Thanks for the reply, xnop. You brought up lots of interesting things.
But first please know this: I'm not a defender of the status-quo. For a variety of reasons, there are many wealthy people who got that way by means of coercion and fraud (or by working for organizations that did). Property or controlling interests attained by those means are nothing else but
stolen goods, and thus forfeitable (ethically at least, if not practically).
@klapseBut where does coercion begin? I believe that any form of capitalism implicitly requires coercion or better leads to coercion, because of many factors. If we continue to divide between owners of property (meaning production facilities, laborforce, patents, education, knowledge... not talking about personal possessions) and poor people, this will never go away.
I accept that you still believe it requires coercion and I'm curious to see your reasoning as to why it does. (Before you think about it, please note that the definition of "coercion"
http://www.dictionary.com/browse/coercion is pretty clear, so I won't accept you expanding it to include things like "imbalances in relative negotiating power".)
If you are considering shifting the goalposts to "exploitation" I'll save you the trouble: Marx's theory of capitalist exploitation was proven false in 1884 by Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk.
https://fee.org/articles/austrian-exploitation-theory/
H.H. Hoppe also touches on it in "What Marx Gets Right" (A comparison of Marxist and Austrian class analysis.)
https://mises.org/system/tdf/9_2_5_0.pdf?file=1&type=document
https://mises.org/library/hans-hermann-hoppe-what-marx-gets-right
Saying "they got there on their own, now they have to deal with it", just isn't going to cut it for me. A person who has never had a proper education and cannot read or write will also not have any chance to earn enough money in a free market society, to get out of that.
I agree with you that the community - motivated by moral, ethical and utilitarian interests - should organize cheap and free education services for the poor. (Of course enterpreneurs are just as much a part of the community as anyone else and should be free to compete and innovate to offer educational service at varying price points.) Churches and monestaries, scholarships and stipends have provided cheap and free education for centuries and today we are seeing a boom in extremely cheap private schools in poverty-stricken places like poor areas of India.
By contrast, a coercive State education system is nothing less than a crime against the people. It centralizes policy and procedural decisions and dictates what the next generation will be taught and what opinions to have of things in this world. Most important to the State's survival and growth: teaching all the little children that State intervention in all aspects of daily life is essential, good, right and just.
If State-run schools were offering anywhere
near the value per dollar as private and parochial schools, they would not fight tooth and claw against school voucher legislation. Think about it: if they
really knew better how to educate kids they'd have nothing to fear from competing on a fair playing field with private and parochial schools.
The New York State public school system costs $14000-140,000 per pupil (per year!) and employs thousands of administrators versus the twenty-some people who manage the NY Catholic School system (iirc about 1/8th the student body size). The abysmal performance of the US public school system has resulted in colleges and universities accepting students who haven't learned the difference between "your and you're", people who haven't learned
basic algebra and so on. This isn't a 'so what' thing; this is evidence that we are seeing the lowest standards of admission to higher education the history of the west.
What is the incentive for an organization that is build upon the free-market to also take care of someone who is not economically worth anything (like most of the so called poor, the uneducated, the sick)? Is there any kind of moral regulatory instance? no, there is only the free market that magically balances everything and self-regulates.
Since the work of Böhm-Bawerk and Menger, we know that
value is a subjective property of the individual human mind.
https://mises.org/library/subjective-value-theory "To be worth something" requires an evaluator: there
is no 'objective value' of different things in this world. To be valuable a person or thing must be
valued. For you to be valued, therefore, you must serve your fellow human, and/or have personal bonds to other people who value
you.
By being a good family member, neighbor or friend, those people you form bonds with will support you when some accident befalls you, you lose your home etc. We all have been there before and without that kind of helping each other, we lose our humanity. And whenever the state provides this 'aid' after first taking the resources from us, we have less incentive and opportunity to personally display that humanity by choosing to sacrifice. Worse yet, the expanding abrogation of our moral duties by the State incentivizes us to teach and nurture them less and less with each generation.
But we also serve each other when we trade goods or services. When we trade things, we're not exchanging things of equal value, as Plato and others thought. If we did there'd be no benefit to the exchange. Instead we trade goods or services because both parties expect to be better off afterwards. Because both profit, at least in the ex-ante sense,
both are serving each other! This is mutual cooperation. This is the free market.
The moral regulatory instance for us is religion, philosophy and secular ethics. (In some societies religion is also the legal regulatory instance.) I suspect there is an increasing number of people who are not regulated by morals at all, but I wont expound on that here.
What is the incentive for companies to engage in charitable works? Well corporate image is the big one. Companies are also made up of people who make sacrifices of company resources for moral reasons. I recall the story of Wal-Mart, which shipped water and ice to hurricane stricken areas only to get it blocked by FEMA and other govt agencies. The current level of donations to charitable causes is ~400 billion dollars per year in the US alone, with about 30% from corporate donors. And the State-crowds-out private charity by taking the money for its own 'charity. What would that 400 billion $ become if people had 4 times the disposable income remaining after taxes?
what about someone who is addicted to a substance? All substances would be legal, and the free-market theory tells us, that only the purest and safest product would survive, because consumers would only choose the best product. I am pretty sure heroine addiction does not work like that... as far as I understood, the stance on such an issue would be "well that person willingly and knowingly got addicted, so they chose this life and noone is responsible to help, thus they may aswell die".
I have to contradict you here. The free market theory doesn't tell us that only the purest and safest product will survive and no economist claims it does. The market offers a wide range of products with varying quality and safety (among other qualities) at varying price points.
The libertarian stance on the issue of addiction is that it is just a special case of "helping other people in need". People who want to help others in need should help others in need instead of pointing guns at other people and telling them to pay for a third person (crony friend) to provide the 'service' of 'helping'.
and the question noone has answered: How does patiotism fit in with this? This is where I think the right-wing libertarians entangle themselves. With no government, there is no point to being patriotic or nationalistic. national anarchism requires separation of people by race/ethnicity. This in itself is coercion. Why can people not chose wherever they want to live or travel or whom they love and fuck with in a world where economically it should not make a difference?
I feel this has gotten quite long already and suggest we leave those things for some other day.
