organized a pack (a for-profit company which was recognized as a government) to hunt and to kill Africans and win profits from exploiting them. He was a predator. He fought over territory that he wanted to acquire with other predators from Zanzibar, but he didn’t need to push all the other predators out of the market, and in fact, the existence of other predators was probably necessary for his success at accomplishing his evil goals.
Oh, and he happened to sell some of his hunting trophies — that is, the products obtained by forced labor — on the market for prices. A predator, selling things. Hence “predatory pricing”.
However, King Leopold II bears much greater responsibility for his crimes than a shark or a wolf. He did not hunt merely to eat and to live, but to gain enormous wealth. He hunted other members of his own species. He not only killed they, but engaged in great cruelty against them. Also, he possesses more free will than a shark or a wolf, and should therefore be held to higher standards. In conclusion, although he acted in some ways like a shark or a wolf, he was infinitely more evil.
Various mafias and mafia-type organizations still exist, and still sell stolen goods, including goods that are perfectly legal to sell (aside from the fact that they are stolen), such as razor blades, pregnancy test kits, and cologne.
For example,
https://www.providencejournal.com/news/20190321/mob-associate-sentenced-for-receiving-stolen-goods-at-providence-club
Tiberi may have gone to prison, but Nestle has recently received the green light from the Supreme Court to sell as much stolen cocoa as they want with total impunity, as long as the cocoa is stolen from African children living in Africa. They don’t even have to pay damages in civil court.
Note that cocoa is perfectly legal to sell in the United States. There’s no Cocoa Prohibition.
See:
www [dot] justsecurity [dot] org/tag/nestle-cargill-v-doe-symposium/
In particular, see the December 21, 2020 article by Terry Collingsworth
Likewise, there was no Rubber Prohibition when King Leopold II sold his stolen rubber.
Direct link to the Terry Collingsworth article, “Nestlé & Cargill v. Doe Series: Meet the “John Does” – the Children Enslaved in Nestlé & Cargill’s Supply Chain”
https://www.justsecurity.org/73959/nestle-cargill-v-doe-series-meet-the-john-does-the-children-enslaved-in-nestle-cargills-supply-chain/
Guest wrote,
Almost all of Tom Woods’ argument in that particular, so far as I could tell, rested on the assumption that companies selling goods at below production cost still had to pay that production cost, and thus selling goods at less than production cost would mean selling at a loss. So far as I can tell, Tom Woods didn’t think about this assumption, he just took it for granted.
However, as I have pointed out, the assumption is false. A company, mafia, or other person or organization can sell goods at below production cost by stealing them, and, rather than taking a loss, actually profit off the sales.
Since the assumption on which Tom Woods’ argument rests is incorrect, the argument should be re-thought.
Andrew Napolitano as quoted by Guest,
19th century America did not respect individual rights based on natural law. 19th century America reveled in depravity, committing crimes against humanity against black people, American Indians, and even some white folks, although, there were, admittedly, some dissidents who objected.
For example, as explained by Douglas Blackmon in “Sl***ry by Another Name”, blatant racial forced labor continued in the United States until around the time of World War II. It just morphed from its previous forms into new forms such as convict leasing. Convict leasing was this thing where a person, usually a black person, could be arrested for allegedly committing some ridiculous so-called “crime”, such as “using abusive language in the presence of a white woman”, given a sham trial, and then sentenced to work someplace like a coalmine. Some people were even convicted and sent to coal mines for the crime of “Not given”. (And while racial forced labor is no longer so blatant, it was arguably never fully abolished… consider some of the forced labor going on in present-day US prisons, and consider how many people were convicted of non-violent crimes.)
Also, Americans Indians were, at various times, prohibited from leaving reservations. For example, as told by Aaron Huey,
https://www.ted.com/talks/aaron_huey_america_s_native_prisoners_of_war/transcript?language=en
Guest wrote,
I earlier mentioned that different people define free trade differently, in this comment:
consultingbyrpm [dot] com/blog/2021/05/bob-murphy-triple-play.html#comment-2040672
I guess your reply to that comment is probably among those still awaiting approval.
However, in that comment, I quoted Edmund Dene Morel, who in the book “Red Rubber” wrote,
https://archive.org/details/redrubberstoryof00more/page/186/mode/2up?q=free+trade
In this quote, we can see that Morel sees sl***ry as, by definition, a violation of free trade. Specifically, it is a violation of the the ens****d person’s right to “own the produce of his country” and to “buy and sell”. Edmund Dene Morel also mentions that he would prefer it if there were no tariffs, but he considered this a very minor violation of free trade relative to sl***ry.
Using Edmund Dene Morel’s definition of “free trade”, it is ridiculous to speak of “free trade” ending sl***ry, because any economic system which has sl***ry is obviously not one practicing even a minimal level of “free trade” as the term is defined by Edmund Dene Morel. If the rights of the natives of Africa to trade freely were respected, they could have simply chosen not to be ens****d, and that would be that. However, there rights were not respected. By definition this is not free trade (as defined by Edmund Dene Morel). Capitalism is not free trade (as defined by Edmund Dene Morel).
However, the way Edmund Dene Morel uses the term free trade is not the only way the term has been used.
André Morellet is someone who used the term “free trade” in a completely different way from how Edmund Dene Morel used the term.
From an article on Aeon titled “Sl***ry as free trade: The 18th-century thinkers behind laissez-faire economics saw sl***ry as a great example of global free trade”,
André Morellet defined the term “free trade” in a completely different way from Edmund Dene Morel. Whereas Edmund Dene Morel spoke of the human right to “free trade” being disrespected in the case of sl***ry, André Morellet spoke of the freedom of the oppressors to ens***e others. And, as André Morellet, depraved ens****rs did quite well with this sort of “freedom”, and with competing against each other.
Here’s a link to the Aeon article, entitled, “Slavery as free trade:
The 18th-century thinkers behind laissez-faire economics saw slavery as a great example of global free trade”
https://aeon.co/essays/why-the-original-laissez-faire-economists-loved-slavery
Resetting indentation because I’m a little tired of everything being squished all the way over to the right. However, this is in response to this comment by guest
consultingbyrpm [dot] com/blog/2021/05/bob-murphy-triple-play.html#comment-2040702
Guest wrote,
The fact that you’re writing this tells me that you didn’t bother reading the example I provided. In the example I provided, the employee is producing something on his own without any assistance from the employer, and he DID IN FACT PLANT A GARDEN. The depraved employer in the example given did absolutely nothing other than to claim to own the products of the employee’s labor by virtue of an alleged legal title (which was never actually proven), i.e. the employer was simply a thief.
I repeat what I already wrote/quoted above.
The following story from “Blood and Earth” by Kevin Bales discusses a lesser form of exploitation, and shows how that lesser form of exploitation makes a person vulnerable to more severe forms of exploitation, such as forced labor.
Please read this carefully. The employer did not “earn the land”, the worker did. The worker states what “earn the land” means to him: he found a piece of unused land and planted a crop on it, possibly after clearing it to make space for a crop first. The employer played no role in locating, clearing, or planting crop on the land. (Or, to use your words, the employee planted a garden.) In other words, the worker started the business. The employer did not start it.
After the employee had done all the work in starting the business, then the capitalist thief — the employer — comes along and says that he owns the land that the employee has planted a crop on. Although he emphatically did not plant the crops, he claims to own them because they are allegedly on his land. He then volunteers to pay the worker a wage to harvest “his” crop, which he did nothing to earn, transforming said worker into an employee.
If the worker were allowed to bring his crop to market directly, he would presumably be empowered to get a better price for his goods than if the thieving employer claims a monopoly on the right to buy them on the basis that the employer, having done no actual work to earn the crops, allegedly already owns them, and is merely paying the employee for the work of harvesting the crops the employer alleges to own.
This is not a voluntary situation. It is true that the employee chose to accept it, rather than to fight back, but if he had chosen to fight back, there likely would have been bloodshed. Perhaps he saw avoiding bloodshed as more important than fighting for the right to the products of his labor, an understandable view.
This is how much capitalist exploitation occurs — the capitalist claims a legal title to land that they did nothing to actually earn (or, if not legal title, then at least title by force of arms), and which in fact other people may have already earned, and, based on this legal title (or title by force of arms), the right to a monopoly to buy anything produced on that land, or, in some cases, the right to demand that residents produce for them without being paid anything at all.
Blood and Earth by Kevin Bales is apparently published online, to my surprise:
https://christusliberat.org/journal/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/Blood-and-Earth_-Modern-Slavery-Ecocide-Kevin-Bales.pdf
I don’t know if that’s deliberate, or just the result of an improperly implemented paywall.
Note that that the above example of a capitalist coming along and laying claim to a land where *other people* have already done the work of “planting crops” (or taking other action to “earn the land”), is not an isolated example. It is, I believe, the normal practice of conquerors, and of ruling classes who have already established their military might in a given area.
However, here is another example of this practice occurring in the Belgian Congo.
This is from a document by Hyacinthe Vanderyst, a Jesuit priest and missionary who lived in the Belgian Congo, as quoted by Jules Marchal in Lord Leverhulme’s Ghosts
Note that I have no idea whether the natives in question truly believed in ownership in the European sense of the term, or whether they might agree with some American Indian philosophers who have argued that people do not own the land, and that instead, we are stewards (stewardship being, to the best of my understanding, ownership minus whatever is prohibited by natural law), and perhaps Vanderyst merely failed to make this distinction in summarizing the view of the natives. In any case, that’s a minor detail. The natives claimed either ownership, or something close to it, like stewardship.
So, the natives claimed either ownership or stewardship of the palm groves. Their case argument was strong, in my opinion: that they or their ancestors were the ones who planted the palm groves to begin with.
The argument of the companies and the colonial State was far weaker. They did not even try to claim to have planted the palm groves. And it would have been ridiculous for them to have tried to make such a clearly false claim. Instead, the best argument that they could come up with was that the natives were lying or mistaken about them or their ancestors having planted the palm groves. Even if they were correct, this would be insufficient to give the colonial State and the companies valid moral title to the land. At best, it might give them the right to go and harvest the fruit with their own labor, if they wanted to, but certainly not to demand that the natives harvest the fruit on their behalf. (And, indeed, even if they had planted the palm groves themselves, which they clearly didn’t do, still, it would not give them the right to force others to harvest the fruit.)
However, the Belgian/European forced labor regime relied on multiple components. There was the head tax, which was enforced by forcing natives to earn money against their will. However, a head tax alone would still have allowed the natives a degree of choice over how to earn the money, in theory at least. In order to compel natives in palm grove areas to hand over the fruit to specific buyers, rather than allowing them to choose among multiple competing buyers, the colonial state granted concessions to specific companies, which included, for example, a monopoly on the right to buy fruit in that concession.
In a section titled “The Portuguese of Bumba protest”, Jules Marchal quotes the following letter. Please note that the tripartite contract referred to was imposed by the colonial state and the HCB on the natives against their will. It was not a voluntary contract. It was a legal document used to oppress the natives.
Here, we see that the Portuguese at Bumba were arguing that land ownership – specifically, the unjust system of land ownership being enforced in the Belgian Congo (if you agree with Hyacinthe Vanderyst that the system of land ownership enforced was unjust) — was a violation of “commercial liberty”.
This is of great relevance to the system of capitalism, since in capitalism, we can find many examples of land title being held not by the people who actually “earned” the land, e.g. by planting palm groves, but by conquerors and those companies which conquerors chose to favor with legal titles.
This is an example given by Jules Marchal of one method used to coerce natives into accepting tripartite contracts:
In other words, in this particular example, they were threatened with captivity unless they agreed to the contracts. That’s duress, which proves that the contracts were illicit. In other examples, other forms of duress may have used, or the colonial state and the companies may have relied on the terror they had already inspired in the natives on previous occasions. (Just as, having been repeatedly violently robbed by the same bandit on previous occasions, a household may choose not to offer any resistance the next time the bandit comes by, in order to avoid further injury.)
“Various mafias and mafia-type organizations still exist, and still sell stolen goods, including goods that are perfectly legal to sell (aside from the fact that they are stolen), such as razor blades, pregnancy test kits, and cologne.”
And your point is? Obviously legalizing the consumption and sale of alcohol was a move in the direction of liberty.
Your point that mafias still exist and that there are still some people that are unfree doesn’t change that.
So – and again – even on your own terms free-er markets are preferable than a nanny state that enables the increased violence of mafia types.
To be sure, there is still *plenty* of centralization in the economy that needs to be undone.
Tariffs still remain, there’s this socialist-based belief that we should “buy local” (as in “buy America”, or “buy from local mom and pop stores”) such that importers (even from China which uses slave labor) are demonized for nothing.
You can’t outcompete free market innovation with slave labor – you have to have the government in the way to stifle the free market in order to enable enslavers to have market share.
A free market isn’t a utopia, but that you can look at some of the horrible things that happen under a less-socialist country, notice that the less-socialist country is doing better economically, and still complain that there’s not enough socialism in the free-er country really is childish.
I mean *woosh*.
Your ideology is what’s holding people back, not the freedom of people to trade in such a way that might sometimes enable bad men to do some bad things.
Because if you don’t have central planning, you can escape bad employers by moving.
Like how child labor laws hurt the most victimized children the worst, by denying them a means to survive on their own without the abuse.
The solution to any legitimate problems you raise are found in the direction of economic liberty and decentralization, not in top-down pretend-management of the economy for the “benefit of the masses”.
That you can think of people as a group of people working to make each others lives better off for each other shows that you don’t understand economics or humanity.
Humans are unique. And with uniqueness comes different desires and aptitudes. And with those differences come arbitrage opportunities that are logically available to some and not to others.
There is no world where unique human beings can even conceivably do anything other than as individuals. Even altruistic motives are the motives of individuals.
Different production processes require different skills. Different skills may rely on different affinities for doing said skill (I may be good at math, but I may not want to do math).
And then, to top it all off, the goods being produced must be made in accordance with the preferences of individuals in order to qualify as “wealth”.
(If you’re really good at producing tofu, keep that to yourself, because that’s retarded and I don’t care.
(You could end hunger with tofu and I’d still tell you to go pound sand, because I’m not your slave. I don’t work for your fulfillment or anyone else’s – what’s wealth for you may be different than what it is for me.)
Guest wrote,
Alright, imagine you intended a speech where someone was talking about unicorns. They explained that a unicorn was basically a sort of magical horse with a horn on its head. They went on and on about all the magical things unicorns can do including heal wounds with their tears.
You might think, okay, this guy is telling me about his fantasies about unicorns. Perhaps other people have shared these fantasies too, and they have become mythology. But in any case, you think, the topic being discussed is clearly fiction, not something that actually exists in the real world, or if it does exist in the real world, then most likely it is on a distant planet, in a galaxy far far away; certainly nothing you’d expect to see actual proof of.
Then imagine they bring in a horse with a horn-shaped piece of metal nailed to its head. The horse is clearly bleeding and in pain from the nailed-on horn-shaped metal. And they try to convince you that the tears from this so-called “unicorn” will heal your wounds. But they don’t, because it’s not a unicorn, it’s a horse that’s been tortured.
If you can picture that, then perhaps you can understand how I feel when people talk about the “free market”, and it sounds like they’re talking about some sort of Magical Fantasyland where all transactions are voluntary, and all your economic problems are solved. And then they point at a specific time and place in history, like, for example, 19th century America, and try to tell me that that was the free market, and everything was great back then. And it’s like, no, that was a society that still used forced labor (even after the Civil War in various forms such as convict leasing) and was committing genocide against American Indians. It wasn’t a Magical Fantasyland where all transactions are voluntary. Quite the opposite.
When I read Marx’s Das Capital, it’s easier to understand, because I understand that even if I don’t agree with every word he says, at least I know he’s not talking about some Magical Fantasyland. He’s talking about his observations, views, and opinions of capitalism as it exists in the real world. Because he is a human being and not an omniscient being, he may have made errors, but at least he did his best to stick to discussing the world as he saw it and not a Magical Fantasyland.
intended -> attended
Incidentally, if you wanted to sum up the argument between King Leopold II and Edmund Dene Morel in just four sentences, it might go something like:
King Leopold II: Look at all these free trade laws we’ve drafted up! We are bringing free trade to the Congo!
Edmund Dene Morel: That is not free trade! That is a murderous forced labor regime!
Guest wrote,
If you were, say, Guatemalan, and you noticed that employers were hitting their employees, and sometimes executing them, and on further investigation, determined that the causes of this included a) forced labor laws compelling all people who legally owned less than 10 acres of land to do 100 days of forced labor per year and, b) a land distribution system in which dictators sold huge amounts of land to the wealthy, leaving almost none for the peasants, and, subsequently, you engaged in activism to end the forced labor laws and redistribute unused land, and this activism went against the interests of a US corporation operating in Guatemala, this would be enough for the CIA to label you a cryptocommunist (i.e. someone who sympathizes with communists, even if they don’t self-identify as communist) and subsequently try to assassinate you. In fact, they might not bother figuring out who the alleged “cryptocommunists” (to use the CIA terminology) actually are, and instead arrange for the slaughter of entire villages to make sure they don’t miss any. (Hence the Guatemalan genocide, brought to you by the CIA and the United Fruit Company.)
If the CIA had said “socialist” rather than “communist”, they would have not been far off — a person who is against employers hitting their employees, and subsequently engages in relevant activism, likely a socialist. Even though this follows consistently from a human rights view, a person who actually consistently applies human rights to labor relations and subsequently engages in activism against employers hitting their employees is a socialist. (I can’t find a clear definition of what a communist is, but apparently a communist is an extreme socialist, whatever that means.)
Likewise, a person who is against men raping women (which flows logically from being against people raping people, as men and women are both people), and who subsequently engages in anti-rape activism, is a feminist, and will be attacked as such by pro-rape misogynists. (E.g. when Franca Viola, with the support of her family, refused to marry her rapist, and their vineyard was subsequently set on fire by pro-rape misogynists.)
If you read this comment, it might help you understand better:
https://consultingbyrpm.com/blog/2021/05/bob-murphy-triple-play.html#comment-2041639