02
Jul
2021
Catching up on the Podcast: Murphy Quintuple Play
Bob Murphy Show episodes:
203 on “What Did Bob Learn?” Part 2 of 3
204 on Scott Sumner arguing the Fed was too tight in 2008.
205 on Matt McCaffrey on entrepreneurship and Chinese military history.
206 on “What Did Bob Learn?” Part 3 of 3
and
207 on “They Said What?!” John Lennon edition.
Bob Murphy Show Ep. 207, “They Said What?!”:
Regarding John Maynard Keynes’ “In the long run, we are all dead””
The point is saying that doubling the money supply ultimately just doubles nominal prices and accomplishes nothing else is that there’s no point in doing it.
Those short term economic effects are redistributional in nature, and chaotic. Redistributing other people’s wealth is theft, and that’s all it is.
So, whatever benefit Keynes had in mind with those short term effects of monetary expansion had to be for certain people at the expense of others.
I think his critics’ point stands: In the long run, Keynes isn’t accomplishing anything, and what he does accomplish is cronyism.
Thanks for nothing, Keynes.
“The point [EDIT: “in”] saying that doubling the money supply ultimately just doubles nominal prices and accomplishes nothing else …”
I would clarify that doubling the money supply accomplishes nothing else *only if* the money has no link to use value.
Real money is always non-neutral, even in the long run, because real money is also a non-monetary good that people value on the margin, and because as commodity money is being consumed for its non-monetary use-value, some demands for its use-value are being satisfied, which alters the use-value-based ability of money to enable economic calculations.
(Calculations of arbitrary numbers are meaningless. If paying $1 says nothing different about the exchange than does paying $30,000, then the money isn’t telling you anything of an economic nature. Which is why calculations of an economic nature *must* have a link to use-value.)
The theft is deliberate. Karl Marx cites DeWitt, who apparently characterized the system of using so-called “public debt” to print more money as being “the best system for making the wage labourer submissive, frugal, industrious, and overburdened with labour” (Marx’s summary of DeWitt’s position). I looked briefly over DeWitt’s work, and the writing is archaic, and it seemed to me he intended this as a condemnation, but presumably, someone out there, someone in power, is doing it on purpose.
Also, you should go back and read this comment:
https://consultingbyrpm.com/blog/2021/05/bob-murphy-triple-play.html#comment-2041639
Anyway….
— Karl Marx, Das Kapital, Volume 1, Chapter Thirty-One
marxists [dot] org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch31.htm
Also see:
oll [dot] libertyfund [dot] org/title/court-the-true-interest-and-political-maxims-of-the-republic-of-holland
“Karl Marx cites DeWitt, who apparently characterized the system of using so-called “public debt” to print more money as being “the best system for making the wage labourer submissive …”
“… The state creditors actually give nothing away, for the sum lent is transformed into public bonds, easily negotiable, which go on functioning in their hands just as so much hard cash would.”
What in the … This must be Marx’s schizophrenic stage, right?:
Because in his Communist Manifesto, plank 5 is this:
“Centralisation of credit in the hands of the State, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly.”
Printing claims to something that doesn’t exist (or was never intended to exist) is theft and redistributional no matter who’s doing it.
Whether it’s a private bank or the US Treasury or a central bank, it doesn’t matter.
Go back to using a money that also has a use-value of its own on which to base its moneyness, and a lot of these problems don’t even get started. And those that do are eventually weeded out by the price system.
“Also, you should go back and read this comment …”
“… 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.”
Socialists don’t believe these obvious examples of theft exhaust their definitions of theft. They literally think that working for a wage is somehow *necessarily* exploitive, and so they come up with nonsensical concepts like “worker-owned” companies, or “stakeholder capitalism” – clearly confusing unequal outcomes, themselves, as exploitation.
You can’t blame wage-labor for the theft that occurs in your example. That’s the point.
I try to avoid terms like schizophrenic, because I believe the psychiatrist class is generally violent, and likes force drugging people, locking people up, torturing people (e.g. at certain points in history, the labotomy), and uses labels like “schizophrenic” to justify their abhorrent behavior.
However, there are obvious inconsistencies between Das Kapital and the Communist Manifesto, such as this. (Or at least, obvious if you compare specific statements, one from Das Kapital, and one from the Communist Manifesto, side by side.)
I searched around on Quora to see what other people thought of this inconsistency (not this one specifically, but the general inconsistency between Das Kapital and the Communist Manifesto), and I thought the best answer was this (Quora technically labelled it as a “related answer”, but anyway):
quora [dot] com/What-are-the-differences-between-The-Communist-Manifesto-and-Das-Kapital-Which-is-more-definitive-of-Marxs-thoughts
1848 versus 1867. I think that is sufficient to explain the inconsistency. 19 years is plenty of time for a person’s views to change, especially if that person reads a lot of historical documents.
My point is that I gave you a very specific example: worker goes out, finds a piece of unused land, and plants a garden, because he wants to “earn the land”. Thieving capitalist comes along, alleges that he has legal title to the garden that the worker planted, and offers to pay the worker to harvest “his” crops. Since the worker doesn’t want to fight for his land (and, given the political situation in Brazil, could not reasonably hope to be able to do so in any case), he accepts this and is transformed, against his will, into a wage laborer. However, it is not 100% against his will in the same way that sl***ry is: he could still *leave* if he wanted to. But his rights as a peasant proprietor to work for himself and sell his crops to whomever he chooses aren’t respected. Because this is an obvious injustice, but I don’t want to conflate the problem with sl***ry, a worse crime, I call it exploitation. (However, things get worse for the worker, and he is tricked into sl***ry later in his story.)
Then, rather than read the example I provided, you proceeded to pretend that I was talking about a situation where the capitalist had planted a garden with his own labor, and then hired an employee to tend to and/or harvest it, and attack that strawman accordingly.
Now I’m not sure how much of what you wrote to reply to, because trying to argue with someone who is distracted by attacking a strawman is tiresome. I feel superfluous. Like if you want to argue with the strawman, you don’t actually need me here.
Also, the thief in that case was motivated by the desire to claim a monopoly on the right to buy the products of the worker’s labor, i.e. to deprive him of the right to sell the products of his labor on a competitive market, i.e. to make him a wage laborer. The thief was to blame, along with the corrupt Brazilian political system that enabled him, but the concept of forcing “wage labor” on someone was the motive.
1. There are many different kinds of socialists, just as there are many different kinds of feminists. You can see that there are some feminists who focus primarily on fighting the worst abuses of the patriarchy, such as rape, “marry your rapist” laws, so-called “honor killing” of women who marry the man they love instead of who their father tells them to marry, and so on. And then there are others who seem more interested in the wage gap (real or alleged) in the US workplaces. Likewise, there are many different kinds of socialists.
Unfortunately, however, a lot of people don’t apply any sort of basic sanity check to the term “socialist”. If people applied no basic sanity check to the term “feminist”, than a serial rapist could run around declaring that because he was allegedly raping women “for their own good”, he was a feminist. He might even go so far as to declare that women have a “right” to be raped. However, this would not pass any sort of basic sanity check. No self respecting feminist should accept this man as a fellow feminist.
However, for some strange reason, people consider it perfectly acceptable to avoid applying any sort of sanity check to the terms “socialist” or “communist”. Thus Stalin is called a “communist”. However, this makes about as much sense as calling a guy who organized a rape gang that raped millions of women a “feminist”. Or, to use another example, it makes as much sense as calling King Leopold II an abolitionist.
I believe the CIA may be partially to blame for this. The seem to know the real definition of the terms, more or less, when they label anti-slavery and land reform movements as communist (though they should probably say “socialist” instead, but whatever). But they’re counting on a public perception that a “communist” is someone like Stalin, so they can get away with suppressing anti-slavery and land reform movements with extreme prejudice, e.g. in the case of the Guatemalan genocide.
2. Wage labor can’t be fully free unless the wage laborer has the full, free choice to be a peasant proprietor instead, and, through informed consent, genuinely decides that he or she would rather be a wage laborer. Furthermore, for this to occur in the context of a truly free culture, the wage laborer cannot be paid in stolen goods. (E.g. As an obvious example, if a soldier is paid a “wage” out of goods obtained in the process of looting and pillaging, this has obvious moral problems, even if the soldier himself is happy with it.)
If you live in the United States, what do you think would happen to you if you went out, found a piece of unused land, and tried to build a house and plant a garden on it?
In the United States, there was a homeless guy who tried this — at least the house-building part, I don’t know about planting the garden. (Well, probably many homeless people have tried it, but I’m citing a particular example.)
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/mar/14/homeless-self-built-homes
Okay, so this guy built his own home. But, rather than say “yay for you, here’s a legal title to formally commemorate your achievement, and don’t worry about paying property tax, we know you can’t afford it”, the police are going to evict him. (Or, since that was written years ago, I presume they already have by now.) And those police are probably more generous than a lot of police in the US — many probably would have evicted him immediately. (Perhaps the police in this particular story didn’t feel morally right about evicting this person from the house he built in the winter, and decided to delay their law enforcement action until spring.)
There’s a lot of police in the US who deliberately slash the tents of houseless people with knives. I truly believe that if the rights of houseless people to become peasant proprietors were respected, a lot more of them would build their own houses.
But that’s not what your supposed to do in the US. You’re supposed to get a job, pay rent (which has property taxes included in it), save up to buy a house if you want to, get a mortgage, pay off the mortgage (and property tax at the same time), and keep paying the property tax even after paying off the mortgage. This artificial need for money, created by evicting people who try to build their own houses, acts as an indirect coercive measure to force people to become wage laborers. However, because it is indirect, and people are technically free to be homeless if they want to, at least in certain parts of the country, it doesn’t rise to the level of sl***ry. Also note that, while many employers, especially large employers, do arguably benefit from this, in so far as it makes people more likely to accept wage labor, many employers, especially smaller employers, are arguably in a similar position: they too must earn money to pay for their homes, even if they’d rather not.
The prevalence of sl**e-made goods, and other goods acquired by means of theft, on the market is also a problem: it means that at least some of the incentives being offered to wage laborers in the United States are stolen incentives (often stolen from people living in third world countries). Thus, even if some people are happy with this, it poses a similar moral problem to the aforementioned soldier being paid with stolen goods obtained in the process of looting in pillaging.
I try to avoid terms like schizophrenic, because I believe the psychiatrist class is generally violent, and likes force drugging people, locking people up, torturing people (e.g. at certain points in history, the labotomy), and uses labels like “schizophrenic” to justify their abhorrent behavior.
However, there are obvious inconsistencies between Das Kapital and the Communist Manifesto, such as this. (Or at least, obvious if you compare specific statements, one from Das Kapital, and one from the Communist Manifesto, side by side.)
I searched around on Quora to see what other people thought of this inconsistency (not this one specifically, but the general inconsistency between Das Kapital and the Communist Manifesto), and I thought the best answer was this (Quora technically labelled it as a “related answer”, but anyway):
quora [dot] com/What-are-the-differences-between-The-Communist-Manifesto-and-Das-Kapital-Which-is-more-definitive-of-Marxs-thoughts
1848 versus 1867. I think that is sufficient to explain the inconsistency. 19 years is plenty of time for a person’s views to change, especially if that person reads a lot of historical documents.
My point is that I gave you a very specific example: worker goes out, finds a piece of unused land, and plants a garden, because he wants to “earn the land”. Thieving capitalist comes along, alleges that he has legal title to the garden that the worker planted, and offers to pay the worker to harvest “his” crops. Since the worker doesn’t want to fight for his land (and, given the political situation in Brazil, could not reasonably hope to be able to do so in any case), he accepts this and is transformed, against his will, into a wage laborer. However, it is not 100% against his will in the same way that sl***ry is: he could still *leave* if he wanted to. But his rights as a peasant proprietor to work for himself and sell his crops to whomever he chooses aren’t respected. Because this is an obvious injustice, but I don’t want to conflate the problem with sl***ry, a worse crime, I call it exploitation. (However, things get worse for the worker, and he is tricked into sl***ry later in his story.)
Then, rather than read the example I provided, you proceeded to pretend that I was talking about a situation where the capitalist had planted a garden with his own labor, and then hired an employee to tend to and/or harvest it, and attack that strawman accordingly.
Now I’m not sure how much of what you wrote to reply to, because trying to argue with someone who is distracted by attacking a strawman is tiresome. I feel superfluous. Like if you want to argue with the strawman, you don’t actually need me here.
Also, the thief in that case was motivated by the desire to claim a monopoly on the right to buy the products of the worker’s labor, i.e. to deprive him of the right to sell the products of his labor on a competitive market, i.e. to make him a wage laborer. The thief was to blame, along with the corrupt Brazilian political system that enabled him, but the concept of forcing “wage labor” on someone was the motive.
1. There are many different kinds of socialists, just as there are many different kinds of feminists. You can see that there are some feminists who focus primarily on fighting the worst abuses of the patriarchy, such as rape, “marry your rapist” laws, so-called “honor killing” of women who marry the man they love instead of who their father tells them to marry, and so on. And then there are others who seem more interested in the wage gap (real or alleged) in the US workplaces. Likewise, there are many different kinds of socialists.
Unfortunately, however, a lot of people don’t apply any sort of basic sanity check to the term “socialist”. If people applied no basic sanity check to the term “feminist”, than a serial rapist could run around declaring that because he was allegedly raping women “for their own good”, he was a feminist. He might even go so far as to declare that women have a “right” to be raped. However, this would not pass any sort of basic sanity check. No self respecting feminist should accept this man as a fellow feminist.
However, for some strange reason, people consider it perfectly acceptable to avoid applying any sort of sanity check to the terms “socialist” or “communist”. Thus Stalin is called a “communist”. However, this makes about as much sense as calling a guy who organized a rape gang that raped millions of women a “feminist”. Or, to use another example, it makes as much sense as calling King Leopold II an abolitionist.
I believe the CIA may be partially to blame for this. The seem to know the real definition of the terms, more or less, when they label anti-sl***ry and land reform movements as communist (though they should probably say “socialist” instead, but whatever). But they’re counting on a public perception that a “communist” is someone like Stalin, and quite possibly have done a lot to encourage that public perception, so they can get away with suppressing anti-sl***ry and land reform movements with extreme prejudice, e.g. in the case of the Guatemalan genocide.
2. Wage labor can’t be fully free unless the wage laborer has the full, free choice to be a peasant proprietor instead, and, through informed consent, genuinely decides that he or she would rather be a wage laborer. Furthermore, for this to occur in the context of a truly free culture, the wage laborer cannot be paid in stolen goods. (E.g. As an obvious example, if a soldier is paid a “wage” out of goods obtained in the process of looting and pillaging, this has obvious moral problems, even if the soldier himself is happy with it.)
If you live in the United States, what do you think would happen to you if you went out, found a piece of unused land, and tried to build a house and plant a garden on it?
In the United States, there was a homeless guy who tried this — at least the house-building part, I don’t know about planting the garden. (Well, probably many homeless people have tried it, but I’m citing a particular example.)
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/mar/14/homeless-self-built-homes
Okay, so this guy built his own home. But, rather than say “yay for you, here’s a legal title to formally commemorate your achievement, and don’t worry about paying property tax, we know you can’t afford it”, the police are going to evict him. (Or, since that was written years ago, I presume they already have by now.) And those police are probably more generous than a lot of police in the US — many probably would have evicted him immediately. (Perhaps the police in this particular story didn’t feel morally right about evicting this person from the house he built in the winter, and decided to delay their law enforcement action until spring.)
There’s a lot of police in the US who deliberately slash the tents of houseless people with knives. I truly believe that if the rights of houseless people to become peasant proprietors were respected, a lot more of them would build their own houses.
But that’s not what your supposed to do in the US. You’re supposed to get a job, pay rent (which has property taxes included in it), save up to buy a house if you want to, get a mortgage, pay off the mortgage (and property tax at the same time), and keep paying the property tax even after paying off the mortgage. This artificial need for money, created by evicting people who try to build their own houses, acts as an indirect coercive measure to force people to become wage laborers. However, because it is indirect, and people are technically free to be homeless if they want to, at least in certain parts of the country, it doesn’t rise to the level of sl***ry. Also note that, while many employers, especially large employers, do arguably benefit from this, in so far as it makes people more likely to accept wage labor, many employers, especially smaller employers, are arguably in a similar position: they too must earn money to pay for their homes, even if they’d rather not. Thus, the situation is exploitative, but individual employers may or may not be to blame, and may, in some cases, themselves be exploited too. (If we wanted to judge an individual employer, we might check if they were paying politicians, or “lobbying”, to enforce coercive policies, such as evicting homeless people who try to build homes. We might also look for command responsibility issues, e.g. if they are knowingly ensl**ing African children.)
The prevalence of sl**e-made goods, and other goods acquired by means of theft, on the market is also a problem: it means that at least some of the incentives being offered to wage laborers in the United States are stolen incentives (often stolen from people living in third world countries). Thus, even if some people are happy with this, it poses a similar moral problem to the aforementioned soldier being paid with stolen goods obtained in the process of looting in pillaging.
I try to avoid terms like schizophrenic, because I believe the psychiatrist class is generally violent, and likes force drugging people, locking people up, torturing people (e.g. at certain points in history, the labotomy), and uses labels like “schizophrenic” to justify their abhorrent behavior.
However, there are obvious inconsistencies between Das Kapital and the Communist Manifesto, such as this. (Or at least, obvious if you compare specific statements, one from Das Kapital, and one from the Communist Manifesto, side by side.)
I searched around on Quora to see what other people thought of this inconsistency (not this one specifically, but the general inconsistency between Das Kapital and the Communist Manifesto), and I thought the best answer was this (Quora technically labelled it as a “related answer”, but anyway):
quora [dot] com/What-are-the-differences-between-The-Communist-Manifesto-and-Das-Kapital-Which-is-more-definitive-of-Marxs-thoughts
1848 versus 1867. I think that is sufficient to explain the inconsistency. 19 years is plenty of time for a person’s views to change, especially if that person reads a lot of historical documents.
“Then, rather than read the example I provided …”
“Now I’m not sure how much of what you wrote to reply to, because trying to argue with someone who is distracted by attacking a strawman is tiresome.”
Dude, you write a lot of stuff. I come back and there’s often four responses. I’m not going to read through them all because I have other things I’d like to do with my time.
Again, your obvious examples of theft say nothing about a free market, which I claim would tend to suppress such violations of individual rights.
Socialists, in their bleeding heart agitations, neglect to use their brains and thereby cause even more damage. That wage-labor, itself, is not exploitive was the point. None of your examples where someone steals a homesteader’s land and threatens them with eviction if they don’t do wage-labor are relevant to my point.
Socialists *do* think wage-labor *as such* is exploitive with or without someone stealing from a homesteader, and I’m correcting *that* misunderstanding.
“Wage labor can’t be fully free unless the wage laborer has the full, free choice to be a peasant proprietor instead, and, through informed consent, genuinely decides that he or she would rather be a wage laborer.”
BS. Someone without the means to plant his own food (and again, here, you’re missing my point) does not have a right to have land that is already owned demolished so that someone can plant food on it.
If the land around him is already owned, and the only current means of eating is wage-labor, then logically he either becomes a wage-laborer or he dies of starvation. In those circumstances, wage-labor is his only choice regardless of his desire to plant a garden – because his rights end where another’s begins.
Now, through wage labor one can acquire the capital and productive capacity to hire other wage-laborers, not to mention the capacity to simply buy already-processed food from stores or wholesale suppliers.
You should look up an article where this guy starts an experiment to see how much it actually costs to make a sandwich, except that all the ingredients are made from scratch (growing the food himself, etc.) I think the cost, in money terms, turned out to be around $1,500.
For a sandwich hat would cost far less to just assemble ingredients he buys at the grocery store.
And this was my point about me saying that the guy in my previous example doesn’t want to grow his own food.
If you can help it, you *don’t* want to be “self-sufficient” in the sense that you own and control all the means of production that supplies your consumption. Because the opportunity costs are *enourmous*. No, what you want to do is to trade with others who have control over their production processes so that you can focus on what you’re good at doing and then just trade.
In fact, the whole idea behind “buy America” and “not being dependent on foreign oil” is based on socialist thinking where, because people are “dependent” on the production processes of another, that means they’re vulnerable to being exploited by being cut off from supplies that they rely on. But people *want* to make a profit off of you – they would hurt *themselves* by not trading with you.
“Murray Rothbard also endorsed the concept of worker-owned companies, in certain cases …”
No he didn’t. In the examples of Rothbard you share, the workers should own the land because the workers are the only ones to have mixed their labor with the land and therefore have become the real homesteaders in those examples, not because workers, as workers, have a better claim to ownership of the business they work at.
In those examples, the state has just asserted its claim to ownership of a piece of land because it paid for it – except that the funds came from the theft of taxation. And so the state didn’t really pay for it. That leaves the only legitimate homesteaders to be those who are actually mixing their labor with, as yet, unowned resources.
(Aside: My point about leaving otherwise voluntary trade alone, even when it involves trading in stolen goods, is not to legitimize the theft, but to protect any existing voluntary aspects of the trade. The reason this is important is that socialists often attack the wrong things, and cause even more damage than the original theft of goods.)
“If you live in the United States, what do you think would happen to you if you went out, found a piece of unused land, and tried to build a house and plant a garden on it?”
The government would claim ownership of it, and deny your right to homestead unowned land (it has to be unowned, and not merely “unused” – something unused can still be owned by someone else).
Not only is this the fault of central planning, such policies of government are based on the socialist belief that private ownership of land leads to grossly unequal outcomes. So if you want to prevent such unequal outcomes, you have to violently prevent people from homesteading their own land.
And of course, socialists can’t leave people alone to own their own land, because then what would they need the nanny state for? No, in order to implement social programs (building centrally-planned infrastructure, promising people a “living wage”), they would have to impose property taxes.
If I can just trade for my neighbor for whatever I need, what do I need the government for? So the property taxes that you claim to be opposed to are, in fact, based on consistent applications of socialist theories.
“However, for some strange reason, people consider it perfectly acceptable to avoid applying any sort of sanity check to the terms “socialist” or “communist”. Thus Stalin is called a “communist”.”
That’s because, as was said above, if you leave people alone to homestead and own their own property, what you get is unequal outcomes which can happen entirely due to humanity just being human (different desires, aptitudes, different arbitrage opportunities that result, etc.).
So, in order to suppress what is a natural and desirable bent of humans, which is to attempt to better their lives with the naturally unequally supplied opportunities around them, you have to literally commit genocide in order to scare the humanity out of humans before they can ever hope to become “other minded”.
As C. Bradly Thompson said, Stalin is not an aberration of socialism, but a fulfillment of it:
“Why Marxism?” An Evening at FEE with C. Bradley Thompson
[www]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nt58gg1DQGk
You don’t have time to read, but you have time to write a long argument against a strawman?
If you don’t have time to read, the sensible thing to do would seem to be to not reply until you do have time.
Marx and certain other socialists have gone to great length to show how, in every instance they investigated, wage labor and other forms of exploitation was preceded by mass theft from peasant proprietors, or, if you prefer, homesteaders. If you don’t acknowledge that because you don’t have time to read, you aren’t correcting a misunderstanding, you’re fighting a strawman.
No, it is not the result of socialism: it’s the plan of capitalist thieves who know they cannot make people submit to wage labor (or other forms of exploitation) unless they expropriate the peasants from the land (or, if you prefer, rob the homesteaders) — or in this case, would-be homesteaders — as documented by Marx. In Das Kapital, Volume 1, Chapter 33, Marx specifically cites Wakefield, who apparently deliberately advocated for the government to put an artificial price on land in order to compel people to be wage laborers. Marx call this process by which the peasants are expropriated from the land (or the homesteaders are robbed, if you prefer) the “slaughter of innocents”. Clearly he’s not against legitimate homesteading. He’s against this murderous process of robbing the homesteaders to turn them into proletariats (or other forms of exploited people).
Marx wrote that capitalism was founded based on the appropriation of the peasants from the land. What did Stalin do? He expropriated the peasants from the land. He was not a communist. He was not even a socialist. He was a pro-sl***ry mass murderer who claimed to be a communist, just as King Leopold II was a pro-sl***ry mass murderer who claimed to be an abolitionist. And you attack strawmen!
Marx isn’t against trade between free people. Edmund Dene Morel wrote quite a bit in favor of trade, where it was between free people. You attack strawmen.
“You don’t have time to read, but you have time to write a long argument against a strawman?”
It’s not a straw man, and you know it – as evidenced by what you said next:
“Marx and certain other socialists have gone to great length to show how, in every instance they investigated, wage labor and other forms of exploitation …”
You admit that you think that wage-labor, as such, is a form of exploitation.
So no I didn’t need to address your specific example to respond to it. I attacked the heart of your claim, which *does not require* there to be theft from an invading capitalist – you believe that wage-labor, *itself* is exploitative.
I win.
Further, that Marx went to great lengths to try and prove that correlation equals causation is moot and, again, childish.
You’ve just taught me that Marx and socialists are not concerned with breaking out events into their constituent parts for their examination. You don’t have to understand the wage-labor relationship, on its own, to make a value judgement?
In what world is *that* considered educated?
“WAS PRECEDED BY MASS THEFT FROM PEASANT PROPRIETORS, OR, IF YOU PREFER, HOMESTEADERS.”
To make your strawman argument, you had to replace that part with “…”, i.e. deliberately quote me out of context.
You attack strawmen by replacing “WAS PRECEDED BY MASS THEFT FROM PEASANT PROPRIETORS, OR, IF YOU PREFER, HOMESTEADERS” with “…”.
You attack strawmen by replacing “WAS PRECEDED BY MASS THEFT FROM PEASANT PROPRIETORS, OR, IF YOU PREFER, HOMESTEADERS” with “…”.
You are only capable of winning against strawmen. I.e. you lose. To do this, you replaced “WAS PRECEDED BY MASS THEFT FROM PEASANT PROPRIETORS, OR, IF YOU PREFER, HOMESTEADERS” with “…”
I have apparently taught you nothing, because you insist on attacking a strawman by replacing “WAS PRECEDED BY MASS THEFT FROM PEASANT PROPRIETORS, OR, IF YOU PREFER, HOMESTEADERS” with “…”
YOUR ENTIRE ARGUMENT CONSISTS OF ATTACKING STRAWMEN. YOU LOSE (EXCEPT AGAINST THE STRAWMEN).
If you mean because I’m not interesting in discussing what wage labor might hypothetically be like without any sort of theft preceding said wage labor, its because a) without any specific historical or modern examples, it’s like trying to imagine what unicorns are like and b) because I’m not interested in having that discussion with someone who strawmans me by replacing my nuances with dot dot dots. If it weren’t for B, I might look and see if I could find any historical or modern examples, but given B, it seems pointless.
“If it weren’t for B, I might look and see if I could find any historical or modern examples, but given B, it seems pointless.”
Thank you, you’ve proven me right a third time.
Correlation does not equal causation. The socialist method of analysis is short-sighted and childish.
I will use this experience going forward to press socialists on their method of analysis to see if this is the primary reason why they cannot be reasoned with.
If so, I will blow that error wide open for everyone to see.
Your world view ends up murdering tens and hundreds of thousands of people all because you guys don’t understand that correlation doesn’t equal causation?!
Your worldview isn’t moral. It’s childish and insane.
Definition of a strawman argument,
Why should I continue a debate with someone who repeatedly misrepresents my position, refuses to accept clarifications or nuances?
There is no reason for me to do so. Because no matter what I say, you keep misrepresenting my position and claiming to have beaten me.
WHY SHOULD I CONTINUE AN ARGUMENT WHERE NOTHING I SAY MATTERS BECAUSE MY OPPONENT CONTINUALLY MISREPRSENTS MY ARGUMENT NO MATTER WHAT I SAY?
And because I’m not interested in being strawmanned, you call me childish, insane, an incapable of being reasonsed with?
YOU HAVE SERIOUS ENTITLEMENT ISSUES IF YOU EXPECT PEOPLE TO JUST ACCEPT THAT THEY BELIEVE WHAT YOU SAY THEY BELIEVE RATHER THAN WHAT THEY ACTUALLY BELIEVE. MY THOUGHTS DO NOT BELONG TO YOU. I BELIEVE WHAT I BELIEVE, NOT WHAT YOU SAY I BELIEVE.
“Definition of a strawman argument …”
Definition of Genetic Fallacy (from Wikipedia):
“The genetic fallacy (also known as the fallacy of origins or fallacy of virtue)[1] is a fallacy of irrelevance that is based solely on someone’s or something’s history, origin, or source rather than its current meaning or context. …”
“… The fallacy therefore fails to assess the claim on its merit.”
This is why all the correlation that Marx observes is irrelevant.
Socialists appear to be unwilling to examine the wage-labor relationship with an employer on its own merit.
Even if I asked you what you mean by examining “the wage-labor relationship with an employer on its own merit”, what would it matter if you kept strawmanning me? I’m not sure what “examining the wage-labor relationship with an employer on its own merit” means to you, but to me at least, examining anything at all involves at least the possibility that I will need to make nuanced distinctions, which are impossible (or nearly so) to make effectively if I have to constantly be on guard against being quoted out of context and told that I believe things that I don’t believe.
“… if I have to constantly be on guard against being quoted out of context and told that I believe things that I don’t believe.”
“… in every instance they investigated, wage labor and other forms of exploitation …”
Definition of “other” from Websters:
“(1)a : being the one (as of two or more) remaining or not included held on with one hand and waved with the other one
“(1)b : being the one or ones distinct from that or those first mentioned or implied taller than the other boys”
Saying “wage labor and othher forms of exploitation” means that you believe that wage labor, as such, is included in what qualifies, to you, to be exploitation.
Those are *your* words. You are *not* being quoted out of context. And this is *not* a straw man.
Again, it is *irrelevant* what preceded wage-labor relationships, because correlation is not causation.
Examining the wage-labor relationship on its own merit would be to isolate the implications of exchanges of labor for money.
For example, is there something about the nature of labor the legitimacy of exhanges for which would merit something other, or more, than wages.
(Socialists certainly think so, with their labor theory of value, and Austrian Economists have a rebuttal to that.)
The historical circumstances surrounding any given wage-labor employment relationship can’t tell you those things.
You took some words that I wrote. You deleted the part that didn’t serve your strawman argument, namely “WAS PRECEDED BY MASS THEFT FROM PEASANT PROPRIETORS, OR, IF YOU PREFER, HOMESTEADERS.”
Then you said,
That argument doesn’t work, except as a strawman, when I specifically said “WAS PRECEDED BY MASS THEFT FROM PEASANT PROPRIETORS, OR, IF YOU PREFER, HOMESTEADERS.”
YOU DON’T believe that wage labor requires there to be theft by one or more invading (or ruling) capitalists. I DO believe that wage labor requires there to be theft by one or more invading (or ruling) capitalists. By pretending I share your belief, when I don’t, and deliberately quoting me out of context so you can ignore the fact that we don’t share that belief, you are strawmanning me.
In other words, you’ve repeatedly strawmanned me, and repeatedly insisted on continuing to strawman me even after I’ve repeatedly clarified my position.
You could, instead of strawmanning me, attempt to prove that my belief that wage labor’s existence necessarily requires there to be theft by one or more invading (or ruling) capitalists wrong by attempting to find a historical or modern day counterexample. But instead you keep strawmanning me as if we already share that belief.
“I DO believe that wage labor requires there to be theft by one or more invading (or ruling) capitalists.”
That’s what I’ve been saying the whole time. Again – not quoting you out of context.
What’s that, like the fourth time you’ve proven me right, now?
Your part of the quote that I replaced with an elipsis is where you’re committing the genetic fallacy.
Your historical examples do not prove that wage-labor must, of necessity, accompany invasions of capitalists because correlation does not mean causation.
That’s why it’s not relevant, and also why it’s not a straw man.
Included in your historical example of accompanying invasions by capitalists was another claim that wage-labor, in and of itself, is exploitive.
Your historical examples are irrelevant to whether wage-labor is, in itself, exploitive, and *that’s* the point I was addressing.
No, it’s not the same thing. I’m not trying to allege that, in a situation where there are no invading or ruling capitalists, and someone agrees to wage labor, that that is exploitative, I simply don’t believe that such a thing happens, and I won’t believe that it happens until I see an example of it, like I won’t believe that there are horses with horns until I see one. And if there was a horse with a horn, then is it actually a horse, or is it a unicorn?
“Correlation doesn’t imply causation, but it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively and gesture furtively while mouth ‘look over there.'”
The constant refrain we here from many right-wingers is that wage labor is voluntary. Wage laborers wouldn’t do it if they didn’t see some benefit in it to them. Even supposing we exclude situations like the Belgian Congo where workers are given a choice between wage labor and prison, why do we keep finding that in these allegedly “voluntary” situations, peasants are first thrown off their land (or some other theft occurs), such that they “agree” to this allegedly “voluntary” arrangement only after violence has occurred? (Also, note that a situation in which workers are given a choice between wage labor and prison or other harsh penalties may evolve over time as these penalties are reduced, said penalties never seem to go away completely, e.g. even in the United States we still see a lot of criminalization of homelessness.) Why are employers not able to tempt them off the land with strong positive incentives (and, to make sure everything is legit, strong positive incentives which were not themselves procured by theft)?
So you want more current examples?
Peasants are still being expropriated from the land. That hasn’t stopped. Simply look at eminent domain laws. Also look at “forced pooling” laws, i.e. where legal landowners are forced to cooperate with oil and gas companies against their will as long as a certain percentage of acreage worth of landowners agree. (In Virginia, the threshold is as low as 25% of the acreage.) Consider what happens to people who can’t afford to pay their property taxes. Consider homeless encampments forcibly cleared out by police.
Look at so-called third world countries, where peasants often aren’t given legal title to their land to begin with, and dictators sell the land out from under their feet, or else the government is so weak that the companies just come in and steal land from whomever they want and the government can’t stop them even if it wants to, e.g. when a Nigerian court told Shell it had to stop gas flaring (which was a form of expropriating peasants from the land by means of poisoning them), and Shell was just like, “No, we’re going to continue”.
Look, there’s a recent journal article right here:
Chih-Jou Jay Chen (2020): Peasant protests over land seizures in rural China,
The Journal of Peasant Studies
https://www.ios.sinica.edu.tw/people/personal/ccj/Chen%202020%20Peasant%20protests%20over%20land%20seizures%20in%20rural%20China.pdf
Why are they being expropriated? Why don’t they go to the factories and other workplaces voluntarily?
One possible explanation…
“600,000 Chinese die from overworking each year”
www [dot] chinadaily [dot] com [dot] cn/china/2016-12/11/content_27635578.htm
If given a legitimately free choice, why would anyone choose being worked to death over being a peasant proprietor?
This isn’t new. This is from Das Kapital, Volume 1, Chapter 10
www [dot] marxists [dot] org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch10.htm
It’s happened before and it’s happening now. People are being worked to death.
If we accepted the right-wing argument that these were genuinely voluntary arrangements, it would mean that, for some very strange reason, large numbers of people were voluntarily agreeing to be worked to death. But, on further examination, we find that the situation is preceded by peasants being expropriated from the land, and it makes more sense. If they had a truly free choice, they would probably choose to remain peasant proprietors, and not work themselves to death. But since they only have limited choices, they have to pick whatever they think is the best of bad options.
(Don’t forget @Major_Freedom’s responses)
“… e.g. even in the United States we still see a lot of criminalization of homelessness.) Why are employers not able to tempt them off the land with strong positive incentives …”
It’s because we have central planning in the way that is ostensibly there for everyone’s benefit.
Property taxes, zoning laws, building codes. Absolutely enourmous areas of land are “owned” and “managed” by the government to “protect wildlife and habitats”.
None of which is constitutional, mind you.
So, it’s because socialist ideals are in place that the poor and homeless are still harassed.
The poor don’t need the government to do anything for them other than get out of the way.
Guest wrote,
YOU ATTACK STRAWMEN!
I have repeatedly shown you that I oppose the criminalization of homelessness. I’ve repeatedly shown that Marx did as well.
BUT YOU ATTACK STRAWMEN.
EVERYTIME YOU SAY/IMPLY WHAT SOCIALISM IS (so far as I have seen), YOU ATTACK STRAWMEN!
The criminalization of homelessness can be traced back to the post-Civil War “vagrancy” laws in the United States, when the pro-sl***ry people in power in the former Confederate states wanted to re-ensl*** black people. (See, for example, “Sl***ry by Another Name” by Douglas Blackmon). And it can be traced back further still, for example, to the 16th century English legislation Marx cites in Das Kapital, Volume 1, Chapter 31, and we he clearly opposed.
ANTI-VAGRANCY LAWS (the precursors and more extreme forms of the modern criminalization of homelessness laws) HAVE THEIR ORIGIN IN PRO-SL***RY CAPITALIST LEGISLATORS LIKE KING HENRY VIII!
BUT YOU DON’T CARE, BECAUSE YOU ATTACK STRAWMEN, AND TRY TO BLAME SOCIALISTS FOR THE ACTIONS OF PRO-SL***RY CAPITALIST LEGISLATORS LIKE KING HENRY VIII, EVEN THOUGH SOCIALISTS LIKE MARX HAVE SPECIFICALLY OPPOSED WHAT KING HENRY VIII AND OTHERS LIKE HIM DID!
Marx and von Mises were both clever people and both got an awful lot wrong.
A lot of time has passed for both, more for Marx of course, but not that much more. Given what we know now, it is somewhat daft to cling to their words when there is so much more information and thought since then. It is somewhat like criticizing evolution because Darwin got something wrong.
To: Harold
Marx seems to be much more mercilessly strawmanned that other economists. Additionally, some of the same people who strawman Marx tend to make the part-to-whole fallacy of assuming that all socialists think like Marx did, so when they strawman Marx, they tend to strawman all socialists by extension.
For example, Matthew Dunnyveg writes on Quora:
https://www.quora.com/Was-Karl-Marx-a-bad-person
Alright,
1. Marx was dead before the so-called Russian Revolution even started. He didn’t lead it, even in the beginning. The doctrine of command responsibility requires that the commander you wish to blame for “tens of millions” of deaths must actually be in command, or specifically, that the commander either commanded or encouraged the atrocities, or, alternatively, that the commander either knew or should have known that his subordinates were committing atrocities and failed to take appropriate disciplinary action to stop them. It would be kind of hard for Marx to do all that, being dead and all.
2. Considering that Marx was dead before the so-called Russian Revolution even started, he most certainly never even had the opportunity to “wax poetic” over it. He had no opportunity to critique it either, being dead and all. However, based on Das Kapital, there is strong reason to believe that if he could somehow come back from the dead and critique it, it would be a harsh critique. For example, the Holodomor bears some similiarity to the Irish famine of 1846, which Marx criticizes harshly in Volume 1 Chapter 25 of Das Kapital. According to Marx, the Irish famine of 1846 killed over a million people. Considering that Marx critiqued the British landlords (inheritors of conquered land) so harshly for that famine, it’s ridiculous to think that if he had the chance to critique the Holodomor, which killed an estimated 7 to 10 million people, that Marx would have spoken any more kindly about the people who caused it.
Further, Marx might have noted that, “enough grain was exported to buy machinery for USSR’s modernization and military buildup that could’ve fed the entire population of Ukraine for nearly two years” during the Holodmor. This fits in with his theories of the “expropriation of the people” being the cause of much misery (in this case, the peasants were expropriated of the right to keep their own harvests from the land) and about how “capital
comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt” (Das Kapital, Volume 1, Chapter 31). The machinery the USSR bought, i.e. the capital, came dropping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt, to use Marx’s colorful anguage, since it was paid for with stolen food, and millions starved as a result. Also in Volume 1 Chapter 31, Marx writes, “The treasures captured outside Europe by undisguised looting, ensl***ment, and murder, floated back to the mother-country and were there turned into capital.” In the Holodomor, the treasure – grain – captured in the Ukraine by undisguised looting and murder floated back to Russian and was there turned into capital (machinery).
source for quote about grain being exported: auburnpub [dot] com/opinion/columnists/balyszak-honor-the-victims-of-the-holodomor/article_ab7821ed-fa22-52ee-9c53-28f4925283ef.html
3. To the extent that soldiers, assassins, etc., can be considered “workers”, it could be argued that all atrocities are committed by “workers” specializing in murder/torture/etc, or in commanding murder/torture/etc. However, these were not the type of workers Marx wrote about. He mostly wrote about oppressed plantation sl***s, farmers, factory workers, and so on. However, it is worth pointing out that the so-called Russian Revolution was not even a genuine revolution — it was a coup d’etat, a capture of the government by a small minority.
As Sean McMeekin writes in “The Russian Revolution: A New History”,
Also, I recall Sean McMeekin writing something about the promise to end the war with Germany being the Bolshievek’s sole claim to popular support, and how they didn’t even manage to keep that promise; however, I can’t find the exact quote for that at the moment. In any case, it’s worth pointing out that the war was very unpopular, and although no truly popular uprising rose to counter it, it did create conditions which made a coup d’etat more likely to succeed.
Furthermore, not only was the so-called “Russian Revolution” not a genuine popular revolution, it was actively resisted by many elements of the working classes.
Sean McMeekin writes,
Thus, although we cannot argue that no workers whatsoever participated in the coup d’etat, it appears that large numbers of workers actually valiantly resisted it. It is therefore senseless to blame “workers” as a class, although some individual Bolshieveks no doubt happened to be workers.
4. It is true that Marx wasn’t a pacifist. Throughout human history, strict pacifists have been a minority — most people, or at least most people whose views have been recorded, are not against a bit of revolution to overthrow what they perceive as an unjust system. For example, the Fourth of July in celebrated annually in the United States, in honor of a violent revolution. Do we call the people who celebrate the Fourth of July “gleefully homicidal”? What about the people who celebrate the US Civil War and the passage of the 13th Amendment? I suppose some people might call such people “gleefully homicidal”. However, I haven’t heard anyone do so. I think it’s because on some level we understand that although the revolutions involved some bloodshed, it’s not as if everything was fine and bloodless beforehand. Oppressive regimes also spill a lot of blood. Many people consider the overthrow of an oppressive regime necessary to stop that blood spillage, even if that overthrow also involves blood spillage. Even Machiavellian pacifists don’t want to stop revolution, just propose a new set of tactics that require less bloodshed.
“YOU ATTACK STRAWMEN!
“I have repeatedly shown you that I oppose the criminalization of homelessness. I’ve repeatedly shown that Marx did as well.”
Do you believe that public schools and police should exist?
Do you believe, as you alluded earlier, that there is such a thing as the “dumping” of cheap goods in the economy that destroys local businesses, and that “dumping” should not be allowed to happen?
Do you believe that homeowners or renters should have the security of knowing that a building’s builders have been forced by law to make sure a building meets certain safety standards?
Do you believe that the natural beauty of nature should be preserved against the destruction involved in the growth of civilization and commerce?
These are all loaded questions? They constitute part of my response.
Guest wrote,
Probably not, and probably not, at least not in their current forms. (And if they were radically different, they probably wouldn’t still be called “public school” or “police”.)
However, I’m not going to go shoot a bunch of people just because I don’t approve of how they are living their lives or am unsure if I approve of how they are living their lives.
Guest wrote,
See, this is one of the times you attacked a strawman.
I had just quoted something from Marx showing how, even under conditions that would not rise to the level of sl***ry as it is conventionally defined, certain immoral employers prefer a more or less captive workforce, and are willing to keep a workforce captive by resorting to governmental means, e.g. prohibiting or placing unreasonable restrictions on emigration.
The exact quote from Marx was:
https://consultingbyrpm.com/blog/2021/05/bob-murphy-triple-play.html#comment-2040672
And then in this comment, you quoted the intro blurb I wrote to Marx’s quote, and your reply included the Tom Woods video about predatory pricing.
consultingbyrpm [dot] com/blog/2021/05/bob-murphy-triple-play.html#comment-2040685
The only relevant thing I could see about the video, was that Tom Woods had for some reason assumed that “cost of production” and “cost of acquisition” were equivalent, and kept saying “cost of production” when he should have been saying “cost of acquisition”.
Selling goods at below the cost of acquisition for a long enough time to wreck other businesses might indeed be very difficult for the reasons he describes. However, he kept saying “cost of production” rather than “cost of acquisition”. It is possible for unethical people to get the “cost of acquisition” to be lower than the “cost of production” utilizing theft and other types of violence. Whether this harms competitors or not is somewhat besides the main point, especially if the competitors are also using unethical methods of acquisition.
The main point is that businesses should not be allowed (i.e., should not be protected from lawsuits) to deliberately sell stolen goods. (And if they accidentally sell stolen goods, they should still be sue-able, but for a lower amount of reparations, just as you still should pay reparations even if you only accidentally cause a traffic accident.)
This has very little to do with holding a workforce captive (preventing or inhibiting emigration), except in so far as that might be a way of getting the cost of acquisition to be lower than the cost of production.
Guest wrote,
I think without the government and/or feudal landlord (same difference, really) artificially increasing the price of land (both when you initially buy the land, and for the entire time you live/work on it, whether this is called “property taxes” or whatever other term), more people would build their own homes, either by themselves or with the help of their family / neighbors. (For this purpose, we can assume a “feudal landlord” is anyone who acquired the land by conquest or other types of theft, or inherited/bought it from someone who acquired the land by conquest or other types of theft, regardless of what label they are called by.)
For example, I have heard that it used to be a tradition in parts of the southwest of what is now the US that, when a couple got married, the members of community would bring them adobe bricks and wedding bricks, and help build an adobe home as part of the wedding celebration. If more people were free to build their own homes, either by themselves or with the help of their families/communities, I think building developers as they currently exist would go out of business, rendering current regulations on them irrelevant.
In Volume 1 Chapter 33 of Das Kapital, Marx discusses how capitalist governments put artificially high prices on land in order to prevent people from easily becoming peasant proprietors, and instead indirectly force them into wage labor, in the sense that they must work as wage laborers for a long time in order to be able to afford their goal of buying land at the artificially high price set by the capitalist government.
Guest wrote,
I believe the allegation that environmentalist, and especially indigenous/peasant environmentalists, are just worried about “the natural beauty of nature”, is a strawman argument that capitalist corporations and government use to justify stealing already-homesteaded land. The beauty is not, in fact, purely natural — around the world, indigenous/peasant communities engage in various forms of stewardship to keep the land useful. The usefulness also happens to correlate to beauty. Then capitalist thieves deny the work that these people’s have done as a way of justifying their right to buy the land from a conquering/dictatorship government or conquer it themselves.
I already provided an example of capitalist thieves doing this in this comment:
consultingbyrpm [dot] com/blog/2021/05/bob-murphy-triple-play.html#comment-2041655
Specifically, I quoted this 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,
Everywhere civilization is built, it is built on theft, bloodshed, forced labor, rape, and torture. The only more or less “free” peoples are the so-called barbarian peoples, and, to the extent that even some barbarian tribes have some rather oppressive internal power structures, only a subset of them are really more or less “free”.
To quote James C. Scott’s “Against the Grain”,
A few things to get out of the way, first.
One, I try to go out of my way to use the words “free market” as opposed to “Capitalism” because Capitalism appears to have had a different meaning to Marx than how it is commonly used today by advocates of free markets.
Free markets are where individuals are free to trade without third party interventions (such as by a State), and to homestead unowned property.
Two, to the extent a central planner is involved, this is not consistent with a free market.
(By definition a central planner is coercive, otherwise the pooling of resources would be based on individual contracts, parties to which could just stop participating after their contract has been fulfilled or just never begin to participate – effectively rendering the planning de-centralized.)
Three, no matter if labor was enslaved or if wage labor was entirely agreed upon by an individual, the following assessment of a laborer’s price on the market is just false:
“The ubiquity of sl***s as a commodity was reflected in the fact that in the classical world a “standardized” sl*** became a unit of measurement: in Athens at one point—the market fluctuated—a pair of working mules was worth three sl***s.”
In this specific example, slavery was used, but the author thinks that it’s relevant that a worker’s value was priced in mules. On this point, he just doesn’t understand economics.
Here’s how I know:
The transportation of material can be done by physical labor or with capital such as trucks.
Does the fact that I can get, say, 100 times more transportation work done with a truck – and therefore, the correlary fact that more profit is earned using one method versus the other – mean that a laborer is being enslaved because his labor can be valued in money terms?
This is ridiculous. It’s a fact of reality that certain methods are more productive than others, and therefore pricing of labor in terms of other goods or money would happen even if nobody was being exploited.
Public schoos and police.
It’s good that you *say* you oppose these, but since you’re a socialist, I don’t believe you.
I’ll point out in the future when you advocate these things “for the public good”.
Anyway, property taxes are how central planners attempt to close a loophole that property owners could use to avoid taxation. If I can do business on my property in secret (in practice, easier said than done because word gets around), then I don’t need to pay for any “societal” projects, such as infrastructure.
IInfrastructure doesn’t need a central planner.)
Dumping of cheap goods.
I hear socialists complaining all the time about how the Walmarts of the world put smaller, Mom and Pop stores out of business, as if the fact that merely offering cheaper goods is a crime that needs to be forcefully prevented.
Again, your specific examples don’t suffice as adequate responses to the free market position on this matter because your examples involve central planning.
And this is another area where I’ll have to just point it out to you, when I see you mention it.
Another reason socialists oppose “dumping” is because if someone has an economy of scale that’s large enough to not use as much labor, well then it will displace laborers in certain lines of production – because they’re not needed for that particular line of production.
So, socialists will say that it’s pro-labor to prohibit “dumping”.
Anyway, what “dumping” also does – besides displace workers in particular lines of production – is it *makes goods cheaper*, benefitting the less wealthy that anti-dumping laws are supposedly concerned about.
So, it doesn’t matter that socialists *think* they’re helping the poor – the laws of economics says they’re *not*.
(What does a worker so displaced do to earn money? Human desires are endless, and so there are job opportunities everywhere when there’s no one telling you what jobs you may or may not take.)
“It is possible for unethical people to get the “cost of acquisition” to be lower than the “cost of production” utilizing theft and other types of violence.”
It is also *impossible* for any production process – including those owned and ran by one person – to be profitable unless its “cost of acquisition” is lower than its “cost of production”, so a lower cost of acquisition, in itself, tells you nothing about whether a business is being exploitive.
Your examples of the sale of stolen goods aren’t relevant, since this is not consistent with free markets.
What socialist fail to realize in their “cost of acquisition” analysis is that since value begins with the ends of the consumer, and that since ends sought by individuals are logically ranked higher in preference than other ends available (and that are not sought after), that means that any effort to satisfy those ends are logically going to rank lower in value than the ends sought.
The value of the ends, therefore, are imputed *backwards* through the production process (Menger’s “Theory of Imputation”), such that all factors and inputs to a production process (including labor) are going to be chosen as inputs *precisely because* the costs of those inputs are viewed as less valuable (or less costly) than the next leg of the production process.
Or, said another way (I credit Joseph Salerno), diamond mines and diamond mining equipment and the physical labor of diamond miners would have zero value unless there was a value for the end product of diamonds.
This is logic. This is not nefarious. Costs of acquisition are always lower than the costs of production, whether exploitation is being used or not. Or else the business would eventually run out of money.
Buildings and safety codes.
You’re right that, without the government, people would build their own homes.
Your feudal landlord examples are irrelevant because they’re not consistent with free markets – free market people don’t defend such practices (talk about straw men).
The reason socialists want there to be building codes is because they say that the poor are the most negatively affected by a lack of building codes.
First of all, safety is a trade-off. If I could afford to live in an indestructible building, I would prefer to live in one. But because eating is more valuable to me than seeking perfect security without risk, I voluntarily choose to live in a building that is destructible in some ways.
So, if you impose building codes, you make it that much more expensive for the poor, the very people building codes are supposed to be helping.
Second, people don’t look at the horrors of poor construction and naturally refuse to learn from these mistakes. So the problem with poor construction would have to be regulations preventing people from making their homes stronger.
Preservation of the natural beauty of nature.
This is actually a thing, and not a strawman. You have people who celebrate “Earth Day” precisely for this reason.
“Save the planet”, “Save the whales”, “Capitalists are destroying the planet”, “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle”, etc. People actually hold these positions.
And the point of socialists advocating these positions is to hinder capital production and accumulation. But since increases in supply are what ultimately make goods less costly, and you need capital to increase production, such advocacy actually hurts the very poor these people think they’re helping by making goods more expensive than they would be in a free market.
To the extent that homesteaded lands are, in fact, stolen, free market advocates don’t support that, so those examples aren’t relevant.
“Everywhere civilization is built, it is built on theft, bloodshed, forced labor, rape, and torture. …”
[You quoting someone else]: “… It would be almost impossible to exaggerate the centrality of bondage, in one form or another, in the development of the state until very recently.”
Civilization doesn’t require a state.
And maybe the reason it has become possible very recently to exaggerate the centrality of bondage is because Westerners – for all of the horrors they have inflicted on the world (along with their non-Western contemporaries and their contemporaries’ ancestors) – finally started to understand the benefits of free markets:
Facts About SLAVERY They Don’t Teach You at School
[www]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6nuVhEdAgOY
“Although intellectuals, today, may condemn slavery as a historic evil of our society, what was peculiar about western society was not that it had slaves – like other societies around the works – but that it was the first civilization to turn against slavery.”
– Thomas Sowell
“Probably not, and probably not, at least not in their current forms.”
I responded to that post some time ago.
Just waiting for the comment to be approved.
Guest wrote,
Regardless of what the unapproved comment says, you’ve shown down below, with your persistent use of statements starting with
“You, yourself, literally believe” or “you believe” or similar wording, followed with completely made-up summaries of my alleged beliefs, that you have NO INTENTION WHATSOEVER TO CEASE AND DESIST STRAWMANNING ME, so my reply down there should suffice.
https://consultingbyrpm.com/blog/2021/07/catching-up-on-the-podcast-murphy-triple-play.html#comment-2045699
I am exhausted from reading and replying to Guest’s comments, because he repeatedly, knowingly, and deliberately STRAWMANS me, and attempts to correct the strawman arguments on my part seem to have had little or no effect, and he just keeps making the strawman arguments. Because attempting to correct the barrage of strawman arguments has proven to be a waste of my time and energy, I am simply writing this generic response so that other readers can know not to believe anything Guest says about what I believe, unless they hear it from me directly.
“Regardless of what the unapproved comment says, you’ve shown down below … that you have NO INTENTION WHATSOEVER TO CEASE AND DESIST STRAWMANNING ME, so my reply down there should suffice.”
By the way, that unapproved comment was finally approved, and here’s the link:
Catching up on the Podcast: Murphy Quintuple Play
[www]https://consultingbyrpm.com/blog/2021/07/catching-up-on-the-podcast-murphy-triple-play.html#comment-2044492
(Also, nobody’s strawmanning you.)
Note to other readers: Guest has been KNOWINGLY, DELIBERATELY, and PERSISTENTLY STRAWMANNING ME. I therefore ask that you not believe anything he says or implies about my beliefs, unless you hear it from me directly.
Thus, I am no longer interested in debating Guest, for the same reason I wouldn’t want to continue to play chess with someone who repeatedly insisted on making my moves for me, falsely claimed to be countering my actual moves, and claimed I was the one being misleading when I tried to correct that person and say I hadn’t actually made the moves he said I did.
However, I am aware that the purpose of strawmanning is to effectively silence a person from getting their views across to an audience, by convincing the audience that the person actually has the views that the strawmanner says they do, rather than the person’s real views.
Therefore, I am leaving this standardized response to Guest’s comments from now on, so as to warn readers that Guest is not a reliable source of information about my views. However, it is not a specific response to anything he has written above, which I don’t consider worth my time to read or respond to, based on his past dishonest behavior.
For further details, see:
https://consultingbyrpm.com/blog/2021/07/catching-up-on-the-podcast-murphy-triple-play.html#comment-2045761
as well as the comment right after it.
According to tvtropes dot org,
tvtropes [dot] org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/StrawmanFallacy
My point is that I gave you a very specific example: worker goes out, finds a piece of unused land, and plants a garden, because he wants to “earn the land”. Thieving capitalist comes along, alleges that he has legal title to the garden that the worker planted, and offers to pay the worker to harvest “his” crops. Since the worker doesn’t want to fight for his land (and, given the political situation in Brazil, could not reasonably hope to be able to do so in any case), he accepts this and is transformed, against his will, into a wage laborer. However, it is not 100% against his will in the same way that sl***ry is: he could still *leave* if he wanted to. But his rights as a peasant proprietor to work for himself and sell his crops to whomever he chooses aren’t respected. Because this is an obvious injustice, but I don’t want to conflate the problem with sl***ry, a worse crime, I call it exploitation. (However, things get worse for the worker, and he is tricked into sl***ry later in his story.)
Then, rather than read the example I provided, you proceeded to pretend that I was talking about a situation where the capitalist had planted a garden with his own labor, and then hired an employee to tend to and/or harvest it, and attack that strawman accordingly.
Now I’m not sure how much of what you wrote to reply to, because trying to argue with someone who is distracted by attacking a strawman is tiresome. I feel superfluous. Like if you want to argue with the strawman, you don’t actually need me here.
Also, the thief in that case was motivated by the desire to claim a monopoly on the right to buy the products of the worker’s labor, i.e. to deprive him of the right to sell the products of his labor on a competitive market, i.e. to make him a wage laborer. The thief was to blame, along with the corrupt Brazilian political system that enabled him, but the concept of forcing “wage labor” on someone was the motive.
1. There are many different kinds of socialists, just as there are many different kinds of feminists. You can see that there are some feminists who focus primarily on fighting the worst abuses of the patriarchy, such as rape, “marry your rapist” laws, so-called “honor killing” of women who marry the man they love instead of who their father tells them to marry, and so on. And then there are others who seem more interested in the wage gap (real or alleged) in the US workplaces. Likewise, there are many different kinds of socialists.
Unfortunately, however, a lot of people don’t apply any sort of basic sanity check to the term “socialist”. If people applied no basic sanity check to the term “feminist”, than a serial rapist could run around declaring that because he was allegedly raping women “for their own good”, he was a feminist. He might even go so far as to declare that women have a “right” to be raped. However, this would not pass any sort of basic sanity check. No self respecting feminist should accept this man as a fellow feminist.
However, for some strange reason, people consider it perfectly acceptable to avoid applying any sort of sanity check to the terms “socialist” or “communist”. Thus Stalin is called a “communist”. However, this makes about as much sense as calling a guy who organized a rape gang that raped millions of women a “feminist”. Or, to use another example, it makes as much sense as calling King Leopold II an abolitionist.
I believe the CIA may be partially to blame for this. The seem to know the real definition of the terms, more or less, when they label anti-sl***ry and land reform movements as communist (though they should probably say “socialist” instead, but whatever). But they’re counting on a public perception that a “communist” is someone like Stalin, and quite possibly have done a lot to encourage that public perception, so they can get away with suppressing anti-sl***ry and land reform movements with extreme prejudice, e.g. in the case of the Guatemalan genocide.
2. Wage labor can’t be fully free unless the wage laborer has the full, free choice to be a peasant proprietor instead, and, through informed consent, genuinely decides that he or she would rather be a wage laborer. Furthermore, for this to occur in the context of a truly free culture, the wage laborer cannot be paid in stolen goods. (E.g. As an obvious example, if a soldier is paid a “wage” out of goods obtained in the process of looting and pillaging, this has obvious moral problems, even if the soldier himself is happy with it.)
If you live in the United States, what do you think would happen to you if you went out, found a piece of unused land, and tried to build a house and plant a garden on it?
In the United States, there was a homeless guy who tried this — at least the house-building part, I don’t know about planting the garden. (Well, probably many homeless people have tried it, but I’m citing a particular example.)
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/mar/14/homeless-self-built-homes
Okay, so this guy built his own home. But, rather than say “yay for you, here’s a legal title to formally commemorate your achievement, and don’t worry about paying property tax, we know you can’t afford it”, the police are going to evict him. (Or, since that was written years ago, I presume they already have by now.) And those police are probably more generous than a lot of police in the US — many probably would have evicted him immediately. (Perhaps the police in this particular story didn’t feel morally right about evicting this person from the house he built in the winter, and decided to delay their law enforcement action until spring.)
There’s a lot of police in the US who deliberately slash the tents of houseless people with knives. I truly believe that if the rights of houseless people to become peasant proprietors were respected, a lot more of them would build their own houses.
But that’s not what your supposed to do in the US. You’re supposed to get a job, pay rent (which has property taxes included in it), save up to buy a house if you want to, get a mortgage, pay off the mortgage (and property tax at the same time), and keep paying the property tax even after paying off the mortgage. This artificial need for money, created by evicting people who try to build their own houses, acts as an indirect coercive measure to force people to become wage laborers. However, because it is indirect, and people are technically free to be homeless if they want to, at least in certain parts of the country, it doesn’t rise to the level of sl***ry. Also note that, while many employers, especially large employers, do arguably benefit from this, in so far as it makes people more likely to accept wage labor, many employers, especially smaller employers, are arguably in a similar position: they too must earn money to pay for their homes, even if they’d rather not. Thus, the situation is exploitative, but individual employers may or may not be to blame, and may, in some cases, themselves be exploited too. (If we wanted to judge an individual employer, we might check if they were paying politicians, or “lobbying”, to enforce coercive policies, such as evicting homeless people who try to build homes. We might also look for command responsibility issues, e.g. if they are knowingly ensl**ing African children.)
The prevalence of sl**e-made goods, and other goods acquired by means of theft, on the market is also a problem: it means that at least some of the incentives being offered to wage laborers in the United States are stolen incentives (often stolen from people living in third world countries). Thus, even if some people are happy with this, it poses a similar moral problem to the aforementioned soldier being paid with stolen goods obtained in the process of looting in pillaging.
Random, there was an interesting series on radio $ (UK) about connections from slavery to current day.Link here, I don’t know if it will work for you
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000wdgh/episodes/player
One example was Chidi, a descendant of an African trader who traded slaves and palm oil. This tied into Lord Leverhulme (of Lever) a well known philantropist who built Port Sunlight. He also utilised appropriation of lands in Belgium Congo as you describe above to obtain his palm oil. A school he founded in Bolton has had the opportunity to re-examine the legacy of their hero. The pupils recognise both his forward thinking reforms, but also the darker side.
Anyway, I found it very interesting and it seems up your street. Of course, everyone else as well.
This looks like a very interesting series. The link does work: the BBC website just wanted me to register an account, and now I can listen to the series.
I still need to finish listening to the series, but these seem to be excellent examples of how wealth stolen by the most brutal means in the past continues to be present in wealthier countries.
Lord Leverhulme utilized a combination of land appropriation and outright forced labor. (Basically, having bought the stolen land from the Belgian colonial government, he believed he had the right to force the people to work the land for him. This, of course, is a very simplified summary. Jules Marchal discusses the matter in great detail in the book Lord Leverhulme’s Ghosts.)
It should be noted that wealth from past theft is not the only problem. The massive theft regimes continue in the present day in new and terrible forms.
Al Jazeera has a good docuseries, “Sl***ry: A 21st Century Evil”
Should be the first search result here:
https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aaljazeera.com+a+21st+century+evil
Or if you’d rather read a text document, Longreads has an article, “Your Phone Was Made By Sl***s: A Primer on the Secret Economy”
Which should be the first search result here:
google [dot] com/search?q=site%3Alongreads.com+your+phone+was+made+by
I was just getting to the part where Deadria Farmer-Paellmann was talking about tracing the wealth looted by ensl***rs to companies that still exist.
I wish there was a transcript I could quote directly, but it was in this episode:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p09jjqk1
Yes! You go Deadria Farmer-Paellmann! Those companies should pay those reparations!
(As should the companies that are *still* using forced labour.)
Overall, a very excellent radio series!
There were, however, a couple problems that stood out:
1. In the “James Cleverly MP and Deadria Farmer-Paellmann” episode, one of the corporate representatives, presumably a lawyer, arguing against reparations said that the last sl*** had died in [some year]. I don’t recall the exact year he gave, but whatever it was, it was blatantly false, and someone should have called him out on it, because there are an estimated 40.3 million people in sl***ry as of 2016, according to the Global Sl***ry Index. Although the exact figure is disputed, multiple people and organizations studying the matter clearly agree that the figure is in the millions, if not higher. More people are being ens***ed every day! So it is ridiculous to speak of any “last sl***” dying in any year, except perhaps in the future, if you want to make predictions.
This error in particular drives me nuts, since how can would-be abolitionists help fight against sl***ry if they mistakenly believe it has already been abolished?
Also, it would be interesting to investigate if corporations who got rich off of past sl***ry were continuing to invest in modern sl***ry. (I believe in many cases, especially banks, the answer is yes, but for obvious reasons, the question would need to be answered on a case by case basis.)
2. In the episode about Lord Leverhulme, they admitted that he used forced labor, but insisted several times that it wasn’t sl***ry. I believe the only way they could reach this conclusion is if they were using an obscenely narrow definition of the word sl***ry. I understand that part of why people do this, is because the transatlantic sl*** trade, and the hereditary racial sl***ry resulting from it, were so incredibly horrible, that people are reluctant to label other types of forced labor as sl***ry if it doesn’t match hereditary racial sl***ry very very closely.
However, I believe this is a mistake. And I’m apparently not the only one, because the international legal definition of sl***ry backs me on this one.
According to the 1926 Sl***ry Convention, which is international law,
https://legal.un.org/avl/ha/sc/sc.html
The UN document linked above also clarifies that,
and also,
Okay, so, even if it was a very different kind of forced labor from what happened as a result of the transatlantic sl*** trade to the Americas, it still met the international legal definition of sl***ry, so long as “control tantamount to possession” was established.
I believe it is important not to define sl***ry in an excessively narrow way, lest we let ensl***rs off the hook just because they implement a few reforms. While such reforms may be part of a gradual abolition process, sl***ry should not be said to be abolished until “control tantamount to possession” is no longer present. Even then, other forms of exploitation may persist — the abolition of sl***ry, i.e. of control tantamount to possession over workers — does not mean that workers have gained full freedom — i.e. they may still be controlled in unethical ways that do not rise to the level of tantamount to possession.
In the book “Lord Leverhulme’s Ghosts”, Jules Marchal documents that the “Huileries du Congo Beige” (HCB), Lord Leverhulme’s company on the Belgian Congo, requested a military outpost in the Lusanga region to help them with their forced labor recruitment as early as 1912.
There is evidence of resistance to the forced recruitment going back at least as far as 1914. Jules Marchal gives the following examples:
The volleys of arrows are a fairly clear indication that the Africans in this region did not consent to work for Lord Leverhulme’s company, even if he did pay wages. The presence of wages don’t mean that it wasn’t sl***ry, just as a transaction can still be theft even if the thief leaves payment behind.
(Imagine, for example, that you quarried some alabaster, carved it into a statue, and intended to sell the statue for $100. Then some thief steals the statue and leaves you $3. It’s still theft, even though he left you $3. Likewise, a situation can still be sl***ry, even if a wage is paid. The point is that it is coerced, and that the coercion rises to the level of “control tantamount to possession”, regardless of whether a wage is paid.)
Military outposts were established to repress such resistance against the forced labor recruitment. However, the was some struggle over this — it appears that at certain times, some military outposts believed they were there to actually enforce law (which included tax collection, so let’s not pretend they were innocent, even if they weren’t fully cooperating with the companies), and not just carry out forced labor recruitment, causing the HCB to complain.
However, it seems that the Belgian colonial government was at times reluctant to grant this request, so the HCB simply hired their own private forced labor recruiting military personnel.
It seems that this was in response to World War I: the Belgian colonial government had previously been helping more with forced labor recruitment, but scaled back its efforts due to World War I. (Not that this actually stopped the forced labor recruitment from happening, since, as you can see above, the HCB simply hired their own forced labor recruiting military personnel. Hence people who say that sl***ry can’t exist without state assistance are clearly wrong. Sl***rs may *prefer* state assistance, but they are capable of arranging their own coercion even without it.)
And there you see a portion of the Bula Matari’s role in the matter, when they chose to help in ensl***rs — to compel people to accept wage labor by means of requiring them to earn money to pay taxes.
Accepting wage labor *only* out of fear of unjust tax collection is not voluntary labor. That is forced labor. The tax is essentially the fee that Bula Matari expects in return for their role in forced labor recruitment.
Bula Matari did attempt to regulate the sl***ry, that is, to demand that Lord Leverhulme and other ensl***rs treat workers with a certain minimal amount of humanity, such as supplying food and whatnot. These regulations seem to have been largely ignored, but attempts at enforcing them has left some documentation of the situation.
For example, in the 1923 Lejeune report, Dr. Emile Lejeune noted workers not being given blankets and subsequently dying of respiratory illness.
When you force someone to work in such bad conditions that they die of respiratory illness as a result, this is murder, in my opinion. Thus, Lord Leverhulme was a mass murderer. Also, this information is evidence that the situation rose to the level of sl***ry,
According to the Bellagio-Harvard guidelines,
Lejeune also noted that the workers were only being given one meal per day, and not on Sundays, so only 6 meals per week.
And also Lejeune wrote,
Some very delusional people sometimes claim that sl***ry isn’t that bad because at least sl***s are “guaranteed” food, housing, etc., but as we can see from the Lejeune report, this is clearly false. Lord Leverhulme’s company provided so little food, that the families/communities of the workers felt the need to donate food to their ensl***d kindred! The people back home were, in a sense, indirectly ens***d. By holding their family/friends hostage, and failing to provide proper food, Lord Leverhulme’s company forced this people to work to provide food for them (on threat of watching their loved ones starve to death instead).
Of the housing conditions, Lejuene writes,
Lejenue also notes that children were not spared from the forced labor.
These are pretty terrible conditions. It is no wonder Lord Leverhulme’s company had to used forced recruitment to get workers — no sane person would want to work in such conditions.
Also, as we can tell from this quote from Ryckmans (as quoted by Jules Marchal in Lord Leverhulme’s Ghosts), the workers were subjected to whipping. Jules Marchal tells us that this was part of Ryckmans’ correspondence to his wife regarding the Leverville area.
Alright, so, Ryckmans was clearly pro-sl***ry. The chicotte was a type of whip, so he’s admitting here that workers were whipped into submission.
Although Ryckmans was pro-sl***ry, this didn’t stop him from criticizing the HCB’s quota system in a 1931 report, which he wrote along with two others. Apparently, the HCB failed to vary the quota throughout the year based on the productivity of the palm trees. This lead apparently lead to natives being punished to failing to harvest non-existant fruit, during the times of year when there was little if any palm fruit to be found.
In my opinion, Lord Leverhulme was clearly guilty of being a mass murderer and an ensl***r, using the international legal definition of sl***ry, even if it was a very different form of sl***ry than what we saw resulting from the transatlantic sl*** trade.
To: Harold
In one of the episodes, one of the people from Jamaica discovered he had some Irish ancestry.
I really wish there was like a transcript I could easily pull quotes from. But anyway…
This got me wondering about how the Irish came to be in Jamaica, and I found this on the internet:
https://irishamerica.com/2018/05/slainte-mon-the-irish-of-jamaica/
And also, from an article about the Irish in the Caribbean more generically,
historyireland [com] com/early-modern-history-1500-1700/shipped-for-the-barbadoes-cromwell-and-irish-migration-to-the-caribbean/
A huge tragedy that this happened, of course, but it is uplifting to reach about the solidarity between the ensl***d Irish and the ensl***d black people.
Murray Rothbard also endorsed the concept of worker-owned companies, in certain cases, even though he self-identified as an anarcho-capitalist.
— Murray Rothbard, The Libertarian Forum Vol. 1, No. 6, June 15, 1969
https://mises.org/library/complete-libertarian-forum-1969-1984
I think if he’d been Guatemalan, instead of American, the CIA might have called him a crypto-communist and killed him and his neighbors.
Randomperson:
continued from past thread, re: Marx empiricist or purveyor of axiomatic system?
Here’s the nail in the coffin to the notion that Marx arrived at his conclusions ’empirically’:
Marx wrote to Engels that he has just forecast something in his column for the New York Tribune. He adds cynically and revealingly:
Since the ‘dialectic’ allegedly means that the world and human society consist of conflicting or ‘contradictory’ tendencies side by side or even within the same set of circumstances, any prediction can then be justified as the result of one’s deep insight into whichever part of the contradictory dialectic might be prevailing at any given time.
Since either A or non-A can occur, Marx and his followers could always safely hedge their bets so that no prediction of theirs can ever be falsified.
And what do we call a non-falsifiable system?
AXIOMATIC.
QED.
If that’s an axiom, so is the statement, “I don’t know.” Is someone who says, “I don’t know” safely hedging their bets so that no one can prove their statement false? Or are they simply being humble with respect to their knowledge on the topic in question?
If a weatherman says, “I predict an 82% chance of rain tomorrow in this town,” is he “safely hedging” his bet so that even if there’s no rain, he can’t be proven “false”, because after all, he did admit there was an 18% chance of no rain? Or is he simply acknowledging that, not being God, he can’t be 100% certain about these things, and therefore is expressing the level of confidence that he does have?
If a doctor prescribes you a medication, and when you get the prescription filled at the pharmacy, there’s a list of potential side effects, is the pharmacy trying to “safely hedge” their bets by trying to list all the possible outcomes you might experience from taking the medication, so that you can prove their predictions “false”, or are they simply acknowledging that, not being God, they can’t be certain whether the medication will have the desired effect or not, and therefore, in the interests of informed consent, they need to warn you of the potential for things to go wrong?
RansomPerson:
This reply is totally left field.
It’s not left field. It’s sensible field. Your own summary was “either A or non-A can occur”.
If I say, “either A or non-A can occur”, that’s just a fancy longwinded way of saying “I don’t know if A will occur,” or, to use the abbreviated form “I don’t know.”
It’s true that “I don’t know” is a difficult statement to prove false. (What are you going to do? Read someone mind telepathically and say, “NO, YOU DO KNOW, YOU ARE 100% CERTAIN!”???) But it’s not much of an axiom. It’s more a statement of humility.
Von Mises also correctly saw Marx’s entire system as axiomatic, not empirical:
“We may summarize the Marxian doctrine in this way: In the beginning there are the ‘material productive forces’, i.e., the technological equipment of human productive efforts, the tools and machines. No question concerning their origin is permitted; they are, that is all; we must assume that they are dropped from heaven.”
Marx himself wrote on numerous occasions that politics, religion, production relations, wage labor, law, even the contents of the human mind were all ‘superstructure’ phenomena, all being driven by ‘material productive forces’ (which Marx never made clear what exactly he meant by it, but inferring into it we could say he meant technology) in a monocausal logic.
If you don’t want to accept ‘wage labor is exploitation’ as an axiom in Marx’s system, fine, but there is absolutely no denying that ‘material productive forces’ is an axiom in Marx’s system, and since everything else, including wage labor, are all driven by the supposed reality of that axiom, this is yet another proof that Marx’s system is axiomatic plus rules of inference.
If that’s what von Mises wrote, then he attacked a giant strawman — his characterization of Marx’s position is about as incorrect as I can imagine.
Marx spent chapters writing about the origin of technological equipment and other capital. To quote a brief sample from Das Kapital, Volume 1, Chapter 31,
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch31.htm
If von Mises wished to engage in good faith debate with Marx’s work, he could have acknowledged that Marx did indeed look into the origins of technological equipment, and quibbled with Marx about either the reliability of the sources of his information, or his interpretation of those sources. Instead, if your quote is correct, he simply strawmanned Marx and pretended Marx had never made the argument at all.
(I looked up your quote, and it appears to be from Theory and History: An Interpretation of Social and Economic Evolution by Ludwig von Mises.)
Random Person:
“If that’s what von Mises wrote, then he attacked a giant strawman — his characterization of Marx’s position is about as incorrect as I can imagine.”
Serious question: Is using such extreme verbiage serving as a cover for an inability or unwillingness to engage what Mises was in fact describing in Marx’s system because it contradicts what you think you know about what Marx wrote?
To just knee jerk and claim Mises, one of the greatest minds ever, was attacking a giant straw man, shows that your understanding of Marxism is so engrained that it’s almost betraying a sensitivity to being proved wrong about it, even if it means straw manning Mises claiming he straw manned Marx!
A sort of “how dare he!” outrage?
You’ve only quoted out of Das Kapital, which is unfortunate because Marx’s logic and methodological approach to observation was already established years before he started writing a single word in Kapital. It is Marx’s logic that Mises was addressing, not the observation of people making equipment.
Take a deep breath.
The passage you quoted from Das Kapital has zero bearing on the argument Mises made.
You have to step back and think higher level. Mises was addressing Marx’s view of the ORIGINATION/SOURCE of that which makes possible the existence equipment being produced in the way it is the first place. Does that clarify?
Marx DENIED that ‘material productive forces’ ORIGINATES with HUMAN THOUGHT.
Individual human beings to Marx were just the carriers, a ‘means’ to the end of a historical process that has its own destiny, where the only space for ‘choice’ is the proletariat class acquiring ‘consciousness’ of its alleged historical ‘purpose’.
Apologies for using all caps in some of the passages above but I wanted to put emphasis on the words that I hope will clue you in to what Mises was in fact talking about in describing Marx’s view on how it all becomes possible for there to even be ‘equipment’ in the first place.
To Marx, real people are effectively ‘vassals’ who not by their own account physically ‘manifest’ all the production relations driven by the philosophical concept of ‘material productive forces’.
There is a reason Marx used the (German equivalent) word ‘forces’, and NOT ‘human ingenuity’, or ‘human invention’, or ‘ideas’. Marx bitterly attacked his contemporaries, particularly in The German Ideology, for daring to suggest that human ideas are driving human actions. Oh no, to Marx. To Marx it was the other way around, that material productive forces determine human ideas.
Marx ‘inverted’ Hegel all the way top to bottom. Anything to do with mind, ideas, spirit, these were all to Marx a ‘symptom’ of weak German philosophy. He went so far as to deny its existence even in human individuals! There was no room for ‘ideas’ as original motive force anywhere in Marx’s system because to Marx any admission of such would be, using Marx’s parlance, a ‘false consciousness’.
That is why Mises wrote that to Marx, ‘it all begins with’ material productive forces.
Mises’ position was that technology doesn’t just come out of nowhere like Marx’s system had it, but was driven by human intelligence.
Marx believed the opposite, that it was the material productive forces that determine human ‘ideas’.
Go back and read that passage you quoted from Kapital again and UNDERSTAND it as written by an author who is ‘seeing’ people creating equipment not because their minds are driving it, but because the datum of ‘material productive forces’ inherent in the fabric of reality as driving them to do it.
The ‘greedy capitalists’ are doing what they’re doing because the ‘material productive forces’ are compelling them to do it.
The ‘hapless proletariat’ are doing what they’re doing because the ‘material productive forces’ are compelling them to do it.
The ‘dialectic’ is a mystic force that will allegedly drive all human society to the cusp of a bloody revolution, a dictatorial state that maximizes depravity and lust, after which communist utopia is supposed to just happen on its own.
This is why Marx wrote ‘I’ll just use a little dialectic’ when making his predictions.
Your response to that other post with “so is I don’t know”, certainly did not apply to Marx according to Marx. According to Marx, Marx knew where human history would lead and where it would end, in communism.
You won’t be able to understand what Marx meant when he wrote Kapital unless you know his prior writings.
Have you read anything from Marx other than Kapital which was Marx’s attempt to ‘critique’ capitalism USING his already established logic developed years prior?
You wrote: “Marx spent chapters writing about the origin of technological equipment”
The ENTIRE passage you quoted has exactly zero sentences that explain the ORIGIN of even the existence of technology, or the greedy capitalists and hapless proletariats.
Remember, Marx was a God denying atheist. The ‘datum’ driving EVERYTHING HE SAW was this ‘material productive forces’. These ‘forces’ are allegedly responsible for the existence of ‘class conflict’, of ‘capital’, of ‘capitalists’, of ‘prolaterians’, and of the entire ‘super-structure’.
THAT is why Mises wrote ‘We may summarize the Marxian doctrine in this way: In the beginning there are the ‘material productive forces’.
It’s no straw man, Mises just knew Marx way better than a person who seems to have only read Kapital.
Your response to the other post about axioms, poo pooing it and deflecting to ‘If that is an axiom then so is…’ wasn’t directly engaging the claim that Marx’s system was a formal system of axioms and rules of inference at all, it was a total deflection. Too bad.
To understand Marx, you need to read the 1844 manuscripts, The German Ideology, Theses On Feuerbach, and The Poverty of Philosophy, at least. It is in these writings that ‘mature’ Marxism was fully developed, and it was using all the logical categories and philosophy there that he then ‘saw’ what he ‘saw’ when writing Kapital.
Major_Freedom wrote,
Mises was most certainly not one of the greatest minds ever. While he may have had useful insights on some topics, this unfortunately did not extend to the topic of colonialism.
For example, in Liberalism in the Classical Tradition, Mises made the extremely ignorant claim that,
Google informs me that the book was published in 1927 (although maybe not in English at that time). In 1927, the Belgian Congo was suffering under a brutal, murderous forced labor regime, so it is blatantly incorrect to state that, without exception, raw materials were carried out of Africa after mutually beneficial voluntary exchange. (Also, the Congo was far from the only place where forced labor was imposed, but it is among the best documented.) Interestingly, Mises mentions the Belgian Congo, but doesn’t seem to grasp the implications,
Mises wrote,
Now, perhaps Mises was probably the victim of a propaganda campaign. The Belgians put a good deal of effort into their propaganda.
However, the books by Jules Marchal, for example, Forced Labor in the Gold and Copper Mines, and Lord Leverhulme’s Ghosts, make it quite clear that the Belgians were systematically bringing forced labor, torture, rape, and death to the Congo, and, while there were a few dissidents (including, perhaps, the “trustworthy correspondents” Mises mentions), the horrors were not merely the excesses of a few specific functionaries acting against the overall plan. Forced labor was the overall plan.
While I can acknowledge that Mises was a victim of propaganda, and not the sort of person likely to deliberately deny the forced labor regime in the Congo if he had had the benefit of being able to read the books that Jules Marchal published only decades after the fact, if he were “one of the greatest minds ever”, then he should have been much less susceptible to propaganda. And even though Jules Marchal had not yet written his books, still, Mises could have picked up Red Rubber by Edmund Dene Morel, which was published well before 1927. It would not have told him all of the information about the brutality of colonialism that is now published, but it would have told him enough that he should have at least qualified his statement to be something like, “These raw materials not always taken from the natives of these areas by force. They are not always carried away as tribute, but are sometimes handed over in voluntary exchange for the industrial products of Europe.” rather than “These raw materials are not taken from the natives of these areas by force. They are not carried away as tribute, but handed over in voluntary exchange for the industrial products of Europe.” Dispute might then be had over what exactly is meant by “not always” and “sometimes” and just how often these “voluntary” exchanges occurred relative to the involuntary ones. (In the Congo, the answer would be: not often. Not often at all.)
Major_Freedom wrote,
That is blatantly false. I already quoted one of the 1844 manuscripts down here, when I previously addressed your ridiculous claim that “Marx enunciated his entire philosophical view of labor well before he wrote a single word of Kapital.”
https://consultingbyrpm.com/blog/2021/07/catching-up-on-the-podcast-murphy-triple-play.html#comment-2042999
If you can’t be bothered to read it, the summary is, if Marx had “his entire philosophical view of labor” all worked out “well before” (well before, meaning, in 1844, if I understand you correctly?) he wrote a single word of Das Kapital, and thenceforth refused to change his mind about anything, then I shouldn’t find anything in these 1844 manuscripts that contradicts his views as expressed in Das Kapital. But I did find a contradiction between the 1844 manuscripts and Das Kapital. It didn’t even take that long. I’d probably find more contradictions if I spent more time on it. Marx had clearly changed his mind based on his study of history.
If you continue to focus on his 1844 manuscripts, and neglect Das Kapital, and act as if his views were already set in stone in 1844, then you are doomed to continue strawmanning Marx.
Mar
It has everything to do with it. Mises alleged that according to Marx, “No question concerning their origin [the origin of tools and machines] is permitted; they are, that is all; we must assume that they are dropped from heaven.”
Marx does not assume they drop from heaven. He literally quotes Fielden saying “the newly-invented machinery”. Fielden, as quoted by Marx, then goes on to describe how this “newly-invented machinery” was, in this particular example, worked by ensl***d children:
Marx doesn’t *focus* on the invention part, because it is of far less interest to him than the problem of ensl***d children being forced to work with the machines. But he doesn’t deny that there was an invention. There is a difference between not focusing on invention, but acknowledging that it happened, and simply assuming that the machines dropped from heaven.
Major_Freedom wrote,
Good god, you strawman me just as Mises strawmanned Marx. I ALREADY looked over the 1844 manuscripts, as per your earlier suggestions, and reached the conclusion that they did not hold up to your earlier claim.
Here is the link again:
consultingbyrpm [dot] com/blog/2021/07/catching-up-on-the-podcast-murphy-triple-play.html#comment-2042999
Rather than address my argument, you just pretend I didn’t write it at all, just as, rather than address Marx’s discussion on the origins of machinery, Mises pretended that Marx didn’t discuss it at all.
I even quoted you a relevant passage where Marx discussed the origins of machinery. Rather than acknowledge that I did so, you continued strawmanning Marx, and proceeded to describe Marx’s views in a way that was directly contradicted by the passage in question. You are an unrepentant strawmanner.
Do you also intend to continue pretending as if I didn’t write this comment?
consultingbyrpm [dot] com/blog/2021/07/catching-up-on-the-podcast-murphy-triple-play.html#comment-2042999
“Now, perhaps Mises was probably the victim of a propaganda campaign. The Belgians put a good deal of effort into their propaganda.”
From that same chapter you quoted:
Books / Digital Text
[Liberalism: In the Classical Tradition; 3. Liberal Foreign Policy; 6. Colonial Policy]
[www]https://mises.org/library/liberalism-classical-tradition/html/p/43
“The considerations and objectives that have guided the colonial policy of the European powers since the age of the great discoveries stand in the sharpest contrast to all the principles of liberalism. The basic idea of colonial policy was to take advantage of the military superiority of the white race over the members of other races. The Europeans set out, equipped with all the weapons and contrivances that their civilization placed at their disposal, to subjugate weaker peoples, to rob them of their property, and to enslave them. Attempts have been made to extenuate and gloss over the true motive of colonial policy with the excuse that its sole object was to make it possible for primitive peoples to share in the blessings of European civilization. Even assuming that this was the real objective of the governments that sent out conquerors to distant parts of the world, the liberal could still not see any adequate basis for regarding this kind of colonization as useful or beneficial. If, as we believe, European civilization really is superior to that of the primitive tribes of Africa or to the civilizations of Asia—estimable though the latter may be in their own way—it should be able to prove its superiority by inspiring these peoples to adopt it of their own accord. Could there be a more doleful proof of the sterility of European civilization than that it can be spread by no other means than fire and sword?”
Maybe Mises was being more nuanced in your quote than you realized.
Let’s go back and read some context.
Note to other readers: Guest has been KNOWINGLY, DELIBERATELY, and PERSISTENTLY STRAWMANNING ME. I therefore ask that you not believe anything he says or implies about my beliefs, unless you hear it from me directly.
Thus, I am no longer interested in debating Guest, for the same reason I wouldn’t want to continue to play chess with someone who repeatedly insisted on making my moves for me, falsely claimed to be countering my actual moves, and claimed I was the one being misleading when I tried to correct that person and say I hadn’t actually made the moves he said I did.
However, I am aware that the purpose of strawmanning is to effectively silence a person from getting their views across to an audience, by convincing the audience that the person actually has the views that the strawmanner says they do, rather than the person’s real views.
Therefore, I am leaving this standardized response to Guest’s comments from now on, so as to warn readers that Guest is not a reliable source of information about my views. However, it is not a specific response to anything he has written above, which I don’t consider worth my time to read or respond to, based on his past dishonest behavior.
For further details, see:
https://consultingbyrpm.com/blog/2021/07/catching-up-on-the-podcast-murphy-triple-play.html#comment-2045761
as well as the comment right after it.
Matthew Holzapfel wrote on Quora,
“Why do you think people are tempted to use the straw man fallacy in disagreements on moral issues? How do you feel when someone uses this fallacy against you?”
Well, this is a two-parter question, so I’ll give it a two-part answer.
“Why do you think people are tempted to use strawman fallacies…”
This is an easy one, with many reasons, and isn’t restricted to moral issues:
Because it’s easier to take down someone’s position if you make it easier to take down.
“Bonus points” if you target something unrelated, or something the other side explicitly rejected.
Overt generalizations can create weaknesses that’re easy to attack. Compare “head astronomer says the Earth is pear-shaped” to “astronomer shows how the Earth is not a perfect sphere due to gravitational pull and centrifical forces.”
It forces the other side to waste their time (in a formal debate structure, at least) correcting the record.
It’s an easy way for one side to shut down a conversation, then claiming victory when no-one wants to constantly correct you.
It also earns quick points from people who’ve already subscribed to your side of an argument, and are looking for cheap validation.
Now, for the second part:
“How do you feel when someone uses this fallacy against you?”
I’m not someone who’s had experience in a formal debate with this (or any discussion offline, at least), but I find it annoying when someone brings out, and infuriating when they do so after being corrected.
quora [dot] com/What-is-the-psychology-behind-the-straw-man-fallacy
“Remember, Marx was a God denying atheist.”
Is this significant?
It’s a commonly held view, but it’s disputed.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/9781119119302.ch3
He wrote some rather negative things about religion, but I’ve known people who definitely believed in God and yet insisted to me that they were “spiritual, not religious”, and proceeded to explain that spirituality and religion aren’t the same thing (in their view).
What I gather from this is that, since, from some perspectives, religion and spirituality aren’t the same thing, and a person can have a “spiritual” belief in God without believing in any religion, and a critique of religion, even a fairly negative critique, is not necessarily an allegation that God definitively does not exist.
Also, Das Kapital reads more like what an independently-minded Christian might write, that is a Christian who has his or her own interpretation of the Bible and doesn’t rely on any particular church organization to tell him or her how to interpret the Bible. (Or what Catholics might call a “heretical Christian”.)
There’s a footnote in Das Kapital Volume 1 where he cites a Children’s Employment Commission Report from 1866, and apparently some of the children hadn’t been taught properly about Jesus Christ.
Does it matter either way?
I think the important thing is that he had morals. Regardless of whether he believed in God and Christ or not, Marx’s morals seem to have been much closer to Christ’s teachings than those of certain self-professed Christians such as Gomes Eannes de Azurara (see below).
Looking at a variety of examples of how religion has been practiced historically, it’s not hard to see why a socialist might develop anti-religious views, or at least negative opinions about certain kinds of religion, regardless of whether said socialist believes in God.
For example, this is from an account of a sl*** raid in the 15th century, as told by a Portuguese historian, Gomes Eannes de Azurara. The translated version I am quoting comes from “Children of God’s Fire” edited by Robert Edgar Conrad,
Alright, so from the above, we can see that a number of Portugues sl***rs, along with their supporters like the historian de Azurara, believed that carrying villagers off to sl***ry, and killing some of them, was doing a “good deed” in God’s service.
A socialist obviously isn’t going to agree with de Azurara’s view. (If they did, they wouldn’t be a socialist.) But a Christian or other monotheistic socialist might think that Azurara was slandering God.
This is from Volume 1, Chapter 31 of Das Kapital,
Alright, so, “so-called Christian race” was W. Howitt’s choice of wording, and Marx quoted Howitt. This choice of phrasing suggests that Howitt believes these colonizers are slandering Christ by calling themselves Christians. It’s not clear if Marx agrees with that choice of wording, or is merely sympathetic to it, but it does seem to fit a pattern where Marx tends to make fun of (alleged) Christians who don’t seem to be following the teachings of Christ / the Bible.
For example, a footnote in Das Kapital, Volume 1, Chapter 15 reads,
So, here, Marx seems to agree with Moses, and seems to be making fun of Christian philathropists of Germany who don’t follow Moses’ teaching. Marx doesn’t explicitly include the words “so-called” before “Christian philanthropists of Germany”, but the context and tone at least imply that “so-called Christian philanthropists of Germany” is the appropriate interpretation.
This is from a 2018 Time Magazine piece by Noel Rae, apparently reprinted from The Great Stain: Witnessing American Sl***ry by Noel Rae,
And according to William Dusinberre in “Them Dark Days: Sl***ry in the American Rice Swamps”,
Major_Freedom wrote,
If Marx had “his entire philosophical view of labor” all worked out “well before” (well before, meaning, in 1844, if I understand you correctly?) he wrote a single word of Das Kapital, and thenceforth refused to change his mind about anything, then I shouldn’t find anything in these 1844 manuscripts that contradicts his views as expressed in Das Kapital?
This is from one of his 1844 manuscripts:
marxists [dot] org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/wages.htm
This is from Das Kapital, Volume 1, Chapter 25
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch25.htm
I suppose just quoting Destutt de Tracy doesn’t mean that Marx necessarily agreed with Destutt de Tracy. But whether he agreed or not, he apparently considered it a worthwhile enough quote to present to the reader for consideration.
But this is from later in the same chapter of Das Kapital,
This raises the question of what he means by “the wealth of the country”, but I think he means the “wealth” as measured by the ruling classes, in particular the people who didn’t care about murdering the Irish.
And this this is from earlier in the same chapter of Das Kapital,
This seems to contradict his claim in the 1844 manuscripts that, “If the wealth of society declines the worker suffers most of all, and for the following reason: although the working class cannot gain so much as can the class of property owners in a prosperous state of society, no one suffers so cruelly from its decline as the working class.” I believe that, rather than making up his mind once and for all, and refusing to adapt his views to new evidence, he actually changed his views as he studied history.
“Like all other laws it is modified in its working by many circumstances, the analysis of which does not concern us here,” is a pretty strong disclaimer. He may as well say, “This law is not 100% accurate, but like the laws of Newtonian physics, it is still useful.”
I think a major “modification” in the case of the USA would be that, just as the US has “outsourced” much of it’s working class, so has it “outsourced” much what Marx calls the “industrial reserve army”. The USA is effectively a global or near-global empire, even if on maps it appears much smaller. I think they draw the maps wrong. See, for example, “How to Hide and Empire” by Daniel Immerwahr. From a New York Times review, “What the United States has now is a “pointillist empire”: specks of land scattered around the world that have served as military bases, staging grounds, detention facilities, torture sites. (The United States has 800 overseas bases, whereas Russia has nine; most countries have zero.)”
nytimes [dot] com/2019/02/13/books/review-how-to-hide-empire-daniel-immerwahr.html
If we accept that the USA is a pointillist empire ruling much of the world, to some extent, and we consider how much misery those overseas bases bring to the people who are effectively, at least to some extent, under US rule, I think Destutt de Tracy is right: the wealth of the USA means the poverty of much of the world. It is, after all, US wealth that allows the US to build bombs to drop on the poor of it’s worldwide (or nearly worldwide) pointillist empire.
Regarding Marx’s disclaimer that “Like all other laws it is modified in its working by many circumstances, the analysis of which does not concern us here”, consider, for example, in response to a question on Quora where someone asked, “Why are we still teaching Newtonian physics if it’s “false”?”
physics [dot] stackexchange [dot] com/questions/154788/why-are-we-still-teaching-newtonian-physics-if-its-false
So falsehoods can still be “close enough” to the truth to take astronauts to the moon!
The comment I am replying to is here, it seems I put my reply in the wrong place:
https://consultingbyrpm.com/blog/2021/06/beyond-the-fed-shadow-banking-and-the-global-market-for-dollars.html#comment-2042864
Major_Freedom wrote,
The reason he saw peasants stripped off their land by the time he wrote Das Kapital rather than “homesteading and homesteaders hiring labor voluntarily” is because he wasn’t a raging genocide denier like Ayn Rand.
https://www.salon.com/2015/10/14/libertarian_superstar_ayn_rand_defended_genocide_of_savage_native_americans/
Of course, Karl Marx lived before Raphael Lemkin coined the term genocide in 1943. But Karl Marx had the general idea of it:
marxists [dot] org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch31.htm
The genocide against the American Indians was an “expropriation” of an agricultural / hunting / gathering population from the soil, to make space for American capitalists, and involved a “great slaughter of innocents”. Likewise, the theft of Africans from Africa, and their forcible transportation to the United States (or the colonies that later became the United States) was another “expropriation” of often-agricultural populations from the soil (in Africa) so they could be sold to American capitalists, and involved a “great slaughter of innocents”, consider for example how many died during the transatlantic passage, or on their way to the boats while still in Africa. And consider how many more Africans had to abandon their farmland to move to more defensible positions to better be able to run away and hide from the ens****rs — more expropriation. Granted, that isn’t the specific example Marx used in that quote — I’m simply showing another example of the concept Marx is discussing.
But looking at some of the specific examples Marx gives, what sane person could read these examples and see “homesteading and homesteaders hiring labor voluntarily”.
From Das Kapital Volume 1 Chapter 27,
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch27.htm
Razing people’s homes to the ground to drive them from the land is does not look like “homesteading and homesteaders hiring labor voluntarily” to me.
And from Das Kapital Volume 1 Chapter 28,
Whipping, imprisonment, cutting off of half the ear, execution, branding, chaining, putting iron rings round people’s necks — when I read these things I do not see “homesteading and homesteaders hiring labor voluntarily”.
There’s an article here complaining about how some variant of these vagrancy laws was exported to Malawi, a former British colony:
https://www.southernafricalitigationcentre.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/04_SALC-NoJustice-Report_A-Short-History-of-English-Vagrancy-Laws.pdf
And Edmund Dene Morel concluded that there was sl***ry in the Congo before anyone sent him reports or photographs. So what? Edmund Dene Morel was smart enough to deduce the presence of sl***ry in the Congo based on shipping manifests, where he saw that there was nothing going to the Congo to pay for what was coming out of the Congo. I suppose there was a chance he could have been wrong. But he turned out to be right: further investigation turned up plenty of evidence that there was indeed a massive forced labor regime in the Congo. The modern historian Adam Hochschild estimated that approximately 10 million Congolese people were killed under King Leopold II and the immediate aftermath of his control, and part of the reason we have so much information about it is because Edmund Dene Morel made a deduction based on shipping manifests that turned out to be right, and proceeded to go get evidence.
Likewise, so what if Marx had an intuition that wage labor is exploitative before he collected so much evidence? Following his intuition, he went out and collected evidence. He turned out to be right, at least generally speaking, even if he found out he had to modify his views on a lot of the details.
Random Person
“The reason he saw peasants stripped off their land”
Was because he was unable to see homesteading because his philosophical blinders prevented him, and seemingly you too, from seeing it.
Of course there was theft, but this is not capitalism. A person isn’t acting as a capitalist by robbing people.
A capitalist, as George Reisman defines it, is one who buys for the purposes of making subsequent sales.
Buying and selling are voluntary activities.
And before you try to knee jerk and simply deny by defining the terms differently, I will say that extortion, blackmail, threats, you know, actions often done by unions today (and free market denying zealots), these are NOT ‘buying’ and ‘selling’. Buying and selling are reciprocal negotiations of exchanging private property and labor voluntarily.
Proletariats are guilty of the most evil crimes ever perpetrated in the history of humanity.
See what I did there?
Can’t deny it, but see how I totally ignored crimes by ‘capitalists’?
I could write ‘chapters and chapters’ on the crimes committed by wage earners. But I won’t. But if I were a mirror of a Marxist, I would.
That’s why all you write about is darkness in that part of human history.
Marxism blinds to the realities of human life by casting everybody as one of two psychological personas from Marx’s own demented headspace: the God hating, Demon praising, Infinitely Selfish ‘capitalist persona’ on the one hand, and the pathetic, mortal, finite, corporeal body of the flesh ‘proletariat persona’, on the other.
Marx projected his own self-alienated psychology and ‘saw’ a world in conflict with itself as two great ‘classes’ representing the two personas in his mind that he couldn’t reconcile given the God denying neurotic person he was.
And millions died because of it.
““The reason he saw peasants stripped off their land”
Was because he was unable to see homesteading because his philosophical blinders prevented him, and seemingly you too, from seeing it.”
That reminds me of these resources that seem relevant:
The Terrible Industrial Revolution, and Other Economic Myths
[by Tom Woods]
[www]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lNWuc_jDb38
Propaganda, Meet Modern Research
[www]https://tomwoods.com/anti-capitalist-propaganda-meet-modern-research/
“Distributists have sometimes pointed to the enclosure movement as an important example of large landowners’ use of state power to dispossess others of their property and rights …”
“… Whether the process of enclosure satisfies libertarian standards of justice is not the issue before us here …”
“… The question, rather, is whether the process was responsible for systematic dispossession, the depopulation of the countryside, or rural poverty. It caused none of these outcomes.”
Are you so blind that you can’t see the self-contradiction in your own statement?
Do you need me to spell it out for you in simpler terms?
THE PEASANT PROPRIETORS WERE THE HOMESTEADERS!
Then, in the examples in question, and in numerous other examples, THE CAPITALIST THIEVES ROBBED THE HOMESTEADERS.
Even if you disagree with me that the capitalist thieves robbed the homesteaders in any given historical example, say, 15th or 16th century England, the fact that we might disagree on this topic doesn’t mean that either I, or Marx, are “unable to see homesteading”. Because there’s a difference between “not seeing homesteading” and “seeing homesteaders being robbed”.
Major_Freedom wrote,
Considering that we are discussing Karl Marx, Karl Marx’s definition of capitalism is much more relevant than George Reisman’s definition.
I don’t recall Karl Marx ever writing a one-line, easily quotable definition of capitalism anywhere, but it’s clear from reading Das Kapital that Karl Marx considers thieves who accumulate wealth by robbing people to be capitalists, and a great deal of his critique of capitalism is a critique of this robbery.
To cite one example to make this clear, in Volume 3 Chapter 23 of Das Kapital, Marx explicitly clarifies that a sl***-holder is a type of capitalist while translating something by Aristotle. And sl***holders are among the worst of thieves.
And another example, in Volume 3 Chapter 20 of Das Kapital, Marx wrote,
Merchant’s capital, when it holds a position of dominance, stands everywhere for a system of robbery,[4] so that its development among the trading nations of old and modern times is always directly connected with plundering, piracy, kidnapping sl***s, and colonial conquest; as in Carthage, Rome, and later among the Venetians, Portuguese, Dutch, etc.
When Marx critiqued capitalism, this is the capitalism he was critiquing: a system of robbery, plundering, piracy, kidnapping people to make them forced laborers, and colonial conquest.
How other people define capitalism is besides the point, since Marx was critiquing capitalism as he defined it, not how other people defined it.
Major_Freedom
If you want to define soldiers who happen to earn wages as proletariats, but this is a bit of a stretch of the term proletariat. I don’t think this is the sort of proletariat Marx was writing about. He condemns plunder pretty strongly, which at least implies condemnation of the plundering soldiers, regardless of whether they happened to be paid with wages. I suppose, if we wanted to engage in a more nuanced discussion of the topic of plundering soldiers, we might also ask whether they signed up voluntarily, or were conscripted, or were forced to become soldiers in some other way.
Major_Freedom
A) That’s a strawman, Marx’s arguments in Das Kapital are based on history, and B) Marx never lead any armies, killed anyone, or even ordered anyone’s death, so far as I am aware, so I don’t see any way in which he could be prosecuted for “millions of deaths” under the doctrine of command responsibility.
King Leopold II is another story. King Leopold II could be prosecuted for an estimated 10 million deaths under the doctrine of command responsibility.
Major_Freedom wrote,
If a person is told, “Either sell or go to prison”, this is not a voluntary activity. And, if we study colonial history, the history of the Belgian Congo in particular, there was much selling that occurred under threat of prison or other violence. (See for example Lord Leverhulme’s Ghosts and Forced Labor in the Gold and Copper Mines by Jules Marchal.)
Buying and selling may be voluntary or involuntary, depending on context.
Also, a thief may proceed to sell stolen goods. (E.g. King Leopold II selling rubber stolen from the Congolese people by means of forced labor. See King Leopold’s Ghost by Adam Hochschild for details.) King Leopold II may be acting voluntarily, and the customer may be acting voluntarily, but since the producers were not acting voluntarily, the entire transaction cannot be considered voluntary. To call the sale of stolen goods a “voluntary” transaction just because some of the parties in question agreed to it would be like saying that, in a situation where a rapist is raping a victim, that the rapist is experiencing voluntary sex at the same time as the victim is experiencing rape — in fact, they are both experiencing rape, just from different perspectives. All parties must agree of their own free will for a transaction to be legitimately voluntary.
Major_Freedom
What do you expect me to do? Celebrate the luxuries that the classes of peoples who got to enjoy sl***-made goods to enjoy at the expense of the rape, torture, and murder of other people?
The pro-sl***ry writer George Fitzhugh thought that way (i.e. celebrating the sharing of the loot of sl***ry)… down that path lies madness.
George Fitzhugh’s celebration of capitalism, which I fervently disagree with,
Found in “The Ideology of Sl***ry: Prosl***ry Thought in the Antebellum South, 1830-1860”, edited by Drew Gilpin Faust
In reply to:
consultingbyrpm [dot] com/blog/2021/06/beyond-the-fed-shadow-banking-and-the-global-market-for-dollars.html#comment-2042865
and
consultingbyrpm [dot] com/blog/2021/06/beyond-the-fed-shadow-banking-and-the-global-market-for-dollars.html#comment-2042864
Major_Freedom wrote,
The reason he saw peasants stripped off their land by the time he wrote Das Kapital rather than “homesteading and homesteaders hiring labor voluntarily” is because he wasn’t a raging genocide denier like Ayn Rand.
https://www.salon.com/2015/10/14/libertarian_superstar_ayn_rand_defended_genocide_of_savage_native_americans/
Of course, Karl Marx lived before Raphael Lemkin coined the term genocide in 1943. But Karl Marx had the general idea of it:
marxists [dot] org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch31.htm
The genocide against the American Indians was an “expropriation” of an agricultural / hunting / gathering population from the soil, to make space for American capitalists, and involved a “great slaughter of innocents”. Likewise, the theft of Africans from Africa, and their forcible transportation to the United States (or the colonies that later became the United States) was another “expropriation” of often-agricultural populations from the soil (in Africa) so they could be sold to American capitalists, and involved a “great slaughter of innocents”, consider for example how many died during the transatlantic passage, or on their way to the boats while still in Africa. And consider how many more Africans had to abandon their farmland to move to more defensible positions to better be able to run away and hide from the ens****rs — more expropriation. Granted, that isn’t the specific example Marx used in that quote — I’m simply showing another example of the concept Marx is discussing.
But looking at some of the specific examples Marx gives, what sane person could read these examples and see “homesteading and homesteaders hiring labor voluntarily”.
From Das Kapital Volume 1 Chapter 27,
marxists [dot] org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch27.htm
Razing people’s homes to the ground to drive them from the land is does not look like “homesteading and homesteaders hiring labor voluntarily” to me.
And from Das Kapital Volume 1 Chapter 28,
marxists [dot]
org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch28.htm
Whipping, imprisonment, cutting off of half the ear, execution, branding, chaining, putting iron rings round people’s necks — when I read these things I do not see “homesteading and homesteaders hiring labor voluntarily”.
There’s an article here complaining about how some variant of these vagrancy laws was exported to Malawi, a former British colony:
southernafricalitigationcentre [dot] org/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/04_SALC-NoJustice-Report_A-Short-History-of-English-Vagrancy-Laws.pdf
And Edmund Dene Morel concluded that there was sl***ry in the Congo before anyone sent him reports or photographs. So what? Edmund Dene Morel was smart enough to deduce the presence of sl***ry in the Congo based on shipping manifests, where he saw that there was nothing going to the Congo to pay for what was coming out of the Congo. I suppose there was a chance he could have been wrong. But he turned out to be right: further investigation turned up plenty of evidence that there was indeed a massive forced labor regime in the Congo. The modern historian Adam Hochschild estimated that approximately 10 million Congolese people were killed under King Leopold II and the immediate aftermath of his control, and part of the reason we have so much information about it is because Edmund Dene Morel made a deduction based on shipping manifests that turned out to be right, and proceeded to go get evidence.
Likewise, so what if Marx had an intuition that wage labor is exploitative before he collected so much evidence? Following his intuition, he went out and collected evidence. He turned out to be right, at least generally speaking, even if he found out he had to modify his views on a lot of the details.
I looked up that legal quote from Marx (see above):
The historical reference link is here.
https://archive.org/details/statutesatlarge00raitgoog/page/n136/mode/2up
The actual law is a bit different to what Marx claims:
Important differences:
* Significant discretionary judgement is given to local Justice of the Peace to decide who is needy and who is not.
* Most of the law is to punish people pretending to be needy, who really are not (that would be fraud).
* Marx made up the stuff about blood running, presumably for dramatic effect since it isn’t in the law.
* The key phrase “and not able to account how they get their Living” is critical here … the assumption is this person probably makes a living illegally. Marx simply edits out this part of the law and ignores it.
No person is expropriated from their own private land by this law … seeing as if you have a place of residence, and you live there, then by definition you are not a vagabond. People might be expropriated from public (common) lands, only if it is determined they are genuinely not needy, and should indeed be working, and cannot provide any explanation as to how they do make a living.
It should be fairly evident that a town will not benefit from having strong men about the place, sleeping in the street, not working, and very likely doing a bit of thieving, mugging and extortion on the side. If you leave them alone to keep doing that, they will inevitably prey upon the townspeople and significantly reduce productivity … possibly leading to violent purges and the sort of tit for tat reprisals that rule of law is intended to deal with in the first place. Maybe H8’s law was a bit crude but in many ways simple laws that solve a problem are about the best you can get … even if not ideal in every circumstance. Having no law ends up with street justice as a substitute and have complex laws rapidly gets ridiculous.
I found the followup law 5 years later which is more harsh … but interestingly for the Marxists we see King Henry VIII dabbling in a bit of central planning of the welfare state here. The context is somewhat important, it was the year 1535 and King Henry had executed first a bunch of senior churchmen and then executed his Lord Chancellor Sir Thomas More and was facing excommunication by the Catholic Church.
https://archive.org/details/statutesatlarge00raitgoog/page/n286/mode/2up
Interesting that he has now completely outlawed all begging and forcibly centralized all charitable donations … in effect a totally different law to the previous licenced beggar system. He has combined this with dumping the responsibility to care for the poor onto local government … something you would think modern “Left Leaning” politicians would applaud.
Tel wrote,
I think one of the key words there is “politicians”. Couple things about that word:
1. If a person was going to try to use non-political or at least non-governmental methods to achieve their goals, we would probably call them something other than a “politician”… like a “grassroots activist” or “historian” or “philosopher” or “journalist” or even “church lady”. Thus, regardless of what a typical modern left-leaning politician might applaud, left leaning people in general have a wide variety of opinions.
2. Also, a lot of politicians are Machiavellian liars, so just because leftist words come out of their mouths sometimes doesn’t mean they genuinely have many of the traits generally associated with the left.
One book you might like by a modern left leaning *historian* (not politician) is “Against the Grain” by James C. Scott. It seems to have a slightly Marxist influence (in so far as he uses the term “proletariat” a few times), and is a fairly damning condemnation of the world’s earliest states. Of course, as with most analyses of history that far back, he mixes evidence with guesswork, but, for example, he argues that the world’s first states would have targeted grain-growing communities (and later brought in coerced labor to grow more grains) due to the ease of appropriating grain.
A short one paragraph biography of James C. Scott from Dissent Magazine,
https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/cheerleaders-for-anarchism
At one point in Chapter 25, Marx condemns the demolition of homes in the (alleged) name of sanitation, pointing out that it has the opposite affect,
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch25.htm
For comparison, consider more modern laws that prohibit people from building or (when enforced) continuing to live in housing that doesn’t meet certain standards, without regard to whether this causes people to be or become homeless, to remain in or return to domestic violence situations, or other problems associated with a housing shortage.
Also in that chapter, he discusses how “poor-rates” (a type of tax, I believe, what you might call the “centralization of charitable donations”) motivates landlords (who he suggest probably have unjust legal title to begin with, although I don’t think he examines that in detail in this Chapter) to deliberately depopulate their lands.
The short version…
Excellent work finding the original law! 🙂
Tel wrote,
Marx’s argument is that they were first expropriated from the land where they were dwelling and working, (see one of the above quotes, or for the short version, “The dwellings of the peasants and the cottages of the labourers were razed to the ground or doomed to decay”), and then, after having been driven from their former homes, laws like this were passed to force them to accept wage labor.
That is, people used to living in their own communities, farming and crafting, working for themselves, trading with their neighbors, and so on, might have been extremely reluctant to accept a new (new to them, at least) form of social relationship, where they had to do whatever someone else told them to do in exchange for whatever small payment they were offered. The level of violence used to persuade them to accept wage labor gives an indication of the degree to which they did not consent to it, and did not consider it adequate compensation for having had their dwellings and cottages razed to the ground or doomed to decay.
Consider if, in Australia, the government first used eminent domain (or laws similar to eminent domain) to kick a bunch of people off their land (or, if not the government, maybe some billionaire came in and did it illegally, via command responsibility of course), and then, because there were a bunch of homeless people wandering around, having been uprooted from their communities, Australia passed a bunch of rather extreme laws criminalizing homelessness.
Tel wrote,
Marx did acknowledge that, according to the law, “Beggars old and unable to work receive a beggar’s licence,” but anyway…
In the modern USA, the ACLU has put a great deal of effort into making the argument that panhandling (i.e. begging) is protected free speech, provided it doesn’t cross certain boundaries of “aggressiveness”. That is, the panhandler doesn’t need to prove to any judge or Justice that he or she is legitimately needy; he or she is allowed to practice free speech, as long as he or she is not too aggressive about it. He or she could, I suppose, stand up holding a sign saying, “Help me raise $10,000 so I can go on vacation to Hawaii and have a great time, please. Thanks!” and it would be up to people passing by to decide if they want to help that person achieve their dream of a Hawaii vacation. Granted, I’ve never seen anyone try this. I did however meet someone who was panhandling and saving up they to buy a bit of land in a really cheap part of the country so he could build his own house.
Is the ACLU right that begging should be protected free speech? Or should panhandlers be required to seek permissions from judges, and if they don’t get it, put to forced labor (or penalized in some other way)?
And if panhandlers, who didn’t get approval from judges, were put to forced labor, would it make sense to say, “Well, they accepted the job voluntarily, so they must have seen some benefit in it to them, and it was a mutually beneficial transaction.” I don’t thinks so. That which is motivated by fear of whipping, the stocks, imprisonment, or other harsh penalties is not voluntary. Rather, we should say that other people decided for the would-be panhandler that it was better for them to have a job than to panhandle, and subsequently enforced that decision with violence.
Note that relatively recently in US history, after the Civil War in the former Confederate states, the fact that a judge’s approval was required for the sentencing of an alleged vagrant didn’t do anything to protect them. In the post-Civil War former Confederate states, the judges often received a share of the profits when sentencing alleged vagrants (and others) to forced labor, which gave them an incentive to find people guilty regardless of the evidence.
Specifically, in Alabama at least, as explained by Douglas Blackmon in “Sl***ry By Another Name”,
[To be continued]… but I have some work I have to get done today.
Tel wrote,
I was able to cross reference the blood running stuff, so it’s not made up, just poorly cited.
“Curious Punishments of Bygone Days”
by Alice Morse Earle
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/34005/34005-h/34005-h.htm
And here’s another cross-reference,
“A Sociological Analysis of the Law of Vagrancy”
by William J. Chambliss
www [dot[ jstor [dot] org/stable/798699?origin=JSTOR-pdf
Chambliss’s article also gives some additional context. Serfdom (which, if we use the international legal defintion of sl***ry, is a form of sl***ry, even if it has some obvious differences from chattel sl***ry) had been in the process of gradual abolition since at least the Peasant’s Revolt of 1381.
My interpretation is that, as serfdom was gradually abolished, the feudal lords decided to kick the former serf class off the land in revenge, and to organize the passage of these various “vagabond laws” as a way of re-instating forced labor in another form.
We saw something similar, but not the same, far less gradual, in the former Confederate states after the US Civil War: sl***ry in its previous form having been abolished, vagrancy laws, and other laws, were passed as a way of re-instating sl***ry in new forms, such as convict leasing. In so far as “changing employers without permission” was one of the things punished with convict leasing, sharecropping became another new form of sl***ry. (See “Sl***ry by Another Name” by Douglas Blackmon for further details.) Since land reparations were never instituted, I don’t think the ensl***r class had incentive to kick people off in this case, but we still see that they were unwilling to give up control over labor.
I believe there was another similar case in Nepal, but I need some time to try to remember where I read about that.
Another cross-reference:
Old-time punishments
by William Andrews
https://archive.org/details/oldtimepunishmen00andruoft/page/146/mode/2up?q=1530
Apparently, someone named Judge Jeffreys is quoted as saying,
https://archive.org/details/oldtimepunishmen00andruoft/page/154/mode/2up?q=blood
Tel wrote,
And also,
This is a protest poem from the 1700s, by an Anonymous author. There are a number of different versions of it, but anyway,
https://unionsong.com/u765.html
The poem talks about the law locking up man or woman “who steals the goose from off the common”, which is hunting basically. Hunting is a form of work, but it’s not wage labor. This really shouldn’t be referred to as “stealing”, except possibly from an animal rights perspective, e.g. by a vegetarian who doesn’t believe that people have the right to eat animals. However, I think it is called “stealing” here, not from an animal rights perspective, but because the “lords and ladies” (i.e. the people whose ancestors used to force people to work as serfs) have stolen the commons, and now claim that it is their “property”. From a natural rights perspective, I would argue that the peasantry of that time and place had just as much right to hunt the geese as the American Indians had to hunt the buffalo, deer, and so on.
Based on my understanding of James C Scott’s book “Against the Grain”, non-state cultures, and probably to a lesser extent peasantries attempting to avoid state control as best they can, will likely utilize at least two, and possibly all four, of the following methods of acquiring food: hunting, gathering, pastoralism (e.g. shepherding), and agriculture.
Here’s a specific quote from that book,
So, I think it’s reasonable to guess, that if, at least pre-enclosures, the peasants of this time period were probably engaged in some combination of hunting, gathering, agriculture, and pastoralism. They would not strictly speaking have been non-state peoples, but they probably would have been doing their best to avoid state control (see, for example, the negative view of the lords and ladies in the above poem), and seem to have been involved in a gradual struggle to free themselves from serfdom, and process that overlapped with the so-called “enclosures” (massive land theft program). The commons would have been homesteaded by them and their ancestors, possibly in a disorderly way as James C. Scott describes many non-state peoples doing, and possibly in a more organized way, considering that they were not, strictly speaking, non-state peoples — probably some combination of both disorderly and more organized homesteading would have occured.
So, their objection, as I understand it, was not to working. They were apparently fine with hunting, based on the poem, and likely with some combination of gathering, pastoralism, and agriculture as well. Their objection was, more specifically, to having these more traditional methods of working for a living ripped away from them, and being forced into wage labor instead. They, or their ancestors, so far as I can tell, hadn’t fought for emancipation from serfdom just to be wage laborers instead — they wanted to be their own bosses, and hunting/gathering/pastoralism/agriculture is a system suitable to everyone being their own bosses, or at any rate working together in family / kinship / community structures, rather than capitalist ones.
James C. Scott, who has extensively studied, so far as it is possible, the world’s earliest states and their conflicts with non-state peoples, as well as more modern non-state peoples, makes a similiar argument in “The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia”
Incidentally, James C. Scott’s “The Art of Not Being Governed” got a mostly positive review from Jeff Riggenbach on mises [dot] org, although Riggenbach either doesn’t mention in the review or perhaps didn’t even notice that James C. Scott self-identifies as a crude Marxist.
mises [dot] org/library/art-not-being-governed
In response to something from the first 5 minutes of “Ep. 207 “They Said What?!” John Lennon Edition”
I wouldn’t refer to Marxists as “hateful and violent” (from somewhere in the first 5 minutes of Bob Murphy’s episode 207) any moreso than any other group calling for reparations.
For comparison, it’s true that many sl**e revolts, and other revolts against oppression, throughout history have involved a certain amount of hate and violence, but it’s extremely one-sided to fail to mention the extreme levels of hate and violence they were revolting against. Spartacus’s rebellion against Roman sl***ry involved violence, and probably a number of those involved in the revolt experienced hate towards their oppressors, but this is a natural, albeit not perfectly enlightened, response to being captured and forced to fight, sometimes to the death, in gladiatorial arenas. We can say it was “not perfectly enlightened” in the sense that Jesus (or some other “perfectly enlightened being”, for those who don’t believe in Jesus) would have coped with the situation in a better way; however, in so far as most human beings are not perfectly enlightened beings, and torture is known to mess with people’s minds in serous ways, it was perfectly natural. Likewise, the Haitian Revolution involved a great deal of violence and hate, but it would be extremely one-sided to neglect to mention the extreme levels of hate and violence that the black people of Haiti suffered under sl***ry.
Also consider the Stono Rebellion of 1739, the New York Conspiracy of 1741, Gabriel’s Conspiracy of 1800, the German Coast Uprising of 1811, and Nat Turner’s Rebellion of 1831. All these episodes involved violence and hate. But we should not forget what the were rebelling against — torture, rape, murder, and sl***ry.
Jean-Jacques Dessalines was much more hateful and violent that Karl Marx ever was, and personally ordered the 1804 Haiti massacre, but is it really such a surprise, given what the French ensl***r class did to Dessalines and his people?
I am reminded by this passage written by the pro-sl***ry author, James Henry Hammond
Alright, so, this is from a pro-sl***ry piece of propaganda he wrote, in which he tells many lies to make sl***ry seem not as bad as it really was, and also point out other evils of society in an attempt to make the evils he does admit about sl***ry seem not as bad by comparison. For example, it is shockingly incorrect to say that a “legal investigation” always followed every time an sl***holder killed an ensl***d person, or, if such things did occur, the investigators must have consistently been in league with the sl***holders.
A brief quote from “The Half Has Never Been Told” by Edward Baptist:
Alright, so, the precise conditions of exploitation varied, but when the exploitation of ensl***d people increased, so too did death rates. Many sl***holders were therefore serial killers. James Henry Hammond charges that many abolitionists would have thought that all was right if an ensl***d person cut their tormentor’s throat. He is probably correct, though not necessarily of every individual abolitionist, some of whom might also be pacificists. But aren’t there a lot of people who believe that it is just to give the death penalty to serial killers? And aren’t there also some who argue that the death penalty is also appropriate for other crimes sl***holders commit, such as torture and rape? And aren’t there many who argue that, even if the death penalty is excessive after the threat has been neutralized, it is still appropriate if a person defending themselves happens to kill their tormentor in the process of defense?
From the perspective of people who believe it appropriate to punish murder and/or rape and/or torture with death, or at least acceptable for someone defending themselves to kill their attacker in the process of self-defense, it makes perfect sense to rejoice if an ensl***d person kills their ensl***r.
Are, abolitionists, excluding strict pacifist abolitionists, therefore hateful, violent people who rejoice at the killing of ensl***rs?
Perhaps, but it is nonsensical to point this out without pointing out that pro-sl***ry lunatics like James Henry Hammond are far more hateful and violent than abolitionists are.
Likewise, it may be that Marx’s philosophy contains a certain amount of hate and violence, he certainly wasn’t a strict pacifist, but it’s ridiculous to point this out without also pointing out that there’s a lot more hate and violence in defending capitalism, a system based on genocide (or, as Marx puts it, the “slaughter of innocents”), torture, rape, and forced labor.
I add this in part to soften the above criticism, so that you can understand that you too criticize capitalism, and should not count yourself among capitalism’s shameless defenders, but, what Marx said about old “public debt” systems in not that different from what you (Bob Murphy) have said about the Federal Reserve.
I can’t recall exactly where you talked about it, but, you have talked about the Federal Reserve “creating” money just by buying things, and how this has the effect of robbing Americans, yes? Something like that, at least?
I tried to find an exact quote, and, while I remember hearing you talk about the Federal Reserve in a podcast, this is what I found on Google,
— Robert Murphy, 2011
https://mises.org/library/inflation-harmless-or-even-good
Okay, so, in capitalism, the Federal Reserve is committing mass theft and making most of us poorer, yes?
Anyway, it didn’t sound to me all that different from what Marx wrote here,
— Karl Marx, Das Kapital, Volume 1, Chapter Thirty-One
marxists [dot] org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch31.htm
Wouldn’t it be fair to say that the Federal Reserve is exploiting people and extracting surplus value from people, and perhaps to extend that judgement to certain organizations, such as banks, that are in collusion with the Federal Reserve? Or, to put it in different words, that there is a great magnitude of theft that is making most of us poorer?
And wouldn’t it be unfair if someone referred to your criticism of the Federal Reserve as “hateful and violent”, without at least qualifying that by pointing out that the Federal Reserve itself is much more hateful and violent?
This is a continued response to Bob Murphy, in particular the portion of episode 207 where Bob Murphy says something about Marxists being “hateful and violent”.
There is a book available from Archive dot org which demonstrates conclusively, even if you only take the time to read just the Preface, that socialists fought against the Bolshevik regime from the very beginning.
https://ia800203.us.archive.org/6/items/cu31924028354102/cu31924028354102.pdf
It concerns the trial of 12 Socialist-Revolutionists, persecuted by Lenin, and those who defended them. One of their lawyers was Emile Vandervelde, a prominent Belgian socialist of the time period, also known for his efforts to struggle against his own government’s atrocities in the Congo, and his friendship with Edmund Dene Morel, the English socialist who spent a significant portion of his life fighting the good fight, by means of the pen (or at any rate, the printing press) against King Leopold II, the Belgian King who condemned the Congo to forced labor of genocidal proportions.
I would strongly recommend reading the whole Preface, at least, which is only 7 pages long.
“… in particular the portion of episode 207 where Bob Murphy says something about Marxists being “hateful and violent”.”
From the Communist Manifesto:
“We have seen above, that the first step in the revolution by the
working class, is to raise the proletariat to the position of
ruling as to win the battle of democracy. …”
“… Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by
means of despotic inroads on the rights of property, and on
the conditions of bourgeois production; by means of measures,
therefore, which appear economically insufficient and untenable,
but which, in the course of the movement, outstrip themselves,
necessitate further inroads upon the old social order, and are
unavoidable as a means of entirely revolutionising the mode of
production. …”
“1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.
(But, according to you, Marx was never against homesteading. Hmm.
([@”random person”]: “Clearly he’s not against legitimate homesteading.”
(Link: [www]https://consultingbyrpm.com/blog/2021/07/catching-up-on-the-podcast-murphy-triple-play.html#comment-2042783
)
“2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.
“3. Abolition of all right of inheritance.
“4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.
(Skipped #5 because you said you opposed it.)
“6. Centralisation of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State.
“7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by
the State; the bringing into cultivation of waste-lands, and
the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan.
“8. Equal liability of all to labour. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.
“9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of the distinction between town and country, by a more equable distribution of the population over the country.
“10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children’s factory labour in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, &c., &c.”
How are socialists going to accomplish any of this without violence?
Also, I’m pretty sure “despotic means” involves violence.
(Also, no one is strawmanning you.)
Note to other readers: Guest has been KNOWINGLY, DELIBERATELY, and PERSISTENTLY STRAWMANNING ME. I therefore ask that you not believe anything he says or implies about my beliefs, unless you hear it from me directly.
Thus, I am no longer interested in debating Guest, for the same reason I wouldn’t want to continue to play chess with someone who repeatedly insisted on making my moves for me, falsely claimed to be countering my actual moves, and claimed I was the one being misleading when I tried to correct that person and say I hadn’t actually made the moves he said I did.
However, I am aware that the purpose of strawmanning is to effectively silence a person from getting their views across to an audience, by convincing the audience that the person actually has the views that the strawmanner says they do, rather than the person’s real views.
Therefore, I am leaving this standardized response to Guest’s comments from now on, so as to warn readers that Guest is not a reliable source of information about my views. However, it is not a specific response to anything he has written above, which I don’t consider worth my time to read or respond to, based on his past dishonest behavior.
For further details, see:
https://consultingbyrpm.com/blog/2021/07/catching-up-on-the-podcast-murphy-triple-play.html#comment-2045761
as well as the comment right after it.
Some website gives states the following about strawman arguments,
developgoodhabits [dot] com/straw-man/
Although Guest has used a variety of these strategies, he is an exceptionally extremist strawmanner, and has gone to the extreme of making up things that I did not say.
“Although Guest has used a variety of these strategies, he is an exceptionally extremist strawmanner, and has gone to the extreme of making up things that I did not say.”
I noticed that you used the magical Lefty dog-whistle label, “extreme”.
That dog whistle was exposed a long time ago:
Sen. Chuck Schumer calls GOP ‘extreme’ during Dem pep talk
[www]
““I always use the word extreme,” Schumer told Sens. Barbara Boxer, Benjamin Cardin, Thomas Carper and Richard Blumenthal. “That is what the caucus instructed me to use this week.””
And, for the momen (until YouTube removes it)t, there still exists audio of him doing it:
Sen. Schumer and Other Senior Dems Play Politics w/ Budget Crisis on Conf Call 3/29/11
[www]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mFdYLnS73yk&ab_channel=goprapidresponse
Note to other readers: Guest has been KNOWINGLY, DELIBERATELY, and PERSISTENTLY STRAWMANNING ME. I therefore ask that you not believe anything he says or implies about my beliefs, unless you hear it from me directly.
Thus, I am no longer interested in debating Guest, for the same reason I wouldn’t want to continue to play chess with someone who repeatedly insisted on making my moves for me, falsely claimed to be countering my actual moves, and claimed I was the one being misleading when I tried to correct that person and say I hadn’t actually made the moves he said I did.
However, I am aware that the purpose of strawmanning is to effectively silence a person from getting their views across to an audience, by convincing the audience that the person actually has the views that the strawmanner says they do, rather than the person’s real views.
Therefore, I am leaving this standardized response to Guest’s comments from now on, so as to warn readers that Guest is not a reliable source of information about my views. However, it is not a specific response to anything he has written above, which I don’t consider worth my time to read or respond to, based on his past dishonest behavior.
For further details, see:
https://consultingbyrpm.com/blog/2021/07/catching-up-on-the-podcast-murphy-triple-play.html#comment-2045761
as well as the comment right after it.
Some website gives the following example of a strawman argument, as well as an explanation of why it is a strawman:
developgoodhabits [dot] com/straw-man/
Of relevance to how capitalism and landlords-by-conquest caused the Irish potato famine:
“The Land-Tenure System in Ireland: A Fatal Regime”
by Cynthia E. Smith
Published in the Marquette Law Review, Volume 76, Issue 2 Winter 1993
https://scholarship.law.marquette.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1653&context=mulr
I suggest reading the whole thing, but a few relevant quotes to give you the gist of it:
(Note from random person: perhaps, despite of lack of tenant protection, the Irish had to invest in improvements in the land to keep up with rents.)
And thus it was that the Irish were genocided by English capitalist conqueror-landlords.
This genocide, in which the Irish were forced by capitalist conqueror-landlords to export grain even as they were starving to death, bears remarkable similarity to the Holodomor, where the grain of the Ukranians was exported by conquerors even as the Ukranians starved. (Obviously not exactly the same. But there were parallels.) Considering that Marx correctly condemned this Irish genocide (although not using that word, since the term “genocide” hadn’t been coined yet) in Das Kapital, Volume 1, Chapter 25, it seems clear that he would have condemned the Holodomor too. Thus it is clear that the USSR was not socialist or communist, but capitalist, just like Ireland during the famine.
(Also note that, being part Irish, this genocide of the Irish by depraved capitalist conqueror-landlords is very personal to me.)
Once again, it was government intervention, not free markets, that was responsible for poverty and famine.
What Caused the Irish Potato Famine?
[www]https://mises.org/library/what-caused-irish-potato-famine
“The British Corn Laws were designed to protect local grain farmers from foreign competition. In 1801, these laws were extended to Ireland. The laws not only kept prices high; they protected against falling prices in years of plenty. The main beneficiaries of this protectionism were the English absentee landlords of Ireland, not the Irish. …”
“… Higher prices encouraged the cultivation of new lands and the more intense use of existing farmlands. A primary input into this increased production was the Irish peasant who was in most cases nothing more than a landless serf. Likewise, the population growth rate did slow in response to reduced levels of protectionism in the decade prior to the Famine.
“This artificial stimulus to the Irish population was secure with English landlords in control of Parliament. However, English manufacturers and laborers supported free trade and grew as a political force. With the agitation of the Anti-Corn Law League, the Whigs and Tories agreed in 1845 to reduce protectionist tariffs and the Corn Laws altogether by 1849. The price of wheat plummeted in 1847 (“corn” being British for grains, especially wheat, the prime grain protected under the Corn Laws), falling to a 67-year low.
“Repeal drastically impacted the capital value of farmland in Ireland and reduced the demand for labor as Irish lands converted from grain production to pasture. It should be clear that while free trade did bring about these changes, the blame for both stimulating prefamine population growth and the subsequent depopulation (the Irish population did not recover until 1951 and net emigration did not end until 1996) rests with English protectionism and the Corn Laws. …”
“… Let us now take a look at the so-called laissez-faire approach that the English applied to the famine and for which Tony Blair apologized. …”
“… Far from allowing the market to work, England launched a massive program of government intervention, consisting mainly of building workhouses, most completed just prior to the onset of the Famine.
“Earlier, the Irish Poor Inquiry had rejected the workhouse as a solution to poverty. …”
“… The workhouses, an early version of New Deal make-work programs, only made the problem of poverty worse. A system of extensive public works required heavy taxation on the local economy. The English officials directed money away from projects that would increase productivity and agricultural output into useless road building.”
Guest wrote,
YOU ATTACK STRAWMAN!
Cynthia E. Smith’s article contains the phrase “free markets” literally zero times.
You only address her point that the landlords were ALIEN CONQUERORS to the extent that you quote (at least to some extent) agrees with that assertion by calling the peasants “landless serfs”, although aside from that use of terminology, your quotes ignore that point.
EVERY PENNY (or whatever monetary unit) OF “RENT” THEY STOLE WAS LITERALLY PILLAGED FROM THE IRISH PEOPLE. THE LANDLORDS WERE BASICALLY RAIDING SCUMBAGS.
Guest wrote,
Incidentally, this is the sort of STRAWMAN ARGUMENT THAT YOU MAKE REPEATEDLY, over and over and over again. I have, multiple times previously, attempted to explain that I avoid terms like “free markets” and “free trade” because they are ambiguous, in so far as different people use them to describe polar opposite concepts. I avoid the terms as much as I can because if I were to use them, it would not be clear if I meant them as defined by Edmund Dene Morel, or as defined by André Morellet. “Free trade” as defined by Edmund Dene Morel is so different from “free trade” as defined by André Morellet, that to love one of those concepts is necessarily to hate and revile the other.
Here’s the post where I brought this up in the most detail:
https://consultingbyrpm.com/blog/2021/05/bob-murphy-triple-play.html#comment-2041211
Another post where I brought it up:
consultingbyrpm [dot] com/blog/2021/05/bob-murphy-triple-play.html#comment-2040672
And another:
consultingbyrpm [dot] com/blog/2021/05/bob-murphy-triple-play.html#comment-2041212
And yet, even though I avoid these terms for the most part due to their ambiguity, you repeatedly, over and over again, attack a strawman by saying that I and/or whomever I am quoting is against free trade or free markets. This would be somewhat less exhaustingly annoying if at least you would specify whether you meant free trade as defined by Edmund Dene Morel or as defined by André Morellet, although only in so far as at least that would make it more clear what you were accusing me of being against.
Regardless of which definition of the term you are using, your quotes have almost nothing to do with the points made by Cynthia E. Smith. To the extent that they are slightly relevant, they seem to agree with her by calling the Irish “landless serfs”, but then ignore the point and proceed to babble on about the incentives placed on the conquering landlords to extort either one commodity or another, without getting into the question of whether they had the right to extort at all.
Test string for the filter:
The Failure of Wage and Price Control in the Massachusetts Theocracy
[www]https://www.lewrockwell.com/1970/01/murray-n-rothbard/when-the-christians-ran-massachusetts/
The filter doesn’t like the word sl*ve for some reason, and it also doesn’t like multiple URLs in a single comment.
O rly?!
I thought you were just being weird this whole time, like you didn’t want to spell out the word.
Heh. Ok, I’ll try altering that string.
“EVERY PENNY (or whatever monetary unit) OF “RENT” THEY STOLE WAS LITERALLY PILLAGED FROM THE IRISH PEOPLE. THE LANDLORDS WERE BASICALLY RAIDING SCUMBAGS.”
Which would not have happened had the government *not* involved itself in attempting to manage the economy.
Left to itself, the free market’s price system naturally discourages such moral hazards.
Further, *simply being robbed* is not enough to *keep* someone in poverty, assuming that there exists economic mobility.
(Otherwise, it would always be impossible to start with nothing and make a life for yourself, anywhere.)
Here’s another example of poverty we need not blame on free markets or the profit motive, even though people *were* motivated by profit, and there was slavery involved – *the logical result* of government attempts to centrally plan the economy *is* poverty and slavery, *quite apart* from any evil or selfish intent:
The Failure of Wage and Price Control in the Massachusetts Theocracy
[www]https://www.lewrockwell.com/1970/01/murray-n-rothbard/when-the-christians-ran-massachusetts/
“Maximum-wage control always aggravates a shortage of labor, as employers will not be able to obtain needed workers at the statutory price. In trying to force labor to be cheaper than its price on the free market, the gentry only made it more difficult for employers to obtain that labor. By 1640 Winthrop was admitting that Massachusetts had “found by experience that it would not avail by any law to redress the excessive rates of laborers’ and workmen’s wages, etc. (for being restrained, they would either remove to other places where they might have more or else being able to live by planting or other employments of their own, they would not be hired at all).…”
“… Of course, one method of alleviating this induced shortage was by using the forced labor of slavery, servitude, and compulsory harvest service. Thus, one intervention by violence in the market created conditions impelling a further and stronger intervention. But apart from forced labor, the Massachusetts authorities, as we have noted, found it extremely difficult to enforce maximum-wage control.”
And I’m sorry you didn’t get to see it because my other comment wasn’t approved, but I deliberately use the words “free market” because it does not seem to convey the meaning I used to believe was being understood by the word “capitalism”, which apparently had a different meaning to Marx than how free-market people usually use it.
If it helps, I mean by “free markets” that people are free to trade with another willing individual without permission from a third party.
If there are instances of injustice, then target those specific injustices.
But you are not helping anyone with boycotts (their slaves will be used to produce something else you like).
You’re not helping anyone by attempting to raise workers’ wages by law (ultimately, employers can just shut their business down, and now fewer goods are being made that the poor can enjoy.)
You’re not helping anyone by trying to prevent billionaires from existing (the ppor can have access to mass-produced cheap goods *precisely because* of economies of scale that make a few fortunate people filthy rich – and the poor would not have access to those goods without these people).
(Slave labor in China and other places is another matter. If it helps, consider Henry Ford and his efficiency.)
There is nothing nefarious about the profit motive *as such*, and your attempts to attack it have proven fatal for millions of people – mostly the poor, who socialists think they’re helping – *many times over*.
Learn the lesson that is never learned:
Forty Centuries of Wage and Price Controls: How Not to Fight Inflation
[www]https://mises.org/library/forty-centuries-wage-and-price-controls-how-not-fight-inflation
“An economist of the time, John Hales, wrote a disquisition on the problems of inflation in the Tudor period, which, except for the spelling, could have been written yesterday. …”
“… And thuse vndre the coulour of a Common weale they vse souche extreime tyrraney and Cruelnes that it wolde pitty a man’s harte to be holde it: I maruell therfor that this foresaid auctorrite is not taken a waye frome the foresaid officers, seinge that the longe experience haue so well declarid that the foresaid settinge of prices of victuall, do nothing at all bringe downe the highe price thereof. But I marvell mouche more at those men which have not only all Reddy seine the successe of price settinge, but also the sucesse of the moste parte of proclamacons and penaull Stattutes, and yet will holde oppinion this present derthe of victuall may be redressid bi setting of prices vppon victuall, but surly it is not the settinge of lowe prises that will aney thinge a mende the matter. …”
[Separate quote follows:]
“… After the disastrous winter at Valley Forge when Washington’s army nearly starved to death (thanks largely to these well-intentioned but misdirected laws), the ill-fated experiment in price controls was finally ended. The Continental Congress on June 4, 1778, adopted the following resolution:
“Whereas. . .it hath been found by experience that limitations upon the prices of commodities are not only ineffectual for the purposes proposed, but likewise productive of very evil consequences to the great detriment of the public service and grievous oppression of individuals. . . resolved, that it be recommended to the several states to repeal or suspend all laws or resolutions within the said states respectively limiting, regulating or restraining the Price of any Article, Manufacture or Commodity.”
Note to other readers: Guest has been KNOWINGLY, DELIBERATELY, and PERSISTENTLY STRAWMANNING ME. I therefore ask that you not believe anything he says or implies about my beliefs, unless you hear it from me directly.
Thus, I am no longer interested in debating Guest, for the same reason I wouldn’t want to continue to play chess with someone who repeatedly insisted on making my moves for me, falsely claimed to be countering my actual moves, and claimed I was the one being misleading when I tried to correct that person and say I hadn’t actually made the moves he said I did.
However, I am aware that the purpose of strawmanning is to effectively silence a person from getting their views across to an audience, by convincing the audience that the person actually has the views that the strawmanner says they do, rather than the person’s real views.
Therefore, I am leaving this standardized response to Guest’s comments from now on, so as to warn readers that Guest is not a reliable source of information about my views. However, it is not a specific response to anything he has written above, which I don’t consider worth my time to read or respond to, based on his past dishonest behavior.
For further details, see:
https://consultingbyrpm.com/blog/2021/07/catching-up-on-the-podcast-murphy-triple-play.html#comment-2045761
as well as the comment right after it.
Alec Cawley wrote on Quora:
quora [dot] com/Why-is-it-that-most-people-don%E2%80%99t-like-a-straw-man-argument
Response 1 of ?
(We’ll have to see what the algorithm allows.)
(OK, last time I got the message that my comment would have to be reviewed, it never went through, so let me try and break this up. Sorry for the inconvenience.)
“EVERY PENNY (or whatever monetary unit) OF “RENT” THEY STOLE WAS LITERALLY PILLAGED FROM THE IRISH PEOPLE. THE LANDLORDS WERE BASICALLY RAIDING SCUMBAGS.”
Which would not have happened had the government *not* involved itself in attempting to manage the economy.
Left to itself, the free market’s price system naturally discourages such moral hazards.
Further, *simply being robbed* is not enough to *keep* someone in poverty, assuming that there exists economic mobility.
(Otherwise, it would always be impossible to start with nothing and make a life for yourself, anywhere.)
Here’s another example of poverty we need not blame on free markets or the profit motive, even though people *were* motivated by profit, and there was slavery involved – *the logical result* of government attempts to centrally plan the economy *is* poverty and slavery, *quite apart* from any evil or selfish intent:
The Failure of Wage and Price Control in the Massachusetts Theocracy
[www]https://www.lewrockwell.com/1970/01/murray-n-rothbard/when-the-christians-ran-massachusetts/
“Maximum-wage control always aggravates a shortage of labor, as employers will not be able to obtain needed workers at the statutory price. In trying to force labor to be cheaper than its price on the free market, the gentry only made it more difficult for employers to obtain that labor. By 1640 Winthrop was admitting that Massachusetts had “found by experience that it would not avail by any law to redress the excessive rates of laborers’ and workmen’s wages, etc. (for being restrained, they would either remove to other places where they might have more or else being able to live by planting or other employments of their own, they would not be hired at all).…”
“… Of course, one method of alleviating this induced shortage was by using the forced labor of slavery, servitude, and compulsory harvest service. Thus, one intervention by violence in the market created conditions impelling a further and stronger intervention. But apart from forced labor, the Massachusetts authorities, as we have noted, found it extremely difficult to enforce maximum-wage control.“
Note to other readers: Guest has been KNOWINGLY, DELIBERATELY, and PERSISTENTLY STRAWMANNING ME. I therefore ask that you not believe anything he says or implies about my beliefs, unless you hear it from me directly.
Thus, I am no longer interested in debating Guest, for the same reason I wouldn’t want to continue to play chess with someone who repeatedly insisted on making my moves for me, falsely claimed to be countering my actual moves, and claimed I was the one being misleading when I tried to correct that person and say I hadn’t actually made the moves he said I did.
However, I am aware that the purpose of strawmanning is to effectively silence a person from getting their views across to an audience, by convincing the audience that the person actually has the views that the strawmanner says they do, rather than the person’s real views.
Therefore, I am leaving this standardized response to Guest’s comments from now on, so as to warn readers that Guest is not a reliable source of information about my views. However, it is not a specific response to anything he has written above, which I don’t consider worth my time to read or respond to, based on his past dishonest behavior.
For further details, see:
https://consultingbyrpm.com/blog/2021/07/catching-up-on-the-podcast-murphy-triple-play.html#comment-2045761
as well as the comment right after it.
Steve Roberts wrote on Quora:
quora [dot] com/Why-is-it-that-most-people-don%E2%80%99t-like-a-straw-man-argument
Response 1 of ? (Try #2)
(We’ll have to see what the algorithm allows.)
(OK, last time I got the message that my comment would have to be reviewed, it never went through, so let me try and break this up. Sorry for the inconvenience.)
“EVERY PENNY (or whatever monetary unit) OF “RENT” THEY STOLE WAS LITERALLY PILLAGED FROM THE IRISH PEOPLE. THE LANDLORDS WERE BASICALLY RAIDING SCUMBAGS.”
Which would not have happened had the government *not* involved itself in attempting to manage the economy.
Left to itself, the free market’s price system naturally discourages such moral hazards.
Further, *simply being robbed* is not enough to *keep* someone in poverty, assuming that there exists economic mobility.
(Otherwise, it would always be impossible to start with nothing and make a life for yourself, anywhere.)
Guest wrote,
At least you finally acknowledged that I said that the landlords of Ireland in this time period were thieves.
But raiding is how governments come to be governments to begin with.
James C. Scott explains it in “Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States”
Raiding is how the certain powerful English people got to be the government in Ireland in the first place. It was their purpose. The system of landlords and rent was simply their way of sustaining the raiding over a long period of time. The landlords WERE the government, the ongoing raiders.
Guest wrote,
This is nonsensical. If the “free market” could naturally discourage raiders from coming in and making the market not be free anymore (assuming we are using Edmund Dene Morel’s definition of a free market and not André Morellet’s definition), then the governments never would have come into existence to begin with. Apparently, governments do exist, and no “free market” stopped them from doing so.
Guest wrote,
It depends on how extreme / frequent the robbery is.
If someone steals 5 pounds of grain from you, but you grow 3000 pounds of grain annually, for a family of four, that little robbery isn’t going to make you poor.
If, on the other hand, you grow 3000 pounds of grain for a family of four, and every year you have to hand over 2,400 pounds of grain to the robbers, leaving only 600 pounds of grain for your family, then that’s likely going to make you pretty poor.
(For reference, a family of four, if fed on grain, is supposed to have 1,200 pounds per year for a minimal diet… although that honestly might not be enough to sustain farm labor.)
Guest wrote,
The it’s not *impossible* doesn’t mean that robbery doesn’t keep people in poverty: it just means that it’s not 100% effective at keeping people in poverty. If we assume that there would be 0% poverty without a specific system of robbery (which seems to be consistent with a number of prestate cultures, who simply didn’t experience the sorts of poverty we see in so-called “civilization), and that 2% escape poverty in spite of a specific system of robbery, that just means that system of robbery is only 98% at keeping people in poverty. Even if it’s only 98% effective, it’s still keeping people in poverty, in so far as that 98% wouldn’t be poor if they weren’t subjected to that system of poverty. Further, if the 2% escape by either by a) joining the robbers, or b) leaving the society and joining the so-called “barbarians” instead, or c) leaving the society and joining one where people are less robbed instead, that’s hardly a recommendation for the system of robbery.
(There is so much awesome being left out because I couldn’t get my whole comment in.)
“This is nonsensical. If the “free market” could naturally discourage raiders from coming in and making the market not be free anymore … then the governments never would have come into existence to begin with. Apparently, governments do exist, and no “free market” stopped them from doing so.”
You should hear yourself.
You, yourself, literally believe that it’s a good thing for there to be central planning over an economy because you think that markets, left to themselves, cause poverty.
Yeah – you and everyone else who doesn’t understand economics, and that includes, to some extent, America’s own founders, who thought that patents and copyrights would be a good thing.
Thomas Jefferson, himself, thought that agriculture was the basis of all market values, not dissimilar from socialists who believe that labor is the basis.
People don’t understand economics – *that’s* why they keep involving governments in the economy.
And one of the *logical* result of government interventions is poverty and economic inefficiency.
Guest wrote,
This is another one of your strawman arguments.
The last time I recall you bringing up central planning, we didn’t even agree on a definition for the term. There’s a reason I generally just avoid the term unless someone else brings it up. It’s too ambiguous.
It was in this comment area I remember you most recently bringing up “central planning”:
https://consultingbyrpm.com/blog/2021/05/bob-murphy-triple-play.html#comments
You alleged,
Then I responded,
(For reference, Crystal Roh Gawding, Leymah Gbowee and Comfort Freeman were pacifist leaders of a Liberian revolution of pacifist women, which successfully won a Civil War.)
Then you replied as follows, indicating that a) you don’t share the same definition of “central planning” as me, b) you STRAWMAN SOCIALISTS AND ROUTINELY BLAME THEM FOR THE ACTIONS OF CAPITALISTS (e.g. King Leopold, who meets your definition of a central planner if ever anyone did, was a capitalist, not a socialist, and indeed, was actively resisted by socialists of the time), and c) you are hopelessly ignorant of business owners routinely force other people to do things against their will, thus meeting your definition of central planning.
I replied to your allegation that business owners don’t engage in attempting to force people to do things against their will as follows, just citing some of history’s more obvious examples of how your allegation is not true.
Guest wrote,
I don’t understand economics??? As opposed to someone who falsely alleges that business owners don’t force people to do things against their will??? (Your exact words were: “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.”) In spite of all the counterexamples listed above??? IG Farben??? King Leopold II’s International Association of the Congo??? The East India Company??? Union Miniere??? Lever Brothers??? Shell??? Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad??? Nestle??? All examples of corporations known for forcing other people to do things against their will.
Or, to return to the question Irish famine, the landlords in Ireland of the time period were conquerors, forcing people to pay rent against their will. Which meets your definition of “central planning”.
You know, if you had any intention to stop STRAWMANNING me, any time you felt a temptation to start a sentence with “you, yourself, literally believe” or “you believe”, or whatever variation on those words, you would stop, reconsider, and simply delete the sentence, since clearly either you have NO IDEA what I believe, or are deliberately lying about it.
I think you are strawmanning me on purpose, at least to some extent. Like in this comment, where you literally quoted my correction of your strawman argument, demonstrating that you actually managed to read it, and weren’t just shooting off a reply without bothering to read what you were replying to (which you’ve also been known to do), and then proceeded to tell me that I was “misleading” you about my own beliefs??? In other words, you strawmanned me, I corrected your strawman argument, you read the response, AND YOU CONTINUED TO STRAWMAN ME ANYWAY.
In a spectacular show of deliberate, purposeful STRAWMANNING, Guest wrote,
Leave the room, if it gets too annoying. 9000 IQ plays being made here — there can’t be a straw man if there is no man.
YOU ATTACK STRAWMEN ON PURPOSE!
YOU HAVE NO INTENTION OF ENGAGING IN GOOD FAITH DEBATE! TRYING TO CORRECT YOUR STRAWMAN ARGUMENTS IS USELESS (except in so far as it might help clear things up for other readers who might otherwise be mislead by you repeated strawman arguments
into thinking I believe things I don’t believe) BECAUSE YOU DON’T CARE ONE WHIT ABOUT ABOUT I ACTUALLY BELIEVE, AND INTEND TO KEEP STRAWMANNING ME REGARDLESS OF WHAT I SAY!
A Medium article on strawman arguments suggests,
medium [dot] com/purple-theory/the-straw-man-fallacy-682ab87445c4
There are other people here I want to talk to, so maybe “leaving the room” would be a bit of an overreaction, but I’m exhausted from trying to correct someone who repeatedly, knowingly, and deliberately STRAWMANS ME OVER AND OVER, so if you persist in replying to my comments, perhaps I should simply write a statement along the lines of “Guest repeatedly and deliberately strawmans me, and I am too exhausted from it to continue bothering to read his comments. Here is a link. Please don’t believe anything he says about what I believe unless you hear it from me directly, because as shown, he is an unrepentant strawmanner.”
Link to Guests blatant, deliberate strawman argument, quoted above:
https://consultingbyrpm.com/blog/2021/05/bob-murphy-triple-play.html#comment-2040702
Also, the paragraph “Leave the room, if it gets too annoying. 9000 IQ plays being made here — there can’t be a straw man if there is no man.” was supposed to be in blockquotes, and cite this article, which deals with the topic of strawman arguments:
medium [dot] com/purple-theory/the-straw-man-fallacy-682ab87445c4
Of relevance to Guest’s persistent and deliberate strawmanning behavior:
In “A Field Guide to bad Faith Arguments”, Aaron Huertas writes,
(The last paragraph quoted above is clearly full of sarcasm.)
https://medium.com/s/story/a-field-guide-to-bad-faith-arguments-7-terrible-arguments-in-your-mentions-ee4f194afbc9
“All examples of corporations known for forcing other people to do things against their will.”
Also, all non-examples of free markets, and therefore irrelevant to whether free markets work or not.
Its irrelevance is also the reason I keep ignoring your attempts to include them in the discussion as relevant.
Because they’re not.
“Or, to return to the question Irish famine, the landlords in Ireland of the time period were conquerors, forcing people to pay rent against their will. Which meets your definition of “central planning”.”
See above.
—
“I replied to your allegation that business owners don’t engage in attempting to force people to do things against their will …”
“… Forcing people against their will to do things the central planner wants” is something most businesses engage in to some extent …”
Not even remotely true.
Most businesses have to offer a wage to their workers, to be accepted voluntarily.
“I don’t understand economics??? As opposed to someone who falsely alleges that business owners don’t force people to do things against their will??? (Your exact words were: “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.”)”
We both agree that the examples you cite are inexcusable.
What we don’t both agree on is that they are not examples of free markets in action.
Who’s strawmanning, again?
And just like how Trump can supposedly be a racist and *still* be acknowledged to have gotten something right about COVID (that his lab leak theory has not, as yet, been ruled out, scientifically.
And just like how America’s founding generation was sometimes racist and often-times OK with slave-owning, and *still*, on occasion, take a dump or eat breakfast, or dance *sometimes* for non-racist reasons.
Just like those two examples, it is also true that businesses offer their low wages to potential employees for other-than-exploitative reasons – and that’s true *even* when they don’t care a bit about their employees’ livelihood.
Because if the worker *has no other choice* but to accept the low wage, and the government isn’t legally prohibiting them from engaging in better economic activities (like operating a business *without* a license if the customers are OK with it), and nobody is stealing from them, then the job offer is voluntary.
No exploitation going on in this scenario.
Everyone is constrained by reality. Resources are scarce.
If there’s not enough material to accomplish your project at the cost you’re OK with, that’s not the fault of exploitation, that’s the fault of reality.
And since nobody owes you a living (since nobody is your slave), then you can simply treat an employer’s unwillingness to pay you more as a natural resource limit.
You certainly wouldn’t be complaining about inequity if you couldn’t *see* what the employer had, or if the employer never existed.
You socialists only ever bring up inequity out of jealousy when you see that other people have more than you (or someone you’re advocating for).
Let me reiterate: If you continue to bring up irrelevant examples of exploitation that are not, in your worldview, inherently a part of free market ideology, I’m going to continue ignoring you on that topic.
Responded with some more awesome, but it didn’t make it past the filter, again.
Note to other readers: Guest has been KNOWINGLY, DELIBERATELY, and PERSISTENTLY STRAWMANNING ME. I therefore ask that you not believe anything he says or implies about my beliefs, unless you hear it from me directly.
Thus, I am no longer interested in debating Guest, for the same reason I wouldn’t want to continue to play chess with someone who repeatedly insisted on making my moves for me, falsely claimed to be countering my actual moves, and claimed I was the one being misleading when I tried to correct that person and say I hadn’t actually made the moves he said I did.
However, I am aware that the purpose of strawmanning is to effectively silence a person from getting their views across to an audience, by convincing the audience that the person actually has the views that the strawmanner says they do, rather than the person’s real views.
Therefore, I am leaving this standardized response to Guest’s comments from now on, so as to warn readers that Guest is not a reliable source of information about my views. However, it is not a specific response to anything he has written above, which I don’t consider worth my time to read or respond to, based on his past dishonest behavior.
For further details, see:
https://consultingbyrpm.com/blog/2021/07/catching-up-on-the-podcast-murphy-triple-play.html#comment-2045761
as well as the comment right after it.
One commenter on Quora wrote,
quora [dot] com/Why-is-it-that-most-people-don%E2%80%99t-like-a-straw-man-argument
“I therefore ask that you not believe anything he says or implies about my beliefs, unless you hear it from me directly.”
Streisand Effect?
Also, you did call yourself a socialist.
Are socialists so “extremely diverse” that the word no longer means anything?
I didn’t think so.
Come to think of it, that’s probably why whenever socialism fails, socialists claim that it wasn’t real socialism that failed.
With so many “diverse” interpretations of the word “socialism”, you can claim that any failed socialist ezperiment is “not real socialism”.
Note to other readers: Guest has been KNOWINGLY, DELIBERATELY, and PERSISTENTLY STRAWMANNING ME. I therefore ask that you not believe anything he says or implies about my beliefs, unless you hear it from me directly.
Thus, I am no longer interested in debating Guest, for the same reason I wouldn’t want to continue to play chess with someone who repeatedly insisted on making my moves for me, falsely claimed to be countering my actual moves, and claimed I was the one being misleading when I tried to correct that person and say I hadn’t actually made the moves he said I did.
However, I am aware that the purpose of strawmanning is to effectively silence a person from getting their views across to an audience, by convincing the audience that the person actually has the views that the strawmanner says they do, rather than the person’s real views.
Therefore, I am leaving this standardized response to Guest’s comments from now on, so as to warn readers that Guest is not a reliable source of information about my views. However, it is not a specific response to anything he has written above, which I don’t consider worth my time to read or respond to, based on his past dishonest behavior.
For further details, see:
https://consultingbyrpm.com/blog/2021/07/catching-up-on-the-podcast-murphy-triple-play.html#comment-2045761
as well as the comment right after it.
Mark VandeWettering wrote on Quora,
quora [dot] com/Why-is-it-that-most-people-don%E2%80%99t-like-a-straw-man-argument
To expand on the point of robbery being sufficient to cause poverty of famine-inducing proportions, specifically in the case of the Irish genocide:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1997/09/27/the-irish-famine-complicity-in-murder/5a155118-3620-4145-951e-0dc46933b84a/
An infographic informs me that 8 bushels of grain is sufficient to feed a person for a whole year. 26 million bushels of grain divided by 8 bushels of grain per person means that in 1845, a “famine” year, Ireland exported enough grain to feed 3,250,000 people, if my calculations are correct.
Stealing food from people who are producing more than enough food to feed themselves, such that more than 1 million of them die of the theft, is genocide.
Infographic link with 8 bushels per person statistic:
resource-media [dot] org/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/Food_or_Fuel.pdf
Test word for the filter: Massachussetts
Test string for the filter:
The Failure of Wage and Price Control in the Massachusetts Theocracy
[www]https://www.lewrockwell.com/1970/01/murray-n-rothbard/when-the-christians-ran-massachusetts/
@”random person”
I’m sorry, dude.
I’ve had some great responses for you, but the filter is not letting them through for some reason.
Unless and until the filter is removed, it looks like it’s going to be difficult to respond.
I can’t find anything objectionable that would trigger the filter.
Response 2 (Try #6)
Here’s another example of poverty we need not blame on free markets or the profit motive, even though people *were* motivated by profit, and there was slavery involved – *the logical result* of government attempts to centrally plan the economy *is* poverty and slavery, *quite apart* from any evil or selfish intent:
The Failure of Wage and Price Control in the Massachusetts Theocracy
[www]https://www.lewrockwell.com/1970/01/murray-n-rothbard/when-the-christians-ran-massachusetts/
“Maximum-wage control always aggravates a shortage of labor, as employers will not be able to obtain needed workers at the statutory price. In trying to force labor to be cheaper than its price on the free market, the gentry only made it more difficult for employers to obtain that labor. By 1640 Winthrop was admitting that Massachusetts had “found by experience that it would not avail by any law to redress the excessive rates of laborers’ and workmen’s wages, etc. (for being restrained, they would either remove to other places where they might have more or else being able to live by planting or other employments of their own, they would not be hired at all).…”
“… Of course, one method of alleviating this induced shortage was by using the forced labor of sl***ry, servitude, and compulsory harvest service. Thus, one intervention by violence in the market created conditions impelling a further and stronger intervention. But apart from forced labor, the Massachusetts authorities, as we have noted, found it extremely difficult to enforce maximum-wage control.”
And I’m sorry you didn’t get to see it because my other comment wasn’t approved, but I deliberately use the words “free market” because it does not seem to convey the meaning I used to believe was being understood by the word “capitalism”, which apparently had a different meaning to Marx than how free-market people usually use it.
If it helps, I mean by “free markets” that people are free to trade with another willing individual without permission from a third party.
Note to other readers: Guest has been KNOWINGLY, DELIBERATELY, and PERSISTENTLY STRAWMANNING ME. I therefore ask that you not believe anything he says or implies about my beliefs, unless you hear it from me directly.
Thus, I am no longer interested in debating Guest, for the same reason I wouldn’t want to continue to play chess with someone who repeatedly insisted on making my moves for me, falsely claimed to be countering my actual moves, and claimed I was the one being misleading when I tried to correct that person and say I hadn’t actually made the moves he said I did.
However, I am aware that the purpose of strawmanning is to effectively silence a person from getting their views across to an audience, by convincing the audience that the person actually has the views that the strawmanner says they do, rather than the person’s real views.
Therefore, I am leaving this standardized response to Guest’s comments from now on, so as to warn readers that Guest is not a reliable source of information about my views. However, it is not a specific response to anything he has written above, which I don’t consider worth my time to read or respond to, based on his past dishonest behavior.
For further details, see:
https://consultingbyrpm.com/blog/2021/07/catching-up-on-the-podcast-murphy-triple-play.html#comment-2045761
as well as the comment right after it.
Andrew Kiener wrote on Quora:
quora [dot] com/Why-is-it-that-most-people-don%E2%80%99t-like-a-straw-man-argument
Response 2 (Try #7)
Here’s another example of poverty we need not blame on free markets or the profit motive, even though people *were* motivated by profit, and there was sl***ry involved – *the logical result* of government attempts to centrally plan the economy *is* poverty and slavery, *quite apart* from any evil or selfish intent:
The Failure of Wage and Price Control in the Massachusetts Theocracy
[www]https://www.lewrockwell.com/1970/01/murray-n-rothbard/when-the-christians-ran-massachusetts/
“Maximum-wage control always aggravates a shortage of labor, as employers will not be able to obtain needed workers at the statutory price. In trying to force labor to be cheaper than its price on the free market, the gentry only made it more difficult for employers to obtain that labor. By 1640 Winthrop was admitting that Massachusetts had “found by experience that it would not avail by any law to redress the excessive rates of laborers’ and workmen’s wages, etc. (for being restrained, they would either remove to other places where they might have more or else being able to live by planting or other employments of their own, they would not be hired at all).…”
“… Of course, one method of alleviating this induced shortage was by using the forced labor of sl***ry, servitude, and compulsory harvest service. Thus, one intervention by violence in the market created conditions impelling a further and stronger intervention. But apart from forced labor, the Massachusetts authorities, as we have noted, found it extremely difficult to enforce maximum-wage control.”
And I’m sorry you didn’t get to see it because my other comment wasn’t approved, but I deliberately use the words “free market” because it does not seem to convey the meaning I used to believe was being understood by the word “capitalism”, which apparently had a different meaning to Marx than how free-market people usually use it.
If it helps, I mean by “free markets” that people are free to trade with another willing individual without permission from a third party.
Note to other readers: Guest has been KNOWINGLY, DELIBERATELY, and PERSISTENTLY STRAWMANNING ME. I therefore ask that you not believe anything he says or implies about my beliefs, unless you hear it from me directly.
Thus, I am no longer interested in debating Guest, for the same reason I wouldn’t want to continue to play chess with someone who repeatedly insisted on making my moves for me, falsely claimed to be countering my actual moves, and claimed I was the one being misleading when I tried to correct that person and say I hadn’t actually made the moves he said I did.
However, I am aware that the purpose of strawmanning is to effectively silence a person from getting their views across to an audience, by convincing the audience that the person actually has the views that the strawmanner says they do, rather than the person’s real views.
Therefore, I am leaving this standardized response to Guest’s comments from now on, so as to warn readers that Guest is not a reliable source of information about my views. However, it is not a specific response to anything he has written above, which I don’t consider worth my time to read or respond to, based on his past dishonest behavior.
For further details, see:
https://consultingbyrpm.com/blog/2021/07/catching-up-on-the-podcast-murphy-triple-play.html#comment-2045761
as well as the comment right after it.
Jacqueline Wong wrote on Quora,
quora [dot] com/What-is-the-psychology-behind-the-straw-man-fallacy
Now it doesn’t appear to be accepting my comments at all.
It probably thinks all my attempts are spam, now.
Anyway, I guess we’ll try another time on another topic.
Thanks for your patience.
Sometimes the filter doesn’t like it when you try to post a comment that’s nearly identical to one you’ve already attempted to post.
Let me see if I can get these last quotes in, they’re so good:
Learn the lesson that is never learned:
Forty Centuries of Wage and Price Controls: How Not to Fight Inflation
[www]https://mises.org/library/forty-centuries-wage-and-price-controls-how-not-fight-inflation
“An economist of the time, John Hales, wrote a disquisition on the problems of inflation in the Tudor period, which, except for the spelling, could have been written yesterday. …”
“… And thuse vndre the coulour of a Common weale they vse souche extreime tyrraney and Cruelnes that it wolde pitty a man’s harte to be holde it: I maruell therfor that this foresaid auctorrite is not taken a waye frome the foresaid officers, seinge that the longe experience haue so well declarid that the foresaid settinge of prices of victuall, do nothing at all bringe downe the highe price thereof. But I marvell mouche more at those men which have not only all Reddy seine the successe of price settinge, but also the sucesse of the moste parte of proclamacons and penaull Stattutes, and yet will holde oppinion this present derthe of victuall may be redressid bi setting of prices vppon victuall, but surly it is not the settinge of lowe prises that will aney thinge a mende the matter. …”
[Separate quote follows:]
“… After the disastrous winter at Valley Forge when Washington’s army nearly starved to death (thanks largely to these well-intentioned but misdirected laws), the ill-fated experiment in price controls was finally ended. The Continental Congress on June 4, 1778, adopted the following resolution:
“Whereas. . .it hath been found by experience that limitations upon the prices of commodities are not only ineffectual for the purposes proposed, but likewise productive of very evil consequences to the great detriment of the public service and grievous oppression of individuals. . . resolved, that it be recommended to the several states to repeal or suspend all laws or resolutions within the said states respectively limiting, regulating or restraining the Price of any Article, Manufacture or Commodity.”
I didn’t bring up the topic of price controls.
If you read Cynthia E. Smith’s full article, and not just my chosen quotes, then yes, she brought it up, but she only brought in up in the context of controlling theft, and only because she thought abolishing the theft entirely would have been “highly unlikely” in strategic terms.
I don’t think the question, “Should thieves be limited in how much they are allowed to steal?” should be answered in the same way as, “Should legitimate producers be limited in how much they are allowed to charge?” Thus, as far as I am concerned, an answer to the latter question is not relevant to the former question.