Libertarianism is incoherent - Page 17 - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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Classical liberalism. The individual before the state, non-interventionist, free-market based society.
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#14505789
SueDeNîmes wrote:Oh I see. I'm forgetting that by "labour" and "production" you mean investment, however passive, whatever the money's provenance.

No, I've already corrected that misstatement of what I plainly wrote. Labor is human effort devoted to production. Production is bringing a desirable good into existence or providing a desirable service.
I'm still happy to leave that standing on its merits.

No, you are apparently only happy when you are claiming I said something I did not say.
IR employers of adults in safe conditions were, as they said at the time, undercut by employers of children in unsafe ones.

Yes, but you are conveniently "forgetting" that sometimes the reverse happened, or none of the latter would ever have gone broke, and none of the former would ever have stayed in business. So you are, absurdly and dishonestly, blaming the employers of children in unsafe conditions for not knowing, in advance, information on labor and product market conditions, production engineering, etc., that you know only with the benefit of centuries of hindsight. You are also absurdly blaming them for conducting their business according to the prevailing standards of the time, and not by modern standards they had no way of anticipating. It's just idiotic and dishonest.
And, no, I hadn't forgotten that you think land owners somehow make the latter philanthropists.

No, what you have "forgotten" -- again -- is that I said no such thing. What I said was that unlike the landowner, the factory owner is MAKING A CONTRIBUTION TO PRODUCTION. He is MAKING THE WORKERS BETTER OFF by providing them with access to opportunities to be much more productive than they could be on their own, opportunities that HE PROVIDES, and would not exist without his contributions. Why else would they deal with him? The landowner, by contrast, only makes others WORSE off, by first DEPRIVING THEM and then charging them for access to the opportunities and advantages government, the community, and nature provide.

You just have to refuse to know these self-evident and indisputable facts of objective physical reality, because you have already realized that they prove your beliefs are false and evil.
You repeat that wage-labourers trade ownership for wages. I repeat that ownership isn't on the table.

But I already proved to you that it is: the cottage industry laborer owned his product directly, because he bought the work-in-progress and owned the capital he used to work on it. The wage laborer just exchanges his property right in the value he produces directly for wages, instead of having to buy and sell intermediate products (and buy expensive capital goods he can't afford), because it is much more efficient in the context of most modern production systems.

But there are many examples of workers who still exercise the option of owning their products directly, though others who do the same kind of work may opt to trade their ownership rights for wages. A photographer, for example, can work for a news syndicate for wages or own his own work as a freelancer. An artist can sell directly to buyers or work for wages at a design firm. Many farmers produce for their own account, while others work for wages at large agribusiness firms. Steve Jobs and his partner started out making computers themselves, by hand, in a garage, and owning them directly. The fact that the economics of modern factory production, mining, etc. often makes it very economically unattractive for wage laborers to own what they produce directly does not alter the fact that they still have that option, and that many workers exercise it when market conditions make it attractive to do so.
#14505811
mikema63 wrote:Black and white with no grey area is the view of a child or a fool.


"There is black and there is white and there is nothing in between!" - Steve Ditko

On a more serious note, right-libertarianism is the least palatable ideology, I think, that exists. That's as far as I'm considered, however. I'm sure it's quite alluring if you're a spoiled middle-class brat. It seems, in general, to be the ideology of the oppressor (which is why it has such a considerable overlap with the Men's Rights Movement).

The rich have decided that, rather than a sign of their villainy, the destitution of everyone else is only a sign that the poor have not worked hard enough. It's how you end up with people, sincerely, defending the utterly miserable livelihoods of those in the third world; usually spun as though it provides those suffering with an incentive to better themselves.
#14505831
capital

"Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks."

Marx, Capital, Vol.1, ch.10.
#14505858
ingliz wrote:"Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks."

Marx, Capital, Vol.1, ch.10.

Marx was a nincompoop who infected the world with his absurd lies. Though finally forced in Vol III of Capital to admit that he was wrong, and that it is landowners who profit by the exploitation of labor, not capital owners, he then turned around and said this fact should be ignored, as it removes the rationale for violent seizure of factories!

It is capital accumulation that enables modern labor to be fantastically more productive than the labor of our paleolithic ancestors, thus producing the enormously greater supplies of goods and services we enjoy. It is LANDOWNERS who remove our rights to liberty without just (or any) compensation, preventing us from enjoying the bounty that CAPITAL OWNERS have enabled our labor to produce.
#14506061
Self-evidently false, absurd, and dishonest.

The chicken produces the egg: the farmer feeds the chicken and takes the egg to market.

Obviously, if I were trying to make your argument I could not say the chicken lays the egg because if I did I would be forced to concede that the worker produces the widget.

the product of his labour

The product of his labour is not the egg it is the money he makes from selling the egg.

capital

Capital is dead labour.

Marx, Urtext "A Critique" p. 942 wrote:Money is now objectified labour, whether it possesses the form of money or of a particular commodity. No objective mode of being of labour is opposed to capital, but all of them appear as possible modes of existence for it, which it can assume through a simple change in form, going from the money form over into the commodity form. The only antithesis to objectified labour is unobjectified labour; in antithesis to objectivized labour, subjectified labour. Or that labour that is present in time, living, in antithesis to labour past in time, but existing in space. As labour that is present in time, unobjectified (and thus also not yet objectified), this can only be present as capacity, possibility, ability, as labour-capacity of the living subject. Only living labour-capacity can form the antithesis to capital, independent objectified labour preserving itself, and. so the only exchange by means of which money can become capital is that which the owner of the latter concludes with the owner of living labour-capacity, i.e. the worker.


in Vol III of Capital

"Capitalist production, therefore, only develops techniques and the degree of combination of the social process of production by simultaneously undermining the original sources of all wealth—the soil and the worker."

Marx Capital, Vol. I
#14506315
ingliz wrote:The chicken produces the egg: the farmer feeds the chicken and takes the egg to market.

No, the chicken only lays the egg, much as the wheat plant only grows the kernels. The farmer is the one who initiates and enables the egg's production by feeding, housing, and protecting the chicken, and who converts the egg in the nest box into a marketable good more capable of satisfying human desires.
Obviously, if I were trying to make your argument I could not say the chicken lays the egg because if I did I would be forced to concede that the worker produces the widget.

But he clearly and self-evidently doesn't. He is just one of many people -- very definitely including the capital owner -- who make contributions to its production. The producer is self-evidently the one who effects production, who causes the product to exist rather than not exist. That is the entrepreneur who initiates and enables production, not the worker who only provides one factor.
the product of his labour

The product of his labour is not the egg it is the money he makes from selling the egg.

Garbage. Money is just the medium of exchange. It is obtained by exchanging something, and that something is in this case a product.
capital

Capital is dead labour.

That is nothing but self-evident absurdity -- in fact, meaningless nonsense. And we already know the purpose of absurdities, don't we?
Marx, Urtext "A Critique" p. 942 wrote:Money is now objectified labour, whether it possesses the form of money or of a particular commodity. No objective mode of being of labour is opposed to capital, but all of them appear as possible modes of existence for it, which it can assume through a simple change in form, going from the money form over into the commodity form. The only antithesis to objectified labour is unobjectified labour; in antithesis to objectivized labour, subjectified labour. Or that labour that is present in time, living, in antithesis to labour past in time, but existing in space. As labour that is present in time, unobjectified (and thus also not yet objectified), this can only be present as capacity, possibility, ability, as labour-capacity of the living subject. Only living labour-capacity can form the antithesis to capital, independent objectified labour preserving itself, and. so the only exchange by means of which money can become capital is that which the owner of the latter concludes with the owner of living labour-capacity, i.e. the worker.

Idiotic Hegelian gibberish.
"Capitalist production, therefore, only develops techniques and the degree of combination of the social process of production by simultaneously undermining the original sources of all wealth—the soil and the worker."

Marx Capital, Vol. I

More self-evidently false and stupid garbage.
#14506473
Garbage

With respect to capitalist production, the product of labour becomes a commodity in circulation and is necessarily sold for money.

Money is just the medium of exchange

"The fatal flaw in all versions of quantity-based monetary theory is the definition of money. The definition must establish a money supply which is quantitatively determinate and has an empirical manifestation. The task is impossible in the simple analysis in which money serves only as a means of circulation, and the flaw creates an increasing number of contradictions for other functions of money. In contrast, the analytical strength of commodity-based monetary theory increases as these functions are elaborated."

J. Weeks, The Theoretical and Empirical Credibility of Commodity Money



#14506490
@TTP

Those definitions seem fine but I've still no idea how the capital-centric property rights you tout don't thus exclude some producers.

What you say about cottage industries would, if anything, confirm what I said : ownership is no longer on the table.

I can't tell what exactly your latest child labour effort is saying. That the children were marginally better off than destitute* remains irrelevant to the moral condemnation (*and even that isn't true - enough children tried to run away that gov't had to outlaw the practice of physically shackling them).

A freelance photographer owning photographs doesn't mean wage-labourers have traded ownership of what they produce.
#14507129
ingliz wrote:With respect to capitalist production, the product of labour becomes a commodity in circulation and is necessarily sold for money.

So now you admit the product is different from the money it is sold for. That's progress, I suppose.
Money is just the medium of exchange

"The fatal flaw in all versions of quantity-based monetary theory is the definition of money. The definition must establish a money supply which is quantitatively determinate and has an empirical manifestation. The task is impossible in the simple analysis in which money serves only as a means of circulation, and the flaw creates an increasing number of contradictions for other functions of money. In contrast, the analytical strength of commodity-based monetary theory increases as these functions are elaborated."

J. Weeks, The Theoretical and Empirical Credibility of Commodity Money

This fool doesn't understand money any better than you do. Unless you start with the three different kinds of money -- commodity, fiat, and debt -- and their differing characteristics, you will never understand money or monetary history.
#14507144
SueDeNîmes wrote:Those definitions seem fine but I've still no idea how the capital-centric property rights you tout

Again, you are just makin' $#!+ up about what I plainly wrote. In most cases, the capital owner does not own the product his capital helped produce. It is the entrepreneur who owns it, and he pays the capital owners interest or dividends in return for their property interests in the product, much as he pays the workers wages in return for theirs.
don't thus exclude some producers.

Maybe it's the terminology you are having trouble with. "Producers" or "the productive" includes all who contribute to production -- i.e., workers, capital owners and entrepreneurs. "The producer," though, is the single agent who is ultimately responsible for the product existing rather than not existing -- i.e., who actually effected its production -- and who therefore rightly owns it.
What you say about cottage industries would, if anything, confirm what I said : ownership is no longer on the table.

But I have proved it is. It just doesn't make economic sense for certain kinds of production where capital costs are high and/or division of labor is minute. Nobody is stopping anyone from producing those types of goods that way; there is just no way to make it profitable.
I can't tell what exactly your latest child labour effort is saying. That the children were marginally better off than destitute* remains irrelevant to the moral condemnation (*and even that isn't true - enough children tried to run away that gov't had to outlaw the practice of physically shackling them).

It is not irrelevant. OTC, it proves that the moral condemnation of the capital owner for having provided the landless poor with access to economic opportunity, and the moral equation of the capital owner with the landowner who DEPRIVED them of access to economic opportunity, is unjust, irrational, indefensible, and evil.

You seem to be unaware of the fact that you are not even talking about a consensual economic relation of capital owner and worker. The conditions you describe had nothing to do with capital owners or even employment. They were the result of legal institutions that enabled certain authorities like workhouse managers to treat children as slaves, even to the point of selling them as "apprentices." The treatment such children got was even worse where there were fewer capital owners and thus fewer opportunities:
"But despite the growth of cities, agriculture remained the biggest employer of children during the Industrial Revolution. While they might have escaped the deadly fumes and machinery of the factories, the life of a child farm labourer was every bit as brutal.

Children as young as five worked in gangs, digging turnips from frozen soil or spreading manure. Many were so hungry that they resorted to eating rats.

The gangmaster walked behind them with a double rope bound with wax, and 'woe betide any boy who made what was called a "straight back" - in other words, standing up straight - before he reached the end of the field. The rope would descend sharply upon him'. "

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... itain.html

To blame capital owners for that situation is as stupid, dishonest and evil as blaming free white shop owners in the antebellum South for slavery. They didn't cause it. They were just there.
A freelance photographer owning photographs doesn't mean wage-labourers have traded ownership of what they produce.

It is an example of what you incorrectly claimed was not possible, and thus proves your claim false.
#14507156
It's funny to see socialists calling liberals incoherent when we have yet to even see the birth or true left wing politics. If history has thought us anything it's that the so called left has only ever served to weaken the position of the common man.
#14507247
So now you admit ...

"If we make abstraction from its use value, we make abstraction at the same time from the material elements and shapes that make the product a use value; we see in it no longer a table, a house, yarn, or any other useful thing. Its existence as a material thing is put out of sight. Neither can it any longer be regarded as the product of the labour of the joiner, the mason, the spinner, or of any other definite kind of productive labour."

Marx. Capital. Vol. I Part I: Commodities and Money, Ch. I: Commodities

This fool doesn't understand

When mainstream economics is based on nothing more than an assumption, the model of perfect competition, who is the fool?


Last edited by ingliz on 06 Jan 2015 10:47, edited 2 times in total.
#14507272
@ TTP

Yep, I still don't know how some producers aren't thus excluded. Or how what you keep repeating about cottage industries vs mass-production means wage labourers trade ownership. I made exactly the same point arguing that ownership is no longer on the table.

I don't know who's making "the moral equation of the capital owner with the landowner" or blaming capital owners for agricultual child-labour.
#14507463
ingliz wrote:"If we make abstraction from its use value, we make abstraction at the same time from the material elements and shapes that make the product a use value; we see in it no longer a table, a house, yarn, or any other useful thing. Its existence as a material thing is put out of sight. Neither can it any longer be regarded as the product of the labour of the joiner, the mason, the spinner, or of any other definite kind of productive labour."

Marx. Capital. Vol. I Part I: Commodities and Money, Ch. I: Commodities

Another example of the absurdities designed to enable atrocities.
This fool doesn't understand

When mainstream economics is based on nothing more than an assumption, the model of perfect competition, who is the fool?

Anyone who has read my posts and still thinks I have any truck with mainstream neoclassical economics.
#14507466
SueDeNîmes wrote:Yep, I still don't know how some producers aren't thus excluded.

Which ones? Excluded from what? How? We know how people are excluded from accessing the opportunities government, the community and nature provide: they have to pay landowners full market value for access to them.
Or how what you keep repeating about cottage industries vs mass-production means wage labourers trade ownership. I made exactly the same point arguing that ownership is no longer on the table.

And I proved you wrong. You can own your own products directly any time you want. You just can't make the market give you a profit when you do it in an industry where it makes no economic sense.
I don't know who's making "the moral equation of the capital owner with the landowner"

You are. Shall I quote you?
or blaming capital owners for agricultual child-labour.

You blame factory owners for exploiting child factory labor. So now you are going to blame farm owners for exploiting child farm labor? And ship owners for exploiting child crew labor? And mine owners for exploiting child mine labor? Craftsmen for exploiting child apprentice labor? The generals and admirals for exploiting child soldiers and sailors?

Don't you think that rather than a bunch of wicked capital owners and employers who could have chosen to be nice, there might have been some underlying factor that enabled and even compelled exploitation of those children by depriving them and their parents of their rights, most particularly their liberty to access opportunities to sustain themselves without being exploited??
#14507545
We know how people are excluded...

I am confused. Why would a 'capitalist' not know that, in the formation of the capital relation, the worker must be separated from the land?


#14507619
@TTP

Wage-labourers in general are thus excluded. I don't see where you've "proven" otherwise.

I condemn anyone employing desperate people, especially children, in the worst conditions they can get away with. And anyone responsible for their desperation.

Duh.
#14507768
SueDeNîmes wrote:Wage-labourers in general are thus excluded.

Huh? That's tautological: if someone is working for wages, they have ALREADY AGREED to give up their property claim to the product of their labor.
I don't see where you've "proven" otherwise.

I proved that in many cases -- where it is economically feasible -- working people can choose to retain direct ownership of the product of their labor. It just isn't economically feasible where capital costs are high and/or labor is minutely divided.
I condemn anyone employing desperate people, especially children, in the worst conditions they can get away with.

Well, "the worst conditions they can get away with" are just what the legal environment and market conditions dictate, and are not something they are responsible for. So like any good socialist, you are unjustly condemning capital owners for something they do not do, in order to rationalize unjustly abrogating their rights justly to own the results of what they DO do: what they produce.
And anyone responsible for their desperation.

No, you have explicitly claimed that the capital owners who offered them relief from their desperation were responsible for it when they clearly were not: landless workers would have been even more desperate had there been no capital owners offering them employment. And it appears you did so in order to exculpate the landowners who WERE responsible for the desperation of landless workers.
Duh.

Big-time.
#14507776
We know how people are excluded...

ingliz wrote:I am confused.

Of course. You're a Marxist. Being confused is what you do best.
Why would a 'capitalist'

Which I am not.
not know that, in the formation of the capital relation,

"Capital relation"...? I smell an absurdity coming....
the worker must be separated from the land?

And there it is. The worker is always inherently separate from the land. It is his liberty to use the land that capitalism separates him from.
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