Capitalism is an inherently unstable system and only works with good regulation. I think a capitalist system only works as well as its regulation.
However, I think it is important for regulations to generally (not always) be structured on a sliding scale that is directly related to company size, i.e. the bigger the business, the more regulations it becomes subject to. Otherwise, regulations become a cudgel with which small businesses are beaten down because only the big established players can afford to comply. In today's age of regulatory capture in the USA, we are seeing this play out. Industries have been consolidating, and the productivity gains therefrom are not being passed onto the consumer via price cuts.
Government is always going to be an ongoing, adaptive process with back-and-forth struggles and adjudication between interested parties. Maybe we'll evolve into a more inherently cooperative species in the future, but you're definitely right about what the first business response is. :)
And I'm sure there are restaurant owners out there who aren't complete assholes.
Alternately, we could institute worker protections and support unions (which are necessary to develop the political will to institute worker protections) so they all have to treat you decently and everyone who works hard for a living can have a humane reasonable life.
And even if that isn't okay for you, there are plenty of ways to do this without even curtailing anyone's "freedoms" to be abusive: we can provide government jobs to all workers if they want them and require managers at government run institutions behave decently, for example, as we did in the New Deal.
The trick is to add regulation without adding unnecessary friction, and finding an approximate solution to the free rider problem.
has never existed in the history of modern civilization for more than 5 minutes. Ironically for your statement, the most unregulated markets are the most violent as they only occur after one government falls before institutions create themselves to deal with the chaotic state of unorganized and fearful humans.
It will be interesting to see if the digital economy brings with it any self-created software companies (purely software companies created and administered by self-writing software) which tries to avoid any attempts to shut it down.
Capitalism is by no means a perfectly well defined system that you can deduce from a set of axioms. You can have a discussion about which property rights the government should enforce, such as whether it should enforce intellectual property. But certain systems are clearly fall outside of the bounds of what constitutes a free market, such as systems in which I am allowed to put a gun to your head to make you give me your wallet.
Only in the most extreme interpretation of the word.
"No person forced you to work for me. "
Maybe not, but the idea that I will be fired if I don't do what you say means that it's not entirely voluntary.
"I can only "force" you to work 20 hours a day if all your other options are even worse, and I am the one who improves your options the most."
Again, that's not voluntary. That's exploitation.
"If however I put a gun to your head and tell you to work 20 hours a day I actively make your options worse by force."
Guns are not the only way to exercise force. Company towns were full of force. Just not physical.
"such as systems in which I am allowed to put a gun to your head."
Guns are not the only expression of force. Failure to see that is a huge fallacy.
> Maybe not, but the idea that I will be fired if I don't do what you say means that it's not entirely voluntary.
Being fired is simply no longer engaging in the transaction where one party trades their money for the labour of the other party.
> Guns are not the only expression of force. Failure to see that is a huge fallacy.
I did not say that they were.
That won't make it any better. You're still hand waving away a lot of exploitation.
"Being fired is simply no longer engaging in the transaction where one party trades their money for the labour of the other party."
Which is a threat of force often used when the employer wants the employee to do something that may be unethical, or simply wrong (like making someone work 20 hours a day).
"I did not say that they were."
But the way you're phrasing things, and focusing on them, indicates that you believe that physical force is the only force that matters.
I'm not hand waving away any exploitation. I did not pass any moral judgement, for or against. I described what an unregulated market is. To do so I used the word "voluntary", and I explained what I meant by that word in that context. In particular, it does not include the use of a gun to make somebody give you their wallet.
I'm seriously amazed that we are having a whole discussion as a result of me saying that "unregulated market" doesn't mean that you can shoot people.
> Which is a threat of force often used when the employer wants the employee to do something that may be unethical, or simply wrong (like making someone work 20 hours a day).
Only if your definition of "threat of force" is so broad as to include not giving you money. Is it also a threat of force if an employee says that they will quit their job if they don't get a raise? It may be a threat, but a threat of _force_?
> But the way you're phrasing things, and focusing on them, indicates that you believe that physical force is the only force that matters.
That is not what you said. You said "_Guns_ are not the only expression of force. Failure to see that is a huge fallacy."
This inhumane treatment inevitably ends up with physical violence, because it is the only resort left when the dominant's autnority is questioned.
You don't need to trust me, just look at the events of labour-related violence in the US at the turn of 20th century. Observe what happened before the situation became violent, and you will realize that in dozens of examples, the mechanisms that led to violence are the same: a class of workers that were dispossessed of so many rights that physically removing them did not look despicable as a business option.
Here are a few examples to start with: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludlow_Massacre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bisbee_Deportation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorado_Labor_Wars
Holding people captive is the opposite of voluntary.
> Here are a few examples to start with
First example: Colorado National Guard massacres workers who refuse to work.
Second example: a company, working together with the sheriff, kidnaps and kills people who refuse to work.
These examples do not show that the dispossessed have to resort to physical violence because that's their only resort left. The physical violence was initiated by the companies working together with the government.
Just read the description on Wikipedia:
> Those who went on strike were promptly evicted from their company homes, and they moved to tent villages prepared by the union. The tents were built on wood platforms and furnished with cast iron stoves on land leased by the union in preparation for a strike.
So far so good.
> Baldwin–Felts had a reputation for aggressive strike breaking. Agents shone searchlights on the tent villages at night and fired bullets into the tents at random, occasionally killing and maiming people. They used an improvised armored car, mounted with a machine gun the union called the "Death Special" to patrol the camp's perimeters. The steel-covered car was built in the Colorado Fuel & Iron Company plant in Pueblo, Colorado from the chassis of a large touring sedan. Frequent sniper attacks on the tent colonies drove the miners to dig pits beneath the tents where they and their families could be better protected.
The workers were using their right to refuse to work! What the workers needed was precisely government enforcement of the law that you can't just go around shooting people. This is the exact opposite of what you implied it was.
Yet, you were saying that compelling me to work 20 hours a day, which would effectively give me no time at all to find another job, was perfectly fine and still voluntary.
In that context, claiming that a choice is possible for miners is an illusion. And as many examples illustrate, physical violence is merely one more step which can not perceived as fundamentally different from the previous ones.
This is why this violence was the natural next move whenever miners tried to unionize.
Once you've piled up all these kinds of domination schemes, it becomes hard for the owner to actually discern the difference between all of this and physical violence ; it is also a process of dehumanization that makes it much harder to consider the workers deserve safety. Therefore, violence that goes as far as deportation, mutilation or death becomes acceptable.
My point being, there is no instance of unfettered relations of power that don't end up like that.
I believe there's a large corpus of work on the various areas involved here, if you want a specific precision, I can try to find relevant infos.
The whole point of what I said was that in a free market the transactions have to be voluntary. Whatever your definition of voluntary, the precise meaning of which can be debated, it does not include opening sniper fire on people in order to make them work.
Exploitation is an incoherent doctrine. A moral crime, where the victim is strictly better off for having been victimized! A crime where each successful enforcement action makes all parties strictly worse off, but where the person who suffers most from enforcement is the "victim."
In a just world, someone who supports this doctrine would be made to suffer in proportion to the suffering they willfully and violently inflict on the most vulnerable by removing their access to "exploitative" situations.
Wanting people to enjoy a high standard of living is noble. Wanting to get there by banning all labor transactions that don't confer an uppper-class lifestyle is lunacy. Redistribute the income. Make direct provision for services. Whatever. Don't pat yourself on the back for removing the best option of someone with no options. That's about the vilest and most evil thing a human being can do. Give them better ones.
Property rights don't exist without some form of regulation.
> Property rights don't exist without some form of regulation.
If by regulation you mean any law whatsoever, certainly. That's not what people usually mean by unregulated market. When people say "unregulated car market" they don't mean a market in which I can steal your car. They could mean a market in which you can sell me a car without safety belts.
Another example is the minimum wage. Let's say that I want to offer to work for you for $5 an hour and you want to accept this offer. This is a transaction that we would both voluntarily engage in, but it is not allowed by the minimum wage law.
If we include stealing and unrestricted use of guns in the meaning of "unregulated market", then the word becomes all but useless. We have other words to describe those situations.
The concept of an unregulated market that includes land ownership is already nonsense because the system of land ownership is inherently non-voluntary. I never opted into the system where people can exclude me from certain parts of the earth; it was imposed on me with the threat of violence.
It comes from exactly that, and the system in which that occurred was not a free market.
> it was imposed on me with the threat of violence.
Absolutely, _the system_ is imposed with the threat of violence. I said that transactions within the system must be voluntary.
When your factory is producing noise pollution around it, is that a volutary transaction you have entered into with your neighbours? What about when it pollutes the air, or the water? What about transactions where both sides don't have perfect information? How can you voluntarily agree to a transaction in which you don't know what you're getting, but your counterparty does? What about the fact that most revealed preferences are largely fiction?
Voluntary transactions are pure fiction. Nothing actually operates on that principle. You can't construct a functioning society from them, without requiring an orgy of arbitrary logical and ethical gymnastics.
> Capitalism is by no means a perfectly well defined system that you can deduce from a set of axioms. You can have a discussion about which property rights the government should enforce, such as whether it should enforce intellectual property. But certain systems are clearly fall outside of the bounds of what constitutes a free market, such as systems in which I am allowed to put a gun to your head to make you give me your wallet.
In order for language to be useful we have to assign a reasonable range of meaning to a word. The word "voluntary" becomes completely useless with the meaning you describe. You can do the same to any word, even words such as "apple". If you let an apple rot it eventually becomes compost. Somewhere in between it stops being an apple. By the same type of reasoning you can conclude that "apples are pure fiction". These kind of language games are not very useful.
It's just too convenient to define the range to what amounts to a modern version of the divine rights of kings. Where certain meanings - voluntary and property rights in particular - become some sorts of theological constants in which the privileges of the king (or property owner in the libertarian case), which have no bearing in justice, are explained.
It's basically ad-hoc law in benefit of the privileged. Bottom-up resistance is violence. Top-down violence/exploitation is a voluntary exchange.
The problem in the age of kings was that kings enjoyed special rights and the populace did not have property rights. The king could, and often did, take whatever he wanted without consent. We see the conflict between aristocracy and private property even in modern times. Consider how the aristocracy in the UK reacted to Thatcher's selling off government entities to the people who worked in those entities. The aristocracy reacted in horror when they saw ordinary "peasants" getting control of what were previously government entities controlled by the aristocracy. They desperately attempted to throw her out of the conservative party, and eventually succeeded.
I would also point out that the places on earth where the poor have relatively good lives are precisely the places with property rights, and that the places where the poor aren't even able to get a loaf of bread (e.g. north korea, venezuela, several countries in sub-saharan africa) are precisely the places without property rights.
I'm surprised by the extent to which the recent rise of socialism has even penetrated HN. I fear we need another 100 million cold bodies to relearn that lesson.
You do realize that even if the common people would have property rights during the age of kings it wouldn't matter? Neither will it in a modern version of it. The concentration of capital/property, and thus kings, would be inevitable. I'm sure this is a feature and not a bug given the demographics of libertarians.
Also you could've spared me the inevitable "Let's compare the idea I oppose by a measurement than I'm not willing to judge my own idea". I'm sure we could compile an equal body count of regimes calling themselves free market/market economy/capitalist or similar. But people using this body count rhetoric seldom accept such comparisons.
What libertarians believe is not relevant. I am not a libertarian and do not speak for them. I do not share their dogmatic understanding of the word voluntary. I agree that the meaning is not perfectly well defined and that there is a discussion to be had, but there are limits to which you can stretch its meaning. What of my description of voluntary is not widely accepted?
> You do realize that even if the common people would have property rights during the age of kings it wouldn't matter? Neither will it in a modern version of it.
Except for the fact that it has. Almost all aristocratic families in my country have gone all but bankrupt. They have had to transform their castles into hotels and museums in order to barely break even on the cost of the upkeep. In fact, many of these castles are receiving government help as monuments.
> I'm sure we could compile an equal body count of regimes calling themselves free market/market economy/capitalist or similar.
No, you cannot. There are a few, like the Pinochet regime, but the death toll is orders of magnitude off. In fact, although authoritarian politically, Chile did transform from the poorest country in Latin America into the richest. And it transitioned to democracy with very little violence.
However, I'll give you a starting point for compiling a list by the same yard stick; there was recently news coverage of an Indian politician accusing Churchill of genocide. It has been barely contested, and for good historical reason. And that's the proverbial tip of the iceberg.
You have also not pointed out what is ahistorical about my view, let alone provided evidence that it is in fact ahistorical.
That's a regulation, and for that to be binding, it needs to be backed up by coercion and violence.
In an unregulated market, whether or not one can shoot people, or whether or not transactions should be voluntary, would be decided like everything else by success or failure through competition in the marketplace.
You can't have free market except for this one little rule... that's just a very weakly regulated market.
> You can't have free market except for this one little rule... that's just a very weakly regulated market.
In what sense is that a market at all? Market implies that the transactions are voluntary. Unregulated market implies that all voluntary transactions are legal. A regulated market is a market in which some transactions are disallowed even if they are voluntary. Minimum wage, for example, makes it illegal for you to offer your services for $5 per hour.
That doesn't have to be true for all parties. Referring to your earlier comment, that "an unregulated market doesn't mean that you can shoot people," I would claim that, yes it does - all that's needed is for someone to pay you to shoot people. Murder for hire, extortion, blackmail, piracy and slavery are all examples of valid markets with non-voluntary participation. Morally reprehensible, but still valid.
https://www.continuetolearn.uiowa.edu/laborctr/child_labor/a...