There’s a growing moral scrupulosity going on in libertarian land, to the point that every really existing business is closely examined for any hint of state involvement (sin!), even when one stage removed (sin!), and then, upon discovery, condemned to hell has yet another example of the terrible things that the state does to the world. How does this work? If you defend WalMart – an amazing company that provides for the world – the scrupulous will cite how it thrives off public road access. Speak about the glories of personal computers, and the scrupulous will point to the vast sales to public schools. Nike has a factory in a foreign land where the World Bank had some involvement and so therefore not even my shoes are creatures of the market; they too are stained with sin.
It seems that nothing escapes condemnation because, after all, in a heavily interventionist economy, nothing is immaculately conceived outside the smallest autarkic production unit. Given this, the critic lets the imagination run wild: surely all the things I personally hate would vanish in my utopia.
Here is an example. I posted a nice piece on Taco Bell on Facebook. Like clockwork, here was a response:
Note that the writer is not claiming that Taco Bell receives direct subsidies, only that it uses ingredients that it uses to build its food are themselves are produced with the aid of subsidies. That’s scrupulous! But here is the problem. How can we really know that there would be no fast food without corn subsidies? If corn were more expensive, the drink makers would use sugar, and that’s great, but note that sugar itself would be far cheaper without egregious import restrictions and would probably be competitive with corn at current prices. Why, then, does the writer not blast sugar import restrictions for imposing lower priced corn on the company? For that matter, corn itself would be much cheaper without corporate taxes and land taxes, labor interventions, payroll interventions, immigration restrictions, regulations on machinery and the like. Without any state involvement, the price of corn might fall by half — there is no real way to know. Maybe all corn would be grown overseas and imported at prices cheaper than dirt. And what if that did happen? Ultimately it is up to the company and, finally, the consumers to determine how products are made in a free market.
Mostly, I find it just preposterous for anyone to believe that somehow Taco Bell is thriving because of corn subsidies alone. It is thriving because it serves consumers food that tastes good, is low priced, and is very convenient. In other words, its profits come from public service. Why is that so hard to understand?
Murray Rothbard used the phrase “do you hate the state?” to ferret out real from mild libertarians. As a correlative question, we might ask “do you love commerce?” to ferret out real defenders of real markets as versus those who just enjoy standing in moral judgement over the whole world as it really exists. Yes, I too am against corn subsides, and against all subsidies, as well as taxes, regulations, inflation, zoning, public roads and everything else. In a free market, everything would thrive even more than it does today, and that goes for fast food too.
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Great post. I just linked it on Facebook with a note saying you can probably link anything you like to something you hate with only one or two degrees of separation. I included the following comment:
Here’s an example. Suppose you say “gosh, I really think organizations like the Mises Institute, the Institute for Humane Studies, and the Foundation for Economic Education are doing the Lord’s work. Have you seen the resources they make available online for a price of $0?” Is the following response appropriate, or useful?
“Meh. They’re only able to do that because they get favorable tax treatment as non-profits. A lot of the scholars affiliated with these organizations were either educated at or teach at colleges and universities that are run by governments. And even private schools get tons of government money. Organizations like LvMI, IHS, and FEE are only able to survive because of government subsidies to higher education and favorable tax treatment.”
Also-and I actually had this argument made toward me the other day-you can only use the internet to express your critiques of the State “because the State created the internet.” Ergo, the internet must be evil, or the State good.
I’ve encountered this before also. That is similar to the “developed for the space program” argument. When people credit the internet as having been created, magically, by government do-nothings, they conveniently forget the private market and the capital developed by it as having made it possible to fund. Same thing with NASA, et al.
Without capitalism, socialism isn’t possible.
Without NASA, Tang is impossible.
Crap. Can I be an anarchist with some orange-flavored reservations?
But what of all the strangely flavored drinks that were never created, because of the diversion of funds to government? Think of the unseen flavor drink that you never got to taste, never got to know, never got to love.
From nasa.gov
“Are Tang, Teflon, and Velcro NASA spinoffs?
Tang, Teflon, and Velcro, are not spinoffs of the Space Program. General Foods developed Tang in 1957, and it has been on supermarket shelves since 1959. In 1962, when astronaut John Glenn performed eating experiments in orbit, Tang was selected for the menu, launching the powdered drink’s heightened public awareness. NASA also raised the celebrity status of Teflon, a material invented for DuPont in 1938, when the Agency applied it to heat shields, space suits, and cargo hold liners. Velcro was used during the Apollo missions to anchor equipment for astronauts’ convenience in zero gravity situations. Although it is a Swiss invention from the 1940s, it has since been associated with the Space Program.”
Good old NASA myths. NASA is responsible for very little. My favorite are the aerogels, which were created because one guy bet another guy he couldn’t pull water out of a gelatin without losing its shape.
All you have said is yin + yang = Tao. That’s life. That’s what all the people say.
Jeff,
As usual good points and you have a knack from being able to easily see and explain the “forest from the trees.”
In a true free market, those that catered to consumer needs in a timely fashion would earn a profit irrespective of subsidies. Those that didn’t would go out of business. That’s where the real difference would be as compared to today.
The state subsidizes inefficiencies. The end result is that consumers pay more for goods because of the state giving money to those who can’t compete otherwise.
The reality is, it is amazing that companies can survive IN SPITE OF THE STATE and all the burdens it creates. That is the true test of the market: Even as it is manipulated by self-interested and corporate influenced politicians direct it, innovation and profits still exist!
To say that whole industries wouldn’t exist without subsidies may be true, but only because consumers are unwilling to spend the money on the products and services that are provided by that industry.
Jeff, I think you are one of the wisest men I know (if not THE wisest). This “left libertarianism” is an outright scourge, for it claims that unless ANY business operate completely without any laws, is not located on a government road, or something else, then it is totally illegitimate and MUST be smashed. That is an impossible standard, so the “left libertarians” can claim that while they support free markets, there are no free markets so whatever government predations come upon business, well, they are deserved.
Agreed; this is a great post. I’ve long been tired of the left-libs tarring non-lefties with a broad brush of “vulgarism”–Rothbard well knew the evils of business getting in bed with state (State Antitrust (anti-monopoly) law versus state IP (pro-monopoly) law, http://blog.mises.org/14623/state-antitrust-anti-monopoly-law-versus-state-ip-pro-monopoly-law/; see also TUcker’s great piece http://blog.mises.org/15416/does-favoring-free-enterprise-mean-favoring-business/ — as do we; and we know that the current system is a mixed economy not a perfect example of capitalism.
There are some businesses so close to the state as to be virtual arms of the state, that could not exist without it, such as the RIAA, private prisons, and others. But Walmart? Taco Bell? My view is that in a free market we would likely have even more international trade, even bigger multinational firms, and probably more artisans and small, more independent types and craftsmen too.
I’ve also long wearied of being lectured that libertarianism is “really” left, that we can learn from the left. I agree that we are not “right”, but nor are we left! We are libertarians! We are neither left nor right; we are better than both. If anything the left needs to learn a little rationality, economics, and consistency and honesty from us. The left is utterly evil (See the work of Rummell; Leftism Revisited: From De Sade and Marx to Hitler and Pol Pot , by Erik Von Kuehnelt-Leddihin; Sowell’s Vision of the Anointed); let’s not forget this. Left libertarians are simply libertarians who have some affinities with or have learned some things from the non-odious parts of leftism; that is fine, but enough with the inversion of reality.
Stephan Kinsalla said: ‘My view is that in a free market we would likely have even more international trade, even bigger multinational firms, and probably more artisans and small, more independent types and craftsmen too.’
Almost, but not quite, agreed. I do think we would likely have MORE ( large) multinational firms, but not necessarily ‘even bigger’ ones. The economies of scale that come with increased size do not grow indefinitely. increasing size brings additional managerial, logistic and bureaucratic costs too, and the marginal returns from increasing size must decline due to the increased drag caused by ever larger bureaucracies ( not to mention loss of ability to respond swiftly to changed market dynamics with quick decisionmaking), and subversive managerial behaviours start to resemble government departments as deeper heirarchies make it progressively dififcult to discern the connections between managerial actions and consequences. The optimal firm size will of course be be different for different businesses, sectors or industries, but its a fair bet that in the current mixed economy regime, the bigger a firm might grow from scale economies, is ( and hence the more lobbying power it gains), the emore likely it is that protectionist interventions by the state will benefit that firm, and this will tend to encourage the firm to grow BEYOND its optimal market-driven size. Nowhere is this truer than in the case of th ebanking sector, where (IMHO) central banks and byzantine regulation are the primary drivers of chronic concentration. Only the juggernauts can afford to carry such colossal compliance costs and still do better than breakeven.
$0.02
“I do think we would likely have MORE ( large) multinational firms, but not necessarily ‘even bigger’ ones. The economies of scale that come with increased size do not grow indefinitely. increasing size brings additional managerial, logistic and bureaucratic costs too, and the marginal returns from increasing size must decline due to the increased drag caused by ever larger bureaucracies (”
Yes, there are upper limits to the size of the firm as Rothbard and Klein argue. But with other state-imposed costs reduced taht at present impose additional limits on the size of firms, we can expect the upper limit in a free society to be even higher. IMO
I find this whole left-right libertarianism thing really annoying. Both sides could learn from one another (so called “lefties” seem to downplay benefits of corporations while righties seem to defend corporations without mentioning their deviations toward rent seeking). Both sides (it seems to me) agree that the free market is the best system, the status quo is not the free market, and the ideal would be to have a government which governs the least or not at all. The niggling is silly. A libertarian proponent of Walmart shouldn’t have to list and condemn every rent seeking activity Walmart does or benefits from. Neither should a libertarian critic of Walmart have to praise every convenience it provides in spite of state coercion.
I believe that, in a truly free market, there would be a thriving fast food industry. I also believe that, in a truly free market, “the fast food industry wouldn’t exist in its present form”. I don’t think either of these beliefs is far-fetched.
Of course, if having freed markets means I’d find out that these beliefs are wrong, I’d have no problem with that.
Edit: I didn’t mean this as a reply to Joshua. I must have hit the wrong button.
I just think it’s great that libertarianism is becoming mainstream. Not ten years ago most people wouldn’t be able to define it at all. Now folks are arguing the nuances of left vs right libertarianism.
For the first time in my life I’m optimistic about the future (not the immediate, unfortunately).
I have no problems with, “left libertarians.” They advocate non-aggression, property rights, and often times a stateless society (“private law society”). Since they do not advocate the initiation of violence to solve any problems they discuss, I have no fundamental objects (in fact, complete agreement) with their position. I find their work is a great contribution to the conversation, for they in fact highlight rights violations throughout the business world, and the negative effects which result.
Their critical voice is a great reminder of just how far we are from a “free economy,” and show us that private enterprise is not the innocent victim that we may sometimes characterize. The arguments of, “well things would work like X in a free society,” are speculation and I think of lesser importance when considering the ideal.
Will there be Taco Bell in a free society? Who cares!?!? That decision will be made by the market anyways.. lets just concentrate on getting there!
Personal note: I am a huge fan to Taco Bell and the institution of fast food….
“…and often times a stateless society”
I don’t really know of any left-libertarians that aren’t anarchists.
Good post, Jeffrey. Surely the fundamental point about commerce is that entrepreneurs are fulfilling their role – recognizing and acting upon opportunities to combine resources in such a way that they produce something of greater value. Obviously, if they are to do “something” instead of “nothing” and if they are to remain profitable while doing that “something”, they must necessarily take into account what prices actually are or will be, not what they should be, even if it were possible to determine what prices should be (which as everyone here knows, it isn’t).
In fact, it is often the artificial opportunities for arbitrage set up by false government-policy-inspired prices, and their exploitation by entrepreneurs, that ultimately leads to the realization that those policies are unsustainable or illogical.
Agreed. It’s part of why the government finds it so hard to control the market. Yet when certain entrepreneurs actively support/lobby for regulations, that is when they need to be lambasted.
Right, and a shining paragon of free market virtue such as Taco Bell would never do something like lobby for subsidies or advocate federal menu regulation that stifles competition.
It’s pretty sad, right? J. Tuck just lost a good deal of respect. An actual, legitimate concern over the wedding of big corporations and government comes up in the other article along those same lines. Instead of addressing them, or just admitting that Taco Bell isn’t the paragon of human achievement he’d have us believe, he creates an entirely separate article to post a strawman from some light-weight.
Nothing wrong with praising the admirable aspects of a business that is peaceful and satisfies consumers for a profit in the face of state depredation.
Nothing wrong with it at all. That shouldn’t prevent us from pointing out statism when we see it, though.
I don’t understand the need to go entirely black / white on this issue. In keeping with the Taco Bell example, I could easily say that it is neither the second coming of Jesus, nor Hitler. It provides a product at a price consumers want to pay. They can and should be praised for this.
As pointed out above, they also advocate state intervention when they think it will benefit them. This should be condemned. It’s perfectly possible for one example to contain both positive (from a libertarian perspective) and negative attributes.
Jim,
That’s essentially what I said, but you said it better.
saying we should not be black/white is an ambiguous assertion. If you mean we should never be principled–no. this is wrong. If you mean something else, well, then, whatever it is, maybe you can share it.
Yes of course we condemn taco bell for its statist aspects but this is not its essence; on net it is, like us, a victim of the state. And we are praising what is good and amazing in it–did you not read Tucker’s post??
Stephan:
I do not advocate an abandonment of principals, and yes, I did read Tucker’s post.
The primary principal is to oppose statism. I was saying we should not be black/white on the issue of whether any industry is “praise-worthy” or only worth of “condemnation”. This somewhat dovetails with what Tucker wrote, in that just because Taco Bell, for example, seeks favors from the state, does not make the entire organization the embodiment of evil. But neither does it make them a completely passive “victim”.
If the principal is to oppose the state, then we should praise companies that provide wanted products at a competitive price, while simultaneously decrying the same company for rent-seeking, when/if they do. That is not ambiguous, it is consistent.
Yup.
Iq.>”Agreed. It’s part of why the government finds it so hard to control the market. Yet when certain entrepreneurs actively support/lobby for regulations, that is when they need to be lambasted.”
I think I agree with this. lol
Yeah, I think it would be stupid for a company to be pure — to refuse to ship their products on a government road on principle, for ex. I don’t even blame them for leveraging IP laws when *all* their /competition/ does it. I don’t expect them to shoot themselves in the foot in comparative terms.
I don’t expect “Libertarian Joe” not to take a government job based on principle, if he views it in his self interest. If he doesn’t take it, a statist or drone will.
What I do object to is lobbying for more statism, or defending its pernicious presence. I can even say I expect a condemnation when possible and at a minimum, silence otherwise.
“to the point that every really existing business is closely examined for any hint of state involvement (sin!)”
Every time I drive on the road, even when I’m a pedestrian walking on the sidewalk, I’m involved with the state and I must admit that I enjoy the fact that those infrastructures are public “property” because it grants me freedom of movement without the need to build a complex network of permissions among different private property agents.
To obey traffic laws, traffic lights, speed limits etc. Is, in my view, a small price to pay in order to enjoy this freedom of movement.
The state is everywhere, therefore it’s impossible for companies to not be involved with the state one way or the other. Sometimes it is the state itself which forces such companies to be involved.
Just look for those who are actively rent seeking through patent laws and other monopoly abuse, the rest are just doing their best within an omnipresent government.
The Internet is a complex network of permissions among different private property agents (they are called peering and transit agreements), but this was all invisible to you as you read this article and posted your comment.
If it’s easier to send an electron around to world to go from point A to point B, it might be a whole lot more difficult to ask people to go on a trip around the world just so to circumvent many property owners to get to where they want, especially when it’s close.
I understand that if freedom of movement does not exist, desire of freedom of movement is universal, everybody wants to be free to move. Sooner or later, people would have to realize that if they want to be free to move, they also have to let others some level of freedom of movement on their own property.
I suppose that this freedom of movement would have been built on top of previous agreements over time as the roads and lands are aquired and built upon and that the experience of driving and walking around would be similar to the one today, except with more roads, more efficient traffic, less need to move around because of no zoning laws so things would be closer and with much more paying roads, but such fees would be alleviated by the fact that there would be no or very little taxes.
But still, at the moment, I am very happy of the government sponsored roads and the absolute freedom of movement over long distances that this procures me. Maybe road building and management is to be left to government after all and maybe a small sales tax to provide for those is not that bad.
What makes you think traffic laws and lights and speed limits wouldn’t exist on private thoroughfares?
There could be like there could not be, that would depend on the owner’s policies and usage agreement etc. But what I am saying is that I completely enjoy public roads and I don’t mind complying with the public regulations in order to enjoy the roads. I enjoy freedom of movement.
They can and they do.
Getting any flak yet for bellying up to the “guys” bar? Fun!!
“the scrupulous will cite how it thrives off public road access.”
We all thrive off public road access, maybe roads are exactly the thing that must be left to the state. Not all libertarians are full blown anarcaps. Some of them, minarchists would grant the state the mandate to build and manage roads for example.
Minarchists would want the state to provide roads, militaries, police forces and a justice department.
The state is so much everywhere and is running our lives in so much many details that perhaps it would serve us right to solve those issues before we start to attack Wal-Mart on the basis that it uses public roads. Customers also use public roads to make it to Wal-Mart, many of them even use public transit, subways, public transportation that is 70% subsidized by the government etc.
Wal-Mart, as a retailer, makes from 1% to 4% profit off it’s inventory, that’s quite low. It’s based on volume. It’s even selling a lot of inventory below cost.
You all most likely typed your response on a keyboard whose layout was fixed long ago due to the immoral patent laws. Just stop it! Ooops, I just did too.
I’ll play the devil’s advocate here mainly for my own edification.
Taco Bell specifically uses state intervention to gain a competitive advantage. Either through aligning their supply chain to govt protected markets to prevent disruptions or reduce volatility or by affirmative efforts such as seeking out Tax Increment Financing or other activities. Wal-Mart specifically works with local city planners to achieve huge infrastructure savings, bundling of parcels and restrictive development agreements on adjacent properties. Additionally both organizations get a louder voice at the legislative table to perpetuate these protections. These opportunities are not available, at least not to the same extent, to Joe’s Tacos or Small-Mart.
Paul Kruman as “journalist” no problem, but as advocate for the perpetuation of the state is he not a valid target for criticism?
Two MBA’s walk into a bar, the first one says “gimme a beer, I closed a $400 million merger today”, the second one says “gimme a beer, I just wrote a new bill for Senator Windbag that will provide additional benefits for blind orphans via a small tax on bike tires”. Do they both deserve a round on the house?
Another example would be Intellectual Ventures known widely as a patent troll. They buy up patents for the sole sake of obtaining licensing fees. A commercial activity that thrives based on state interventions in the marketplace. Is there a case for hating on them?
Yes, of course there is, as long as you believe that IP violates real property rights feel free to censure Intellectual Ventures. On the other hand there is a huge difference between a company like Taco Bell that actually provides a valuable service to customers and a patent company that sues people while creating no value.
It’s called working within the system. We can’t attack organizations and individuals obtaining defensive patents to avoid lawsuits under the very same system and call them troll. Each event has to be viewed independently to see if someone is using the system out of necessity or out of offensive strategy.
If anything, fast food would be even more affordable without state intervention, as would almost everything else.
Jeff,
I think you have highlighted something really fundamental; Few things are either all good or all bad, and to be honest about which is which, we need to use our ability to discriminate one from the other.
There is a good deal of the behavior you describe right here on Mises.org. Whether we are talking about Wal-Mart or the Constitution or IP, the subject is rarely black or white, but the effort to make it so merely destroys the useful distinctions between what is good about something and what is bad. If you cannot bring yourself to acknowledge any good in something you oppose, then you end up engaging in the rants you describe. It is possible, and likely, that almost any subject you pick will have elements of both.
I once said to Kinsella that he was throwing out the baby with the bathwater, and he responded yes, because it is Rosemary’s baby. That was funny, but captures the essence of what I understand as your point.
A little more discrimination between one thing and another and acknowledgment that things are rarely all good or all bad would raise the level of discourse here, in my humble opinion.
This is not Jeff’s point at all. some things are all bad like the drug war and IP and taxes. Jeff is talking about the practical issue of living in an unfree world. But of course Jeff is opposed to all the state regulations that *make* it unfree and *cause* the dilemmas and moral cloudiness of Taco Bells etc. that lefties sieze upon to argue for their own pet weird preferences about localism and smallness. You have no argument whatsoever here.
I don’t know, Mr. Kinsella. I think we all need to be a bit more self-aware on this one. Perhaps Brandon Holmes views ingredient subsidies as being “all bad like the drug war and IP and taxes.” Maybe that’s his personal pet libertarian issue, where yours is IP.
Jeff Tucker makes a great point here, and it’s one that I think libertarians should think long and hard about. It’s easy to go waving our hands and saying, “Oh well taxes! Of course taxation is all bad!” All the while you’re doing nothing more than alienating the masses with a hard-line stance.
I’m not suggesting that you weaken your stance, but I think all libertarians on some level could benefit from learning to acknowledge that sometimes “a little bit better” is preferable to “more of the same.” Not everyone who disagrees with you about IP is a bad libertarian or even a hypocritical or contradictory one.
I’m not suggesting that you weaken your stance, I’m suggesting that hard lines kill dialogue and make debate unpleasant. And if we can’t be inviting and persuasive then it doesn’t matter how right we are. A hermit with a good point is still a hermit.
This is why I hate activism. It corrupts. are you seriously saying that if a position alienates people it is not true? Or that we should not say it? Which is it? Of course taxes are evil–100%. Some things are easy to see, and completely black and white, like taxes and the drug war and IP.
Why do you always respond to me with a false choice either-or? This is exactly the kind of unpleasant, aggressive libertarianism that turns people off.
Think of it this way: You can tell me what your position on IP is, or you can shout it into my ear drums. You’ll be correct in both cases, but I’ll only listen in one.
Which is it?
Nothing anyone ever does over an internet blog is aggressive.
Ryan, Stephan is the kind of libertarian who wants to win friends and influence people by telling them that they’re either stupid or evil, or perhaps both.
He has his place, but he is what he is.
Grin and bear it, or use your own elbows and jawboning to help make this small corner of the universe a better one.
TT
“Ryan, Stephan is the kind of libertarian who wants to win friends and influence people by telling them that they’re either stupid or evil, or perhaps both.”
You think because you are in the business of making friends that means everyone is? Do you come to the Mises blog to make new friends?
I’m sorry, but I am in the business of finding truth, not winning a popularity contest.
Ryan,
Brilliant. Unfortunately, Kinsella doesn’t get it.
People tend to avoid fanatics for a reason. They’re unpleasant and tend towards intollerance of anything or anyone that is not 100% compliant with their personal party line. Anything they don’t love they have to hate.
not an argument. “You’re a fanatic,” Wildberry. now what.
Ryan,
Jeffery and Stephen both think that ingredient subsidies ARE all bad, just like taxes and just like IP. What they are not saying is that any person or organization that benefits from subsidies is necessarily all bad, now would they say that any company that uses any IP is bad.
As for hard lines, they are the big thing that separates libertarians from those who favor politics as usual. There are plenty of debates about minutiae between the mainstream parties… one might say that the little stuff is all they talk about most of the time.
What sets us apart is not that we want slightly lower taxes, or a small reduction in the number of innocent people locked in cages, or a slight diminution in the number of bombs dropped in foreign countries. What sets us apart is that we reject all of those things a illegitimate aggression against non-consenting parties. While we mostly would agree that less oppression is usually better then more, if we give up on our principles in favor of some middle ground we loose the very basis for arguing in the first place.
When I a discussing libertarianism with people I certainly don’t end the conversation if they don’t convert 100%, but I am always clear what my principles are and I at least try to get them moving in that direction. Without the basis in principle, however, I would not be able to make a consistent, logical argument.
Anthony, I don’t disagree with you, Jeff Tucker, Stephen Kinsella, or Brandon Holmes on any of these things. I agree that principles are important, but I don’t think harping on ag subsidies when someone is trying to praise commerce is pleasant. My point is that it’s only a pleasant debate that is interesting and persuasive to people.
Thanks Ryan, actually I do think that ingredient subsides, and the myriad of other tax breaks, regulatory handouts, taxpayer loans that pervade the food system are “all bad like the drug war and IP and taxes.” Maybe it’s not as important an issue as taxes or IP or anything else, but I suspect it does a lot more for liberty than infighting and purity tests to try and filter out mudblood libertarians from exalted purebreds.
Tax breaks are not subsidies or bad Brandon. You sound like a socialist
@ Stephan Kinsella June 2, 2011 at 4:45 pm
None whatsoever? Thank you for making my point.
You seem to have a belief in the mythical possibility that if the world you assert Jeff is opposed to suddenly vanished, that all would be light and goodness. You have absolutely no basis for such confidence.
What you really mean, I think, is that as we move in a direction of increasing liberties, everyone will be incrementally better off, a point upon which you and I may actually agree.
But the view that sees absolute goodness or badness in everything is just a form of intellectual laziness at best, and at worst, hysterical demagoguery.
For example, if we suddenly made all drugs legal, we would still have to deal with minor consent, bad dope, addicts, etc. So abolishing the drug war is no form of perfection that I can see. Every action causes anticipated and unanticipated consequences. The best we can hope for is to gradually increase the proportions in the right direction.
To the demagogue, however, all problems are simple; no need to worry about the details. The point is to win followers, not create a better world.
I’m a libertarian, unlke you, apparently, so I would end the drug war tomorrow if I could, no questions about it. Sad you would prefer incrementalism. What side would you have been in the abolitionism of slavery movement? Got to do it gradually? No thanks. Some of us have principles, as alien as that may seem to some of you.
@Stephan Kinsella June 2, 2011 at 7:39 pm
Like those which are the subject of Jeff’s article, you are so enamored with condemnation that I don’t think you really try very hard to dialogue.
I didn’t express an opinion about whether I would stop the war on drugs tomorrow or next week. What I said is that whether we keep it or stop it, there are still consequences that fall short of perfection. Either way, the solution is not absolute; there are consequences either way.
As to the race baiting, gee that really struck deep. You have a style that appeals to some, I guess.
I’ve seen your approach to IP so have made the rational choice that dialogue with you is not likely to be worthwhile; to the extent I do it’s primarily for the benefit of lurkers.
“I didn’t express an opinion about whether I would stop the war on drugs tomorrow or next week. What I said is that whether we keep it or stop it, there are still consequences that fall short of perfection.”
This is trite and obvious. So what? Why is such an obvious, low level point worth discussing?
” Either way, the solution is not absolute; there are consequences either way.”
are you assuming we should be consequentialists? And what does it even mean to say “the solution is not absolute”? This is not even normal language.
“As to the race baiting, gee that really struck deep. You have a style that appeals to some, I guess.”
It’s not race baiting. I am not accusing you of racism. I am accusing you of being confused and having an aversion to principles and principled thinking.
Stephan,
I fully agree there’s no reason to dilute your conclusions just because many people disagree, and I like the idea of taking a principled stand. On the other hand, I think incrementalism has more to do with strategy and personal attitude than with conviction.
For instance, suppose that you believe all taxes are wrong and should be abolished, but you want to avoid the social unrest and the risk of civil war that would come with such a monumental change as the sudden abolition of all tax-funded activities and entitlements. So, if you become the US president, you would do it gradually, from less controversial to more controversial steps, waiting for a while until the dust settles after each step. That wouldn’t mean you are less principled, just that you are not so bold in your practical approach.
Martin, sure, I could understand such a view. But I don’t think that was Wildberry’s criticism.
Let me clear that up for you. It certainly was.
You tend to reject any position that is not 100% in conformance with your most absolute and radical positions. Therfore, though we may agree on many things, you automaticaly oppose anything I say because I am the one who says it, and I oppose your total rejection approach to social, political and legal issues, in particularl IP.
In case you have forgotten, I don’t really care about IP that much. But it is good vehicle for discussing the hard issues having to do with distinguishing between one thing and another.
The point of Jeff’s article here, TO ME, is that even Taco Bell is not a absolute, open and shut case of one thing or another. On the one hand, it is a successful business model. On the other, it participates in mercantilist conduct that you and I oppose.
If this second type of conduct was eliminated or made less prominant, I think it would have a positive effect on the overal economic systems of our country. I base this on my understanding of Austrian economic theory, such as it is.
I have tried many times to shift discussions here to a platform where we place ourselves in the exact position that Martin OB portrays. It is not an easy task to see where those first moves should be, and to distinguish those actions that would have a big impact for low blowback. That is a real, interesting, and difficult problem.
But with you and many of your adherents, every discusssion that you consider “unprincipled” results in ad hominem attacks and rediculous accusations and irrelevant fabrications of one straw man after another.
I have not been posting her that long, but I am certain that I am not the only person here that feels this way. I’m asking you to think it over.
Wildberry, you are as confused, dishonest, and inept as ever, and not worth replying to.
Case in point.
“You tend to reject any position that is not 100% in conformance with your most absolute and radical positions”
This is called principled thinking. I am very sorry you are so suspicious of its usefulness.
“Therfore, though we may agree on many things, you automaticaly oppose anything I say because I am the one who says it”
Oh that is very whiny. No one is waging a personal vendetta against you Wildberry, he’s attacking the things you say, not you. I do the same. I would respond exactly the same way if it were anyone other than you, save for me referencing previous debates I have had with you.
“and I oppose your total rejection approach to social, political and legal issues, in particularl IP”
And so would you oppose my total rejection approach to slavery? People make all sorts of arguments in favor of slavery all throughout history and I never budge. How stubborn of me! Again, this is called having principals, and I sure do hope you are not dancing around what Dick Cheney had the balls to just come out and say.
“In case you have forgotten, I don’t really care about IP that much”
This is simply incompatible with how much you post on the topic.
“But it is good vehicle for discussing the hard issues having to do with distinguishing between one thing and another.”
So you use it as a vehicle for attacking principled thinking? That’s all you ever did to me at least, basing your arguments on “we can’t ever know anything for sure in ethics”, which as you may not understand, does not vindicate a pro-IP position but renders it impossible to have a justifiable stance on IP, or any other ethical issue at all. It is a standard form of sophistical arguing to say that every identifiable object is “distinct” from any other identifiable object and use that as a basis to reject any universal claims being made. If you give up making universal statements, how can you even make that very statement, seeing that it concerns the universal category of universal statements?
“The point of Jeff’s article here, TO ME, is that even Taco Bell is not a absolute, open and shut case of one thing or another. On the one hand, it is a successful business model. On the other, it participates in mercantilist conduct that you and I oppose.”
I think Jeff’s point is that Taco Bell is mostly a market success while its “abuses” can only be found by relentlessly hunting down tiny details that hardly make a difference as to how the business operates. His point is if the day comes that we actually live in a libertarian society, maybe there would be some more or less powerless shell of a “state” still around, and it would be a waste of time and potentially counterproductive for libertarians to claim “it’s as bad as its ever been!”
“But with you and many of your adherents, every discusssion that you consider “unprincipled” results in ad hominem attacks”
Examples please? I don’t believe this since you seem to be interpreting a critique of what you say as a critique of you.
“and rediculous accusations and irrelevant fabrications of one straw man after another”
People hide behind the “straw man” when they have no position to advocate, and only jab at everyone else’s positions. The only reason why anyone is straw manning you is because you have failed to reveal what position, if any, you *actually* hold. Most of what you have done in this past is just, “I don’t like that property rights theory”. Okay, which one DO you like?
“I have not been posting her that long, but I am certain that I am not the only person here that feels this way. I’m asking you to think it over.”
Dude, I’m sure there are plenty of places you could go where you will find only hostility towards principled thinking. There are plenty of people in the world that, whenever I make arguments like the ones I make here, drive the debate to an insistence that “logic” is just a matter of opinion and everything is uncertain and nothing is black and white or whatever.
Finally, that you keep pointing out that others may agree with you is just an example of entirely unprincipled thinking! Surely you don’t think peer pressure produces truth. But frankly I don’t think I will ever understand the insistence that “everything is uncertain” and “nothing is black and white”, followed by continuing to participate in conversations about anything! If you really believed everything was as uncertain as it was you wouldn’t waste any time defending any position on anything, because you can’t be certain it’s a position worth defending!
Beyond that, you can’t say that everything is uncertain without claiming to be certain that everything is uncertain.
“Case in point”
No, not case in point. Kinsella attacked what you said, not you. When you say something that is confused, it is safe to say the speaker is either confused or lying. The point is that what is being said is a confused position. No one is attacking you here, just the things you write.
I certainly hope you don’t feel any hostility. I mean, it’s just an internet blog. It may seem like I get “pissed off” or whatever when really all I’m doing is trying to vividly illustrate how bankrupt I think certain positions are.
There are plenty of people in the world that think unprincipled and are viciously hostile towards principled thinking. There is no need for you to insist that the few people who *do* use principled thinking ought to stop. Your position is much more represented in the modern world than that of a principled thinker.
@sweatervest June 5, 2011 at 12:55 pm
Although I have found that attempting to have any kind of reasonable discussion with you or Kinsella (and a few others) is nearly useless, I guess I’m just an optimist. Allow me to demonstrate: ( I leave my original words in here to make it easy to follow)
This is the kind of sanctimonious arrogance that marks the holier-than-thou attitudes being highlighted in this and related threads. As if you have a corner on principles, or because I find your treatment of the subject shallow and closed minded, I must be stupid or dishonest or what you apparently think is even worse, “unprincipled”.
You don’t see anything suspect with the attitude that only you and your tiny little choir has a handle on the Truth?
Believe me, I do understand the traits you and Kinsella share. You remind me of the Democrat who searches for a way to spin a reasonable comment by a Republican in a negative light (or vise versa). If the other party said it, I must be opposed. It is not personal, I agree; it is ideological. Anyone who you consider to be less than a “pure libertarian” cannot possibly say anything useful or true. That is my definition of an ideological fanatic. It is very much an “Us v. Them” mentality. It sucks.
Case in point. As if I support slavery. Who is being dishonest here? How did Cheney get into this discussion?
IP is not the most important issue facing civilization. What you cannot seem to understand or acknowledge, is that mercantilist conduct can be abhorred while holding the fundamental principle of a thing like IP as legitimate and useful.
As I have said to Kinsella, I started out advocating a position, much like a lawyer does when representing a client. When I started discussing IP, I would have been happy to discover what a sham it was. But in the end, the arguments against it, while somewhat valid relative to a “parade of horrors”, does not undermine, in my view, the principle and legitimacy of IP. What my personal beliefs were or are has little relevance. I have acted in good faith at all times, despite many unfounded accusations to the contrary.
Similarly, I can acknowledge that our current Federal government is a disaster, yet acknowledge that a limited form of self-government is legitimate in principle. To bring this thread full circle, I can acknowledge that Taco Bell and Wal-Mart have some things going for them which I need not oppose, and yet lament the fact that to play at their level, it is near impossible to forego the mercantilist conduct which I oppose.
The solution is not to divide the room into those who view the situation in the “purist” of ways, and limit my support to that purified, tiny group of “principled” libertarians, it is to level the playing field for everyone by shrinking the scope and power of government.
How did you come to hold yourself in such high esteem? This is the language of an ideologue, who merely presumes that he has a lock on principles and Truth. You apparently have no grasp of what I am saying, so there is no point in my responding.
Its “abuses” can be found by observing them and raising them. What make you the final arbiter of what is “relentless” or not? Everyone here raises things which make a difference to them, and it would help everyone if you could simply acknowledge the offering for what it is; one person’s input, nothing more or less. Respect: give some to get some.
No one that visits here often needs examples. Like I said, it is not personal, it is ideological.
It appears you are admitting to the charge. If you really are asking because you do not know, then I can only say you either do no read or do not comprehend. I am verbose on the subject.
I don’t have a clue what you are trying to say here or below, “dude”. Like, whatever.
Wildberry’s last post is full of emotivism and nonsense. One retort: re his IP is not the worst issue facing civilization–well this is not an argument for it. BUt I would say it’s in the top 6:
http://c4sif.org/2011/06/masnick-on-the-horrible-protect-ip-act/
congrats on supporting it this travesty of justice, Wildberry.
“This is the kind of sanctimonious arrogance that marks the holier-than-thou attitudes being highlighted in this and related threads”
Yeah, well you didn’t say I was wrong. I’m just being a douchebag about it. How can I make this point more gingerly to you? I should say that you are participating in the 2000-year old sophist tradition of blaming rationalists for being ego-maniacs and…
“As if you have a corner on principles”
…claiming infallibility. You have never criticized my principles except for being principles. You have not taken issue with the specific principles I use, only the fact that I use them.
“or because I find your treatment of the subject shallow and closed minded, I must be stupid or dishonest or what you apparently think is even worse, “unprincipled”.”
Look, I may find your position stupid or dishonest but I don’t know you and I’ve never tried to pin down your personality. All I can say to this is, welcome to humanity: you’re gonna say stupid and dishonest things every now and then, and you may even revolt against reason when you are shown something you don’t like (I know I’ve done that!). You’re not so perfect to be immune to such human errors. Feel free to point them out to me whenever I commit them myself.
“You don’t see anything suspect with the attitude that only you and your tiny little choir has a handle on the Truth?”
Standard, textbook sophistry. By claiming to be able to illuminate truth, we are saying something about our own personal intellectual capabilities and denying our ability to make mistakes. No, I’m not being mean, I am pointing you to a long tradition of what you just said. This is nothing new. Your criticism here is the standard criticism of rationalist philosophy that was started by the school of sophistry in ancient Greece. Hoppe deals with it in every one of his writings (though not extensively, for it is an old problem that has already been dealt with).
Once again, you have never simply claimed, “no what you said is wrong, this is the right position”. You have rather attempted to claim that one could never know what the right position is, or that there simply is no right position. You never seem to respond with, “That is wrong because…” It is usually, “That’s too narrowminded, that is too simple”. It is almost like saying, “No, that would make too much sense”, as though my categorization of these problems is too elegant! I honestly suspect we are mis-communicating, but on the other hand I know that people use this type of arguing to get around otherwise unavoidable problems. As a debater it is my duty to point out at least what I think is a deliberate use of sophistry when I see it (and to be clear, I use sophistry to mean the school of thought from Athens, not some empty pejorative term).
“Believe me, I do understand the traits you and Kinsella share. You remind me of the Democrat who searches for a way to spin a reasonable comment by a Republican in a negative light (or vise versa)”
Well I should have seen this coming. After accusing us of giving you an unrequested personality test, here you are detailing to me “the traits” I have. Suffice to say you have not met me. Have you met Kinsella?
“If the other party said it, I must be opposed. It is not personal, I agree; it is ideological”
You should really stop explaining other peoples’ positions to them.
“Anyone who you consider to be less than a “pure libertarian” cannot possibly say anything useful or true. That is my definition of an ideological fanatic. It is very much an “Us v. Them” mentality. It sucks.”
Well, that is almost verbatim the complaint I get from some hardcore socialists (not that it really matters, I just find that interesting). You seem to be suggesting that you or someone has defeated these positions, and we hold onto them simply out of “ideological fantasy” or something. Well, no you have never punctured a hole in ancap theory. I have to explain this every time I hear this. Am I being an ideological fanatic because I don’t just give up my conclusions and adopt yours upon request?
As for the “Us vs. Them”, you do realize you are in the middle of distancing yourself from “those ideological fanatics”, right? Sounds pretty “Us vs. Them” to me… But yes the issue is, for example, the concept of intellectual property (not any particular instance of legislature) being justifiable or unjustifiable. You can’t have it be both. That may be “Us vs. Them” if you want to make it so egoistic, but it’s better than claiming it is somehow both at the same time. You are again invoking sophistry by claiming we are being any more extreme or unwavering in our claim that, for example, IP is unjustifiable, than you are in claiming that some form of it may be justifiable. You are not being less decisive in your claim than we are. You are, then, an ideological fanatic of whatever it is you believe in.
“IP is not the most important issue facing civilization.”
Well I don’t doubt you feel that way, but frankly I disagree. Copyright is currently the main motor to drive state censorship (you may cast that as abuse of copyright law, but it exists none-the-less). Piracy is the biggest “reason” the internet needs a kill-switch or some other type of state control. As some sort of libertarian you *must* be bothered a little by that!
“What you cannot seem to understand or acknowledge, is that mercantilist conduct can be abhorred while holding the fundamental principle of a thing like IP as legitimate and useful.”
No, it is not that I cannot understand or acknowledge that, it is that you cannot explain it. I know that it is how you feel (are you being ideologically fanatical by holding onto this position despite my relentless attacks of it?), but I have yet to get any insight into why. I feel like I have made a very good case for IP being an attack on real property, but then that comes back to the criticism of the property rights theory for being too “simple-minded”.
“Case in point. As if I support slavery. Who is being dishonest here? How did Cheney get into this discussion?”
This is what Peter means when he says you reject logic. I really don’t want to be condescending here, but what are you missing when I point out that, by your reasoning, you must support slavery? Pointing out that you in fact do not support slavery defeats your own case! You have not even tried to illustrate how your arguments in favor of IP do not equally support slavery. You just simply point out, “I support IP but not slavery”. In other words, a universal argumentative form is correct for one premise but not another. *That* is what rejecting logic is! To repeat, you did not even *attempt* to deny my claim that the reasoning you used to support IP also supports slavery! This is wanting to have your cake and eat it too: to accept conclusions that satisfy you, even though they logically contradict each other. That is what unprincipled thinking is.
“I have acted in good faith at all times, despite many unfounded accusations to the contrary”
I suspect you simply do not realize what you are doing. You can unintentionally revolt against reason.
“How did you come to hold yourself in such high esteem? This is the language of an ideologue, who merely presumes that he has a lock on principles and Truth”
Utterly ridiculous. I have to hold myself in high esteem to be able to make universal claims!? I have to be infallible to say that 2 + 2 = 4. Only ideologues are so arrogant as to think they know such a universal truth as two and two being four.
You totally missed the point I made. If you are so adverse to making universal claims then what are you doing here? At most, you could only prove that IP is justified at a particular time and place, for if you think you have proven it justified at all times or places, you are making a universal claim! And such a proof would hardly matter for all the other times and places. By participating in this conversation at all, you are joining the ranks of “ideologues” who dare to make universal claims.
Seriously, you are being ridiculous getting upset over being called an unprincipled thinker and then attacking me as being an “ideologue” for making universal claims (i.e. working with principles). To decisively defeat this sophistry, I need only point out that in your condemnation of making universal claims, you are yourself making a universal claim and being self-contradictory.
“The solution is not to divide the room into those who view the situation in the “purist” of ways, and limit my support to that purified, tiny group of “principled” libertarians, it is to level the playing field for everyone by shrinking the scope and power of government.”
Okay, what happens when libertarianism gets a little more popular and (rest assured this will happen, it is already starting to) liberal statist apologists, communists and fascist “Tea Partiers” start calling themselves libertarians? Should we avoid dividing the room and just let them push their statism into libertarian principles because they showed up?
Look, if your position is incompatible with non-aggression then it is not libertarian and it would be defeating the entire libertarian goal to compromise even a tiny bit with any violation of the non-aggression axiom (there are already plenty of political philosophies that do and already have names that are not “libertarian”). If you don’t like that then you are not a libertarian, because libertarianism has only ever been defined as the implications of non-aggression. If the room contains people advocating non-aggression and people advocating aggression, the room *needs* to be divided so that libertarianism can actually mean what it is supposed to mean.
“Everyone here raises things which make a difference to them, and it would help everyone if you could simply acknowledge the offering for what it is; one person’s input, nothing more or less. Respect: give some to get some.”
Okay, then acknowledge my offerings for what they are: a decisive defeat of other positions, including many of those offered here. Oh wait, that’s not so simple is it? People here actually disagree over things!
I think I give you and your ideas plenty of respect by responding to them. I could just ignore them and tell myself they are crazy, but I don’t do that. I respect you and your intelligence enough to think it is worthwhile to defeat your claims. It is ridiculous for you to ask other debaters to not criticize the ideas they find wrong with every inch of their effort. You do the same, as you are doing now. You don’t go easy on me when you think I’m being a self-absorbed ideologue (and I’m not asking you to be).
“It appears you are admitting to the charge. If you really are asking because you do not know, then I can only say you either do no read or do not comprehend. I am verbose on the subject.”
You might be verbose, but I am claiming loud and clear right here that you never presented a property rights theory of your own, not even close. I’m not falling for this. You can hide behind the volume of your posts but I know you have never explained what your property rights theory is, and rather explained why you think it is impossible to construct a property rights theory. If you actually did it, you could have easily fulfilled my request here instead of dodging it and referencing me back to a body of writings far too long for me to sift through.
“No one that visits here often needs examples. Like I said, it is not personal, it is ideological.”
Then it’s not an ad hominem. So I’m attacking your ideas, on an ideological level? What, then, are you doing by rejecting my anti-IP position?
“I don’t have a clue what you are trying to say here or below, “dude”. Like, whatever.”
I’m saying quit pretending like everyone is like me or Kinsella and the world is not principally populated by people who respond like you do. You are not the underdog being pushed around by anarcho-capitalists.
Wildberry, whether you realize it or not, you are launching the same attack against rationalist philosophy that sophists have made for thousands of years. We really do mean something when we say it is unprincipled thinking.
Wildberry,
You are mixing two aspects of the problem, or two distinct methodological approaches if you will.
The first one is the scientific one. An argument can be either true (assumptions are in accordance with the conclusions), untrue (assumptions contradict the conclusion) or undeterminable (there is no logical connection between assumptions and conclusions).
The second one is what I call an emotional one. For example, whether you like the assumptions or conclusions, or how well they fit into a specific social structure.
Empirical evidence does not support this claim. You go great lengths in supporting the pro-IP position, beyond the limit of the unbiased. Even if we ignore the direct logical fallacies in your arguments and simply assume that that’s an oversight or a lack of interest rather than intentional, there are still indirect issues. You regularly commend people who make pro-IP arguments which bear no resemblance to your own arguments, even if they contradict them. Furthermore, I have never seen you admit that there can, hypothetically, be a coherent anti-IP position.
“I sat on this post a couple of days thinking there is too much ignorance to tackle. As I think Karl said similarly on an earlier post, you are not paying me to teach you about IP, so you are going to have to figure out for yourself if you want to actually learn anything about it before you pontificate confidently from a position of complete ignorance, not only of IP itself, but what I’ve previously written on this blog. Just because you’ve asked doesnt’ mean I have to recap everything for you.”
Oh, yay, we’re back to this. Look, if you don’t get it, then you don’t get it and I can’t explain it to you. If that’s not an admission of defeat, then I don’t know what is. And weren’t you just in the middle of accusing me of thinking only I have access to truth? Hehe…
So when you get smacked with real philosophy you throw in the towel? Fine with me. At least I know the history of the ideas I have and the criticisms made of them.
“So, did you mean to apply this label to me as a compliment? Or do you merely subscribe the modern usage, where something positive is used as a derogatory term; that Orwellian technique of making war peace, etc.?”
*Facepalm*. You didn’t actually read that wiki, did you? As it explained, the pejorative use of sophistry is not the modern usage, that is the ancient usage by Aristotle, Plato, etc. The modern usage is to put it in favorable light, which only shows what a dark intellectual time we are living in. Re-read that wiki more carefully, and maybe you will see that it describes sophists, correctly, as people who master the use of rhetoric to try and convince anyone of anything, no matter how illogical it may be. Aristotle and Plato criticized them relentlessly for using language as a tool deception, a by-then age-old practice, while the two aforementioned philosophers had the novel idea of using language as a tool of discovering the truth.
I am just thrilled you think being called a sophist is a compliment. Yes, you are an expert at rhetoric. In other words, you are a slimy politician that says whatever buzzwords he needs to say to get people cheering for him. The truth does not matter, just how good your words sound. Is it a compliment in your book that you can trick people with flowery language?
“You have no idea what you are talking about, which makes this lengthy post mostly a waste of time. I would love to see you embarrass yourself by trying to explain the ridiculous statement that “Copyright is currently the main motor to drive state censorship”. Gotta hear that one.”
What an excellent sophist you are! Why, it almost seems at first that you have defeated my argument, and your position comes out on top. Ohhh, wait, all you did was write a paragraph about how silly/embarrassing you think something is, and unfortunately that is not an argument. Rhetoric does not fool me. But it may fool some people, which is the only sensible reason you said it. Copyright *is* the main motor to state censorship, as has been explained especially in its origins, which was to allow royal courts to have final say in everything that is published.
“That is because you are lazy and ignorant of the subject upon which you confidently express so many uninformed opinions. You are a perfect Kinsella supporter; it is not necessary that you know much about IP as long as you oppose it.”
More deceptive empty claims that are designed to make it appear as though you have defeated me. It takes no insight to call someone lazy or uninformed. I could just as easily do the same to you.
For the last god damn time, I was anti-IP and *then* found Kinsella. You know that, because I have told you over and over, you dirty liar. If you don’t want to be called a liar, stop lying. You know damn well my arguments are my own, not Kinsella’s, because you pull this “you guys are in a court” BS every time and you just want to keep mentioning it because, as you seem to be proud of, you know how to use words to try and deceive. No wonder Peter is so nasty with you. I cannot believe how you smear the people you argue with and then get all whiny about how they smear you right back!
I came to my anti-IP conclusions through a decade of making music and being faced with the issue of not being able to complete the cover projects I want because it could potentially violate copyright for me to do so. How much creative stuff have you done, Wildberry? You’re such a f*cking expert in positive IP law which, because you are utterly devoid of morals and think “might is right”, you claim is relevant at all, so tell me what I, a creative person, should think of IP? I have only been personally restricted by it with my own creative work, but you’re right. Who am I to have an opinion on any of this? I am only one of the creative people it these things are designed to protect? Who are you but some deceptive sophist on the internet?
I’ll tell you what Wildberry. Compared to you, I am an expert in ethics. I have read much on the subject and spent years thinking through problem and arriving at carefully considered conclusions. You think I’m so uninformed because you reject the entire scientific study of ethics and define your sense of right and wrong by what politicians write down on pieces of paper. It truly disgusts me that you put so much time and effort into defending a relentless attack against the very idea of justice itself.
You are uninformed about the entire science of ethics. I am making this accusation loud and clear: you have not read, or at least comprehended, a single piece of literature on the subject because you are rejecting it entirely.
“How arrogant would you be to demand that someone explain AET to you if you had never opened a book on the subject?”
You’ve never opened a book on ethics in your life you hypocrite!! You’re the only one talking about positive law, and the fact you think positive law has anything to do with what is ethical and what is not only proves that you have never opened a book on ethics! This is just ridiculous. You’ve never read a damn thing about ethics, or at least understood it. Your ignorance on the subject is as complete as ignorance can get.
“Ah, yes you should avoid dividing the room, but an ideologue can never see it that way.”
Alright, so when someone else starts saying “actually socialism is quite libertarian”, then we’ll throw down the welcoming mat. And don’t worry, that won’t dilute the word “libertarian” to the point that it has no meaning.
Apparently being an ideologue means thinking problems through and basing your conclusion on that, instead of what you think is going to be popular.
“This is precisely the attitude that is being explored with the “one-drop libertarian” thread. Your brand of libertarianism will never be popular because you and others think you are doing a service to humanity by explaining to everyone who does and does not have a right to sit on the side of the table advocating liberty.”
Have fun winning popularity contests, you sophist. That was the original intention of sophistry: to be popular.
Yes, I am doing a service by clarifying what it means to advocate liberty and how that is different from calling the advocacy of despotism the advocacy of liberty. Apparently you don’t care what is actually being advocated, as long as the word “liberty” is attached to it.
“The arrogance is astounding, and is a reason why reasonable people resist identifying themselves as libertarians; the leaders here are doing their best to conflate the broad philosophy if libertarianism with the narrow and closed system of ancap ideology.”
Right! I am being arrogant as you go on to define who is reasonable and who is not. As I said before, it is standard textbook sophistry to accuse rationalists of being arrogant. It is so arrogant to think you know that if you add any two things to any two other things at any time or any place, you always get four things.
I believe, and argue as such, that ancap is libertarianism taken to its logical conclusion. Stamp your feet all you want, you have yet to offer even the slightest counterargument to that claim. What you are basically saying is, “It doesn’t matter if you guys are right, it’s just mean”.
“I challenge if for the exercise, not because I think anyone here is about to launch themselves onto the national or world stage.”
And yet it matters so much to you whether or not we can become popular or not…
“Your approach to cooperation and belonging are antithetical to any form of populist political movement.”
GOOD!! Populist political movements are when masses of people rob smaller groups of people are cheer about it by sheer numbers. I want nothing to do with it. Have fun marching with an army, telling yourself it’s the right thing to do cause everyone else is doing it with you.
As I have said before, nothing that can ever be done on a blog is uncooperative.
“As an ideologue, of course, you have no idea what I’m talking about.”
Yes I do, I just have a different outlook on it. You express it every time someone presents a bunch of self-contradicting claptrap in support of IP and you back it up with “yay, bravo, good job, couldn’t have said it better myself. you really get this problem, don’t you?” Truth is consensus to you, or you just don’t care about what the truth is. And when you win an election, I’m sure that is all the proof you’ll need that you are doing what is right.
“You are merely expecting that someday, people will “wake up”, right?”
I don’t expect anything of “people” in general because it is a stupid waste of time. What I care about is articulating what I think is correct in the most sound way I can think, and seeing if anyone can defeat my arguments and lead me to a better position to hold. I am only concerned with myself finding the truth. I participate here in order to better articulate the anti-IP position so that pro-IP arguers have something substantial to go after and maybe *I* can learn something from their posts. I care about me knowing the truth. It is not my place or responsibility to show anyone else the truth, for I am constantly seeking it myself. I share my arguments because the alternative is to hide them and hiding them would be an expression of misplaced arrogance and confidence in my arguments, which I don’t have.
“This just demonstrates my point that you ignorantly presume I have never written here on the subject.”
Or perhaps you are so deeply confused about ethics you think you write about it when you really don’t. For example…
“Here is all you need to understand about my theory of property rights. Property is a human device. (Mises, look it up)”
Mises clearly claimed repeatedly he did not consider ethics to be a science and ignored dealing in it all together. That is not a theory of property rights, but a description of the things called property that have existed historically.
“Property law has a well defined system of property rights.”
Haha you just don’t get how circular this is do you? The only reason why it should matter at all what any law says is because those laws are supposed to be different from mere empty claims written on any piece of paper by anyone. They are supposed to be backed by some form of justifiability, which is exactly what makes them “laws” instead of just what someone wrote down. You have never started to describe a theory of property rights, but merely wowed us with the prophetic insight that existing systems of legislature recognize something called property.
“If you are interested read a book.”
No you go read a book you friggin hypocrite. Read “The Economics and Ethics of Private Property” by Hoppe or “The Ethics of Liberty” by Rothbard or “Ethics” by Aristotle. That you think pouring over law books makes you an expert in ethics is disgusting beyond belief. That you think being a lawyer makes you know any more about what is really right and wrong is truly disgusting.
“I am not obligated to spoon feed you out of your own self-imposed state of ignorance.”
Likewise. You don’t even know what the word ethics means and you refuse to listen to anyone try and explain it to you. Rather you shove law books in our faces and pretend like you have accomplished something in the process.
“That is the foundation of my positions.”
My point being that the foundation of your position is positive law, *not* a theory of property rights. Wow, you can read what positive law is and identify that it supports IP. Is that what you think analytical thinking is!? And if you are suggesting that your theory is “property rights are what positive law says they are” then have fun telling Jews they didn’t have their rights violated during the Holocaust, or that blacks didn’t have their rights violated in pre-Civil War United States. I suppose I gave you enough credit to assume that is not what you are suggesting.
“Natural rights theory has limited applicability to property rights and specifically IP”
Like you know a damn thing about natural rights theory, Mr. law professor.
“but in any case, I reject Rothbard’s theories derived from the Crusoe device, of homesteading physical resources as the only “natural” means of property rights, which leads to the rejection of intangible property rights, and the cul-de-sac concept of title transfer theory of contracts, for example.”
Good for you. You reject it and offer positive law in its place. Again, good luck explaining to people that the Third Reich was the state and its laws were sovereign so there ya go! Again here is another sophistical paragraph with claims and no insight or arguments.
“While human will is inalienable in certain contexts (slavery),”
How? Why? Where do you get this? There are plenty of systems of positive law that say this is not true. It is not my job to spoon-feed you what the said. You can go look them up yourself and prove to yourself that, by your own reasoning, human will may be inalienable here in this country, but not in other places at other times.
“I reject homesteading as the sole theory of how property rights arise, or what types of property can exist or are legitimate forms.”
Good for you. Do you also reject that 2 + 2 = 4?
“Property may arise by capture”
Oh my good lord. Might is right!! If you capture it, you did not violate anyones’ rights, because rights are defined by what people do!
“social/legal convention.”
Complete nonsense. That the property rights that actually exist (not the ones people go willy nilly forming at will) are recognized is a necessary pro-condition to any society existing at all. If your precious positive law makes murder legal or even worse so mandatory, then there will quickly be no society to speak of, and no number of people can get together and decide that things don’t work that way. Reality is not decided on by humans.
“Property law is economic as well as legal, (Hayek, look it up)”
You are so utterly confused about property you think people form society and then decide how to recognize property. You think people just decide what is property and what is not, rather than deciding whether or not to recognize the property rights that exist no matter what. Property comes before an economy, because an “economy” is the product of private property recognition.
“and therefore utility has its place as a justification for economic policies.”
Your density concerning utilitarianism astounds me. That you cannot wrap your head around the subjectivity of value and understand that what is “better for society” to you may very well be “worse for society” to other people is utterly perplexing. What is so hard to get about that? Apparently something that has no definition has its place as a justification for economic policies. If you think “better for society” means anything, then you are not an Austrian economist (because you deny the subjective theory of value). And I know what Mises said, and he understood perfectly that his claim that a free market is a better situation is no more than a personal opinion and can never be justified beyond that. Mises chose to avoid ethics entirely.
“Internalizing externalities is one of my favorite topics in this regard (Coates, Demsetz, look it up)”
And here we go with public goods arguments (Hoppe, look it up). Forcing everyone to build a fence around their houses would internalize externalities too (and with good cause, by your utilitarian reasoning. If I add a piece to my house, increase my property value, and thus increase the property value of my neighbors’ houses, then clearly I deserve to be compensated by my neighbors for raising the prices of their homes. They weren’t the ones that went through the trouble to add to my house, how dare they leech of my efforts?). Can’t wait for you to argue in favor of that.
Besides, you have completely ignored all my arguments explaining why IP is a disincentive for creative work, not an incentive. You must also believe that giving GM a monopoly in car production would lead to more cars because GM would make higher profits.
“IP is a form of legitimate, limited property rights which serve an important social and economic function in a division-of-labor, technical society.”
No it’s not. You can say that till your face turns red, but it is false, plain and simple. It is not legitimate because there are no property rights in non-rivalrous goods and all claims to rivalrous goods other than homesteading and trading amount to an act of violence on the homesteader/trader for he has his property rights confiscated solely by the actions of others over which he has no control. They serve no function but to interfere with the creative process, reduce the number of creative people in order to raise their per-unit wage exactly how minimum wage raises the wage of a few people by kicking a lot of people out of the job market. It interferes with division of labor by tying huge amounts of resources, people included, in the production of anti-piracy algorithms and drawn-out court cases and legal fees. It destroys technical innovation by limiting the very means by which technical innovation progresses (by taking the current idea and tweaking it).
That’s called an argument, Wildberry. Try it some time.
“Without it, producers of intellectual products would be producing for external economies (Mises, look it up).”
By your reasoning, because improving a house produces positive externalities no one would ever do it, because apparently everyone gets deeply offended when others profit from their efforts and they do not get compensated for it. Thus, no one will ever do anything to raise the value of their property because it will raise the value of the property of others and that’s just unacceptable.
Oh wait, they do all the time, because it also raises the value of *their* property! Likewise, when I make a new song, everyone else may get to enjoy a new song thanks to my effort, but so do I. It is such an incredible feeling to listen to a song you made yourself, and that alone is more than enough to keep me making music, whenever I find time to do it. Also, I gain the reputation of being a good composer (well, hopefully!) and serve to increase the likelihood that I get gigs or jobs as a musician, since while other people can play recordings of my songs, they cannot reproduce them themselves (and if they can, that is a useful talent that serves to be paid for).
Oh, and nevermind how the existence of copyright almost caused me to give up on what is by far the biggest (and, according to many of my friends, their favorite) musical project I have ever done (over four hours of music). Rather, I chose to share that project at the risk of being sued for it. Moreover, every time I write music I have no idea if I am inadvertently using a melody that has already been copyrighted, so that’s just a big reason for me to not make music at all.
Which, of course, you would know if you read Hoppe.
You are the one that is completely ignorant about this whole endeavor. You are so completely blinded that you think we are having a debate over what positive law says. You are so confused and uninformed about actual theories of ethics (including natural rights, which you simply dismiss with no reason) that you cannot understand why positive law is irrelevant to this debate.
I will always expose sophism when I see it. Every time I see you fill up a paragraph like, “You don’t understand the issue. You are too ignorant to get this. Your positions is wrong. I reject the position you hold. It is very embarrassing for you to say that. Your arrogance is astounding” I will call it out for being an empty shell posing as something meaningful. That is deception with language, and that is what sophistry is.
@sweatervest June 6, 2011 at 7:22 pm
I sat on this post a couple of days thinking there is too much ignorance to tackle. As I think Karl said similarly on an earlier post, you are not paying me to teach you about IP, so you are going to have to figure out for yourself if you want to actually learn anything about it before you pontificate confidently from a position of complete ignorance, not only of IP itself, but what I’ve previously written on this blog. Just because you’ve asked doesnt’ mean I have to recap everything for you.
I think you are wrong about many things you have said here, including your frequent use of the word Sophistry. Here is a brief education that is available to everyone; although from Wikipedia, it’s all I have time for to make my point.
So, did you mean to apply this label to me as a compliment? Or do you merely subscribe the modern usage, where something positive is used as a derogatory term; that Orwellian technique of making war peace, etc.?
You have no idea what you are talking about, which makes this lengthy post mostly a waste of time. I would love to see you embarrass yourself by trying to explain the ridiculous statement that “Copyright is currently the main motor to drive state censorship”. Gotta hear that one.
That is because you are lazy and ignorant of the subject upon which you confidently express so many uninformed opinions. You are a perfect Kinsella supporter; it is not necessary that you know much about IP as long as you oppose it.
You are not paying me to teach you about IP law, but if you are interested you can read something about it, or go back over what I and many others have already written here. How arrogant would you be to demand that someone explain AET to you if you had never opened a book on the subject? Bring something to the party if you want to participate in a rational discussion of this issue.
Ah, yes you should avoid dividing the room, but an ideologue can never see it that way. This is precisely the attitude that is being explored with the “one-drop libertarian” thread. Your brand of libertarianism will never be popular because you and others think you are doing a service to humanity by explaining to everyone who does and does not have a right to sit on the side of the table advocating liberty.
The arrogance is astounding, and is a reason why reasonable people resist identifying themselves as libertarians; the leaders here are doing their best to conflate the broad philosophy if libertarianism with the narrow and closed system of ancap ideology.
I challenge if for the exercise, not because I think anyone here is about to launch themselves onto the national or world stage. Your approach to cooperation and belonging are antithetical to any form of populist political movement. As an ideologue, of course, you have no idea what I’m talking about. You are merely expecting that someday, people will “wake up”, right?
This just demonstrates my point that you ignorantly presume I have never written here on the subject. Here is all you need to understand about my theory of property rights. Property is a human device. (Mises, look it up) Property law has a well defined system of property rights. If you are interested read a book. I am not obligated to spoon feed you out of your own self-imposed state of ignorance. That is the foundation of my positions.
Natural rights theory has limited applicability to property rights and specifically IP, but in any case, I reject Rothbard’s theories derived from the Crusoe device, of homesteading physical resources as the only “natural” means of property rights, which leads to the rejection of intangible property rights, and the cul-de-sac concept of title transfer theory of contracts, for example.
While human will is inalienable in certain contexts (slavery), enforceable promises are not encompassed by that concept. I favor Kathleen Touchstone’s theory of natural rights derived from the Primary Social Unit (PSU) of mother and child, which presumes that cooperation is the foundation of all natural human rights.
I reject homesteading as the sole theory of how property rights arise, or what types of property can exist or are legitimate forms. Property may arise by capture, contract, creation, or by social/legal convention. Property law is economic as well as legal, (Hayek, look it up) and therefore utility has its place as a justification for economic policies. Internalizing externalities is one of my favorite topics in this regard (Coates, Demsetz, look it up)
IP is a form of legitimate, limited property rights which serve an important social and economic function in a division-of-labor, technical society. Without it, producers of intellectual products would be producing for external economies (Mises, look it up).
That is the best I can do for you. Good luck.
My reply is directly above this post.
You are dishonest, stupid, or a liar–the anti-IP people are not my sycophants; they are incredibly sophistocated and reasoning on their own. I learn from some of them, and I was not the first anti-IP guy. In fact the amazing growth of arguments against IP by me and ohters shows the power of clear thinking and Austro-anarchist principles. It’s really amazing.
Steven Horwitz might have come up with the right name for these people: One-Drop libertarians. The idea is that one drop of statist blood spoils the entire commercial institution.
Jeff, what is amazing to me is the scope and breadth of the implications of state interventions on everything we do. The mere fact that we are debating behaviors of institutions, subdivisions of political ideologies, and what makes them good or bad means that the state has created this huge moral dichotomy in society. Not only do we have real monetary costs directly associated with state intervention, but socially intangible ones.
There is conflict at every level of society. It’s not just war and physical violence, but also mental stress, anguish, and lost productivity. Would there be a debate of libertarian types if no one had the state tit to suckle on? The super majority of us would have such a higher quality of life if we could just delouse.
Well said, Cory.
Ouch. My concerns for the shape of the food industry, as with Brandon’s, do include agricultural subsidy, but along with that are the substantial costs and fines for new businesses trying to enter the industry. It would seem that ever increasing regulation and subsidy create a mysterious puzzle-shape that only prefab diners can fit into. On two accounts, I have had friends who were shut down by the FDA for making cheesecakes and selling them from their homes; where the local Starbucks gets the approval stamp with mold growing out of their service counter. A third friend successfully started her cake business after a huge uphill battle with the FDA and a lot of unexpected, arbitrary costs. Similar accusations could be made against favoritism concerning Taco Bell (Brandon mentions their lobbying investment later in this thread). I believe that when viewing the success of prefab businesses in the market, it is probably good to consider the Federal bullying that prevents competition. Should we discuss the marketing genius of LuVel without mentioning the fact that I have to buy my milk behind a gas station (as do many others) because raw milk is illegal? I don’t think that such concerns should earn someone a dismissive nickname, or that subsidies and regulations to the scope that we have in the food industry classify as “one drop of statist blood.” It is a wonder that companies survive at all in this environment, but I would hope that these forums would be a place where one can discuss both how they came to being in-spite of and because of the state. The only Libertarian/Free-market conversations available to me are on the internet. It would be a shame to be mocked out of a forum for being one of the many branches of Libertarian that I am discovering today.
Well said, Paul.
But if you’re a nasty enviro-fascist like me, then everything you say SHOULD be rightly suspected.
TT
Maybe you are erroneously thinking Jeff is applying the term to you. Is the conclusion of your insights here that the participants of the current food industry are evil and would never survive without that favoratism? Cause that would make the jump to the “one-drop” position. Simply pointing them out is not a problem and certainly welcome. I really think Jeff is talking about libertarians that sound like Marxists, who complain about how screwed everything in the whole world is (not a straw man, I know at least one of them) and that our lives are so terrible because of government oppression (I used to be one of those libertarians). Yes, government oppression is a terrible thing and we would be *so* much better off without it, but capitalism has succeeded very much in the past and we owe so much of our standards of living, standards that were unheard of for even the richest rulers of the world a few hundred years ago. When libertarians bitch endlessly about how dire the situation is and never point out how the things they support have also made things great in many ways it makes people think libertarianism is hostile to the more or less successful civilization in which we live. We have never been hostile to that civilization, only to the parasite that has been feeding on it.
Yes, Taco Bell might look slightly different in a truly free market, but it would not disappear as Brandon said, and his rant about it being bad for you only supports my suspicion that this has nothing to do with economics and only with a misplaced concern for “everyone”‘s health. Did he cite all the ties with the state because he just hates that Taco Bell is “poisoning his neighbors” and whats to frame that disapproval as being backed by libertarian principles?
Because there is nothing remotely libertarian about wanting to stop other people from eating unhealthy food.
My concern is for my and my families’ health and freedom. I want people to be able to eat whatever they want, without the state making choices for them: that has been my point all along. I really can’t see why you take such an issue with my desire to see the government stop telling people what they can eat.
“I really can’t see why you take such an issue with my desire to see the government stop telling people what they can eat.”
When does the state force people to eat certain things? How in the world does people being able to eat at Taco Bell, regardless of what tax subsidies are involved in the food they buy, amount to them being “told what to eat”?
People are taking issue with the fact that you are misrepresenting Taco Bell as a firm that coerces. They don’t. Taco Bell has never put a gun to anyone’s head and told anyone to do anything.
“When does the state force people to eat certain things?”
Do you understand the nature of coercion? When the government taxes, subsidizes, regulates, etc. it causes people to do things they wouldn’t do in a free market: in an environment absent force. People are forced to pay taxes for subsides, forced to pay for TIF loans, forced to conform to MW laws, etc. At the end of the line there are guns involved. I have never claimed anyone was forced to eat at TB, merely that the fast food industry has been subsidized, indirectly or directly, to the point where it has taken a far greater market share than it would in a free market.
Brandon,
Can you really be 100% sure that fast food subsidies have exceeded the costs of government regulation in the industry? Also, are you 100% sure that fast food is subsidized more then other restaurant food? more than grocery stores? more than farmers markets?
I have never seen convincing data to that effect… if you know of a rigorous study then let me know. In the mean time, when you say that fast food has a greater market share then it would in the free market at least acknowledge that this is simply a statement of your opinion and (perhaps) some wishful thinking.
@Anthony
I don’t know of rigiorous study, and I’m not sure one could make a model to conclusively prove that product or industry A is more subsidized/ governmentalized than product or industry B due to the problem of market knowledge. There are reports and studies on subsides, health, regulatory handouts, etc and I’ve begun to collect them in an attempt to paint a somewhat coherent picture.
“In the mean time, when you say that fast food has a greater market share then it would in the free market at least acknowledge that this is simply a statement of your opinion and (perhaps) some wishful thinking.”
I thought I indicated as much at some other point in this thread, so yes, it is my opinion: I believe I refer to it as a “market speculation.” It is just as much opinion as “fast food would be cheaper and more prevalent in a free market.” I’ve given some of the many reasons I have for holding my opinion on this page to show that it’s a reasoned opinion. My original statement was as much culinary criticism as politics.
“My original statement was as much culinary criticism as politics.”
Well as I explained earlier being a libertarian means separating your personal tastes and distastes entirely from your politics. This is not a website for a cooking channel or health enthusiasts, it is a website for libertarians.
“People are forced to pay taxes for subsides, forced to pay for TIF loans, forced to conform to MW laws, etc. At the end of the line there are guns involved.”
You didn’t say that earlier. I will repeat my still unanswered question. When does the state force people to eat certain things?
“I have never claimed anyone was forced to eat at TB, merely that the fast food industry has been subsidized, indirectly or directly, to the point where it has taken a far greater market share than it would in a free market.”
Okay, then if not TB where are they forced to eat? You said the government tells people what to eat…
“I don’t know of rigiorous study, and I’m not sure one could make a model to conclusively prove that product or industry A is more subsidized/ governmentalized than product or industry B due to the problem of market knowledge.”
This is why it is a pointless endeavor. You are admitting that you cannot conclude what you are trying to conclude.
And to be clear, market speculation is not stating an opinion. There is uncertainty involved but it is not like picking a favorite color. Although I suspect you are using the word “opinion” as so many often do, to mean “a fact that I claim but cannot justify”.
You do not choose whether or not to pay for state roads. You do choose whether or not to drive on them. Being taxed to pay for them is an unjustifiable act on part of the state. You driving on them is not an unjustifiable act on part of anybody, even if you start talking about eminent domain and the people that were made homeless by state roads. No matter how much you drive on them, you are not the one with the gun that kicked people out of their houses and took their money.
“This is not a website for a cooking channel or health enthusiasts, it is a website for libertarians.”
Hence the politics part: which has been the focus of my subsequent argument. When the state uses coercion to influence choices, it is coercing people. It may not be making you eat steak on Tuesday, but your choice was guided by coercion. Of course I didn’t claim TB forced anyone, that’s absurd and it is absurd to straw man my argument into saying that I did. If you don’t have a dynamic enough understanding of coercion I don’t think I can help you out.
“You are admitting that you cannot conclude what you are trying to conclude.”
I’m trying to conclude that we would be better off without the state, and you seem to be fighting me tooth and nail on it while calling yourself a libertarian…
You are certainly right this is a pointless endeavor. It seems the divisiveness of this blog post in general is rather pointless.
“Although I suspect you are using the word “opinion” as so many often do, to mean “a fact that I claim but cannot justify”.”
I was relying on the dictionary for my meaning…
Jeffrey Tucker was just stating an opinion, that Taco Bell is wonderful, in the original Facebook post, why not criticism him because this isn’t a site for the foodservice industry or business majors. His opinion is that the fast food industry is “brilliant,” and he gave their efficiency at delivering food and market share as evidence for his claim to brilliance. I indicated that his opinion should be qualified by the fact that the industry is waist deep in government intervention in all sorts of ways, and that is part of a vast concatenation through which government action serves to make people unhealthy (regardless of what would happen in a free market), which in turn serves as political justification for socialized healthcare. The fast food industry may well be an innocent proxy in the whole thing, but they are part of the gov concatenation and ignoring that is, well, ignorant. My opinion is that the fast food industry isn’t much more brilliant than the red-light camera business, even if fast food is a lot more honest. I’ve given reasons. Show me a business that is thriving in an industry that doesn’t rely on the most heavily subsidized goods in the most heavily subsidized sector and I will be more likely to call it “brilliant.”
Maybe you think that businesses can’t collude with the state to coerce: I think that is a very shallow view of coercion and of liberty that serves the cause of liberty poorly. Maybe you think that opinion doesn’t mix with politics: that seems to be an equally shallow view of both opinion and politics. I spend 99% of my time criticizing the state, the Fed, the cops, policies, and the 1% of time I spend criticizing fast food, and you proceed to straw man me about it for five days.
I don’t see the point in pissing matches over who is more libertarian, and I’ve mentioned many times that I’m not concerned with the label. If you want me to admit that fast food is great, well, I’m not going to. You think it’s great, I don’t. That isn’t a statement of moral relativism, it is a statement of seemingly irreconcilable differences in morality that I see no point in continuing to argue about. Perhaps I’m overly forthcoming with my moral criticisms and overly broad in my moral outlook, but all the better than retracting to a rigid and shallow morality and silent complacency.
I may one day write a treatise, but not here and not for you. You can respond to this post with more claims that I’m a statist, emotivist, unlibertarian, blah, blah, straw man blah, but I’m done here. This has been fun. Hit me up on Facebook if you’d like.
“When the state uses coercion to influence choices, it is coercing people.”
You basically just said, “when the state coerces, they coerce”. Is this suppose to prove something about the fast food industry? No one has doubted that the state coerces people. We’re talking about Taco Bell, here.
“It may not be making you eat steak on Tuesday, but your choice was guided by coercion”
Then all of our choices are guided by coercion. That you choose to work at a particular job because some of your money is taxed is the product of coercion. What is the point? What is the purpose if making everyone “responsible” or “involved” with what the state does? What purpose is there in bringing this up.
I really think you are being stubborn missing Tucker’s point. He said when he praises the ubiquity of cheap jeans he gets lectures about cotton subsidies. What do you seek to accomplish by turning every possible success of whatever little market is left into another failure of the state? At most you will convince people that libertarians hate wealth and choice, if only because that wealth or those choices were somehow influenced by violence at some point. By this reasoning, even a free market cannot pretend to be justified because there will continue to be criminals and, in particular, the producer of home security systems are profiting off the existence of violence, those dirty rats!! Even if you don’t want to condemn the security provider, what purpose is there in pointing out that they only make the money they do because people commit acts of violence?
“Of course I didn’t claim TB forced anyone, that’s absurd and it is absurd to straw man my argument into saying that I did”
I’m sorry when someone says, in the middle of a debate concerning Taco Bell, that “people are forced to eat”, that I would draw from this that you are trying to say Taco Bell forces people to eat. Suffice to say if that’s not your position then I don’t know what your position is, and with the several “straw man” claims I suspect you have no position at all. You have no point to make, no conclusion to reach, you’re just sharing facts and what nerve we have to get upset about it! Forgive me if I thought these facts you cited were supposed to have some relevance to something (for example, that Taco Bell has done something wrong). Food subsidies are a problem, but they are not a relevant problem to every discussion, and I do not see how they play into a discussion about Taco Bell, unless you’re willing to admit it would be relevant to point out, every single time you post anything, that the internet was created by the government out of the pockets of taxpayers.
“I’m trying to conclude that we would be better off without the state, and you seem to be fighting me tooth and nail on it while calling yourself a libertarian…”
No that’s not what you are trying to conclude at all, and you’re not gonna surprise me with the fact that I actually don’t hate the state and everything they do. Taco Bell buys subsidized food, therefore Taco Bell would be smaller or nonexistent in a totally free market, does not contain the conclusion “we’d be better off without a state”. They have nothing to do with each other.
“You are certainly right this is a pointless endeavor. It seems the divisiveness of this blog post in general is rather pointless.”
Right, we divide our ideas for the sake of division, not because they are actually different ideas. How is it pointless to really try and tap into what libertarianism is?
“I was relying on the dictionary for my meaning…”
So you actually looked up the word “opinion” before you just used it there? That’s kinda weird, dude…
“Jeffrey Tucker was just stating an opinion, that Taco Bell is wonderful, in the original Facebook post, why not criticism him because this isn’t a site for the foodservice industry or business majors.”
Because his point is that, from the perspective of those people out there, they are satisfied with Taco Bell (that’s why they go there). It has nothing to do with what he thinks is wonderful, beyond I suppose the fact that he finds it wonderful so many people can satisfy their desires. You have not offered any reason why anything Taco Bell does hurts people from the perspective of those people (the health concerns are misplaced, people like smoking cigarettes no matter how bad they are for them). It has only been from the perspective of you.
“indicated that his opinion should be qualified by the fact that the industry is waist deep in government intervention in all sorts of ways, and that is part of a vast concatenation through which government action serves to make people unhealthy ”
Okay, the problem I have at least is that this is very poor argumentation. What basis do you have to claim that government action makes people unhealthy? How do you know they would eat healthier sans government? Tucker has not assumed anything as such on anybody, only the praxeological point that people act to satisfy their ends.
“Maybe you think that businesses can’t collude with the state to coerce: I think that is a very shallow view of coercion and of liberty that serves the cause of liberty poorly.”
I don’t know where you got that from. Again, you have yet to provide a single example of Taco Bell coercing. No, I do not doubt the existence of private crime, I just acknowledge that no such things have been identified here with respect to Taco Bell. They are not coercing, be it through the state or otherwise (as far as I know).
“Maybe you think that opinion doesn’t mix with politics: that seems to be an equally shallow view of both opinion and politics.”
No they don’t! Ethics is not a matter of opinion, nor is economics. If everyone agrees Obama should socialize healthcare, that doesn’t make it justifiable or a good idea.
“I spend 99% of my time criticizing the state, the Fed, the cops, policies, and the 1% of time I spend criticizing fast food, and you proceed to straw man me about it for five days.”
That may be true for your whole body of writings but for what you have offered here it is 99% criticism of Taco Bell, 1% the state if anything. That is not a straw man, at most you merely misrepresented yourself.
“I don’t see the point in pissing matches over who is more libertarian”
This is a pissing match over what libertarianism is, not who is what. If you call yourself a libertarian then you would care to know what libertarianism means.
“and I’ve mentioned many times that I’m not concerned with the label.”
Who is? Who said they care about the words people use? The issue is the concept attached to the label, not the label itself.
“If you want me to admit that fast food is great, well, I’m not going to. You think it’s great, I don’t.”
No, I think lots of people out there think it is great. The only thing I personally think is great is that lots of people out there get to buy what they like. You clearly still misunderstand the problem. This has nothing to do with whether I like Taco Bell because, as I have explained, I separate my opinions from my politics (that is, it doesn’t even matter that I think it is great that other people can satisfy their ends, what matters is that it is justified).
“Perhaps I’m overly forthcoming with my moral criticisms and overly broad in my moral outlook, but all the better than retracting to a rigid and shallow morality and silent complacency.”
Well I just don’t see myself as being silently complacent because I don’t raise hell about everything about everything and admit that some things about this world are pretty amazing (that is an opinion, but regardless who is being silently complacent?). And how is my morality rigid or shallow?
“I may one day write a treatise, but not here and not for you.”
Please do. No one is trying to shut you up by criticizing what you say.
“You can respond to this post with more claims that I’m a statist, emotivist, unlibertarian, blah, blah, straw man blah, but I’m done here.”
Well I don’t know if you’ll read this but hopefully after a little reflection you’ll understand that I was not just calling you names, but rigorously fighting for what I think true libertarianism is. You apparently do the same.
“This has been fun.”
It sure has. There is no doubt everyone who read these blogs will reconsider their own positions carefully about these matters. Even if I remain at my original conclusions that does not mean I have not considered them more fully as a result of these exchanges. That is, after all, what this is all for.
The biggest irony of this is that if *anyone* is telling people what to eat, it is you!!
Straw man. Disappointing.
Sure, it’s called zero tolerance for subsidies. Re-read “Economic Sophisms.”
Brandon does have his point about market distortions and legislative advantage. But, Taco Bell is hardly Halliburton or Boeing. Taco Bell did not create ag subsidies. It largely just deals with the world as given like any human does. I have a feeling that Taco Bell would compete well and adapt regardless of government involvement in agriculture.
The same condemnation of marginally state connected businesses can be turned, probably proportionally, against virtually any individual as well. If, say, 70% of businesses are somehow government connected, you could probably say that 70% of individuals are also (ie, we work for them). And if you’re really going to push it, like with roads and taxes and electricity, we’re all socialists, apparently.
It doesn’t take much to stretch the logic and call us all statists and criminals.
That’s maybe the worst thing about the modern State – it makes us all complicit, even through no particular fault of our own. Businesses, just like regular people, carry on anyway and do the best they can. Carrying on is a virtue, not a flaw. Some businesses, on the other hand, are completely State dependent and exist only because they can milk the taxpayer. Obviously this is wrong.
Just a suggestion for Jeff Tucker, this subject would actually make a really interesting series of short pieces on Daily, in my opinion. I think this Brandon guy was just fumbling around with a complex issue like many people do.
Also, I think Taco Bell is inedible and repulsive, for whatever that’s worth.
Neither did Walmart invent the minimum wage, but it sure does love its competition-destroying effects.
So it would only be right for Wal-Mart to take the ass-end of that stick and be driven out of business by all the other regulations they must face? It is the moral responsibility of every company to only be screwed by regulations and never use them to their advantage. To avoid misunderstanding, I am not contesting that such actions inhibit the market. But how could you possibly blame Wal-Mart for not volunteering their own destruction?
“So it would only be right for Wal-Mart to take the ass-end of that stick and be driven out of business by all the other regulations they must face? ”
False dichotomy. And I’m not singling Wal Mart out.
I completely understand why people are frustrated with the giant corporations. Their chieftains are part of the ruling class. It’s impossible to tell where the government ends and those corporations begin. I call them the sheriff of Nottingham’s tax collectors. They aren’t victims of government. They are eager partners with government.
And it’s impossible for any individual to document all the ways in which these corporate chieftains partner with government to loot us, so if a guy can only come up the example that Taco Bell profits from corn subsidies to express his frustration with the partnership between the giant corporations and government, I get that. Each corporation probably has thousands of ways it partners with government, if not more. At least he understands that Taco Bell wouldn’t exist in its current form without partnering with government. Good for him.
That won’t stop me from buying tacos there if I get a craving at midnight though.
“It’s impossible to tell where the government ends and those corporations begin.” Anyone with 1/3 a brain can tell where Taco Bell ends and where the IRS begins. This is silly.
Taco Bell and it’s shareholders wouldn’t be nearly as wealthy without near-monopoly status, enabled by taxing everyone else…
You’re just being way too simplistic. Go hit up Brandon on facebook with this weaksauce. I bet Rockefeller didn’t benefit from the break up of Standard Oil, too, right? Exxon doesn’t prop up the “environmental” movement either.
Taco Bell has a monopoly? That is news to me. I could have sworn that there were other fast food restaurants… and I don’t remember hearing that Taco Bell was tax exempt, either.
More seriously, are you really sure that Taco Bell would’t be even richer without payroll tax, income tax, corporate tax, municipal tax, capital gains tax, mandatory health insurance rules, etc., along with literally tens of thousands of other regulations and rules?
Do they gain more through subsidies then they lose through taxes and regulation… I am not sure, and I sure as hell doubt that you have done the calculations either.
You better believe they have done the calcs. The rest is heresay.
This is nonsense. You have no evidence that Taco Bell is a net-beneficiary from State action. This is just bald assertion. Since they do not in fact have monopoly status granted to them by the State, and they do not benefit in any significant way from government contracts, it seems far more plausible that they are net tax-payers, not net tax-eaters. If the most that can be said is that they benefit tangentially from subsidies to some of the inputs they use for their products, then wow!
(Also, to argue that tax breaks constitute a State subsidy, as some people here are doing, is totally unlibertarian. The correct amount of tax is zero, and so a tax break is just a partial move towards what every business deserves.)
Mark,
The solution to the problem or corporate/government partnerships starts and ends with removing the government… no actions against corporations are required. Remove the subsidies and beneficial corporations will stay in business while inefficient ones will go bankrupt. Why worry so much about the corporate side of the equation when the corporations are NOT the ones using force? Take away the force (government) and people will be free to decide just what form of organization they want for the market (corporations or co-ops).
I agree that no action need be taken against corporations. Further, corporate chieftains would be failing to do their fiduciary duty if they didn’t lobby government to limit their competition and otherwise climb in bed with government. Government creates these perverse incentives. But libertarians should point this out.
As for the IRS relationship, corporations collect taxes from the people embedded in the price of their products and turn them over to the IRS. They act as agents of the IRS, not victims. They’re the sheriff of Nottingham’s tax collectors, and the sheriff insures they don’t face robust competition in return for their service. We get 2,000 line long laws because government is working with its corporate agents and other special interests to create regulations so all partners can loot us.
As for celebrating commerce, I doubt there’s any libertarian that doesn’t. But are we supposed to celebrate the commerce done by Amtrak, Fannie & Freddie and GM? Where do you draw the line? How much does the government have to control a corporation before it’s acceptable for libertarians to point it out? All the giant corporations in the US, including Taco Bell and Walmart, are largely controlled and protected by the government. That’s how they grow so big and last so long. It’s important for libertarians to point this out. As another commenter pointed out, this is especially true when trying to persuade liberals of the evils of government.
Anthony, many corporations are very obviously in bed with government and driving the decisions of politicians and bureaucrats. Are we to pretend that this isn’t happening, or that those in corporations trying to buy government favor have no moral responsibility for their actions?
Are we also to just hope government goes away, instead of fighting for greater freedom and less government favors to corporations?
I disagree: Immodest thoughts: To fix capitalism, we must get govt out of corporate risk-management (rent-selling) business and get shareholders to stop playing ‘victim’ & start paying attention to risks – TT’s Lost in Tokyo http://bit.ly/kNAWFT
TT
“driving the decisions of politicians and bureaucrats”
The only thing that drives the decision of a politician or bureaucrat is that politician or bureaucrat. They are the ones that are holding the guns, not the corporations. If the corporations ask a favor of the state they must offer something in return, because the operators of the state must voluntarily agree to it (no one case force them). Corporations are by no stretch of the imagination in charge of the state.
Incentives, good and bad, drive decisions of all people.
We get poor decisions from politicians and bureaucrats because of moral hazard, the information problem, budgetary incentives, lack of accountability, the information problem and, not least, the pressure and enticements of corporations.
“Corporations are by no stretch of the imagination in charge of the state.”
I think I said: “many corporations are very obviously in bed with government and driving the decisions of politicians and bureaucrats.” Are you denying corporate influence?
TT
“Incentives, good and bad, drive decisions of all people.”
We’re talking about responsibility, though. Who is the guilty party? By this reasoning everyone is guilty for everything bad ever done.
“Are you denying corporate influence?”
It seemed to me like saying corporations drive the state is suggesting corporations are in charge. Being in charge and being an influence are entirely different things. A child may influence how his schoolteachers behave, but would anyone seriously suggest a child is in charge of, let alone responsible for, a schoolteacher’s actions?
The state has the power. Corporations never have the power, no matter how much they influence its holders or benefit from its existence. That is what I think is crucial to emerging at a uniquely anarcho-capitalist position and understanding what parts of society would need to change to get out of this state corporatist mess.
Right, so all the favors that crony capitalists get from people in government just somehow magically tumble into their laps.
Corporations have no power? Absurd.
“Right, so all the favors that crony capitalists get from people in government just somehow magically tumble into their laps.”
You just admitted that they are favors and they are only granted to the corporations because the operators of the state choose to do so, which means they believe they will somehow benefit from it.
You are presenting a false dilemma where the two options are corporations having no influence and corporations having political power. It is neither. Corporations have much influence and not a drop of political power. They are not in any way in charge of the situation. They do not get the final say. They are not the final arbiters.
“Corporations have no power? Absurd.”
Corporations have no political power. They are not the state. Call it absurd all you want, but the state could shut down any of those corporations in a heartbeat and they will be powerless to stop it. You do remember that they are all being held hostage and having the majority of their incomes stolen, right? Even if some of that stolen loot gets back to them somehow, and even if their captors let them get away with crimes themselves, that does not change the fact that they are the hostages, not the captors. There is no middle ground between the two.
sweatervest, try this on corporate power.
[Revised] Corporations, the state, limited liability and rent-seeking: Some criticisms of Huebert and Block’s criticisms of Long – TT’s Lost in Tokyo http://bit.ly/kaU7wN
But to pretend that big corporations have no power is simply ridiculous. They now have much more power than you or I, and corporate statism is both accelerating and destroying the free market. They are now large, anonymous and moral collections of capital belonging to no man, using government to build ever higher barriers to entry and profiting from ballooning government spending.
Yeesh. Why are we so eager to focus on our differences rather than our similarities? Mr. Tucker ends his article with “In a free market, everything would thrive even more than it does today, and that goes for fast food too.” this, it seems to me, is the exact sentiment expressed by Brandon Holmes on facebook. What a shame.
Nathan, truly, this is just the tip of the iceberg. This nonsense is pervasive, to the point that if you praise the cheapness and ubiquity of jeans, you get a lecture about subsidies to cotton farmers.
This is what I love about the internet. Sometimes you make a simple post and then you get to enjoy a little digital dialogue with the author/editor/whoever you admire. Anyway, I was not aware this is just the tip of the iceberg. I imagine it can wear a bit thin.
Cheerio
Jeff, think of it this way. It is obvious we have an unjust central state that is very intrusive, so intrusive that all actors and firms in the economy are affected, and in different ways and to different extents.
So, we have three choices:
1. Treat every firm as a de facto part of the state.
2. Treat only some firms as essentially part of the state.
3. Treat no firms as part of the state unless they are nominally so.
I submit it is obvious that 1 and 3 are inappropriate. 3 is inappropriate because it’s too nominalist, and it basically says anything goes.
1 is wrong because if our entire economy is really just an arm of the state, then according to Mises’s calculation argument, there is no way this huge state-managed economy can produce tremendous wealth. Which means that despite appearances to the contrary the US economy is not actually the wealthiest and most productive in the history of the world (despite the statism that does exist). I submit that the only way to hold position 1 is to reject Mises, or to reject reality. Mises was right, and obviously, we are very wealthy. That means we do have a free market in essence. That means that it cannot be the case that all or most of the US economy that is nominally private is “really” part of the state.
Obviously 2 is the right choice. Obviously, the vast bulk of US firms are “essentially” genuinely private, *despite* state interference. Some benefit from some state actions, and suffer from others; it is almost certain that the vast bulk of US firms are harmed more than they are helped by the state. They are harmed on net. And yet they prosper anyway, meaning the are very productive, productive enough to pay explicit taxes and the implicit tax of this net harm. (the opposite view means rejecting Mises’s socialist calculation argument: it means believing that even though most firms are surviving on state aid and subsidy, somehow they are creating massive net wealth; or, as i said, it means putting your head in the sand and pretending this is not really a massively productive economy and this is not a rich, powerful, affluent nation).
Since we know that some firms are essentially part of the state, and we know the vast bulk of the others are NOT and are prospering despite being net victims of the state, this can give us some guidance as to what practical tests to formulate to make this determination in particular cases. But until we get better at this, we ought to retreat to common sense, libertarian decency and presumptions, and presume innocence: that is, if a firm is providing a peaceful service of good to consumers who pay voluntarily, and is not receiving obvious significant and net state subsidies or protectionism, then it’s a good bet it’s in the “hampered good guy” column. Obvious candidates include Taco Bell, Sears, Walmart, and many or most small businesses. Even if you can point to occasional imperfections–Walmart on occasion purchases land the state expropriated from previous owners (but even in this case it pays a market price); and so on. The pro-business, pro-capitalism, pro-industry, pro-commerce, pro-cooperation, pro-civilization mindset that naturally accompanies the libertarian mentality leads most of us to assume that absent state institutions and policies (such as roads, taxes, antitrust law, labor union law, etc.), companies like Walmart would do BETTER on net.
In short, the burden of proof should be on the critic of an ostensibly voluntary firm to show that it is not. In some cases we can do this: Microsoft, for example, likely would have lower profits absent copyright law, and would be less dominant; but would likely still be very prosperous (maybe different, maybe better). Apple, on the other hand, seems to be harmed by IP about as much as it is helped by it; they would probably be closer to their present size and dominance, in an IP free world. Lockheed Martin may be much smaller. Halliburton would probably be very different. Private prisons would be radically different. The banking industry would be radically different. GM and the airlines would not have received subsidies, nor would have AIG. So you cannot just paint with a broad brush. You need to satisfy the burden of proof. But we can expect that in most cases you will be unable to do this, because most companies are not net state beneficiaries; as noted, if they were, we would have an essentially socialist, command economy, meaning the productivity we do have would then be inexplicable since socialist economy is impossible.
The presumption of “innocence” or “privateness” I suggest above finds its analog in Rothbard’s view of property titles, which I discuss in http://www.libertarianstandard.com/2010/11/19/justice-and-property-rights-rothbard-on-scarcity-property-contracts/ — Rothbard says:
Likewise, most American firms have to be essentially private, if hampered, not helped, by the state, and that is starting presumption for both common sense, economic sense, and libertarian justice, in my view.
Would you be so kind as to make this its own blog post? It’s excellent and it makes an important point about the burden of proof and the presumption of innocence. Earlier today, someone questioned my claim that Wal-Mart and Taco Bell earned the bulk of their revenues from exchange rather than expropriation/rent-seeking/etc, asked me to prove it, and suggested that it would require more than just a look at their financial statements; my response was that taking a “guilty until proven innocent” approach–”treat(ing) every firm as a de facto part of the state”–to use your points above–is unreasonable and what’s more, that the vast majority of Wal-Mart’s activity is voluntary trade strikes me as so obvious as to not be worth exploring further.
I think it is worth pointing out that the existence of regulations per se is not important, only the extent to which property violations are carried out in the name of those regulations.
In my experience most businesses “get away” with lots of stuff they technically are not supposed to be doing. Getting to bogged down in what Congress says and what is on the legal books is only assuming the biggest statist delusion, which is that the state actually controls everything.
“Mr. Tucker ends his article…”
That’s called a cheap trick.
I think the classic example of this is the way some allegedly free market people have justified the NLRB and their lawsuit against Boeing for expanding into South Carolina, upon the basis that Boeing has appealed to government for intervention in the past.
Therefore, it is argued, they cease to be a private business and relinquish any right to act as such.
Just Nonsense.
I’ve worked under the Boeing umbrella. Have you?
To sum it all up, this situation is a perfect example of Bastiat’s unseen. We have no idea what a non-regulated and non-taxed world would look like, so lambasting an organization for existing is ridiculous. It could very well exist as-is even in absence of government interference.
I was thinking, this attitude is hypocritical. Do these individuals themselves eschew all subsidized activities? Thy clearly don’t live in unpowered huts in the middle of the forest, subsistence farming. Why do these individuals think they can use subsidized power to run their computers obtained by shipping on subsidized airlines and roadways, manufactured with subsidized raw materials from entries with monopoly privilege over an ISP running on subsidized fiber or copper from a state granted monopolistic provider and entities designated as corporations can’t? Hell, even a cabin in the woods is impossible since its government owned land and protected by government paid park rangers. Everyone is enjoying some kind of subsidy by simply living.
The only way anyone can avoid patroning privileged business is to hang a weight on their legs, drown themselves in the center of the ocean, and hope government run rescue crews don’t go looking. Suicide in a remote part of the world is the only way to avoid the touch of government. Demanding similar from the business community is absurd.
Methinks you’re missing the point. I don’t think anyone is suggesting that the business community must “avoid the touch of government” in order to be legitimate.
Read that guy’s reply in Facebook up top again. Taco Bell is illegitimate because the entire agricultural system is subsidized in one form or another according to that individual. Yet he had no problem using a huge string of subsidized entities to post that rant.
[Open Response to Jeffrey Tucker]
Dear Jeffrey,
When I learned from friends that you had turned my comment about heavy subsidies in the fast food industry on a Facebook link to a story about the efficiency of Taco Bell into a blog post I was both flattered and disheartened. I was flattered that you found my offhanded remark so important, and disheartened that my rational criticism was met with such knee-jerk dogmatic scrupulousness. I’m also amazed that you could divine so much about me from a 100 word Facebook comment: how perceptive. I didn’t even know that I thought Taco Bell was thriving because of subsides, here I just thought I was making a salient point about the economic reality of the subject of the post. My bad.
You refer to your link as a “nice piece on Taco Bell.” Indeed the piece is quite well done, and the managerial feat that it covers is impressive. I say as much in my post. However, as Ron Paul recently said in a debate, “we don’t have freedom of speech to talk about the weather.” Did you expect a slap on the back; some canned cliché of approval like “Great piece!” “Burritos are awesome!” or “Go Taco Bell!” Some lively debate that would make: forgive me if my scruples prevent me from standing in complete awe at the creation of a system to deliver government subsidized, unhealthy food so efficiently that Americans are now fat and sick enough to provide political cover for a complete takeover of the healthcare system.
Now before you get in a bunch because I claimed that Taco Bell caused Obamacare, simma down now: that’s not what I’m saying. Here’s the thing: if the story were about some other industry I wouldn’t have made a comment, but fast food isn’t just any industry. It just so happens that nearly all the raw material inputs in the fast food industry are corn based, and corn is the most heavily subsidized crop in the most heavily subsidized sector (oil and gas, the second most subsidized industry, provides most of the primary inputs for corn production, processing, and transit). Fast food could well be the poster child for the bottom feeders in Lake Subsidy. It’s not just the sweetener in the soda, but nearly all the feed for the livestock, flour for buns and tortillas and filler in meat and sauces is corn based. The fast food industry is a corn delivery system, and as such it thrives off of government subsides: YUM Brands, Taco Bell’s parent, spend $1.4 million on lobbying in 2010. Restaurant associations are among the most powerful lobbying groups in many states. Why you correctly point out that corn might be even cheaper sans government, there is ample reason to think the industry would look vastly different, and quite possibly not exist as we know it, if it weren’t for major players in the industry and related industries sharing the beds of lawmakers.
From the perspective of science and health, fast food is crap: it has been shown to make people fat and sick. The industry has made a major contribution to the fatness and sickness that is pointed to when promoting socialized medicine. People bought the food of their own free choice, but that choice was framed by businesses that are happy partners in statism, not just innocent road users. You mention that Taco Bell is so successful in part because it serves food that is cheap, completely missing my point that the food is cheap in this case largely because the government subsidizes the product costs. To spell out the logical extension, my contention is that it very well may not be as cheap, and that therefore TB might not be as successful, in the absence of subsidy. Roads would still exist without government; half-ass tacos might not.
In a free market companies and consumers do choose how products are made, but we don’t live in a free market. In the real world actions aren’t necessarily free market or good just because they are done by a business. The real world is a lot messier than false dichotomies between biz on one side and government on the other as though the two are forever and always at loggerheads and business is the champion of freedom. In the real world promoting the ideas of liberty and holding statists, and who feed off of them, accountable does a lot more to make people more free than fretting over purity and the protection of libertarian dogma.
Of course I believe in commerce, but I also believe that freedom is a dynamic and pervasive concept and that it needs to be minded at the drive-thru as much as at the statehouse. If refusing to praise an industry that goes along willingly with the government to restrict my choices and poison my neighbors and I makes me ‘scrupulous,’ then mark my name down first under “scrupulous libertarian.” Scrupulousness in regard to free markets and business will likely lead to freer markets and better businesses, whereas scrupulousness about libertarian dogmatic purity is likely to lead less people being attracted to the philosophy of liberty.
In LIberty,
Brandon Holmes
PS: I see that over 1/3 of the people who like your original link like my comment: the “mild libertarians” must be on the attack!!
@Brandon Holmes June 3, 2011 at 10:54 am
Regardless of whether it was fair or appropriate for Jeff to spin off from your comment, or whether I properly understood his actual intent, I would hope that what you say above is something upon which we can all agree. This is the essential point that in my view is well worth making.
“goes along willingly with the government”
How willingly? Because they hire lobbyists they are automatically willing? Are you contesting that all lobbying is merely for reducing competition and none of it is to prevent the government from intervening more? This point would be more convincing if you described exactly what YUM brands has argued for in Congress.
“poison my neighbors”
This statement is ridiculous.
“that choice was framed by businesses that are happy partners in statism”
Statists would point to businesses framing consumer decisions by creating attractive advertisements for bad things, even if all information about the product was provided in the advertisement. This is why there are drug laws, for example. People can’t possibly decide for themselves what they want, because bad people will “frame” their choices.
I don’t think JEff’s attack on you was unfair at all.
BTW you did say that getting a taxbreak is “feeding off of local taxpayers”–that it seems to me means you view having a tax break or lower tax as some kind of subsidy, whcih is false, and which is an unlibertarian view, IMO. Did you really mean this?
“I don’t think JEff’s attack on you was unfair at all.”
Above you seem pretty apt to jump all over anyone who doesn’t agree completely with you, so this is no surprise.
By tax breaks I refer mainly to local and state tax abatement that is regularly offered to the Taco Bells and Wal Marts of the world while not offered to corps with lesser lobbyists. Tax Increment Financing and other sweetheart capital investment loans would also fall under “feeding off of taxpayers.”
You miss the point. Getting a tax break is not feeding off the taxpayers. The only way to have this view is to think of the tax dollars you would have paid as property of the state or taxpayers, which is monstrously unlibertarian. Do you not see this? Tax loopholes or breaks are NOT subsidies; it’s just allowing firms to keep their own money. It means not-being-stolen-from.
the rest of your emotivist, irrational comments I ignore.
See Hayek on the need for uniform applicability of law. I didn’t claim that tax breaks were subsides as such, but when a corp swings a deal to pay less taxes than its competitors it is taking an unfair advantage off of those competitors, and when they get a deal for TIF they are forcing the taxpayers to foot their bill. Sorry, I don’t want government to stop stealing from me and keep stealing from you, I want the government to stop stealing from both of us.
In keeping, I’ll ignore your ad-hoc, self-righteous posturing.
It is impossible to have “uniform” or “fair” applicability of “the law” if it is tax; see Rothbard et al. on the “fair tax” idea. You did say explicitly, by inducing “tax breaks” firms “feed off the taxpayers”. Anyone can misspeak but you’ve had many opportunities to clarify or recant, but you do not, so one can conclude only that you view a tax break as feeding off the taxpayers, i.e. taking the taxpayers’ rightful money, rather than simply an inevitable distortion caused by state tax codes.
Libertarians want the state to stop stealing from A and B, of course. But if the state is stealing 30% from B and 15% from A, only a statist mindset would say the 15% difference for A is something is sometign he is “getting away with” or taking from the taxpayers. Recant!
[not sure why I can't thread this reply under Stephan's last comment]
I have nothing to recant. I said that TIF was feeding off the taxpayers. I’m sorry that I can’t make it more clear than it already is that getting the taxpayers to foot the bill for financing one’s business is feeding off them. This holds even if one’s competitors are doing the same.
What happens when A’s wrangling of 15% causes B’s tax to go from 25% to 30%? It seems to me that A has gotten one over on B. Why can’t you just admit, as many reasonable people on here seem to realize, that while by and large businesses operate based on the market, many of them are more than happy to go along with the state to pump up their bottom lines? As I’ve said before, if leveling criticism where criticism is due makes me unlibertarian, you can keep your word and I will keep working toward liberty.
“I have nothing to recant. I said that TIF was feeding off the taxpayers. I’m sorry that I can’t make it more clear than it already is that getting the taxpayers to foot the bill for financing one’s business is feeding off them. This holds even if one’s competitors are doing the same.”
you are wrong. keeping your own money is not feeding off others, and it is monstrous and socialist to say otherwise.
“What happens when A’s wrangling of 15% causes B’s tax to go from 25% to 30%?”
then the state is to blame. but anyway this was not your hypo.
“It seems to me that A has gotten one over on B.”
No, A has kept some of his money, while the state has increased its depredations on B. Blame the state, hate the state, always.
So are you being obtuse or just not paying attention? Under TIF, businesses get a loan, and taxpayers pay off either the loan or the interest on the loan. The money never belonged to the business, it belonged to the other taxpayers in the community.
Telling me that something I didn’t say is wrong is pointless. With rational argument like this it is a wonder that everyone in the world isn’t falling all over themselves to join up with the libertarian camp. Whatever would the movement do without libertarian Voldemorts running around weeding out the mudbloods to ensure that only the statists get enough of a break from political infighting to be effective? Perhaps this is “emotive,” but half of the posts that you have made on this thread have been grandstanding, so I feel no obligation to maintain any high level of discourse.
“so I feel no obligation to maintain any high level of discourse.”
damn, you’ve wasted the the first chance in history for someone named “Brandon” to be taken seriously.
Wow, zero to childish in four posts, you should be proud. I’ve actually been taken seriously by many on this thread and related ones: I suspect by folks who value discourse over name calling.
Your eschewing of activism above means that you are pretty much deadweight to the freedom movement. On the bright side there is new blood coming into the movement that is fighting for freedom without deference to sacred cows or fear of violating dogmatic faith, and the voices of those people will one day come to drown out your brand of BS libertarian puritanism so that freedom can make political headway.
TTFN!
Brandon,
Your entire contribution here is principally composed of whiny sarcastic rants. Once you notice this pattern it will stick out like a sore thumb every time it happens: Person A loses his temper and turns rude, person B gets fed up with it and eventually turns rude himself, and then person A “calls out” person B for being rude. Sorry but I feel compelled to expose the hypocrisy here:
“I suspect by folks who value discourse over name calling.”
…
“the protection of libertarian dogma.”
“In keeping, I’ll ignore your ad-hoc, self-righteous posturing.”
“Whatever would the movement do without libertarian Voldemorts”
This came after Kinsella’s last post, but still:
“your brand of BS libertarian puritanism”
I’ll ask you again. What is libertarian dogmatism, or puritanism?
The tone of the post is witty and sarcastic, and I’m just following suit. Most of my quotes followed Stephan’s baiting.
This is libertarian puritanism:
“ferret out real from mild libertarians”
Brandon: “Your eschewing of activism above means that you are pretty much deadweight to the freedom movement. On the bright side there is new blood coming into the movement that is fighting for freedom without deference to sacred cows or fear of violating dogmatic faith, and the voices of those people will one day come to drown out your brand of BS libertarian puritanism so that freedom can make political headway. ”
Down with the neo-fascist Taco Bell, who “steals” money taxpayers are legitimately owed by “lobbying” “unfairly” for tax breaks! How dare they! Thank God the young vanguard of the movement will fight the neofascist taco providers who dare to seek reductions in taxes rightfully owed to the poor benighted taxpayers!
If the tax break was obtained as a special privilege not available to others as the result of rent seeking, then it is a form of intervention, for which all non-beneficiaries pay, even if indirectly. This is the nature of interventionism.
If taxes are reduced for everyone, then I am keeping what is aleady mine. This is not a form of “Tax Spending” as the current Obama administration has come to call it.
A tax loophole created for a specific beneficiary is just another form of mercantilism; seeking political means to gain a competitive advantage in the market place.
You would call black white, if it was called black by the “wrong” kind of person, you know, the one’s you judge to be “monstrously unlibertarian”.
Allowing one firm to “keep their own money” while making another pay in full is what, if not croneyism plain and simple?
Your argument to me on taxation if applied to intervention in general has some really fun play to it. If “not taxing equally” is cronyism, then one can say that not intervening as much is interventionism. So “libertarians” should now demand that the government add more regulations, licenses, and agencies to cover the industries with less regulations so that they can all be impaired equally.
Matthew, right, we would have a Harrison Bergeron world then. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Bergeron
So by this logic, since the government kills some innocent people in its wars, it is “interventionism” for anyone to object to the government killing them too.
So presumably, since we can’t prevent the murder of some, we should have the murder of all, just to be fair about it. Unfortunately, some of us are obtaining a break from this as a “special privilege”. Damn all this “rent seeking” and these “murder loopholes”!
Good point Grammy. If you ever ask a cop to let you off with a warning, you are guilty of furthering intervention.
Stop pretending that the current interventionist superstructure affords all people & all businesses the same opportunity to get back wealth stolen from them through taxation. Some have become large enough thanks to that very interventionist superstructure to be among the few who can retrieve ill-gotten Leviathan gains, which obligates others (because Leviathan does not curtail its spendthrift ways) to take on even more of the future tax burden once Leviathan reaches the inevitable conclusion that taxes must be raised to maintain spending on important things like ag subsidies.
That is indeed a form of feeding off taxpayers, once you’re no longer one of the taxpayers because you’ve become favored among political circles. That kind of lobbying is known as Oppenheimer’s political approach, and articles like this try to mask such unethical behavior with appeals to whatever economic approach still exists within the enterprise. It’s deceitful.
Serious question: Can someone explain to me where Brandon could not legitimately answer “YES” to both “Do you hate the state?” and “Do you love commerce?” based on his comments here?
I think he was actually rejecting state involvement in commerce. The issues that Jeff Tucker brings up are important, but I think this Brandon fellow here is shouldering a silly amount of blame today. Even if he’s mistaken I think this random internet guy is hardly the villain people are making him out to be.
I hope I’m not Jim!
“From the perspective of science and health, fast food is crap”
This is all I needed to see. He just doesn’t like taco bell. The rest of this paragraph is exactly what Tucker was talking about. It was their own decision, but that’s just not good enough for some reason.
I ate at Taco Bell last week.
Well then you are the victim of your own autonomy!
Well, don’t blame yourself for that Brandon. It’s not your fault they “poisoned” you since your decision was “framed” by all those government subsidies.
Please tell me what “libertarian dogma” is. I’ve been accused so many times of being seeped in it I suppose its time to start investigating what it might actually be (if anything).
The notion that businesses shouldn’t be criticized for colluding with the government, and that daring to question a business practice is “unlibertarian.” I’m not really wed to the idea that there is such a dogma, I’m more using the notion to highlight the absurdity of Jeffrey/ Stephan/ Art’s libertarian puritanism.
Should you be criticized for colluding with the government when you drive on their roads or connect their utilities to your house?
Also, you are not just criticizing Taco Bell for colluding with the government, you are accusing them of poisoning their customers, which you obviously don’t believe if you ate there last week. You are also claiming that they would not exist without the state, for which I see no evidence.
Either way, you’re free to make up new terms as you wish, especially if you admit upon request for clarification that it is the wrong term to use anyways.
As far as I can tell you are just detailing how you don’t have principles and it just so happens that many libertarian ideas sound good to you. Also, you attempted to define the dogmatism by the equally undefined term “puritanism”. Are you seriously criticizing these guys for consistency in their positions? Regardless of what sacrifices may need to be made in the real world, how can anyone call themselves a libertarian without conceiving of the pure theory of libertarianism? How can you know which direction to start walking if you don’t know where you are trying to go?
Subsides and other government action have greatly distorted the fast food market to the point where, I believe, the industry has a far greater share of the market than they otherwise would. I have no more proof for this economic conjecture than Jeffrey has for his belief that fast food would flourish, but if one were an investor in the industry and learned that subsides and other handouts were about to go away it seems like it would be reasonable to be concerned about your investment. Maybe your investment will flourish, but it is still reasonable to be concerned.
The fact that fast food stands out as in industry steeped in government involvement is relative to a discussion of the success of the industry. The fact that a lot of research shows regular consumption of fast food has substantial negative health effects is relevant as well. I’m not arguing for the outlawing of fast food, I’m arguing for the market. I happen to believe that the food that Americans eat is making them sick, and that they eat the food they do because government severely limits their choices, and I think that many players in the food industry are at least complacent about these health implications. I can’t prove it or explain the entire phenomenon in detail, but that doesn’t stop me from having a reasoned belief, and it certainly doesn’t mean that the phenomenon is irrelevant.
I think the issue is important to libertarians because IF it is true that government subsidies have given fast food a overly dominant market share, and if it is true that fast food consumed regularly does contribute to health problems, than it seems a powerful argument for the free market. If we get the government out of food, we won’t need the government in healthcare (as the social-democratic line would go). Those concerned with freedom should be ready and willing to point out the negative consequences of the state wherever they manifest. When talking to liberals, etc we should surely qualify our criticism of business with a reminder that the state is the real problem, but when posting on the LvMI FB page one assumes a shared belief in “the pure theory of libertarianism” (whatever that means; and based on this thread it means different things to different people) that allows Liberty 101 to be bypassed so that people can explore theory and bounce their ideas off of likeminded fellows.
I applaud the consistency and respect the work of Jeffrey/ Stephan / Art: my criticism is aimed at what I see as their criticism of criticism of business. As I mentioned, I’m not interested in labels, I’m interested in liberty. I think we should be pluralistic in our approaches to liberty rather than puritanical about who can call themselves a libertarian because we appear to be outnumbered.
“Subsides and other government action have greatly distorted the fast food market to the point where, I believe, the industry has a far greater share of the market than they otherwise would. ”
haha, yeah, it’s 5.7% instead of 5.2%, the optimal amount! hahah. come on.
“but if one were an investor in the industry and learned that subsides and other handouts were about to go away it seems like it would be reasonable to be concerned about your investment. Maybe your investment will flourish, but it is still reasonable to be concerned.”
This bizarre observation has nothing to do with anything.
“The fact that fast food stands out as in industry steeped in government involvement is relative to a discussion of the success of the industry.”
I didnt know it “stands out”. What is “the industry” it’s in? Food? services? Mexican food? Franchised businesses? What?
“The fact that a lot of research shows regular consumption of fast food has substantial negative health effects is relevant as well.”
It’s not relevant to anything at all.
“I’m not arguing for the outlawing of fast food, I’m arguing for the market.”
Yeah, as are we–in fact one thing we admire about the market is people who creatively find ways on the market to find efficiencies and serve consumers. As Taco Bell is doing here, despite state predations. Taco Bell is a victim of the state, not a beneficiary.
“I applaud the consistency and respect the work of Jeffrey/ Stephan / Art: my criticism is aimed at what I see as their criticism of criticism of business. As I mentioned, I’m not interested in labels, I’m interested in liberty.”
What about the label “liberty”? We are conceptual beings; and we communicate with language, and use labels–words–to denote concepts. Who could be against labels?
” I think we should be pluralistic in our approaches to liberty rather than puritanical about who can call themselves a libertarian because we appear to be outnumbered.”
This last is a strawman. Some of us simply think firms are harmed by the state and heroically persevere and thrive despite the state not because of the state.
“The fact that a lot of research shows regular consumption of fast food has substantial negative health effects is relevant as well”
You assume everyone cares about their health more than not spending much money on food or not cooking. That is the unlibertarian part: assuming that a just free market would conform more to your own desires. You might care about eating healthy, but that doesn’t say anything about everyone else in the world.
“I applaud the consistency and respect the work of Jeffrey/ Stephan / Art: my criticism is aimed at what I see as their criticism of criticism of business”
But business is the libertarian’s best friend. How can you blame businesses for colluding with the state when they have to in order to survive? It’s like blaming a hostage for pleading to not be the one that is shot first. Can you honestly ask it of anyone, including yourself, to stand in front of a gun and say, “No one else deserves this any more than I do, so go ahead”?
“That is the unlibertarian part: assuming that a just free market would conform more to your own desires.”No, I speculate that it would conform more to pre-subsidy production patterns and agricultural science: a nice offshoot for me is that if also conforms to my desires. You desire more commerce, and you assume that in a free market there would be more: how are you not in the same way unlibertarian in thinking the market would conform to your desires?
“But business is the libertarian’s best friend.”
No, liberty is the libertarian’s best friend.
“You desire more commerce, and you assume that in a free market there would be more: how are you not in the same way unlibertarian in thinking the market would conform to your desires?”
Oh I’ve heard statists try and pull this on me: I am apparently being a hypocrite by condemning positions that involve people pushing their evaluations on others, for I am doing the same thing myself by pushing my goal of people being able to evaluate freely. Desiring more commerce means desiring that more people be able to do what they desire. Desiring people to eat healthy food means desiring that people not be able to do what they desire. They are not instances of the same thing, they are instances of opposed outlooks. Regardless, I recognize that my advocacy for commerce is not an outgrowth of my desires. I especially recognize that productive society may often mass produce stuff I have no interest in buying, and I have to be okay with that.
“No, liberty is the libertarian’s best friend”
What is liberty if it is not the ability to do business? Business is the fullest expression of liberty (just how Rothbard said capitalism is the fullest expression of anarchy). If any part of society represents freedom more than any other part, it is business. This is why left-libertarianism is so dangerously confused. You can’t hate business and love freedom at the same time, no matter how ugly that business may be (tobacco companies, fast food, liquor stores, gun stores, etc). What’s even worse is to intentionally muddle people’s inability to stop paying taxes (the only reason why subsidies are an issue at all) with people’s ability to eat where they want. When Taco Bells buys subsidized food they are not committing an act of violence by any stretch of the imagination. The state commits the act of violence by taxing (*not* by giving back some of that tax money to farmers!).
That you started discussing how healthy Taco Bell is for you just illustrates what the real issue here is: people are eating something they “shouldn’t” be eating. What drives me nuts about left-libertarians is that they manage to turn *that*, what very well may be as removed from libertarianism as possible, into some sort of anti-state pro-freedom stance. Someone who champions liberty does not attack Taco Bell for buying subsidized food, any more than one would attack you for posting your complaints on an internet that was designed at the tax-payer’s expense. By this reasoning you are at least guilty of buying Taco Bell last week and participating in this huge government-subsidized food conglomerate. I wonder where you buy the rest of your food!
There is no reason to believe that fast food would be better for you in a free market. That is tantamount to imposing your desire of good health on everyone else. Strange as it may be, there are lots of people out there who would honestly rather smoke, drink and eat themselves to early death than live a long, boring life without those things. Fast food is not trying and never has tried to be healthy (actually some of it is now, but there will always be the dollar menu). It is trying to be cheap and tasty, and making it healthy is at odds with one of those two goals. I have no reason to believe that the fast food industry would change substantially in a totally free market, except it would be cheaper like everything else.
I think the main point is that Taco Bell is guilty of nothing. Well, they may be guilty of something, but nothing that has been mentioned here is an unjustifiable act on part of Taco Bell. If you buy a stolen watch you do not become a thief. Sure, you would need to give back the watch when asked by its rightful owner, but by trading with thieves you do not become a thief. Taco Bell is not any more guilty by association than all of us are (given the information here).
Do you think it makes me unlibertarian to tell my kids, and the children of others, not to use drugs? What if Comcast failed to deliver, and I switched to Verizon, and then complained about Comcast on Facebook? Unlibertarian?
“That you started discussing how healthy Taco Bell is for you just illustrates what the real issue here is: people are eating something they “shouldn’t” be eating.”
The real issue here is that government policy is having wide reaching negative unintended consequences that aren’t being talked about. I haven’t seen you make a cogent argument for not talking about them, aside from, “thou shalt not speak ill of anything related to business.”
Can you point to where I endorsed forcing anyone to eat anything? All along my line has been food freedom.
“For some time I have come to the conclusion that the grave deficiency in the current output and thinking of our libertarians and ‘classical liberals’ is an enormous blind spot when it comes to big business. There is a tendency to worship Big Business per se … and a corollary tendency to fail to realize that while big business would indeed merit praise if they won that bigness on the purely free market, that in the contemporary world of total neo-mercantilism and what is essentially a neo-fascist ‘corporate state,’ bigness is a priori highly suspect, because Big Business most likely got that way through an intricate and decisive network of subsidies, privileges, and direct and indirect grants of monopoly protection.” — Murray Rothbard (HT Roderick T. Long)
“You can’t hate business and love freedom at the same time, no matter how ugly that business may be (tobacco companies, fast food, liquor stores, gun stores, etc).” So you can’t hate the liquor store on the corner? Or the tobacco companies w/o hating business as such? That’s a fallacy of composition.
“That is tantamount to imposing your desire of good health on everyone else.”
Again, no coercion anywhere on my part. It’s a speculation about what a free market would do. You have a different assessment: let’s let the market sort it out.
“I think the main point is that Taco Bell is guilty of nothing.”
As I’ve mentioned above, I’m not singling TB out. My comment about eating there was to show that I wasn’t a total enemy of the industry, and part of my motivation is the fact that the burgers tasted better at McDonald’s when I was a kid, at a time when the other industry practices I and others on here were less prevalent.
“I have no reason to believe that the fast food industry would change substantially in a totally free market, except it would be cheaper like everything else.”
Everything would be cheaper in a free market? Everything? Are you sure? That is quite a conjecture.
“Do you think it makes me unlibertarian to tell my kids, and the children of others, not to use drugs? What if Comcast failed to deliver, and I switched to Verizon, and then complained about Comcast on Facebook? Unlibertarian?”
That’s not what you are doing. You didn’t say, “Hey guys, Taco Bell isn’t that good for you and you should eat other stuff instead.” If you did, I would hound you for giving advice to people that didn’t ask for it, but libertarianism would have nothing to do with that or any of your above examples.
If you said, “kids, a lot of the pot that is in the country is imported from the Middle East where it is possibly made by terrorists, so if you smoke pot you are participating in terrorism” then you would be feeding your children ridiculous lies and parroting a statist anti-drug commercial. They do not become terrorists by buying pot that may have come from someone involved in terrorism, anymore than Taco Bell becomes a part of the state by buying subsidized food.
“The real issue here is that government policy is having wide reaching negative unintended consequences that aren’t being talked about.”
What negative consequences would that be? People having an option to gorge themselves with unhealthy, salty food until they are too fat to leave the house? Cause a libertarian does not take issue with people living their lives how they want, no matter how much it may disgust them personally.
This is like when I hear people tell me without certain regulations or whatever the music industry would change and finally “good” music would be popular, instead of the pure crap most people listen to nowadays. It blows my mind. You are trying to tell me people are somehow being tricked into eating food they don’t want to eat, just like these guys start talking about how commercials and subliminal messaging tricks people into listening to music they really hate. Could it just be that you have tastes that are in the minority?
You have yet to identify an actual negative consequences, which I would define as someone having their choices restricted. Whose choices are being restricted by anything Taco Bell does?
“Can you point to where I endorsed forcing anyone to eat anything? All along my line has been food freedom.”
As long as food freedom means what you want it to mean, which is Taco Bell getting smaller, more healthy, or whatever. What if food freedom means that fast food becomes more ubiquitous and bad for you?
Someone already posted that Rothbard quote. It is completely out of context here as I explained further down.
“So you can’t hate the liquor store on the corner? Or the tobacco companies w/o hating business as such? That’s a fallacy of composition.”
That is not the fallacy of composition. Your argumentative form for disliking a particular business applies to business per se (the whole point of this topic, actually, being the Taco Bell is “guilty” of things every single business in this country is “guilty” of). If you say “I hate Taco Bell because they work around regulations” then, yes, that cannot help but imply you hate business as such.
Do you hate the liquor store or do you think the liquor store is guilty of coercing people? What possible conflict could you have with liquor stores? And yes, people who hate liquor stores and tobacco companies are the antithesis of libertarians! I don’t hear you complaining about Halliburton for poisoning people, I hear you complaining about tobacco companies for giving people the option to poison themselves! What possible problem could you have with liquor stores or tobacco companies beyond a personal distaste?
If you are admitting that, all along, you have simply been detailing your own personal distaste for Taco Bell, then you merely confirm the suspicion I shared when I first entered this forum. The obvious question then is why are you sharing your personal tastes for particular companies on the LvMI website? And what in the world do your personal tastes have to do with libertarianism?
“Again, no coercion anywhere on my part. It’s a speculation about what a free market would do.”
But your speculation involves assuming the desires of consumers. That is a fatal conceit. That Taco Bell would diminish crucially depends on people not liking something about Taco Bell. And yet they go there, over and over and over.
“As I’ve mentioned above, I’m not singling TB out.”
So are you suggesting that everyone, yourself included, is guilty as well?
“Everything would be cheaper in a free market? Everything? Are you sure? That is quite a conjecture.”
Well, that may have been a poor thing to say. I don’t think it is too speculative to assume that when systematic capital consumption stop happening capital accumulation will happen more rapidly and lower the price of goods. But I don’t need to hold onto that claim to hold onto my other claim, which is that I have no reason to believe the fast food industry would be smaller in a truly free market.
Perhaps I can sum up my point as follows: being a libertarian means totally separating what you think is personally favorable and unfavorable from what you think is right and wrong (and letting your sense of right and wrong be guided by something greater than your feelings). I don’t doubt that you know the distinction, but it sounds like you sometimes conflate the two. As far as your first comment in this last post goes, I would never say to anyone, even my future children or any of my closest friends, “you should/should not do drugs or eat certain food, etc” I would probably say, at most, “I don’t like doing those things, but that’s just me”. Perhaps I overdo it, but so much the better I figure.
It is all about realizing that other peoples’ business is actually their business, not yours and that no matter how much you may feel differently, you really honestly do not know what is best for anyone but yourself.
Yes, that’s right folks. I’m not gonna tell my kids not to do drugs (I think I hear the sirens approaching now…). I’m gonna tell them, at most, they need to figure out how to live their own lives, and I’m here to help, not lecture. I really don’t know if my (future) kids should do drugs or not. They’ll figure that out.
“If you did, I would hound you for giving advice to people that didn’t ask for it”
Funny, I don’t recall asking for your advice on how to be a libertarian!
“People having an option to gorge themselves with unhealthy, salty food until they are too fat to leave the house?”
As you’ve ignored several times above, I’m not telling anyone what to do. My beef is with government skewing the market toward what I believe is an inferior product, causing me to have to pay not only for the subsides on those products but also the full cost of higher quality products.
“anymore than Taco Bell becomes a part of the state by buying subsidized food.”
Again, I’ve never claimed as much. My position is much more nuanced.
“Cause a libertarian does not take issue with people living their lives how they want, no matter how much it may disgust them personally.”
No, a libertarian doesn’t force other people to live they way they think people should live. If people want to eat food that makes them obese that is on them, I just don’t want to foot the bill or have reduced options to pay for it.
“But your speculation involves assuming the desires of consumers.”
Again, how does this differ from investing: you invest in AC, I invest in DC, we are making assumptions about the desires of consumers.
“fast food industry would be smaller in a truly free market.”
Pay attention sweater, I said smaller market share multiple times.
“This is like when I hear…”
No, that’s the thing: it isn’t like when you hear. That’s your problem. I laid my position out several times above and have explained the nuances. You came into this with the desire to paint me as a statist because rather than listen to my position you lump it with others that are “like when you hear…” and tend to look past the rest toward a straw man. My argument has been against the state the whole time, you just don’t see it.
“I don’t hear you complaining about Halliburton for poisoning people”
We’re not talking about Halliburton.
“Perhaps I can sum up my point as follows: being a libertarian means totally separating what you think is personally favorable and unfavorable from what you think is right and wrong ”
You’re making moral judgments all the time: you’re whole argument appears to be based on your judgment that it isn’t “right” for someone who calls himself a libertarian to criticize anything business does. You’re making moral judgments when you advocate against the state, even if they are backed by reason. (And if you are unwilling to advocate against the state, as I do, then I’m sorry but you’re just a drain on libertarianism and part of the reason the state is so dominant.)
“It is all about realizing that other peoples’ business is actually their business, not yours and that no matter how much you may feel differently, you really honestly do not know what is best for anyone but yourself.”
You’re preaching to the chior mi amigo, and I think we are just arguing semantics. I suspect that when you do have kids and one of them starts climbing a shelf in a store or opening the car door while you roll down the highway you will find yourself doing something more akin to telling than suggesting. You may at that point even realize that some things are more nuanced than you think, and that talking past people to stand on your libertarian high horse only wastes time you could be using to argue against actual statists or eat tacos or make things or sit on the beach.
“Funny, I don’t recall asking for your advice on how to be a libertarian!”
Nor am I giving you advice. I am explaining what libertarianism is. It’s your business whether you think such a philosophy is worth supporting or not. When did I ever tell you what you should do? I only told you that your arguments are not sound, usually by using their form on a different premise to reach an absurd conclusion (reductio ad absurdum).
“As you’ve ignored several times above, I’m not telling anyone what to do.”
I’m sure you don’t mean to be.
“My beef is with government skewing the market toward what I believe is an inferior product, causing me to have to pay not only for the subsides on those products but also the full cost of higher quality products.”
Well, what percentage of your tax money goes to farm subsidies? This is what the point is. As Walter Block says, I think you’re focusing on the mouse when there is an elephant in the room. If you are upset at having your money taken out of your pocket (quite reasonable) I just find it strange to focus so much on what a tiny sliver of that money is going to. But that assumes the problem is with food subsidies, not the fact that food providers purchase those subsidized goods. That is what I think we are clashing over. In fact, I still think it misses the point to claim “subsidies are evil” or that you are a victim of subsidies. As others have said here, getting some of your stolen loot back is not an injustice for anyone, including those who get no stolen loot back. The injustice is the taxation, not the selective relief from taxation, and it is absurd to claim that if one person is getting robbed everyone else has any obligation to be robbed themselves, or not try to avoid being robbed.
Besides, don’t you buy the same subsidized food yourself when you go to the grocery store? Are you upset that you have to pay to subsidize the food you yourself buy and prepare? Does this complaint against Taco Bell not apply equally to all food producers? Makes me wonder why it is always focused on fast food…
“Again, how does this differ from investing: you invest in AC, I invest in DC, we are making assumptions about the desires of consumers.”
I would be interested to know if any investors thought the fast food industry would grow or shrink in the absence of regulations. The point is, would they say “it would shrink, cause you know fast food is so bad for people it kills them…”?
“Pay attention sweater, I said smaller market share multiple times.”
Well what else could I have meant by “smaller”?
“No, that’s the thing: it isn’t like when you hear. That’s your problem.”
I see a connection between those ideas. I’m not assuming you believe those things as well, I just see the same basic argumentative forms used for all of those types of arguments. As far as I can tell, they are different instances of the same general concept which, forgive me for my bluntness, I think is snobbery. Maybe you should stop taking criticisms of your statements so personally.
“You came into this with the desire to paint me as a statist”
Number one, how in the world do you know what my desire was entering this thread? For the record, you are way off. I don’t care to paint anyone as anything, and you are taking this ridiculously personally.
Number two, when did I call you a statist? Seriously though, at most I claimed you were advocating or presenting a statist position, but I’m not even sure I did that. And if you are presenting a statist position, what’s wrong with me pointing that out?
I really think it is absurd for you to have guessed “why I came in here”.
“because rather than listen to my position you lump it with others that are “like when you hear…””
Just because you don’t like the fact that what you say is related to what others say does not mean such a relation does not exist. You have offered no reasoning to suggest that your arguments are unrelated to the others I mentioned.
“and tend to look past the rest toward a straw man.”
If I have misidentified your position, whose fault is that? I’m not suggesting that has a simple answer, but you seem to think the simple answer is it’s my fault. Forgive me but your arguments sounded like condemnations of the fact that so many people eat Taco Bell.
“My argument has been against the state the whole time, you just don’t see it.”
No, I honestly do not see it. I don’t see how anti-statism leads one to have even the slightest problem with Taco Bell. I can see how food snobbery leads to that though. Are you familiar with “libertarian socialists”? They believe that private property and capitalism are outgrowths of the state and the destruction of the state is tantamount to the destruction of private property and capitalism. So their “anti-statism” leads them to support what any Austro-libertarian would call statism. So no I don’t think it is a trivial matter what it is to be anti-statist. Anarcho-communists think they are anti-statists and they could not be more confused. Now if you turn that into “sweatervest called me a communist” then you’re straw manning me!
Being anti-statist means being relentlessly pro-capitalist. They are two sides to the same coin, and I just find it hard to see Taco Bell as the result of a state and not the result of the limited power of that state (i.e. the stunted capitalism that survives the state’s onslaught).
“We’re not talking about Halliburton.”
That’s fair. I just think if we were talking about them then everything you’ve said about Taco Bell would make sense. Halliburton poisons peoples’ drinking water and hides behind the EPA to get away with it. Now *that* is a corporation using the state to screw people, and they are completely guilty for it.
“You’re making moral judgments all the time”
How is a moral judgement related to an opinion?
“you’re whole argument appears to be based on your judgment that it isn’t “right” for someone who calls himself a libertarian to criticize anything business does.”
Yes, “right” as in “2 + 2 = 4″ is right and “2 + 2 = 5″ is wrong. I am not saying it is my personal preference to never criticize business. I’m saying your criticisms are invalid. To present them as anything more (which you may or may have not tried to do) would be a non-sequitur. There’s no morality there. And for the record, I am a moral objectivist that believes ethics is a science, not a matter of opinion. As I explained, what I think is right and wrong has nothing to do with my personal preferences. What’s right and wrong has everything to do with these problems. My personal preferences have nothing to do with them.
“You’re making moral judgments when you advocate against the state, even if they are backed by reason.”
Well wait a minute. I thought I saw you post something about moral relativism but I can’t find it now, but you seem to be expressing it here. A moral judgement is *not* a matter of opinion. If my case against the state is a moral objection and it is backed by reason, then you admit that morality is rational, not emotional. Ethics is a science, not a matter of opinion. Reason alone must be capable of reaching moral objections. What you seem to be trying to say is that my objection to the state is equivalent to “I don’t like the state”, which is totally wrong. My objection to the state is that their existence is unjustifiable.
My criticism is that your objection to Taco Bell is *not* a valid moral objection, but a mere personal preference. I of course do not suggest that your personal preferences are erroneous, but simply irrelevant to the topic at hand.
“And if you are unwilling to advocate against the state, as I do, then I’m sorry but you’re just a drain on libertarianism and part of the reason the state is so dominant.”
Wait, does that mean I’m not really a libertarian!? I thought you didn’t like labeling like that! Anyways, I feel like when people say “screw the state” and people ask why and they get something like “people eat too much fast food” they’ll look at you like you’re a despot and thank their gods their state keeps people like you from taking away their fast food. You may not actually want to do that, but your arguments sure do sound that way.
I think it is more worthwhile to convey the understanding that hating the state is not hating productive society, and dispelling the myth (however accurate it may describe self-proclaimed “anarchists”) that anarchy spells out some subsistence farm lifestyle for everyone that is devoid of all the “horrors” modern society has bestowed upon us like Lady Gaga and Taco Bell.
I also understand that probably the biggest reason why people hate capitalism is because it most urgently satisfies the needs of the many, which way not be the needs of you. I am not so much accusing you of doing this but pointing it out as an easy trap to fall in. I’ve done it far too many times myself (and no, I’m not giving you advice, just describing the situation).
“You’re preaching to the chior mi amigo, and I think we are just arguing semantics.”
You’re probably right.
“I suspect that when you do have kids and one of them starts climbing a shelf in a store”
Well, I might tell him “If you don’t get down from there I’m gonna have to take you down” and then do that. But well child or adult you deal with property trespasses like that by forcefully stopping the trespass (I suppose you can try and order first). But that’s not an issue of child-raising or giving people advice. That is how to deal with people when they trespass on property.
“or opening the car door while you roll down the highway you will find yourself doing something more akin to telling than suggesting.”
Well by that point I have totally failed as a parent, seeing that my kid is in a position to open a car door when he is too young to grasp the danger involved. I suppose in that case I can violate my child’s right and be rest assured he won’t seek justice for me doing so. But I would very much prefer to just keep the doors locked in a way where he cannot unlock them so I don’t have to rely on instructing him. Also, even if I did that to an adult (pulled them back from danger) I don’t think they would see it as a trespass or forcing advice on them.
“You may at that point even realize that some things are more nuanced than you think”
If nuanced means complicated and unable to be cleanly classified then no I don’t see the point. It may be very difficult to cleanly classify reality but giving up on that goal seems disastrous to me, and leads to muddled and unclear thinking. Perhaps I have failed so far but that would only encourage me to try again.
“and that talking past people to stand on your libertarian high horse only wastes time”
Yes it is a waste of time for you to reduce my arguments to me sitting on a “high horse” and talking “past” you. Frankly I don’t think you can handle being criticized, and sorry but the more you share your ideas the more that is gonna happen. You’re gonna have to man up sooner or later and stop interpreting people finding fault in your claims as ego-mania. I’m sorry but I just don’t buy that confidence in my arguments equals sitting on a high horse. How am I supposed to respond in order to be humble? Admit that I am wrong and you make an excellent point?
“you could be using to argue against actual statists”
Unfortunately even statists refuse to admit they are statists (not suggesting you are one, but it’s really not that simple. Only a few of the most insane ones actually come out and say they are statists. Doubletalk is a powerful political tool. And of course people can be confused…).
“or eat tacos or make things or sit on the beach.”
Hey now, I could be sitting on a beach, laptop in lap, taco in right hand, welding tools in left hand. Ooh, that sounds like a good idea…
Our puritanism? What? When did Taco Bell “collude with” government? Everything is neofascist now?
You’re a good attorney Stephan: I bet you take a tough deposition. I’ve mentioned instances of direct and indirect collusion, as well as my reasons for thinking the level of collusion higher than in other industries, and I refer back to that record.
Is “neofascist” a term from another thread? I don’t recall mentioning it.
Maybe Stephan had too much Bourbon for Breakfast.
The problem is these pretenders who presume to know what the market would look like in any given situation. It’s insane. The airline industry never would have started without subsidies! We would not have enough research without government funding! How do they claim to know these things without the slightest bit of doubt? It’s pride and foolishness run amuck.
The first two sentences contradict the rest. The airline industry is discussed in this article, but there are more: http://mises.org/mobile/daily.aspx?Id=5205. Never stop imagining what a free-market is capable of.
I think Tony was paraphrasing the assertions by those who assume the market would not have produced an airline industry not stating them as his own beliefs. The plain fact that government subsidies couldn’t create an airplane while a pair of brothers in the South could shows the power of a free market.
Oh, yeah, I totally read that backwards, hehehe. Sorry Tony. I will drink more coffee before responding next time.
Great article Jeff, but in the future could you remove any names from screen caps from facebook. I don’t think it’s fair to include a person’s name if you are using them as a general example.
I disagree, like me posting here with my full name, if you post on Facebook you should know your name is out there.
Jeffrey,
Can you point me to some resources that model an economy (and real world experience) in the absence of taxes, regulations, inflation, zoning, public roads and everything else [subsidized by state].
Cheers,
Phil
I couldn’t say for sure, but I recall that the success of Hong Kong under the 50 year reign of very lazy British oversight is a decent example of free-market growth. I have read a couple of places that the British essentially kept out of most of the internal workings of the city which allowed it to grow. I haven’t studied the history of Hong Kong under British rule and don’t remember if the sources were particularly credible, but it may be worth looking into.
Hey, cool it with invective. It’s embarrassing in such an intellectually stimulating place on the web.
Some random thoughts provoked by this discussion:
In some respects, I guess I’m a radical libertarian–a voluntaryist for sure–but I never, ever thought of myself as “left” in any respect. Of course I learn something new everyday.
If a business, even a one-person operation, is incorporated, it is operating with a State-granted privilege of limited liability, which obviously absolves its owners from full responsibility for its actions, which ain’t libertarian. Nevertheless I continually swallow my voluntaryist pride and cavort with such statist institutions in order to obtain the products and services I desire.
Even LvMi and the vast majority of libertarian organizations operate as a government-licensed corporate entities in order that their income-tax-paying donors can deduct their contributions. I happen to think that this compromises to some degree libertarian organizations’ effectiveness on behalf of freedom, but I don’t condemn for the same reason that I eat fast food and shop at Walmart. I don’t want to be labeled logically inconsistent or hypocritical. (I confess that at one time in my libertarian life I would even rise to Walmart’s defense against its left-labor critics–until I realized what a statist outfit I was defending, and pondered the fact that for all its billions in revenues it wasn’t paying me a dime to be its mouthpiece.)
Since taxes are universally condemned by libertarians, and because they are the life blood of the State, it seems to me that if one’s libertarian ethos or purity is to be measured, it ought to be measured first by the amount of tax-funded State benefits one voluntarily consumes, and next by the amount of taxes one voluntarily pays. Underlying all that the State does are its taxes.
It depends on what you mean by voluntary. The IRS defines all income taxes as voluntary, but if you fail to pay them, you end up in jail. Subsidies may be voluntary, but if your competitor takes them and gets a leg up in the market, you risk going out of business. There’s very little about supposedly voluntary government programs that are voluntary in practice. Nomenclature means nothing, action means everything.
At the end of the day, I place top priority on self interest over principle. If turning down a state-granted privelege means someone else can take it and use it against me, I’ll take that privelege. The best I can do is not use it as a weapon against others, just a shield against a broken system.
“f a business, even a one-person operation, is incorporated, it is operating with a State-granted privilege of limited liability, which obviously absolves its owners from full responsibility for its actions, which ain’t libertarian. ”
Wrong–see Rothbard, Pilon, Hessen on this. There is no reason in the first place to attribute vicarious responsibilty to passive shareholders for torts of employees of companies they happen to own shares in.
I engage in a certain amount of this, but not in the context you describe.
When someone praises Wal-Mart for it’s incredibly efficient distribution network, I say, “That’s why they are a case study in every college textbook.” Whether they benefit from government in some other way has no bearing on how efficiently they handle their logistics.
OTOH, when lefties complain about a lack of public transportation, I think it’s entirely appropriate to point out that urban sprawl and the American preference for using a 2,000# vehicle to carry 1 200# person, which IS incredibly inefficient, is partly the product of government road subsidies.
If High Fructose Corn Syrup is, indeed, unhealthy, it’s worth pointing out that HFCS is the sweetener of choice, not because corporations want to make consumers sick, but because sugar is subject to heavy tariffs, and corn receives generous subsidies.
Sorry, Jeffrey, but weren’t YOU exemplifying the same “moral scrupulosity” you now protest when you and others somehow found a way a couple of weeks ago to fault efforts by those who love fish to use markets to put water back into overdrawn Western rivers and streams (by finding ways to connect buyers of water with those with absolute homesteaded water rights)?
Further, it seems to me that there are good explanations for the rise of the “moral scrupulosity” that you can’t seems to get around to puzzling out — could it be that there’s a massive rise in corporate statism, or at least in the feeling that corporate statism is out of control? And of the sense that now is an important time for libertarians to point out such statism and to suggest ways to roll it back?
You suggest that our new shibboleth out to be to “ask ‘do you love commerce?’ to ferret out real defenders of real markets as versus those who just enjoy standing in moral judgement (sic) over the whole world as it really exists.” Besides that being itself a very neat trick of standing in moral judgment of others, I would suggest a different question: do you love corporations? Those state-created entities that institutionalize moral hazard via an absentee shareholder class that was ab initio absolved of residual responsibility for the acts of the the legal fiction they own, and whose CEOs and executives operate without responsibility to any owners?
We have a serious and growing rot at the core of capitalism, easily visible in TEPCO, BP, the entire banking/securities/rating sector, Enron, the auto industry, Big Ag, Big Pharma, you name it. But for you, the real problem is a lack of cheerleaders for our rotten free markets!
Kind regards, your friendly enviro-fascist,
TT
PS: A few recent and relevant posts:
http://mises.org/Community/blogs/tokyotom/archive/2011/05/12/immodest-thoughts-to-fix-capitalism-we-must-get-govt-out-of-corporate-risk-management-rent-selling-business-and-get-shareholders-to-stop-playing-39-victim-39-amp-start-paying-attention-to-risks.aspx
http://mises.org/Community/blogs/tokyotom/archive/2011/05/12/clear-sighted-myopia-a-fossil-fuel-funded-robert-bradley-quotes-ayn-rand-on-energy-but-ignores-that-the-industry-itself-undermines-market-morals.aspx
http://mises.org/Community/blogs/tokyotom/archive/2011/04/05/yes-the-economist-was-right-in-1999-that-industrial-capitalism-was-built-on-limited-liability-but-were-the-resulting-statism-bubbles-and-risk-shifting-really-necessary.aspx
http://mises.org/Community/blogs/tokyotom/archive/2011/04/05/do-contributions-by-corporations-to-39-progress-39-mean-we-ignore-sick-dynamics-set-in-motion-by-limited-liability.aspx
http://mises.org/Community/blogs/tokyotom/archive/2011/05/07/if-we-just-ignore-bp-and-government-39-s-ownership-of-oil-coal-and-other-natural-resources-we-can-see-clearly-that-enviros-just-want-to-destroy-civilization.aspx
http://mises.org/Community/blogs/tokyotom/search.aspx?q=%22moral+hazard%22
http://mises.org/Community/blogs/tokyotom/archive/2010/08/18/mises-on-bp-and-conocophillips.aspx
“And of the sense that now is an important time for libertarians to point out such statism and to suggest ways to roll it back?”
There is nothing about Taco Bell that needs to be rolled back.
This is like hearing about how necessary civilization is, and then jumping all of a sudden to the necessity of the state (thanks Rothbard!). You are jumping from the necessity of opposing actual attempts to thwart market processes to the necessity of opposing Taco Bell for buying subsidized food.
I think the issue at hand is misrepresenting the purchase of subsidized goods as an attempt to thwart market processes and defy consumers. That is what is absurd!
wildberry, I made no particular arguments about Taco Bell. What I was suggesting is that there are very obvious, real and significant problems with capitalism that concern those whom Jeffrey considers overscrupulous.
But rather than confront real problems, what Jeffrey does is attack those who are concerned with rampant statism and who worry that we are advancing steadily on the Road to Serfdom.
This is literally stupid. We know there are “problems with capitalism” and we do “worry that we are advancing” down the Road to Serfdom. Praising the salutory aspects of Taco Bell does not imply otherwise.
What I find most interesting about Jeff’s post is that so many are outraged… and fail to see the bigger picture.
Braden is only pointing out the obvious. He’s is stretching the bounds of his understanding of libertarianism. Nowhere does he say-don’t eat at Taco Bell. He only concludes the industry might not exist as it does today. In many ways, he may be right. What’s the big deal?
If anything, his statement and those of others on Facebook (which tends to attract a younger audience) should be seen as it is:
A new generation of young thinkers embracing the ethics of libertarianism and pushing it to extremes.
That’s what you do when something is new and exciting whether it be a lover or idea… it consumes your existence and you desire to test its limits.
The old guard around here needs to relax and look upon this with amusement and pride not with disdain. (Perhaps some of you have forgotten from whence you came.)
Note:
This left/right libertarian thing is disturbing though. I don’t really understand the labeling at all. Libertarian ethics precludes this type of distinction.
The distinction is pretentious and only sets to divide us within an ethical system that is indivisible among those who embrace it.
(Though, it definitely could be construed as an attack upon the libertarian youth…an ounce of introspection might do some of you good.)
Well said.
I’m certainly neither Left nor Right — from outer space is more like it!
TT
I don’t get it? What’s wrong with what Brandon said? Is it wrong? If not, is it unimportant? Seems worth noting to me.
Well, Mr. Kinsella seems to think there’s something worth ridiculing about the very name “Brandon.” That goes a ways toward explaining the make-believe reason being employed.
Hey,
Someone turned your sarcasm detector off.
Sheldon, here are just a few things really quick:
” If refusing to praise an industry that goes along willingly with the government to restrict my choices and poison my neighbors”
This is sickening! (my personal view), but it stems from total economic ignorance. Nobody is coercing the customer to buy this “crap”, as he calls it. Why are not the consumers “willingly going along” with the government? Given the perverse incentives that interventionism introduces into the market, the consumers are still making choices. They are taking advantage of the “subsidized” corn. Therefore, they are still directing production, and producers are still obliged, by market forces, to serve them!
“The fast food industry is a corn delivery system, and as such it thrives off of government subsides:”
This is a myth! Since when do subsidies actually make things cheaper, especially in the long run?? Incentives become perverse, no doubt. But his conclusions are based on nothing but a non-sequitur. Certainly not on economics.
“From the perspective of science and health, fast food is crap: it has been shown to make people fat and sick.
“There is no such objective scientific perspective. That’s his perspective. Perhaps even the consensus among so called experts. So what? The consensus is also that capitalism is bad.
I’d just like to add that I cannot emphasize more this nonsense implying that subsidies make things cheaper. They don’t! They introduce inefficiencies and as such, we are probably paying much much more for the corn and all those things that he talked about. It is not out of the question that we would even have more fast food absent government subsidies into the industry.
Ag-subsidies pay farmers to overproduce without concern for market prices – they get paid a high price no matter what. In other words, the government guarantees him a price and makes up the difference between the promise and the market prices.
The feed lots and corn syrup companies don’t pay high prices for the corn. The farm overproduction is dumped onto the market for what it is worth – nothing. The corn is artificially cheap because it is artificially abundant. The farmer here is essentially a government employee. Everybody grows corn because they get a guaranteed good price.
Also, I think Sheldon was asking, essentially, “what the hell is the big deal?” I can’t figure it out either. Must be the blood in the water.
This is sheer fallacy. You are stuck in a short-term analysis and some fallacious assumption of no limit on the amount of potential subsidy. No matter what the subsidy is, the farmer upon the initial grant of the subsidy can produce a finite amount of more (There is no such thing as over-production) of the good then what he would have absent the subsidy. But from that point on, other perverse incentives begin to come into play: stagnation and inefficiency are promoted while efficiency and improvement is penalized. That is after all what a subsidy is all about, i.e., prop-up inefficiency. In the long run, these effects could and most probably will outstrip any initial effects the subsidy initially had on prices. While it’s true that the removal of the subsidy would now also initially raise prices, it is not true that prices are currently lower then what they would have been if methods of production had not been stagnated or at least improvement had not been hampered.
If you’re not still not sure, take it to the extreme for a moment. Have the government subsidize the entire economy. According to your reasoning, we will now all be enjoying low prices for everything. This is obviously nonsense.
Late to the game but. . . Apply this construct to the current real estate situation. Voila!
And, as an aside, the body recognizes sugar as sugar and metabolizes only simple sugars, be it from vodka, cane, corn, all the body can utilize is simple sugar.(Not literally, chemically) This corn issue is getting ridculous. I hear actual warring commercials on the radio about sugars.
Excessive consumption of sugars is bad for you. Corn is possibly the least nutritious grain of all (which isn’t saying much).
Excessive consumption of anything is probably bad for you. I am talking about the metabolic breakdown of any food you put in your body.
“For some time I have come to the conclusion that the grave deficiency in the current output and thinking of our libertarians and ‘classical liberals’ is an enormous blind spot when it comes to big business. There is a tendency to worship Big Business per se … and a corollary tendency to fail to realize that while big business would indeed merit praise if they won that bigness on the purely free market, that in the contemporary world of total neo-mercantilism and what is essentially a neo-fascist ‘corporate state,’ bigness is a priori highly suspect, because Big Business most likely got that way through an intricate and decisive network of subsidies, privileges, and direct and indirect grants of monopoly protection.” — Murray Rothbard
Checkmate?
Down with the neo-fascist Taco Bell, and with their stealing revenues from mulched taxpayers by lobbying for undeserved tax breaks!
Stephan, is your notion essentially that if Company X can “beat the system” (in the good, libertarian notion that the tax system SHOULD be beaten), then good for Company X? Even if its competitors can’t do the same?
I’d agree with that, I think. Ideally, of course, a tax break should be across the board. But, frankly, if I had the resources to hire a lobbyist that could free me personally from government servitude, you’d better know that I would do it in a hurry and I’d be damn right to do it. We should all be so lucky.
no, my point is having a tax loophole or lower tax rate is not a subsidy, and is not “feeding off of local taxpayers.” Keeping your own money is not “feeding off of” anyone. Of course I do not deny there is a distorting effect and that selective or unequal tax breaks/loopholes can harm one firm or sector more than another, giving the latter a relative advantage. Stilll, it is not a subsidy, and it is not “feeding off of” the taxpayers. It is harming the former disproportionately and the libertarian solution is to lift the burden on those harmed the most, not to impose the same burden on everyone.
As Rothbard also reminds us, there is already a distorted effect regardless if a tax break/loophole exists or it does not, so this is no argument for those opposing alleged “special treatment”. People forget that the tax is spent by the government. so if the tax/break is removed, the increase in revenue for the government will be spent shifting the distorted effect according to the preference of government officials. So even from the perspective of those opposing the tax break on grounds of “unfair” or “relative advantage” distorted effects, the tax break and loophole is still the least of the two evils.
Thanks for the great Rothbard quote, Rodney.
Unfortunately, it looks like Rothbard never focussed on the special state grants to those forming corporations that institutionalize Moral Hazard and make them such powerful agents of both corrupting/buying favors from government and at destroying commons. The grant of limited liability got the ball rolling, and things have snowballed mightily, as citizens clamor for ever more government control of our government-created amoral agents.
Regards,
Tom
PS: In addition to my comment above, http://blog.mises.org/17179/scrupulosity-and-the-condemnation-of-every-existing-business/comment-page-1/#comment-784780,
there’s more here:
http://mises.org/Community/blogs/tokyotom/search.aspx?q=cliff+notes
http://mises.org/Community/blogs/tokyotom/search.aspx?q=Limited+liability
Why would an attorney initial cap Moral Hazard like this? It’s Crankish.
Maybe because it’s unprincipled and profoundly damaging?
This really is an empirical question, both in terms of what makes companies big (Rothbard wrote during the Cold War and before the ubiquity of WalMart, globalization as we know it, and the digital revolution) and in terms of what libertarians tend to believe. Rothbard’s great victory today is the battle he fought his entire life: nearly every libertarian is glad to call himself or herself an anarchist. But Rothbard was not just an anarchist. He was an anarcho-CAPITALIST. From what I can tell, Rothbard has yet to win THAT victory among libertarians. They have learned from his anti-state writings, but have they learned from his economic writings on the absolute centrality of capital accumulation for the advance of civilization?
Jeffrey, are state-created corporations – the ones that embody moral hazard via a gift of limited liability to shareholders, have an eternal life, and in which responsible persons are fairly anonymous and bear little or no direct obligations to the outsiders they affect – are “absolutely central to capital accumulation and for the advance of civilization”?
Did we have no capital accumulation in the days of business partnerships and associations, before governments started giving away the store to their own little Franskensteins? Didn’t all businesses once have a rather clear set of owners, where the buck stopped?
Please clarify.
Tom
As Rothbard, Hessen, and Pilon argue, the role played by passive shareholders is not such to attribute vicarious liability to them in the first place for torts committed by employees of the company in which they own shares. So this feature of modern corporations would also be present in a free society in which private contractual “corporations” arose.
Same with perpetual life–there is nothing impossible about this, as Hessen explains in In Defense of the Corporation. The contractual members of this co-ownership arrangement have a mini-”consittution” that specifies procedures for governance, use of property, distribution of proceeds, selection of managers, and transfer of ownership interests. And so on. As a lawyer, Tom, you should be able to comprehend this readily.
As for liability of “responsible persons”–I assume you mean the employee-tortfeasor himself/ Or maybe his manager/boss? Or the Board? Limited liability statutes today do not exempt them. In a free society the tortfeasor-employee is directl liable, then you have to make an arguemnt for why someone else is liable for him. If his manager is complicit in the negigence the manager is liable too. And so on. In today’s world the state has foisted the entity theory on us: the state says, look, you can’t have a corporation unless it has legal personality, a separate personhood–it is a legal entity. (The state is wrong; see Hessen.) Then it says, okay we’ll grant this special status but it’s a privilege, and thus we can condition the grant of this privilege on regulating and taxing this new entity (amounting to double taxation of the shareholders). Then, if an employee “of the legal entity” commits a tort, the corporation itself as an entity is vicariouly liable for the employee’s torts under the feudalistic doctrine of respondeat superior (the validity of which Rothbard has reservations, as do I). So the law seems not to have made the Board of directors of managers themselves personally liable for the torts of employees they direct, *because* of the entity theory, because the corporation itself is a better deep pocket to pursue,a nd because its assets are usually sufficient.
Absent the state there would be no legal personhood for the corporation. It would just be a convenient fiction to describe who owns what, but it’s really a contractual relation with respect to certain material assets, among a variety of individuals, including shareholders, board members, and managers. they are all partial “owners,” with various control and other rights with respect to a set of assets, as specified by the “constitution” (articles of incorporation and bylaws). In such a situation then an employee-tortfeasor is liable for his torts to third parties, and the victim can try to find a manager or someone in the chain of causation who is also liable, but he would have to prove it. If such a theory of vicarious liability were allowed to develop in the absence of the state’s incorporation laws which have prevented the development of such a doctrine, then presumably managers and board members would have liability insurance paid for by the firm, similar to the way corporations procure D&O insurance now for directors and officers. But it is unlikely passive shareholders would be vicariously responsible since there is an insufficient causal link. They do not cause the tort, in essence. If you say they do because they have a right to vote, or because they receiev dividends, or b/c they contributed capital to the firm–then you would also by such lax standards have to say creditors, lenders, vendors, suppliers, customers, all co-employees, are all liable for any tort committed by any employees of the firm or even of the firm’s creditors, lenders, vendors, customers…. ie. it would be a world in which everyone is liable for everyone else–sort of like socialized medicine.
Thanks for your comments, Stephan.
1. Calling shareholders “passive” might be a fair representation of the existing, government-created system – especially for listed, “public” companies, but that’s pretty much my point. This is NOT true of partnership or other traditional types of business organization, and the grant of limited liability itself deliberately signals shareholders that they can turn a blind eye to activities that profit the company while posing costs and risks to others.
Sure, it’s probably not now “fair” to passive shareholders to “attribute vicarious liability to them … for torts committed by employees”, but that is both a strawman and besides the point. The point is that the government grant of limited liability MAKES A DIFFERENCE; the strawman is that I am certainly NOT proposing a new rule that shareholders be assigned liability for acts by corporate employees, but simply that the limitation on liability be eliminated – just as other grants by the government of liability limits (nuclear power, offshore oil drilling, and pollution permitting generally) should be eliminated.
Your assertion that limited liability of shareholders “would also be present in a free society in which private contractual ‘corporations’ arose” is totally unsupported. Can you point to where Rothbard, Hessen or Pilon argue that private contracts that limit liability of investors against voluntary creditors could serve to limit their personal liability against INVOLUNTARY creditors, viz., tort victims?
Just as you, surely, have no objection to private agreements between parties to protect the information created by one of them (private “intellectual property”) but simply oppose state-created IP, so too should you (as a lawyer!) be able to understand that in principle, of course, I have no objection to contract-based companies, but oppose the obvious and important favors granted by the state in the case of all corporations?
2. Not to be missed is that the grant of limited liability is extremely important and consequential:
See: The Cliff Notes version of my stilted enviro-fascist view of corporations and government – TT’s Lost in Tokyo http://bit.ly/9oBkC7
It has allowed owners to divorce themselves from formal reponsibility for the acts of their agents/employees, to divorce themselves from the communities in which their firms act, and to dodge claims of moral responsibility.
So we are left with massive corporations which are massively entangled with government and are powerful buyers of favors, which citizens forever clamor for “more control!”, and which lack any clear locus of responsibility — and in which we find anarchist libertarians like yourself and Lew Rockwell acting as their lawyers, and calling them and their shareholders “the biggest victims” (not the little people on the short end of the stick of projects like Gulf oil drilling, nuclear reactor meltdowns or even mundane health/air/water/soil damage from pollution) whenever bad decisions resulting from government-institutionalized buck-passing results in unfortunate “accidents”.
As Mises long ago noted, moral hazard matters. Mises on fixing externalities: progress along the Kuznets curve is not magic, but the result of institution-building – TT’s Lost in Tokyo http://bit.ly/cM4iVb
Clearly, our continuing crises in our banking sector are due not simply to money-printing by the Fed, but to massive moral hazard within banks, investment banks and other advisers, all of which can be laid at least in part at the foot of government. Government’s role in guaranteeing deposits has the effect of telling them they get a free lunch, and don’t need to worry about how well the banks invest their deposits – and of shifting to our wonderful government the risk of failure. Government responds by imposing “prudential rules” (like “investment-grade” requirements and capital standards that are always gamed by insiders to put bonuses in pockets, while leaving risks to the banks and thus the government. Somehow – inevitably – the government is always late to diagnose the gaming and to tighten up rules – which, like Sarbanes^Oxley and other rules imposed on super-duper “public” companies, serve to further raise barriers to entry and to distance managers from shareholder control.
Tell me again that the massive games that a fairly insulated managerial class is engaged in at mega-firms are both natural and inconsequential?
3. While in principle any partnership can keep going even when one partner dies or decides to leave and new partners are added, surely you are aware that this is a very cumbersome process, not in small part because of the concerns that the partners and its lenders, suppliers and customers all have about who, precisely, is managing the business and who has liability for potential losses?
Just as for limited liability, the grants of legal entity status, unlimited life, unlimited purposes and the ability to own subsidiaries are all substantial AND consequence-laden gifts from the state.
Show me a partnership that has any of these, without a grant from the state. Precisely because all of these matter, business people of all stripes clamor to incorporate (or to adopt a new, state-created limited partnership form that makes pass-through tax treatment possible).
4. Your long paragraph of the entity theory that “the state has foisted” on us has much I agree with. The state creation of corporations has do much to muddle who, exactly, is responsible for injuries to third parties caused by “the corporation”. In fact, this is one of my points about limited liability and other benefits that the state bestowed on individual investors – and you and Lew exhibited the same confusion yourself last year when you were stumbling over yourselves to feel sorry for BP’s shareholders, executives and employees:
Corporations uber Alles: Conveniently inconsistent on “abstractions” like “the environment”, Austrians overlook their preference for “corporations” over individuals,& their lack of interest in problem-solving – TT’s Lost in Tokyo http://bit.ly/lWpvol
http://mises.org/Community/blogs/tokyotom/search.aspx?q=kinsella+victim
Getting rid of limited liability would do much to provide moral clarity, and to end not simply risk-shifting and purchase of government favor, but demands by citizens for preventative regulation by government.
5. I would note that, just as if deposit insurance were eliminated, market actors would step up to advise on which banks are safe and to provide deposit insurance, so too would insurers step up if limited liability were ended.
We are NOT talking about bringing down capitalism.
Thanks for the substantive engagement.
Best,
Tom
See Hessen et al.–it is true of limited liability partnerships, where you have limited partners who are passive, and general partners who are active.
But even for a general partner–why is he automatically liable for what torts employees commit? this hoary, feudal notion of respondeat superior–you are responsible for your “servants’” actions–is a bit insulting and elitist.
” and the grant of limited liability itself deliberately signals shareholders that they can turn a blind eye to activities that profit the company while posing costs and risks to others.”
If they would not be liable in the first place then it’s not a grant, any more than you, as a Walmart customer, are “granted” limited liability just b/c the law does not currently make you jointly reponsible for torts committed by Walmart employees. I suppose you could argue this “grant” of limited liability to you as customer makes you as customer turn a blind eye to its risky activities. As I said in my post, this broad view of causal responsibiltiy would make everyone in society liable for everyone else all the time, without exception, which is why I analogized it to socialized medicine/Obamacare.
You keep saying it’s a grant but this is question begging, as this assertion assumes that absent this legal rule they would be liable vicariously under some libertarian principles of causation. I deny that they would. So if you say it’s grant you are arguing dishonestly by assuming your premise.
WElt he state should be eliminated of course. There should be no laws whatsoever regarding corporations. I agree with this. The limitation of liability law should be abolished. I of course agree, which shoudl be apparent from reading what I have written since unlike many left-libertarians who are vague and maunder and equivocat and are disingenuous I try like Rothbard to be clear and upfront, and am very openly anti-state. I simply disagree with people like you who explicitly or implicitly propose that in a free society it would be appropriate to automatically hold the equivalent of passive shareholders (whatever you call them) vicariously responsible for others’ torts. If you think removing limited liability would make a difference, this is your implicit view. This is what I disagree with; your distractions seem to be an attempt to cloud the water to make it hard to see that this issue is at the heart of our disagreement.
Yes, I agree, but that is a bad analogy b/c those ARE real limits that do have an effect, unlike the shareholder case which does nothing IMO but ratify the situation that would obtain anyway.
It’s not contracts that do it. It’s simply the fact that tort victims can pursue the tortfeasor, and the shareholder is not the tortfeasor; and there is no ground for making the shareholder liable vicariously for the employee’s torts.
And yes, see: Rothbard on Corporations and Limited Liability for Tort; Legitimizing the Corporation and Other Posts; Defending Corporations: Block and Huebert; Pilon on Corporations: A Discussion with Kevin Carson; Corporations and Limited Liability for Torts; In Defense of the Corporation
For example, see pilon http://www.stephankinsella.com/wp-content/uploads/texts/ga-l-rev-1979_6.pdf pp. 1310-. for Hessen, see this excerpt, http://www.lewrockwell.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2004/04/Hessen+corporation+tort+liability+excerpts.pdf , pp. 18-20
and http://www.stephankinsella.com/2010/02/rothbard-on-corporations-and-limited-liability-for-tort/ — this last post also quotes Rothbard: “Similarly, if a corporate manager committed a wrong and damaged the person or property of others, there is no reason but “deep pockets” to make the stockholders pay, provided that the latter were innocent and did not order the manager to engage in these tortious actions.”
So, Rothbard, Hessen, Pilon–all hold that passive shareholders are not automatically liable vicariously for torts committed by employees, any more than limited partners would be.
I would not call it that. “Intellectual property” is a propaganda term invented recently to justify state grants of monopoly privilege (patent and copyright) http://blog.mises.org/14914/intellectual-properganda/
You are confusing the case for contractual limited liability of shareholders for contractual debts, with the case for shareholders not being liable vicariously for others’ torts. The latter is not based on contract.
So what? this is not a justification for a law. It’s just some “policy” musings.
That’s b/c there is a state (which you favor, not me; I’m the anarchist), not b/c of the way people would create firms on the free market
Emotivism. You are not making an argument. It is not unlibertarian to have a view as to who is victimized by a given state policy. In fact the central state whose legitimacy you yourself support claims the overlord/landlord status in the offshore continental shelf; BP held a lease. It was your central state that is the landlord whose tenant had the oil spill. By your principles of vicarious responsibilty where you want to willy nilly say some old lady holding a single share of BP stock should be personally liable for this tort, of course the landlord should be too, right? I.e., your state is responsible, so why are you blaming me for favoring private investors in a free society, when you support the very state’s existence, the state that is responsible for the BP spill in the first place? And of course the nuclear industry is heavily distorted and corrupted by the state; Chernobyl was teh state’s fault, and the entire meltdown-prone western nuclear industry was corrupted by your beloved state for military reasons — instead of safe Thorium we needed the current system to produce nuclear weapons http://www.libertarianstandard.com/2011/04/01/the-states-corruption-of-nuclear-power/
So blaming this on private investors is rich. It’s the state’s fault, as usual. You think that getting rid of one of the few state laws that happens to mimic the likely result on a free market (limited liability for passive shareholders) is what you should focus on?!
This is how statists and law professors reason. It is not how libertarians reason. We believe in individual rights–property rights–and have principles. we don’t run around “weighing” various “policy reasons” to tweak and fine tune statist positive law.
Nonsense. SEe the Hessen excerpt above, p. 17, regarding how partnerships or firms can easily make the firm effectively immortal by use of continuity agreements. This is not hard.
More question begging, as I have explained
this is not a gift but an unnecessary status that the state uses to justify regulation and double taxation of shareholders. In a free market firms would not have legal personality nor do they need to. Hessen has already explained this almost 30 years ago.
See Hessen, last mention above. This can be done contractualy.
The purpose is whatever the shareholders agree to. It has nothing to do with the state just as marriage should not. Ownign a subsidiary is not a privilege but just another contractual private scheme. Nothing you described is a gift fromt he state. All these features are doable privately and contractualy, except for entity theory which is not a gift but a penalty.
This is like asking me to show you a 100% reserve bank. They are not used now b/c the state’s fractional reserve/guaranteed system outcompetes it. If I want a perpetual firm I just use a corporation b/c the state provides this mechanism. In a free market people would have to do it privately contractually, on their own; I have no idea if they would be called limited partnerships, LLP, LLC, or what. Who cares? IT’s just a detail. Get the state out of the way, and we’ll see.
Waht i object to is your clamoring for shareholders to be liable, when you have no theory whatsoever undergirding this.
So what, really? In most cases the corporation pays the victim, and has assets to do so.
Again, this is question begging, b/c you are assuming there would and should be liability for shareholders absent the limitation of liability law.
I know, but this still does not justify your claim that shareholders should be liable vicariously for the torts of others. What is your theory of causal responsibility? I have tried to sketch one out — http://mises.org/journals/qjae/pdf/qjae7_4_7.pdf — and see no way to hold passive shareholders liable; confirming the reasoning on the same lines of Hessen, Pilon, and Rothbard.
Stephan, of course the state is also at fault when statist corporations do stupid s**t like in the case of BP and TEPCO, and I’ve been arguing the case against the state as landlord loudly here for years now.
” claim that shareholders should be liable vicariously for the torts of others.”
You keep asserting this, even though I’ve made careful efforts to make it clear that I make no such claim. Do you anarcho-capitalists have such a difficult time reading? (By the way, since the boxes you want to put people in matter so much to you, I’m not by my own consideration “left” anything.)
I simply want to end the state creation of corporations, in particular the grant of limited liability to shareholders. You think it doesn’t matter and fight tooth and nail to defend corporations that lack any clear personal moral locus, while I think it has mattered and still quite profoundly, not the least in providing the rationale for the regulatory state.
Just as deposit insurance is at the root of rampant moral hazard in our financial sector, so too is limited liability at the root of corporate statism.
Sorry, but it’s late and I have a full day tomorrow. But I’ll ask, what INDIVIDUALS would you hold responsible for the BP oil spill and TEPCO bad decisions?
?
So you do not think that share holders should be liable for actions of employees, but you think that the legal framework that prevents share holders being liable for the actions of the employees should be removed?
It seems that these two statements are diametrically opposed under the current system. If you do not think that share holders should be liable then the way you achieve this is via LLC.
The only alternative is to go full AnCap with a contract-based legal framework, but that’s not going to happen any time soon.
If you remove LLC protections then your making shareholders liable vicariously for the torts of others.
sk> “I simply disagree with people like you who explicitly or implicitly propose that in a free society it would be appropriate to automatically hold the equivalent of passive shareholders (whatever you call them) vicariously responsible for others’ torts.”
I’m not sure what “automatic” means to you or Tom. Can you explain?
Pardon the simplistic hypothetical, but say some owners hand control of a piece of their capital, say a gas delivery truck, to a known drunk (constructive notice?), and the drunk fails to deliver the fuel and instead crashes and harms third parties, would the owners be automatically liable or automatically not liable, or would such things like that be decided case-by-case, or what? (I mean absent the state.)
I don’t understand the distinction in terms, so if you can help, that would be nice.
Pompom:
I think the drunk is liable. If you want to find someone else vicariously liable you have to have a reason. I suppose giving keys to a known drunk could be considered negligent on the part of the person doing it. BUt usually that would be a manager or other employee of the firm, not an “owner”–shareholders are PASSIVE and dont hand over any keys or even make decisions. And the law at present does NOT prevent you from suing the manager who hands those keys over–limited liability does not save him. It also does not save a shareholder who does it. Whether the state’s own theories would allow you to find the manager liable, I am not sure, but if not, that is the fault of having state law, not my theory.
And what if the guy is not a known drunk? Suppose you have a friend visiting and you ask him to drive your car to the drug store to pick up something for you. On the way he negligently harms someone. Is that your fault? Why? Because he was using your car? Obviously ownership of hte car is irrelevant–suppose a thief steals your gun or car and hurts a third party with it. Is that your fault? No. Or suppose you ask your friend to use HIS car to go pick up your prescription, and he injures someone on the way. What difference does ownership of the car make?
People are confused when they talk about limited liability because they have no clear understanding of what it even means, nor do they have a clear libertarian theory of causal responsibility. Yet they feel compelled to pontificate and pronounce on this topic.
Thanks. I’ll be the first to admit I know nothing of how legal liability works, “limited” or otherwise.
Your second paragraph describes situations where it would be silly; I can see that, and envisioned similar scenarios.
I think too, that the drunk is obviously liable. Yes, it is the obvious part. I was trying to get to whether in some *cases* (not “automatic” in the generic way I understand it), whether owners could share some amount of liability.
I mean, the capital was their property, which without the drunk would not have caused the damage. Doesn’t property in effect mean “control” of the resource? The owners surrogated control of something potentially hazardous.
It doesn’t (yet) seem unreasonable to me that in extra-ordinary cases, not ordinary, it is okay to examine if there was a common sense notion of “due diligence” on the part of owners in handing control over of something they know is potentially hazardous if carelessly handled.
Am I whacked?
Stephan:
“People are confused when they talk about limited liability because they have no clear understanding of what it even means, nor do they have a clear libertarian theory of causal responsibility. Yet they feel compelled to pontificate and pronounce on this topic.”
And some people, rather than directly addressing others who challenge them, feel the need to blather about how feckless these other people allegedly are, while pontificating about how wonderful Government laws are that help shareholders rest easy about injuries that corporate agents cause using their capital …
“Tokyo”:
This is dishonest. First, i have “directly addressed” others more than almost anyone. Second, I have never said state laws are wonderful. Third, I would never use the pretentious, horrid word “feckless.”
Tokyo: “I simply want to end the state creation of corporations, in particular the grant of limited liability to shareholders. ”
These are not synonmyous. You can have corporations where there is unlimited shareholder liability, or non-corporations (e.g. limited liability partnerships) where there is limited liability. Ending state incorporation does not automatically impose liability on the investor.
Great appeal to authority Roderick.
“There is a tendency to worship Big Business per se”
Absolving Taco Bell of responsibility is worshiping Big Business?
That is a brilliant quote by Rothbard. It is out of context here. No one is denying the network of subsidies, etc. but only that working in that network automatically makes one guilty of something, and especially that sans subsidies those corporations you don’t like would definitely disappear.
I swear, both sides in this little debate probably know the true spirit of the other side’s points and could very well nod along in agreement. But I don’t know how to finish this thought.
This debate really comes down to ethics verses economics within an anti-libertarian world.
As libertarians, our first and foremost concern is the ethics of our vision. Economics, like any other social science, is just an extension from which to apply those values.
To rationalize an economic outcome (because it produces a social good) when faced with an ethical contradiction does not remove us from our responsibility as libertarians to acknowledge that contradiction.
This acknowledgement, however, does not demand that we can’t allow ourselves or others to enjoy the benefits of this social good. To do so would deny individualism and that in itself would be a contradiction of our libertarian values.
I believe this precious white space would be better utilized to the teaching and discussion of libertarian ethics and its application to those who do not fully understand it …
(…instead of arguing over minutia in which one is forced to deny ethics and the other individualism.)
Doesn’t Libertarianism propose an utilitarian approach to life, situations, opportunities, everyday activities, relationships etc.
Utilitarianism’s methodology is practicality.
Therefore, the remedy to this scrupulosity might be a practical utilitarian approach to politics and economics.
Utilitarianism is a meaningless description. It literally can be used to support an type of action. “The greatest good” can mean anything. So, in a sense, libertarianism and utilitarianism can co-exist because utilitarianism can exist with anything.
Normally, utilitarianism is used to justify acts that a true libertarian would abhor. Taxes for the “greater good.” War for the “greater good.” Utilitarianism is better described as a propaganda concept used to convince the masses to accept grotesquely evil actions. I.E. “For the greater good, let’s blow up some women and children.”
“Utilitarianism’s methodology is practicality.”
Utilitarianism has no methodology. The method literally doesn’t matter in the philosophy.
Did here someone say that subsidies don’t lower prices? Has that commenter ever heard the phrase “If you want more of something subsidize it”? If there’s more of something, ceteris paribus, the price goes down. I thought this was the Mises blog!
No Sheldon, Subsidizing more inefficient producers doesn’t necessarily lower prices in the long run for those goods that would still be in demand by consumers absent the subsidy.
“If there’s more of something, ceteris paribus, the price goes down.
Right, but it doesn’t automatically follow that there will be more of the product in the long run. You forgot the long run. You are subsidizing inefficient production, i.e., output that cannot cover the costs of input. It is the inefficient production that is subsidized. So why does it follow that, in the long run, a subsidized but inefficient industry can produce more goods then if it had never been subsidized in the first place? Why are you assuming that capital accumulation and better technological improvements would be the same in both cases?
I’d like to get an answer for this please. I think you can do better then stuff like this:
Sheldon: “I thought this was the Mises blog!”
“If you want more of something subsidize it”?
The only thing you can say for sure, about say American corn subsidies, is that you will get more inefficient American producers of corn. That’s your more of something right there. And even if it were to automatically follow from this that there would be more corn, it would still be just more “American” corn. For example, corn can be imported. Who’s to say that a thriving corn industry in other parts of the world is not being hampered by American corn subsidies. If capital was free to find its most efficient use, corn production may shift abroad where it can be produced more efficiently bringing us again cheap corn, but without the subsidies.
I’ve heard that idea more than I can count. I think I remember Hoppe saying something like “if you subsidize poverty, you will get more of it.” So the next step is to say more is consumed because the “price of poverty” is lower to its “consumers.”
It is an inconvenient concept now?
Comparing poverty to corn is not a valid analogy… the two are completely different.
As for the “subsidize to get more of” concept, is just fine but it is not a fundamental principal of Austrian economics, just an observation that applies in some cases, particularly in the short run. The concept is not inconvenient, just limited.
At most that only applies to the short run. Subsidies won’t result in more of anything in the long run, and will result in less of everything.
I suspect that Stephan’s lack of my response to my most recent comment to him http://blog.mises.org/17179/scrupulosity-and-the-condemnation-of-every-existing-business/comment-page-1/#comment-785116
indicates that he finally understands the difference between (1) a government rule absolving shareholders from personal liability for acts of the corporate legal fiction or its agents and (2) the absence of such a clear limitation of risk, which would leave shareholders subject to the risk of claims and a possible finding of liability.
There is quite a difference, and it can be seen in the choice of corporate founders to use the limited liability form, as opposed to alternatives that leave shareholders/investors on the hook, such as partnerships, corporations where shareholders expressly have no liability limitations (Amex was one such when it was created) or where shares are not fully paid in (and the corporation has a capital call), and in the continuing pressure by owners of partnerships to get governments to create entity forms that absolve owners of liability for damages to involuntary creditors.
nate-m, does this help understand my point? http://blog.mises.org/17179/scrupulosity-and-the-condemnation-of-every-existing-business/comment-page-1/#comment-785121
I am not saying we should have a rule that automatically makes shareholders liable for acts by the corporation and its agents, but that we should end the government rule that frees them from risk – and the incentives to oversee and monitor that risk.
The consequence of limited liability has been the steady growth of the regulatory state, and of use of the regulatory state by corporations (via CEOs who have slipped shareholder control) to create barriers to entry.
Just like we can end financial regulation by ending deposit insurance and forcing depositors to monitor banks, so too can we end the regulatory state by making shareholders pay attention to the risks created by corporations.
http://mises.org/Community/blogs/tokyotom/archive/2011/05/12/immodest-thoughts-to-fix-capitalism-we-must-get-govt-out-of-corporate-risk-management-rent-selling-business-and-get-shareholders-to-stop-playing-39-victim-39-amp-start-paying-attention-to-risks.aspx
Your comments are incoherent, Tom. waht in the world are you trying to say.
I’ll make it simple, so even a non-lefty, non-stupid and non-dishonest anarcho-cap lawyer can understand:
The state grant of limited liability to shareholders, besides simply being unjustifiable under libertarian principles, has, by reducing the need of shareholders to monitor risk, had a profound affect on the development of what we now call ‘capitalism’ and on the growth of the regulatory state in response to complaints about corporate excesses.
I restated this position last September in the comment thread to a post by Geoffrey Plauche:
“Your uncertainty here is a manifestation of the confused discussion over liability for “corporate torts”that Stephan Kinsella refers to. His position is that only humans act, and not corporations (though they are given “legal entity” status), so only particular persons who actually injured someone else (and those who directed/ordered their actions) should be liable for any tort – not the corporation itself (and certainly not shareholders, unless they were personally involved somehow). I agree that granting corporate status has greatly confused discussions over whom should be liable for corporate torts, and think Stephan too lightly brushes back the enormous and anonymous torts that our now massive corporations commit — precisely what individuals, for example, is responsible for the BP disaster, for the damage to health and property caused by pollution, or for injuries resulting from faulty products?
“Rolling back limited liability should not mean that shareholders SHOULD be held liable for corporate torts in the same way that executives, managers and employees (the first two benefiting from company-purchased insurance policies) and sometimes lenders are; it would just mean that they would get no government-provided “get out of jail free” card. In this way, common shareholders would be put on a similar footing to partners in a partnership that acts through paid managers.”
The facts that the state now makes the corporate form widely available and that we have huge, statist corporations do not make the status quo acceptable, just as the state’s generosity in making IP widely available and that many are now invested in the status quo doesn’t justify IP or validate all the damage it’s causing.
But despite your ancap identity, you (and Lew Rockwell) keep rushing out to defend our system of amoral and anonymous pools of capital, rather than real people:
http://mises.org/Community/blogs/tokyotom/search.aspx?q=kinsella+victim
Thankfully, others are seeing this re limited liability:
Finally an LvMI commentator who sees the elephant in the room: effective reform to rein in rampant moral hazard at banks means removing limited liability! – TT’s Lost in Tokyo http://bit.ly/atelEr
The Curse of Limited Liability; WSJ.com: Executives/traders of big financial corporations generate risky business, while smaller partnerships are much more risk averse – TT’s Lost in Tokyo http://bit.ly/8nlWr7
Best,
Tom
@TokyoTom June 5, 2011 at 9:14 pm
I think you may know what side of the fence I’m on concerning SK’s communication style, but I’m having trouble understanding your point in opposition to the corporate form and limited liability.
Put simply, limited liability is a mechanism that facilitates the accumulation of capital; it eliminates the need for a shareholder to risk his personal assets every time he buys a security share in a corporate enterprise. The risk is “limited” to the amount invested. It seems unreasonable to expect a passive investor to risk personal assets when he invests in an enterprise under terms that prevent him from making or participating in any management decisions, except for those of the most general nature, like electing the BOD or selling off assets. Most often, the shareholder has no idea what is being discussed or planned in the boardroom.
It is not like crimes or torts that are committed under the corporate veil go unpunished. Victims still sue and collect damages. Directors and officers, who do have responsibility for management decisions, can be held personally responsible for their tortious or criminal acts, especially if corporate assets are not sufficient to cover damages.
So I don’t get your moral hazard argument. Corporations raise capital and engage in enterprise for a profit. Sometimes they risk too much and lose, and shareholders can see their investment vanish. However, it is not as if they have no risk for bad or wrong decisions, as most are also heavily invested in the shares of the company.
Moral hazard seems to be much more related to the mercantilist conduct of externalizing risks while internalizing profits, which I strongly oppose. However, this has nothing to do with the limited liability feature of the corporate business form.
Am I missing something?
I know you’ll think I’m just giving you a hard time, but this is a big utilitarian argument (this policy helps some people, therefore this policy is justified) and also makes another mistake that seems to be always tied to utilitarian arguments: assuming that how hard something is with your policy implemented is the hardest it could possibly be before no longer being worth it in the eyes of anyone.
Yes, with limited liability there is less of a risk involved, but how does this suggest that however risky it was before was “too risky” by any objective measure, or that even a significant number of potential shareholders would not be willing to take on these higher risks?
Also, utilitarian arguments always isolate the benefits of a policy and never cite the (necessarily existing, due to opportunity costs) losses of a policy. Limited liability might benefit potential shareholders, but it comes at the cost of higher taxes in order to reimburse lost capital which lowers the incentives of all production, corporate or not. There is no way to decide that one allocation of resources is “better” than another allocation of resources.
If there is some way to achieve limited liability out of only private funds then I have no objection to it, but would that count as limited liability or just having friends willing to write you a check?
sweatervest,
The issue is not really that buying shares would be subjectively “too risky” without limited liability… this issue is whether having partial ownership in an object makes you fully liable in the event the object is used to cause harm.
If I have a time share in a cottage with a dock, and another tenant cuts the dock loose such that it hits a passing boat, am I liable in excess of potentially losing my share in the cottage?
What if the dock comes off on its own and hits a boat while someone else is using the cottage… should I be liable to lose my house, car, etc. in your view?
Okay so I in fact do not understand limited liability. I had a feeling that is the case. Thanks for clearing that up!
I haven’t really thought about it at all, but I suppose my first stab at the problem would be to say that in any truly private property society every piece of property would have exactly one rightful owner at any time, even if contracts allow people to conditionally use the property of others. Thus by default the responsibility lies with the rightful owner at the time any damages are caused. But the contract spelling out conditional use by all the other participants could transfer that responsibility, for example, to the person that was using the property at the time (if there was any).
So I suppose the person that can be taken to court is the rightful owner at the time (there must be exactly one at any given time in a sound property system), but the rightful owner can summon the party made responsible by the contract and demand he pay restitution lest he breach the contract.
That is quite a sticky ethics problem. It seems clear to me that a solution existing at all requires there to always be one identifiable rightful owner to any piece of property (this seems very limiting at first but I think such a system proves pretty flexible once one considers what can be done with contracts).
Anthony, liability is for actions. Not for owning property. Ownership means the right to control. It does not automatically imply liability if the property you own plays a role (say, as a means) in harming someone else. For example if someone steals, or borrows, your gun, and robs a bank with it, why should you be liable? Libertarians need to be careful just making assertions about “strict liability” or “liability for property”. See my post here: The Libertarian Approach to Negligence, Tort, and Strict Liability: Wergeld and Partial Wergeld
p.s. sweatervest, note you seem to be assuming something along these lines too in your comment “Thus by default the responsibility lies with the rightful owner at the time any damages are caused.”
Stephan,
While liability would certainly not be automatic if you lent your gun to someone who misused it, I think it would be fair to say that if your friend said “let me borrow your gun so I can rob a bank” you would be partly responsible (and liable) for the resulting robbery. If I interpreted your other writing on this issue correctly then I think you tentatively agree that negligence in lending out property can result in culpability (I think your example was lending a truck to a drunk person).
The issue here then is whether giving money to a company that you know (or ought to know) is committing torts would make you partly liable to compensate any victims.
Certainly this would have to be proven on an individual level, but I would say that if someone knowingly contributes material to aid in the commission of a crime in the hope of profiting from said crime then they would be liable for their contribution. This might not apply to someone who is merely a shareholder but perhaps it would apply to someone providing start-up money?
I think that my position is more or less consistent with yours, but please let me know if I got something wrong…
Anthony:
Yes, this is implied by my causality theory linked in the wergeld post. but the point is it’s not automatic: it’s not due to your ownership, it’s due to your collaboration with an aggressor.
Yes, but the negligence is not always present.
If it does why is being a shareholder special? First: not all shareholders “give monye” (some buy their shares from former shareholders). Second: employees, vendors, creditors, customers, all “give money to” the corporation in one form or the other. Are they all liable? Really?
Is buying a $3 burger from McDonald’s, knowing that some of their drivers might occasionally have a negligent action, aiding and abetting a crime? Really? We should all stay indoors then and die.
Why? What is the diff between a customer or a lender and this person? They all give money to the company.
Wildberry, yes, you’re missing something; you’re missing that the “limited liability …. mechanism that facilitates the accumulation of capital” is made by the government, and itself drives the facts/judgments you speak of:
- the risk is “limited” to the amount invested;
- It seems unreasonable to expect a passive investor to risk personal assets when he invests in an enterprise under terms that prevent him from making or participating in any management decisions, except for those of the most general nature;
- Most often, the shareholder has no idea what is being discussed or planned in the boardroom.
Sure, shareholders “can see their investment vanish” and have SOME “risk for bad or wrong decisions”, but corporate employees, executives, directors and shareholders do not bear the FULL risk of potential loss that can be generated by “corporate actions”. Instead, we have a widespread creation of risks for which NO ONE appears to be responsible, thanks to the magical intervention of government. Rather than restoring risk and management responsibility to shareholders, the government’s answer has always been to step in with more requirements that reise further barriers to entry and further remove management from shareholder oversight.
There is wide moral hazard in our corporate system, in the banks that governments insure, and in oversight of government itself.
If it wasn’t for LLC if somebody walked into a store, tripped over a rug and broke their leg then they could sue the share holders of the company for the damages.
If your a small business owner and somebody hurts themselves on your property or using your products and you lose a lawsuit then they could take your house, you kid’s college savings, your car, take your wife’s savings and all sorts of other stuff.
LLC makes it so your only risking what you invest in a company.
I don’t understand how getting rid of LLC protections would change any of this.
It seems that your very confused about how this stuff works in the current legal framework.
@TokyoTom June 7, 2011 at 1:14 pm
I’m wondering how shareholders should “bear the FULL risk”, and why you think it is necessary that shareholders expose their personal assets for what might be a small investment in an enterprise over which they have no managerial control?
It is probably only a marginally relevant point to your overall position, but I think you are making a small error of equivocation here.
Who in their right mind would invest $100 in Wal-Mart if that investment put their entire personal wealth at risk?
However, if you are addressing the issue of corporations externalizing their own risks through government sponsored interventions; I see and support your position.
AIG, Fanny Mae, General Motors, etc. are good examples of that. The cost of nuclear energy that externalizes the cost of nuclear waste is another. You mentioned FDIC. I get that.
But the assets of corporations are already at risk for decisions and actions of their management teams, and their personal assets and criminal liability are available if the action is so qualified (i.e. “piercing the corporate veil”). No one gets a free lunch, in theory, and if they do cause harm because of some criminal or tortious act, they take personal responsibility, as you advocate. The victim does not (or should not) care if they are compensated from a single individidual, a group, or a legal entity. Money is money.
In the absence of government interventions in the market, where the playing field is level for everyone and costs and risks are internalized by the enterprise, corporate business forms would still exist. What I’m trying to understand is why you think they shouldn’t.
To summarize, limited liability corporations and government-sponsored programs for externalizing costs are two separate and distinct things. I think you are conflating limited liability to make and externality argument.
I support the latter, but not the former.
Respectfully,
Nate-m:
“It seems that your very confused about how this stuff works in the current legal framework.”
Yes, very disturbing for an alleged attorney like Tokyo.
“But despite your ancap identity, you (and Lew Rockwell) keep rushing out to defend our system of amoral and anonymous pools of capital, rather than real people”
This is the same misrepresentation that has been going on here the entire time. No one is defending the status quo, they are defending Taco Bell.
If you don’t accept that there is a difference, then by your own reasoning you are guilty of driving on state roads, connecting state-subsidized utilities to your house, using an internet designed at public universities, etc. If you are a true libertarian you will exile yourself (unless, of course, you accept how absurd such an action would really be).
“The state grant of limited liability to shareholders, besides simply being unjustifiable under libertarian principles, has, by reducing the need of shareholders to monitor risk, had a profound affect on the development of what we now call ‘capitalism’ and on the growth of the regulatory state in response to complaints about corporate excesses.”
You cited the benefits and not the costs, which is higher taxes to reimburse lost capital.
Anyone familiar with Austrian economics should know how absurd it is to claim that any sort of state intervention, or any systematic violation of property rights, leads to more capital accumulation. The necessary mechanism for this scheme to boost capital accumulation literally involves capital consumption (taxation).
I’m not sure I understand what limited liability is, so this is probably wrong.
Either way, there will be some hidden cost to any state intervention into the market and, as Mises showed us, no state laws beyond protecting private property rights (those damn libertarian principles!) will lead to more capital accumulation, because recognition of property rights is the only means to accumulate capital.
sweatervest, you’re getting warmer. The grant of limited liability, while appearing to encourage capital formation, in fact leads to waste, poor decisions by management on behalf of shareholders with little skin in the game, and loss by third parties.
Just look at BP, TEPCO and at the history of pollution generally.
Wow, Tom, I didn’t know pollution was only done by corporations. News to me!
Block points to corporate moral hazard as a dynamic behind the rise of the regulatory state:
Limited liability produces both pollution and political meddling: Block on Environmentalism – TT’s Lost in Tokyo http://bit.ly/mvV4Qn
Ludwig von Mises on laws that cap risks: http://mises.org/Community/blogs/tokyotom/archive/2007/10/11/draft.aspx
“The laws concerning liability and indemnification for damages caused were and still are in some respects deficient. By and large the principle is accepted that everybody is liable to damages which his actions have inflicted upon other people. But there were loopholes left which the legislators were slow to fill. In some cases this tardiness was intentional because the imperfections agreed with the plans of the authorities. When in the past in many countries the owners of factories and railroads were not held liable for the damages which the conduct of their enterprises inflicted on the property and health of neighbors, patrons, employees, and other people through smoke, soot, noise, water pollution, and accidents caused by defective or inappropriate equipment, the idea was that one should not undermine the progress of industrialization and the development of transportation facilities. The same doctrines which prompted and still are prompting many governments to encourage investment in factories and railroads through subsidies, tax exemption, tariffs, and cheap credit were at work in the emergence of a legal state of affairs in which the liability of such enterprises was either formally or practically abated.”
“Whether the proprietor’s relief from responsibility for some of the disadvantages resulting from his conduct of affairs is the outcome of a deliberate policy on the part of governments and legislators or whether it is an unintentional effect of the traditional working of laws, it is at any rate a datum which the actors must take into account. They are faced with the problem of external costs. Then some people choose certain modes of want-satisfaction merely on account of the fact that a part of the costs incurred are debited not to them but to other people. …
“It is true that where a considerable part of the costs incurred are external costs from the point of view of the acting individuals or firms, the economic calculation established by them is manifestly defective and their results deceptive. But this is not the outcome of alleged deficiencies inherent in the system of private ownership of the means of production. It is on the contrary a consequence of loopholes left in this system. It could be removed by a reform of the laws concerning liability for damages inflicted and by rescinding the institutional barriers preventing the full operation of private ownership.”
What is your question, exactly?
Not a question, but a response to your claim that my concern about “moral hazard” and CONSEQUENCES and somehow taints me and is non-libertarian:
“This is how statists and law professors reason. It is not how libertarians reason. We believe in individual rights–property rights–and have principles. we don’t run around “weighing” various “policy reasons” to tweak and fine tune statist positive law.
Balderdash: we all care about consequences, which is the chief reason why people are paying the slightest attention to your ‘principled’ ragings about IP.
Block didn’t jump from “state intervention cause problems” to “those involved in state intervention are all guilty”.
You just jumped from “responsibility” to “consequences”. No libertarians doubt that the existence of subsidies results in mis-allocations and long term losses, and that is not what the issue is over. Kinsella did not suggest that consequences don’t matter and that has nothing to do with his objection to tweaking positive law to try and make everyone happy.
You are muddling the negative consequences of government intervention with tying responsibility or guilt to those who deal with that intervention.
That’s a weak argument. What wise people are saying is “Imagine how much better off consumers would be if this and that subsidies were eliminated: increased competition, companies like Taco Bell would be smaller and more willing to sell a superior end product at the same rate of profit, higher standards of living would ensue and all would be better off.” To avoid pointing out such avenues of potential improvement is to backstab the libertarian movement (“Oh, just let them be, let them continue as they are, nothing bad can happen because government and lobbies would never allow present subsidy levels to get out of control.”).
Or is it only too much intervention once totalitarianism arrives and genocide starts? Where do hypocrites draw the line?
Or, perhaps, people reading this blog should start giving Mr. Oliva a hard time for his posts about the crimes of antitrust and its institutions of enforcement. After all, wonderful entrepreneurs are just trying to do what they can to make a buck in the midst of all those regulations, so pointing out that the regulations themselves are the problem is counterproductive. Bad, bad, Mr. Oliva.
Or perhaps you should stop and look back on how you just suggested that Taco Bell is leading us down the road to genocide.
This is getting ridiculous. Subsidies are bad. No one ever said anything differently. Taco Bell is not bad just because they buy subsidized goods.
“companies like Taco Bell would be smaller and more willing to sell a superior end product”
That is not a wise thing to say. How do you know Taco Bell would be smaller? Because they are selling to more people than want to buy it now? I don’t understand what such a prediction is based on.
As for the superior product, what exactly does that mean? How do you know they would not respond to a freer market by offering a “50 cent” menu of the same food they offer now?
“Oh, just let them be, let them continue as they are, nothing bad can happen because government and lobbies would never allow present subsidy levels to get out of control.”
So, what, we should shut down Taco Bell because they buy subsidized food!? Is that what you are suggesting!?
“Or is it only too much intervention once totalitarianism arrives and genocide starts?”
You are confusing “subsidies are good/okay” with “Taco Bell is not guilty of anything for buying subsidized food”. No, I don’t think Taco Bell is the path to totalitarianism. Wanting to have every last business shut down because they all work in a regulated market would be a much better start.
“Or, perhaps, people reading this blog should start giving Mr. Oliva a hard time for his posts about the crimes of antitrust and its institutions of enforcement.”
Wow. So taking a company to court and trying to use the state law system to confiscate wealth from other companies has anything to do with buying subsidized food!?
Using the state to prey on others for you may incur responsibility (though I think that is questionable), but simply buying something from somebody that was given some money by the state does not.
Funny, no mention of the “nice piece” having been posted on a site that wouldn’t exist at all had spooks not decided to pull a seed-with-drug-money hostile takeover. Black Ops don’t exist, I suppose. No Drug War is necessary, indeed, because CIA/Mossad/MI6 don’t actually control the world drug trade. Nothing to see here, folks, move along — and remember to “friend” everything in sight because not one bad thing is happening anywhere.
nate-m June 7, 2011 at 1:31 pm
“If it wasn’t for LLC if somebody walked into a store, tripped over a rug and broke their leg then they could sue the share holders of the company for the damages.”
See how wonderful and magical the state is?! They just make risk go away!
Rather than less, we need MORE government limitations on liability!
Your completely off your rocker and have no understanding of anything that is going on and It seems that you are completely incapable of communicating with other people at anything approaching a adult level.
If you want to get rid of government, then that is fine. But singling out a single specific facet of business law and raving up and down about it as if it’s the source of all evil is just idiotic.
It’s obvious you have no understanding about anything your talking about. It’s just making you look stupid.
Stephan:
Please tell me whether or not this was indirectly addressed to me; I assumed it was because I’m am the one who raised the issue of limited liability – which I have a very good notion of – and you keep asserting to me that one has to “have a clear libertarian theory of causal responsibility” before one can oppose government interventions and argue that they are unprincipled and lead to disastrous consequences:
“People are confused when they talk about limited liability because they have no clear understanding of what it even means, nor do they have a clear libertarian theory of causal responsibility. Yet they feel compelled to pontificate and pronounce on this topic.”
Was I wrong to take this as a reference to and attack on my position that you chose not to make directly? If I am mistaken, I will do what you find constitutionally impossible, and will say,”my bad”.
You: “This is dishonest. First, i have “directly addressed” others more than almost anyone. Second, I have never said state laws are wonderful. Third, I would never use the pretentious, horrid word “feckless.””
Stephan, get a grip and clean up your act; it is a disgrace and has no business here. I might be mistaken – though you haven’t convinced me – but your attack on my honesty is completely unjustified and out of place, PARTICULARLY in someone of your seniority here. Yes, to your credit you engage, but you denigrate, belittle and demean far too much. It is not merely below what YOU should be, but it is damaging to the LvMI community and to the very ideals of a libertarian community that you so loudly insist is your aim.
Finally, in good fun, you ought to consider using more “pretentious and horrid” words like “feckless”; your accusations of dishonesty, use of “crankish”, or “emotive”, and of direct ad homs like “damn, you’ve wasted the the first chance in history for someone named “Brandon” to be taken seriously” are not only inappropriate, but getting quite stale.
Yours,
Ten-Foot-Pole “Tokyo”
I am just curious if your going to go off raving about Class C corporations, non for profits, and S-corps, too.
No time or interest to figure this out. I leave it to you.
I am always direct, since I am not a dishonest leftist. I was speaking generally, and cannot tell if it applies to you or not. If so, so, if not, not.
The feckless was a joke, but I might have guessed lefties would not discern this. The rest: no. I think you are being either stupid or dishonest, and since I don’t think you are stupid…
You said I have not directly addressed your and others’ criticisms. This is nonsense. It is a lie.
MOre deflection from substantive discussion; typical of emotive lefties.
Isn’t answering an intellectual question with an emotional answer called “begging the question”? Isn’t that a big no-no in the realm of “debate”? I kinda think pragmitism and philosophy butt heads every now and then also. You guys. Read the wheelbarrow blog and go surf e-Bay.
You cannot concurrently say that “we do not know what would happen if state intervention were removed” and then claim that “in a truly free market everything would be thriving even moreso than now!” The conclusion does not logically follow. You need to revise this.
The problem with this editorial is that it does not offer real criticisms of the system, offers no alternatives to it, and doesn’t even really address the concept of limited liability. Instead, it is apologist in nature. It apologizes for corporations using the benefits of the statist, interventionist system and reaping the rewards. It apologizes for the fact that government, rather than business, has facilitated the creation of a system in which global corporatism can thrive. It apologizes for business that exploit the power of the state in order to exploit markets, without daring to assume any risk.
You see, the argument isn’t really indirect benefits vs free markets, it’s statist interventionism vs true economic freedom. The problem is that many libertarians, such as yourself, are unwilling to accept that a true free market system would be much more localized, businesses would generally be much smaller, and globalist corporatism would ultimately fail. To a true market anarchist, this concept would be simple: the system has to be smashed before true freedom can exist. The freedom of privilege to sleep at the slave masters feet is no freedom at all.
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