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Comment by barrkel | Hacker News Reader

Nobody wants a free market. That's a market that includes slaves, child pornography, assassination contracts, etc.

At the level of globally integrated economies, I think the gold standard has been pretty well proven to be disastrous. It especially doesn't deal well with trade imbalances that unwind suddenly. The trouble you see in the Euro area can be seen as a microcosm of what a gold standard is like; countries like Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Spain don't control their money supply - more or less, it's like gold - so they're caught in an extremely painful bind, when what would be best for them is to devalue their currency some. Instead, they're having to struggle under huge debt burdens, and some might have to default, or leave the Euro (i.e. by analogy leave the gold standard).

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> Nobody wants a free market. That's a market that includes slaves, child pornography, assassination contracts, etc.

Those things are perfectly compatible with democracy but completely incompatible with capitalism. An inherent idea to capitalism is the protection of individual freedom which those things clearly violate in some way or another. On the other hand, those things are perfectly compatible with democracy given that 51% of the population are OK with it. In fact, what nobody believes in is democracy (that's why most democratic countries have a constitution).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lMb_72hgkJk

Is capitalism the same as the free market?

There might be other definitions, but I was referring to free market capitalism.

Edit: Why the hell am I being down voted here?

No idea why you were being downvoted. I was just curious, as people were using the terms interchangably and they aren't always used that way.

Our current quasi-free markets already do have "assassination" contracts - your supermarket pays a slaughterhouse to assassinate cows. We also have slavery - horses are forced to labor for whatever amount of money their owners give them.

I'm not making a "meat is murder" argument. I'm just pointing out that pretty much any conceivable capitalist system defines cows and horses to be property, not people. One can envision a capitalist system which does the same for slaves and assassination victims.

I.e., by tweaking the definition of "person" or "market participant", you can get all sorts of odd results.

(That said, capitalist advocates have never made such arguments, as far as I'm aware. Most early supply&demand types were abolitionists, and the phrase "the dismal science" was coined by a pro-slavery advocate.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_dismal_science )

True, but that's a problem of semantics which is not specific to the definition of capitalism. Whatever system you advocate, you'll have to define the terms you employ: "person", "market participant", "proletariat", "equality", etc.

Not treating people as property is a distortion of the free market. If people aren't property, what incentive do companies have to invest in their education? Rich people would be much more likely to pay for the education of their slaves if they were assured of strong property rights over them. How can you properly price human capital if there isn't a free market in it?

Etc., etc. Free markets are amoral machines that discover price levels appropriate to supply and demand through transactions. They are not intrinsically good or bad; it is in the transactions that make them up that moral judgement comes in. But if the market is truly free, then there will be no limit on the kinds of transactions.

I've yet to hear of someone who felt as a criminal after quitting his job (or after stealing himself from his employer as you put it).

Gah! You've completely missed the point of my irony. There's scarcely any point discoursing with you.

Well, you're not talking about capitalism. Your whole reasoning is based on a false premise, because there are limits to the kind of transactions allowed in a free market. In a free market, you are free to do whatever you want as long as it doesn't interfere with someone else's freedom. Your freedom ends where someone else's begins.

Hence, slavery not being compatible with capitalism is a fact, not a distortion of the free market nor a mere opinion.

We're talking about market freedom not individual freedom. You're confusing the two. Companies owned by larger companies can still both operate in a free market. It's no different in principle for people. And my irony was about phrasing the ownership of people issue in free market terms to show how it is distorting (and it straight out is), not to argue for it or that there aren't other approaches to the same problems.

"Free market" is defined as environment of voluntary transactions. Slavery is not voluntary, so it has nothing to do with free market. The same applies to assassinations (unless the victim voluntary agrees to be assassinated).

As for your argument wrt gold, it's inconclusive to say the least. Specifically, PIIGS has failed not because they can't expand their money supply at will now, but because they could (and very much did) extend their money supply before (using ECB as a source of cheap money, which would be impossible on gold standard).

But that's a century old debate, Austrian school has made their very convincing case about fiat money w/ goverment controlled supply causing business cycles in, what, 1912? Something like that.

Why do you think slavery isn't voluntary? Why can't you sell yourself? Do you not own yourself? Why can't you enter into a contract to sell yourself for a particular period of time, or to a binding set of responsibilities, etc.? Many (I've read some accounts that say most) slaves in history were willing slaves, in that they faced destitution and starvation outside slavery. Part of the implied contract of becoming a slave would be that your owner would look after you. And he would have every incentive to, of course - he doesn't want his investment damaged.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voluntary_slavery etc.

I'm not familiar with the situation in all PIIGS, mostly just Ireland (I'm Irish). The money came from British, German, French banks, over the course of a decade. ECB was the source of emergency financing when the bubble collapsed; i.e. you have your order of events backwards.

For as long as they are willing to stay slaves, I see nothing wrong with trading them. Outside of that situation, though, the right to body is unalienable (according to many rights theories).

The money came from British (banks, sponsored by artificially expanded money supply of BoE), German, French banks (sponsored by artificially expanded money supply of ECB), etc. I've got my order exactly correct. Then, when the crisis hit, more money come from ECB. It's a little surprise that the problem caused by excess money is not exactly fixed (in PIIGS) by more excess money.

Seriously, it's ABCT 101.

See, I do see something wrong with trading in slaves; but not because it's contrary to free markets.

Re your selective fitting of crisis to monetary theory, I'm not going to comment; there are too many factors at work to be reductive about it.

"That's a market that includes slaves, child pornography, assassination contracts, etc."

Yes -- but by definition only if agreed upon mutually voluntarily.

But you're probably still right when saying that (almost) "nobody wants" that.

I think most people's definition of "free market" is that people can sell or not sell their property or services for whatever price they wish - not that any good or service is legal to own or produce. People sometimes, but not always, lump the right not to have your property or labour taken from you under the term "free market" and sometimes just lump not having it taken from you except for monetary taxes (as opposed to taxes in kind or forced labour). Some people also lump freedom of contract under the rubric of "free market".

The generally accepted term for everything, including murder and conspiracy to murder, being legal is "anarchy" and if people still have free markets in this anarchy thats generally referred to as "anarcho-capitalism". Though nothing about having a free market says that murder is legal and probably says that forcing another person to work for you using the threat of violence is illegal. I can certainly see arguing that a free market implies legal prostitution, however, since unmarried sex is legal in most places.

EDIT: And as to Capitalism, well to quote Wikipedia: "There is no consensus on the precise definition of capitalism, nor how the term should be used as an historical category."

You keep coming in with this notion of what's legal. That's my very point exactly; what's legal and not is external to the free market itself. It is imposed from without, constraining it, and is not intrinsic to it. Whether contracts for assassination, or prostitution, or raw milk, or cigars from Cuba, etc. are legally traded is a matter of degree, not some self-evident binary choice. All constrain free trade.

People arguing for free trade are generally arguing for a particularly scoped subset of "free" trade, but they take as a relatively unexamined assumption that free trade is inherently good. Usually, there is some trade in particular that they would like to pursue, and they fight laws that inhibit it using free trade as a rallying cry, as if it were a self-evident justification. My point is that free trade by itself is not intrinsically desirable, and that we do in fact want all sorts of limits on what people are free to trade in.

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