What would be ironic would a solarpunk maximiser AI that forced humans to stop doing that shit because it's stupid and self-harming and there are better alternatives.
And the only real cost would be loss of face and status for less than 1% of the population.
Maybe that's not rational either. Hard to tell until it's been tried.
The opposition who takes him down is the opposite: after concluding how to build efficient fusion generators, his premise is further thought is not needed until the solution has been implemented - and his plan is to set out to apply his conclusions to uplifting the world.
Of course the opposition isn't "good" per se - he's still going to use the ability to out-think everyone to accomplish some measure of enslavement, but the plan at least is to try and improve the world for all humankind.
In a practical sense to the rest of us of course, the future reality was going to be alien cognizances subjugating the world in one way or another.
Lack of cooperation on Earth is a bloody affair for the constrained resources, so an intergalactic campaign under the same assumption may lead to advanced alien cognition desiring to expand our sense of self. I.e. if multiple timelike dimensions exist then our survival mechanism is maladapted to that topology. If you discover this constraint expansion on your own, it is freedom. If you are told, it is subjugation. ...or so I muse.
This is of course all about goal setting. I think those fearful of maximisers are being rational, but if we’re going to build AIs then we need to make them part of our community. The things that stop us as individuals going off the rails and taking everyone else around us down with us is respect for community, for others rights and interests. The need to seek consensus and consent. Figuring out how to implement that is the real challenge.
For example, Elon's personal spending and the structure of his compensation. If he just wants to go to mars, why does the stock price and his share thereof matter so dang much?
Or Bill's net worth, which has curiously increased despite his mission of giving it all away.
Capitalism does optimise for property rights, that's true - but if you're taking a utilitarian perspective (as all good rationalists should) then you have to ask what the material outcomes of that are. What we see is accumulation of massive power in the hands of a few, many of whom are doing active harm to the planet (just look at oil billionaires' behaviour). Supporting them is a worldwide underclass of people working in sweatshop conditions or actual human slavery. Maybe optimising for private property isn't providing very good outcomes.
1. The owner of the company doesn't keep all the profit -- they share out the vast majority of it. (Look at the retained profits vs gross margins of any company you can think of. Look at the wages that you, yes I bet you yourself, are paid).
2. When we don't do it this way, we don't actually get the innovation. The thing that incents people to solve the problems of bringing new products to the public (the very large problems, the problems they can spend the majority of their lives attacking) is the possibility of reward.
2 isn't true. Not only is most innovation funded by taxes and conducted by public institutions, but it's the market that drives iterative and combinational improvement on new inventions and you can have markets without capitalism. Capitalism is the division of people into capitalists who own the means of production (traditionally factories but nowadays increasingly IP), and workers who work them for a wage. The first step in moving in the right direction, IMO (I'm keen on incrementally and cautiously implementing improvements) would be to ratchet up the number of cooperatives operating within the economy. They're more likely to survive than corporations and they're more empowering for workers.
Why did this not happen in India, a country which had many advantages over China starting from 30 years ago? It's because the Indian commercial economy is strangled by socialist inspired bureaucracy and anti-competitive special interests. For all the China claims to be communist, it's commercial sector is cut throat capitalism of a particularly raw form. Much rawer that I would like, Chinese people suffer from some of it's excesses, but nevertheless it's produced an incredibly powerful and dynamic economy.
My primary political concern is reducing suffering. Capitalism leads to less suffering than dictatorship, but also leads to things like 996 and Chinese factory conditions, and thus should be either moderated or replaced with market socialism.
There are some people who think that humanity should reach its maximum potential as quickly as possible and that we must make sacrifices along the way, even if it means dooming other life forms (including humans) into misery. That misery then acts as a deterrent, nobody wants to be poor because it means homelessness or starvation, so everyone tries their best and works as hard as they can.
There are some people who think that humanity is doing pretty well, they are not against further improvement but they prefer preservation of humanity, even if it means not living up to its theoretical potential because sustainability is inefficient over the short term. The goal should be to make sure that everyone benefits from societies' progress to the extent that they want to benefit, which in theory should eradicate homelessness and starvation as nobody is willingly risking death.
Let's call the first system capitalism and the second one socialism (not necessarily inspired by marx).
There are two obvious problems. Humans are lazy creatures, economists that postulate that human wants and needs are infinite are kind of wrong. There are lots of humans who basically do nothing but watch TV. The stereotypical "welfare parasite" shouldn't even be able to exist as he is obviously going against his own interests of being unable to satisfy his unlimited needs. So the argument that capitalists make, is that lazy humans have to be whipped into shape and motivated. However, if the capitalists go too far and overexert their workforce or destroy the environment, capitalism will become less effective over the long term. An optimal system would be hard working when there is lots of work to do and lazy when there isn't much to do. It can't be stuck in either state or maybe it needs to do both simultaneously.
In my opinion, the next step that we should take is to remove the dependence on economic growth to keep the economy stable. If growth happens, that's great, but we shouldn't force it. We need to make small steps toward the right direction. Nobody on this planet needs a big step, e.g. a Marxist revolution, etc.
I do agree with not wanting insurrection though - the time for that in the West has probably passed. The global South on the other hand, is still oppressed enough to warrant taking up arms.
Every final (non-waste) output of a capitalist system is intended for human consumption. Compost, pet food, sheet metal, etc are all intended to satisfy human preferences. Price signals ensure that only things which humans value are economic to produce.
How the commons - which exist outside the purview of private property - are treated, is completely orthogonal to one's belief in libertarianism. For example, you can be a libertarian, and believe no pollutants should be allowed to be emitted into the atmosphere, because the atmosphere is part of the commons, and should be maintained in a way where it remains useful to humanity at large.
Coercion is when someone reduces your option set, by threatening violence (against the person or property of you or someone you love). An offer, that you are free to reject, and have the faculty to fully comprehend, cannot meet the definition of coercive.
As for selling yourself into slavery, that calls into question whether the you that exists today has a right to the you that exists in the future to the extent that the current you possesses a right to sell that you's liberty away, and I am fairly a certain a court would rule you don't.
But these extreme/fantastical scenarios are not what libertarians are arguing about. There are far more mundane examples of people's liberty being repressed by anti-libertarian laws, that anti-libertarian apologists cannot excuse, so they resort to these hyperbolic examples.
- demanding sex in order to give an actress a part in a movie
- offering food to a starving man in exchange for his kidneys
- buying all the food in the market to drive up the price from people desperate to not die
- basically the entire American healthcare system
>demanding sex in order to give an actress a part in a movie
There is nothing coercive about this.
>offering food to a starving man in exchange for his kidneys
Unless it's an emergency, where the starving man does not have the time to make/entertain offers on the wider global market, there is nothing coercive about this either.
In an emergency situation, different rules apply, as a consequence of the physical space we each take, which displaces others. This exclusionary effect creates a duty to render help in an emergency, as opposed to abusing one's position in such a situation to exploit others.
>buying all the food in the market to drive up the price from people desperate to not die
There is nothing coercive about this, and in practice, it's impossible. This should certainly be guarded against by individuals, through means like securing long-term food purchase contracts through co-ops, or by growing one's own garden, but that doesn't imply that it's a form of coercion which we have an ethical right to employ coercion to remedy.
You can't really argue with deontological positions given they're axiomatic, so there's probably no reasoning I can give that you would consider.
Could you elaborate? What exactly do you mean?
By "withholding care upon receipt of payment is not coercive", do you mean a person that commits to providing aid in exchange for payment, and then reneges on their obligation upon receiving payment? This is clearly theft/fraud, and in the same class of behaviors as coercion.
I'm totally confused as I don't know when we discussed such a scenario and why you think that I don't consider that coercive.
- you get shot and I withhold my care based on a ruinous payment
- I threaten to shoot you unless you give me a ruinous payment
Obviously as you said these are morally different because I am acting aggressively - but this is not a utilitarian argument. In terms of utility (and i am a preference utilitarian, so that's what matters to me - rationalists typically claim the same framework) these two scenarios are identical, and thus have the same moral weight.
The latter, you have claimed as coercive, the former (eg withholding food from a starving man), you said was not. Therefore, your definition of coercion is not rooted in utility.
The normal libertarian ethics don't apply in such cases. In the ordinary non-emergency market, Newtonian/libertarian ethics do apply, and those are the circumstances you are avoiding contending with by focusing on extreme outlier/edge cases.
You don't seem to be engaging with the implications of what I'm saying, rather just engaging with the specific examples, so I'm not sure you're really willing to engage with the arguments.
These outlier situations have properties not present in normal circumstances, regardless of the power imbalance in those normal circumstances. Normal circumstances mean that Apple, despite being worth $2.8 trillion, can only induce me to purchase its product, if it is the best option for me amongst the entire set of options globally available to me. The harmful/coercive effect of the power imbalance vanishes in a free market, because by the ruleset of the free market, Apple cannot use its power to do anything except provide a better quality product for a lower price.
>> The rich get richer and the poor get poorer because the rich are in a better negotiating position so the poor must take what they're given.
The poor don't get poorer in a free market.. We've seen wages grow over 20 fold since 200 years ago, in 1822. This is after adjusting for inflation, meaning a greater than 20 times material improvement in people's living conditions. The places in the world with the highest wages are precisely those which adhered to the free market ruleset most closely, and for the longest duration of time.
>>You don't seem to be engaging with the implications of what I'm saying
What you're implying is simply misinformed.
> The poor don't get poorer in a free market..
Real wages in the USA have stagnated since the 1960s [1] as neoliberal (aka libertarian) policies have been implemented. The US has some of the worst rates of education, medical expense, and income inequality in the world. Many cities are unaffordable to the service workers and labourers that those cities require. At the same time, the value of real work being done is extracted from countries in the global South by neocolonial policies. That's not the kind of ethical ideal we should be aiming at.
1: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/08/07/for-most-us...
The activity of Apple is massively beneficial to China, and the other suppliers downstream of it. You're simply accepting the Marxist principle that profit is exploitation, and harmful to society, which is not economically valid, and oblivious to the facts around the impact of foreign investment in countries like China.
>>Real wages in the USA have stagnated since the 1960s [1] as neoliberal (aka libertarian) policies have been implemented.
This is incredibly misinformed.
First of all, that link looks at wages, not compensation. The non-wage component of compensation has grown more rapidly than the wage component of compensation. Looking solely at wages, instead of compensation as a whole, is seemingly a deliberate choice to give people a sense of being victimized.
Second, the USA is NOT the world, and it has NOT implemented libertarian policies since 1960.
Market rights have been increasingly encroached upon since 1960, as a result of politically instituted government interventions, that according to basic economics, reduce productivity growth, exacerbate income inequality, or both.
Two major examples:
1. The rapid rise of social democracy:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/social-spending-oecd-long...
Which is feeding the emergence of a highly paid cadre of government workers:
https://www.hoover.org/research/140000-year-why-are-governme...
To say nothing of the rapid expansion of the regulatory bureaucracy, and the barriers to competition it creates for major private sector incumbents, and highly paid consultants/lawyers/lobbyists who know how to navigate it.
2. The rapid increase in land-use restrictions in the major high-productivity population centers, which according to many analyses, has massively increased income inequality, while inhibiting productivity growth. E.g. this study estimates that reducing land-use restrictions in just three cities: New York, San Francisco and San Jose would increase GDP by 36.3 percent:
https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/mac.20170388
This finding was echoed by the White House's Council of Economic Advisers in 2016:
https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/sites/whitehouse.gov/fi...
The world at large, which has moved more toward libertarianism since 1990, has seen the most rapid rise in wage growth in human history over the last 30 years:
https://www.csmonitor.com/World/2016/0207/Progress-in-the-gl...
You can't honestly say that the Reagan era led to increases in regulation?
I don't support regulations uncritically, I think rent control plus NIMBYism is a disaster. You'd ideally want to build more accommodation, preferably apartment blocks over single family.
I'll admit I'm not a policy wonk so I don't know how non wage compensation plays into it. I do know that the American healthcare system is fucked and should be transitioned to a single payer system.
Your other comment about about cooperatives and labour rights was just the perfect market fallacy and completely a historical, respectively, so doesn't merit further analysis.
I've given so many examples of people being victimised in this thread, you just keep restating your opinions and moving on when I show my point so it's pretty clear you're unmovable in your ideology so there's no point continuing with this. I didn't engage with this thread to debate with libertarians when my established premise was that libertarians never move from their positions.
Like I said, your explanation for that not being how capitalism works, which was:
>>However, if you take apple alongside all their inputs, what you have is an extractive model where shareholders capture the value created by employees and suppliers, and the employees of those suppliers are often the ones being ruthlessly exploited (the aforementioned cobalt miners, Chinese factory workers, etc).
Is straight Marxist exploitation theory, and it's not grounded in the scientific consensus on Economics. It discounts the value of saving capital, and risking it on a venture, that the investor provides. It assumes wage earners do not benefit from profit-motivated investments, unless they share in the profits of the enterprise they are employed in, which is totally contradicted by basic economic theory, and a mountain of evidence of the last two hundred years.
>>You can't honestly say that the Reagan era led to increases in regulation?
The Reagan era experienced a quantifiable increase in regulations:
https://regulatorystudies.columbian.gwu.edu/reg-stats
One of the most far-reaching healthcare regulations was enacted during the Reagan era:
https://www.athenahealth.com/knowledge-hub/practice-manageme...
>>Supporters say the growing number of administrators is needed to keep pace with the drastic changes in healthcare delivery during that timeframe, particularly change driven by technology and by ever-more-complex regulations. (To cite just a few industry-disrupting regulations, consider the Prospective Payment System of 1983 [1]; the Health Insurance Portability & Accountability Act of 1996 [2]; and the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Act of 2009. [3])
Beyond federal regulations, state and local regulations increased as well. The land-use study I linked to earlier explains how much land-use restrictions, enacted at the local government level, have increased since 1960, and how much this has contributed to income inequality and productivity growth stagnation.
Those who benefit from centralized government control over society, e.g. the public sector unions and a fully unionized mainstream media, have completely taken over the narrative, and have convinced the masses that what the US experienced since 1960 was a move toward libertarianism.. It's an outrageous piece of misinformation/swindling-of-the-public.
>>Your other comment about about cooperatives and labour rights was just the perfect market fallacy and completely a historical, respectively, so doesn't merit further analysis.
Pure Dunning-Kruger over-confidence.
[1] https://www.cms.gov/medicare/medicare-fee-for-service-paymen...
[2] https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/for-professionals/privacy/laws-reg...
[3] https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/for-professionals/special-topics/h...
There are multiple disciplines within economics that are divided along ideological lines - the discipline is generally more concerned with constructing models that reflect specific perspectives than trying to accurately predict market behaviour, and this is not surprising given the general unpredictability of markets. You can see this given that (let's momentarily discount Marxian economics) Austrian economics, Keynesianism and MMT are all considered variously "consensus economics" within different groups (and libertarians tend to favour Austrian economics while actual economists don't), clearly economics is not a hard science with decided models.
> The Reagan era experienced a quantifiable increase in regulations:
Bureaucracies are gonna create more rules over time, that's what they do, but I'm not making novel claims when I suggest that Reagan's economic policy was one of deregulation, lowering taxation, and shrinking the federal government. His deregulation was of a market form. Here, cited from Investopedia, a pro-capitalist site (that is broadly considered well-reasoned and unbiased): https://www.investopedia.com/terms/r/reaganomics.asp
> Those who benefit from centralized government control over society, e.g. the public sector unions and a fully unionized mainstream media, have completely taken over the narrative, and have convinced the masses that what the US experienced since 1960 was a move toward libertarianism.. It's an outrageous piece of misinformation/swindling-of-the-public.
I honestly don't see how you can believe this. Unions are the weakest they've ever been, having shrunk alongside the middle class (no coincidence there): https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/06/who-kil...
Have you considered that perhaps it is you who has been misinformed?
> Pure Dunning-Kruger over-confidence.
Not a very convincing response in the face of literal historical revisionism. Child labour had to be outlawed. Cooperatives have a greater survival rate than corporations, but are rarely founded because generally speaking people who found companies want to get rich while actively avoiding giving their employees a share in the profits.
https://www.hetecon.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/Olsen_AHE...
The paper notes that corporations can be converted to worker coops, but in actuality this rarely happens because workers don't have the capital to enact a buyout.
And with that, I'm done with this argument. I feel that my hypothesis that libertarians experience cognitive bias towards their ideology rather than taking an objective view of the arguments holds up, because you have continually shifted the goalposts and carved out exceptions where it's "not capitalism" due to emergency circumstances, despite the fact that capitalism is the economic system we operate within in every country on earth. Resorting to historical revisionism about child labour just shows me that you're constructing your conclusions first and making the facts fit that conclusion. Your arguments against left-wing analysis of capitalism have consisted primarily of pointing at the USSR and China, which does not address the critique of capitalism, it just creates a new critique of Leninism. Oh, and calling Marxist analysis "victimhood politics", which isn't an argument.
None of that is meant as an insult - we all have biases, but we should aim to examine them in order to more accurately assess our environments. That's the hypocrisy I find with rationalists being libertarians: they don't even approach Marxist critiques of capitalism, they just ignore them or attack strawmen in response. If you truly believe that capitalism is not meaningfully critiqued by leftists, you should be able to address their concerns directly, even steelmanning their positions.
But there is a mainstraem consensus, and Marxism is entirely outside of it. It is quack economics. For example, Marx believed that automation would reduce the demand for labor, and with it, wages:
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/wage-labour...
>>But even if we assume that all who are directly forced out of employment by machinery, as well as all of the rising generation who were waiting for a chance of employment in the same branch of industry, do actually find some new employment – are we to believe that this new employment will pay as high wages as did the one they have lost? If it did, it would be in contradiction to the laws of political economy. We have seen how modern industry always tends to the substitution of the simpler and more subordinate employments for the higher and more complex ones. How, then, could a mass of workers thrown out of one branch of industry by machinery find refuge in another branch, unless they were to be paid more poorly?
and
>>To sum up: the more productive capital grows, the more it extends the division of labour and the application of machinery; the more the division of labour and the application of machinery extend, the more does competition extend among the workers, the more do their wages shrink together.
This was proven wrong in his own lifetime as factory worker wages rapidly grew in industrializing Britain.
He was an economically illiterate quack promoting basic fallacies like Ludditism that are popular with laymen.
>>Bureaucracies are gonna create more rules over time, that's what they do, but I'm not making novel claims when I suggest that Reagan's economic policy was one of deregulation, lowering taxation, and shrinking the federal government. His deregulation was of a market form. Here, cited from Investopedia, a pro-capitalist site (that is broadly considered well-reasoned and unbiased): https://www.investopedia.com/terms/r/reaganomics.asp
This is just the mainstream narrative. The real powers in society, which revolve around the state, have for 50 years, spun a narrative of an ascendant libertarianism (e.g. "neoliberalism"), when all broad-based measures of the centralization of society shows rapid transition to a more controlled and restricted market with more power in the hand of state bodies and industries tightly intertwined with them.
>>I honestly don't see how you can believe this. Unions are the weakest they've ever been, having shrunk alongside the middle class (no coincidence there):
The reason union membership rates declined is that unions bankrupted nearly every industry that was amenable to unionization. The union movement completely captured US industry and extracted exorbitant benefits that crippled the golden geese of the US economy.
The labor laws passed in the 1930s and 50s guarantee that any industry that does start to become a significant contributor to national output, whether it's the Big Three Auto Makers and the big steel manufacturers in the 1950s, or Tesla, Amazon and Google today, becomes the target of rent-seeking unions who are impossible to effectively resist thanks to the free-market undermining labor laws in place.
The decline in productivity growth, particularly in globally competitive markets like manufacturing, is a predictable consequence of that.
Beyond labor regulations, is the growth of government social welfare spending, at the behest of public sector unions who increasingly control the political system:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/social-spending-oecd-long...
A couple anecdotes illuminates the kind of power these unions wield:
New York has nearly 300,000 unionized public sector employees receiving over $100,000 a year:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2020/05/26/why...
In California, emergency workers can retire at 55 with 90% of their pension, that averages $108,000 per year, and the average government worker in California now makes over $140,000 a year:
https://www.hoover.org/research/140000-year-why-are-governme...
California now has $1 trillion in pension obligations for its unionized public sector workers.
>>Not a very convincing response in the face of literal historical revisionism. Child labour had to be outlawed.
The historical revisionism + ideologically-motivated naivety is in thinking that child labor could be eliminated without the economic development that free market capitalism fostered.
Child labor laws only became practical when per capita GDP reached a level where prohibiting child labor wouldn't lead to an increase in people dying from privation. If you prohibited child labor in the poorest countries in the world today, you would cause an increase in malnutrition and extreme poverty, because productivity in those societies is so low that children working is often the only way every one in the family can afford to eat.
Child labor is also very different than most types of labor, in involving parties who cannot in many cases provide informed consent, so laws relating to it can be justified in a society based on voluntary interaction.
Focusing on child labor is another case of you focusing on an outlier scenario where libertarianism doesn't apply as a matter of principle, as you attempt to rationalize your anti-libertarian principles.
>>Cooperatives have a greater survival rate than corporations, but are rarely founded because generally speaking people who found companies want to get rich while actively avoiding giving their employees a share in the profits.
And you're completely ignoring/depreciating the significance of creating and expanding productive enterprises, which is what the market right to own a company as a founder and investor incentivizes and sustains. You will see dramatically less new business creation if you abolish these rights, for the sake of forcing society to use coops.
>>I feel that my hypothesis that libertarians experience cognitive bias towards their ideology rather than taking an objective view of the arguments holds up,
I spent many many years completely discounting what libertarians online had to say. I only feigned debate with them, when in reality I dismissed them as simplistic ideologues, blindly parroting a narrative concocted by corporate-owned think tanks and media (e.g. Fox News) to trick the masses into fighting against their own interests, and never actually evaluated their arguments with an open mind.
Libertarianism is actually just a basic understanding of economics, devoid of ideological narratives alleging exploitation in certain types of voluntary interaction, that are advanced to rationalize restrictions and special privileges imposed and bestowed by the state, respectively, to allegedly combat these invisible chains of oppression.
>>because you have continually shifted the goalposts and carved out exceptions where it's "not capitalism" due to emergency circumstances, despite the fact that capitalism is the economic system we operate within in every country on earth.
Arguing that market rights cease to apply in extreme circumstances for which market rights were not designed is entirely reasonable, and for you to critique capitalism, and argue for the social democratic anti-libertarian order, which in most countries of the world, gives the state control over at least 40 percent of the productive output via taxation and regulatory gatekeeping, based solely on appeals to these fantastical outlier scenarios, shows bad faith debating.
Debating the various theoretical aspects of various *isms is fun and all but there is practically no immigration from capitalism to communism. The poor know which one is better for them and vote with their feet.
- A Marxist-Leninist state
- State capitalism
- Bolshevism
I don't care much about the terminology, but I do care about people making out that most left-wingers want more USSR. I mean, I'm an anarchist, so if I were alive in the USSR I'd be murdered, so that should tell you the level of friendliness between those people and libertarian socialists.
>>Marxist "doctrines" also led to 5 day 8 hour working weeks, paid leave, unions led to increased wages, and many other workers rights. Hell, before the left wing gained power, child labour was predominant in capitalist economies.
No it didn't. All of those things emerged as a result of the rising levels of per capita GDP that were due to profit-motivated investment in a free market.
Child labor could only be abandoned when productivity increases enabled parents to support their whole family alone, and that productivity increase was, again, a consequence of profit-motivated investment in a free market.
In an economy that defines itself by a high degree of the division of labor, where people no longer gather their own food and are dependent on the cooperation of other people, being excluded from the division of labor is the same as ending their ability to participate in society. They must now scramble and get their own plot of land and work the fields themselves and become self sufficient. There are offers that people cannot refuse realistically.
I would count this as coercion because people who own money can refuse to spend it indefinitely. As money is needed to conduct transactions, it becomes harder and harder to trade the more people keep money for the sake of having money instead of using money exclusively as a medium of exchange as many economists (even Marx) postulate, even though it has been proven wrong hundreds of times.
A store of value cannot be used as a medium of exchange, those are two mutually incompatible and this conflict makes the money -> goods transaction inherently coercive, which ironically also backfires, because the only way you can beat coercion is through psychological manipulation. How do you convince someone to get something they don't need? By creating an artificial need.
No one has the power to exclude you from the market and the benefits of division of labor.. You would only be excluded if what you provide is of such little apparent value, that no one wants to trade what they have for what you provide. That is not coercion. People have a right to not associate with you, even if that choice means you starve to death. You do not own other people.
>>I would count this as coercion because people who own money can refuse to spend it indefinitely.
People can barter. People can create their own money. When the state, under anti-libertarian principles, intervenes, and prohibits voluntary exchanges involving certain kinds of money then yes, these problems can theoretically emerge. This is why libertarian philosophy is so adament about not using the state's apparatus of violence (the courts, police and prisons which compel compliance with state orders) to restrict people from engaging in voluntary interactions with other consenting adults.
The only way to get gold is to dig it out (mines owned by monarchs), borrow it with interest (which leads to the usual debt trap) or to sell your products and services to those who already have gold (which is heavily concentrated geographically and in the hands of the rich).
If it is mandated that you must use a certain currency, then this automatically leads to a power imbalance between those who have money and those who don't. If you need to buy food or pay for shelter then you can't wait, but the rich have all their basic needs met, they can afford to wait until you are desperate to accept any offer. This is why Austrian economists are kind of right when it comes to competition among currencies. A terrible currency can ruin an economy. However, they still insist on the gold standard because they love playing the monarchy game, they even admit it themselves.
Even in modern times the rich benefit from economic crashes because it means desperation and fire sales, in other words, discounts for those who already have more than they need for themselves.
Ah, but that's the crux, isn't it? Because even the implication of this sentence is that that nature of "private property" and "the commons" is socially constructed - what can be private, what cannot be. If it is socially constructed (as it clearly is), then the scope of private property becomes a matter for public and political debate, and really with no limits. Should land ever be private property? Should resources in the ground ever be private property? Water rights? Should anyone be able to own a home?
Libertarians (and many other people) may feel that the answers to such questions are either (a) obvious and/or (b) dictated by the rest of their political philosophy, but the moment you open the door to the possibility that there are some things that remain "in the commons" and other things that do not, you are forced to face the social construction of private property as a concept, and with it the question of what it should really be.
It's socially interpreted, but I believe there is a natural justice, that promotes functional societies, that reasonable people can recognize, that will end up as the social interpretation via any process that is impartial and deliberative, like courts.
Natural resources are not man-made, and thus are not true private property. But we recognize a right to appropriate a small portion of abundant natural resources for our own use, when one does this to reconfigure the appropriated matter into a much more valuable form, whether it's reconfiguring an apple into our flesh through digestive/metabolic processes, or a log and stone into a hand axe. We recognize the natural justice of allowing the person to have perpetual exclusive rights to this value-added portion of the matter of the universe, in order so that they may benefit from the value they created.
I completely disagree. Land ownership should never be perpetual. It should be time limited. Old people own all the land, while young people must buy it from them. That is naturally unjust and forces people to use violence to obtain land. The only sliver natural justice remaining here is the justice of killing "oppressors". If people do not step down from their positions of power voluntarily, then people will force them to step down.
I obviously do not want this to happen so I will argue against anyone who wants earth to be littered with wars over land.
Wars do not break out because people are evil, wars break out because our laws and rules during peace time aren't good enough for everyone. If land is properly allocated to everyone, then borders become irrelevant goals for war. The difference between whether you trade to get indirect access to land or whether you own it should be so slim, that no one ever considers obtaining land forcibly be ever worth it because the peaceful methods work just fine.
Land ownership does not fit the definition I provided, which in greater context, is:
"a right to appropriate a small portion of abundant natural resources for our own use, when one does this to reconfigure the appropriated matter into a much more valuable form, whether it's reconfiguring an apple into our flesh through digestive/metabolic processes, or a log and stone into a hand axe."
Land is not scarce, and appropriating it is not a case of appropriating only that portion of the matter of the universe which one reconfigures into a value-added form.
So I agree, there can be no natural right to private ownership of land. A land tax, therefore, can be justified, as can other forms of state-intervention over how one may manage it.
Ownership of anything by a person is already time limited - limited to a human lifetime.
> If land is properly allocated to everyone
Let’s imagine every person in the world should have an equal holding of arable land (ignores lots of other factors, but whatever!). Assuming 8 billion people and 1.6 billion hectares of arable land, works out to 5 people per hectare.
To be fair, USA needs to a double its population (≈ 2.3 times to 760 million). New Zealand needs to approximately halve it’s population.
For other countries, find your arable land figure (it is in Hectares, left most column of main table is 2016 figure) from https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/arable-la... and multiple by 5 to get the fair population and compare that with the actual population.
The same is true of your use of metal to forge an axe. While that may appear to be value-added to you, others may not share your assessment. However, the metal you used has now been removed from its natural condition (presumably in-ground ore) and is no longer available for anyone else to bring their own value-added use to, and thus your action has the potential to be a net negative to the rest of the population. It's not clear what rationale they might have for respecting your claim to have added value.
There's no clear reason for land ownership given the notion that you should only own value added, but libertarian conceptions of society would be fairly lost without such ownership. Nevertheless, for most of human history, the concept that anyone could own land in perpetuity would have been quite strange. Likewise, the concept that one could has also been the source of many of the most bitter conflicts in human history. This doesn't make the idea of owning land particularly compelling, when looked at over the long arc of human history.
It doesn't break down. I consider land to be under the proper purview of the state, under exactly this principle.
>>The same is true of your use of metal to forge an axe. While that may appear to be value-added to you, others may not share your assessment. However, the metal you used has now been removed from its natural condition (presumably in-ground ore) and is no longer available for anyone else to bring their own value-added use to, and thus your action has the potential to be a net negative to the rest of the population. It's not clear what rationale they might have for respecting your claim to have added value.
Not really. The metal you used is so little that it can't have an appreciable negative impact on others. And the state can in fact charge you for taking that metal out of circulation, and redistribute the proceeds to compensate the rest of society for your extraction of it. But it is not reasonable for the state to simply never allow you to appropriate metal, under any conditions, or demand a right to anything you fashion from that metal, after it has already charged you a fee for your appropriation of it.
Now of course, if you go searching for edge cases, you will find them. A coherent moral philosophy doesn't eliminate the complexity of the world, and the challenge of navigating it. But it does give us a baseline moral philosophy that we can all agree to, and then together try to govern in accordance to.
>>There's no clear reason for land ownership given the notion that you should only own value added, but libertarian conceptions of society would be fairly lost without such ownership.
A land tax is perfectly consistent with both land ownership being an artificial right, bestowed by the state, and libertarianism.
It is also, intriguingly, the perfect tax, from an efficiency standpoint, according to economists:
Just listen to all the people kicking and screaming that interest rates should be increased or that 0% interest rates are wrong and negative interest rates (which represent decentralization of capital) shouldn't even exist. There are consumer protection offices advocating that accounts shouldn't be charged negative interest rates even though it only applies to accounts with more than 100k€ in checking accounts. Imagine the horror of getting a certificate of deposit for one whole month. Instead, some banks have decided to just charge monthly fees which is incredibly regressive because you would need 25k€ in your account to exceed the monthly fee at -0.5%. Meanwhile if you have millions on your account you pay the same fee, ah yes, subsidize the rich.
And nothing in capitalism says you have to value buying a yacht higher than anything else. There is also no rule that says capitalism should have no laws whatsoever.
Power is also a good thing, for example being able to cure cancer or feed people is a power.
Power is something you have over another person, ie the ability to violate their preferences. That's an inherent negative. Presumably the power to cure cancer is something the patient would consent to, and thus not the kind of power I'm talking about.
Capitalism has led to the kind of voluntary transactions where child slaves are paid just enough to not starve so that mining companies can extract cobalt to sell to electronics manufacturers. While the idea of voluntary transactions sounds nice in the small, it plays out pretty badly writ large.
As for wealthy people being not natural, as I said, usually you become wealthy by giving people something they want or need. That is the best thing to reward in a society.
What do you mean by "natural power imbalances", like somebody having more muscles than others? Then why can't you imagine that some are better businessmen than others, too? Was Steve Jobs just an evil guy becoming rich by exploiting his employees, or did he become rich because he made the world a better place for billions of people? Would the world have been better if Steve Jobs had been shot down at an early stage to give somebody else a "fair chance" in his place?
Marxism wasn't a success story in the real world, either.
Now, that was never going to happen, because of the iron law of bureaucracy - states only ever consolidate their own power so Lenin's plan was doomed from the start. But the USSR was never socialist.
I'm not sure what you think is impossible about socialism, because if we were to legally replace corporations with cooperatives, which is not a huge jump in terms of economic law, that would be market socialism. Its happened before (briefly in the USSR before the consolidation of the bolsheviks in power for example, for example in the meaning of the word "soviet" itself) and cooperatives work perfectly well as an industrial unit.
Coops based on voluntary participation are entirely compatible with capitalism, you can already set up a coop today in capitalist countries. Socialism is not voluntary, it forces everybody to participate. It is the most exploitative system, because everybody is supposed to only work for the common good, not for themselves. It also sets the wrong incentives which is why it usually ends in misery.