I may make predications about what a market might look like in the absence of the State (I strongly suspect that there would be currency, for example), but it is not my place to dictate what the aggregation of peaceful activity between persons ought to look like. That would be quite illiberal of me, and therefore contrary to my own principles. — Virgo Avalytikh

In the complete absence of a state, I don't think currency would function as it does. The social construction of legal tender requires an institution to enforce; there are probably better ways of doing this than with what you imagine as a state, but without there being a social institution with lots of power to enforce the norms in which currency operates, I don't see a way of preserving currency (and thus integrated networks of producers and economies).

If there is some way that a market might work, such that it is dependent upon the existence of the State in order to work that way, then obviously it would not work in that way in the absence of the State. But I don’t see this as particularly problematic. It’s true that the markets of our acquaintance are intimitely involved with the State, but that does not imply that a market is eo ipso dependent upon the existence of a State – which it is not. — Virgo Avalytikh

The historical record weighs quite heavily against this; economies that rely on currencies have (always to my knowledge) regulative bodies (states/governments/social institutions) that deal with the currency and the legal structure surrounding production, property rights and individual rights. While this doesn't make it impossible that a market cannot operate without a state, it makes it implausible that such coincidences of markets will not occur.

What you imagine as a market, how you characterise it, is laying very free and unspecified in the background, without logical guarantee that its necessary social properties do not entail the presence of regulative bodies.

Does IP mean intellectual property? If so, I would point out that ideas – the stuff of intellectual property – are non-scarce resources, and treating them as though they need to be rationed is a Statist phenomenon. Patents are, in effect, government-granted monopoly licences, not free-market phenomena. Also, exclusive extraction rights – rights bestowed by whom? Again, this sounds like we are talking about a State franchise. As I mentioned, the State is the pre-eminent bestower of monopoly privilege. — Virgo Avalytikh

Aye, IP being intellectual property. It's an extension of property law to ideas. Companies aggressively pursue patents and use them to enforce exclusive rights. This is much less often done for the products of state backed (through grants and levies) institutions like universities and research groups; consider the iPhone, whose components and technology, besides the interface, were all produced through public funding (that is, through social institutions involved with a state), were public access, and all Apple did was write an interface and integrate the components, but they have plenty of intellectual property associated with their phone. This is a clear case, as is common, of a company exploiting material in the commons for private gain.

When you envision extraction rights as bestowed by the state, and that extraction rights in your stateless imaginings do not have exclusive ownership, what do you imagine actually happens? Two oil companies have equal designs on an oil field, the oil field is public property; the transition from public property to making private property on it (granting access rights) ultimately is consistent with the laws of the state (in ideal circumstances), but without that transition; it could only be private property. The two oil companies both really want it, what happens?

Another thing you are eliding is a market's natural tendency towards the concentration of wealth and power. If a business succeeds, it gets more money, if it gets more money, it gets easier to make more money; to employ workers and buy infrastructure to capitalise on investments, to use its money as leverage in lobbying, bribery and lawmaking. You place too much emphasis on the centralisation of power achieved by the state as a (albeit shoddy) democratic social institution, and far too little on the concentration of power that occurs in the usual anti-democratic hierarchical structure of firms (as ensured by who owns (the majority share in) the company).

In the real world, the people at the top of these hierarchies influence culture and politics much more than their fellow people. They have so much power apportioned to them by the behaviour of markets alone! Moreover, when there were less restrictions in place (placed by states) on what firms could do with their workers, 5 year olds were working 14 hour days breathing in smoke. There are places where this kind of thing still happens.

If I understand you, you are arguing that a service-provider is (softly) coercive, if it is practically difficult to patronise a competitor. I suppose the problematic issue is the vagueness of ‘soft coercion’. Either the firm is invading your property, or it isn’t. If you believe that you have an unconditional claim to, e.g., oil, then the firm is violating your property rights by neglecting to furnish you with it. — Virgo Avalytikh

You artificially limit the operation of power by constraining it to violating a property right! Hierarchical structures like firms have all kinds of internal power relations, and large ones have both huge power over their workers (obey or starve, mitigated by workers' rights law, from the state) and huge political and cultural clout. We recognise the arches of MacDonalds more readily than flags, babies form brand preferences from TV exposure before they can talk.

If, more plausibly, you do not have an unconditional claim to the oil, then your having to pay the price they want for it is not coercive. Since one cannot have an unconditional right to a scarce resource (for this would imply that everyone be able to exploit endlessly a resource which literally cannot be exploited endlessly), private firms, I suggest, are straightforwardly non-coercive.

An aside: in terms of basic necessities, most resources are not scarce now. Global production is sufficient to feed, clothe and shelter literally everyone on the planet - way more than that even. The problem is currently one of access; getting people to the resources. Markets in this regard create a global situation of artificial scarcity. As a particularly striking example; if one has insufficient income, one cannot afford rent or a mortgage. This despite (in the UK and US at least) there being more empty homes than homeless people. Monetary access thresholds for goods always create scarcity when there are sufficient resources to satisfy needs.

In addition, your characterisation of power is tautological. Private firms can't be coercive if they only act upon things they have purchased the right for; whose powers flow from their private property. This is because it is impossible in this model of power to leverage anything except for a property right.

Our sticking point seems to be an ontological one: whether collectives of persons have their own inherent agency, above and beyond the agency of the individual persons which comprise them. Quite simply, individuals are persons; groups are not. Sometimes, we might speak of groups as though they were an organism with their own inherent capacity to act, but this is non-literal. The Greeks called this linguistic phenomenon synecdoche, the improper predication of a property of a part to the whole. We do this in sport, when we say ‘Portugal has scored a goal’ when in fact it is not true that a country has kicked a ball into a net. Or we might say of a woman that she is ‘blonde’, when in fact it is only a principal part, her hair, that is blonde (her entire body is not simply and unqualifiedly blonde). And we do this with human collectives, too: ‘Germany is in talks with Spain’ (this might be two people talking in a room), ‘The country is mourning the death of its monarch’ (persons mourn, countries do not). — Virgo Avalytikh

Take the example of a law. Establishing a law of a country is not a predication of the aggregate on the basis of its individuals, it is an intervention which may only ever be applied to an aggregate of people; citizens, immigrants, business owners etc. IE with a logical gloss, is a relation of an aggregate to another aggregate, and can only be thought in those terms. Most of our "rights and freedoms", even constitutional ones, apply to denizens of a country in the aggregate. Person of type X has status Y (citizen has this rights, Schengen zone passport member can do this... Firm must do this...).
When someone changes or introduces a law, it affects the aggregate. If someone changes the corporate tax rate in a country, it effects firms, then it effects people. The causal arrows go law change -> firm change -> individual change. You simply can't interpret this kind of thing without appealing to emergent properties of aggregates, and the ability of aggregates to act on aggregates.

When the EU introduced sweeping changes on tax transparency, it effected all firms that trade within the EU. The causal arrows are (EU political change) -> (EU firm changes) -> (Firm member changes). Also (EU political change) -> (Stock value change). Complex systems, and socio-economic ones are among the most rich, always have these aggregation properties and emergent phenomena; the law is produced by a negotiating aggregate and effects an aggregate. Political policies do the same. Economic policies do the same.

The examples you provide are not counter-instances to this ontological insight. Certainly, multiple persons might act jointly, and their actions might affect lots of other persons. But this does not imply that a collective is a subsistent entity in its own right. To illustrate, my scrabble club has 4 members (one day we will take over the world), but every Wednesday we engage in collective, collaborate activity with one another (playing scrabble). So we may say, ‘That scrabble club is playing scrabble’. And this is true, in a sense. But the thing we designate as a ‘scrabble club’ is not some fifth thing, subsisting, acting, desiring, intending, over and above the four members. — Virgo Avalytikh

Check this paper out for a thorough demonstration that aggregate properties (macro behaviour/macroeconomic properties) are relatively insensitive to broad classes of individual behaviour (read: microeconomics underdetermines macroeconomics). Emergence in general is a thing.

In similar vocabulary to what you used, interacting parts can have wholes which have properties (and activities) which those parts don't have. Gas molecules don't have pressure. Only aggregates of gas molecules do. Gas molecules don't have temperatures; only aggregates of gas molecules do.

Perhaps I would; but, then again, this is not really an argument. — Virgo Avalytikh

I think you parsed the example I gave as an emotional appeal, which it was in part, but it shows that the interests of the company can greatly diverge from the interests of their workers. Their workers would prefer not to toil until injury, or in the past (in the UK) have children the age of 5 work 14 hour shifts and get black lung. Replace black lung for bleeding hands and perpetual pain and you go to the sweatshops.

A coffee company does an opportunity cost calculation, closes and sells a shop that was actually profitable because it wasn't profitable enough, and it was predicted that the reinvestment of capital into another new branch would make more money. These workers were immediately out of a job, even if their interests were aligned with the success of their coffee shop, it's clear that the interests of the company conflicted with the interests of the workers' continuing to work there in a job they were happy with.

This is before you start to consider so called "externalities" like climate change and tobacco's influence on health. Stakeholders often care very much about things like having breathable air (choking smogs in industrial London or the current ones in Beijing), knowing whether their purchases are slowly killing them and a living wage, ability to spend a lot of time with their families. Firms don't always (read: usually have to be forced tooth and nail to) care about these things, and sometimes benefit from the immiseration of their workers. If there's no social safety net, firing creates destitution, which makes the uh... labour market very liquid, eh? In these circumstances, it doesn't matter so much how you treat your workers because you'll find someone who will do the work because they need to.

"Work here in terrible conditions or have your family starve" is not in any worker's interests. A rational utility maximiser (being tongue in cheek; we don't behave like that at all) would organise with their co workers and make a union, funny that these get beaten down and undermined as much as possible. "Have a global climate and production policy that non-negligibly risks ecological and humanitarian catastrophes" is in no one's best interests; no stakeholder's. But for the firms who profit from such replaceable labour or by maximising their short term profit rates? Yeah, works for them.

Nice thread. I'll watch.

That's one of the best relevant summaries I've recently read concerning the conflicts of interests between corporate/business entities and the labour force. Coupled with the intimate relations between corporate interests and elected political figures, and you get one of the biggest current problems underwriting the wealth gap and the actual issues leading up to the all too common American view that elected officials and politicians cannot be trusted to act in the best interest of the overwhelming majority of Americans.

Very nice.

I feel that the way you use the term the "state" is very unhelpful for the topic being discussed here. Just look at the US, if use your terminology, wouldn't it be fair to say that the "state" is trying to impeach the "state" right now? You say that the "state" wants to become more totalitarian but in fact - in democracies - most of the state is terrified of the state becoming more totalitarian.

Rather, we must ask, ‘What do the three co-equal branches of government have a realistic incentive to do?’ Do the three co-equal branches of government have a realistic incentive to hold one another in check, and to prevent each other from growing in power? — Virgo Avalytikh

This kind of thinking is a symptom of the problem of talking about the "state" as a single political entity. When I say political, I mean domestically and not geopolitically. Branches of the government are not co-equal, they are neither competitive nor collaborative. They are also - just as the state isn't - single-minded political entities.

What motivates those who hold power isn't primarily acquiring more power but rather the preservation of their power, status, wellbeing, wealth and so on. Their power is not the power of the state or the component of the state but the preservation of an individual's role within the state. Transparent acts of corrupt behaviour is a risk, you could lose your job or go to jail and the pay off for corrupt behaviour is usually going to be in the form of a reward for the individual being corrupt - not advancing the political power of the government agency you belong to.

As a democracy, we're relying on the motivations of those in government to be more complicated and varied than acquiring power for the government body or political party that they belong to.

Well, it’s not true that I have not considered what a market is; I just wasn’t certain exactly what you intended by your question. One reason for this is that I do not offer, and should not be thought as offering, a structural vision, or a set of principles for ‘social organisation’. I may make predications about what a market might look like in the absence of the State (I strongly suspect that there would be currency, for example), but it is not my place to dictate what the aggregation of peaceful activity between persons ought to look like. That would be quite illiberal of me, and therefore contrary to my own principles. — Virgo Avalytikh

The difficulty in establishing any objective basis upon which to found one's chosen analysis of the subject at hand, in this case, is that none may conceive of how a market, in its general operation, might appear in the absence of any extraneous structure, that otherwise holds sway over the particularities of its course, and to some extent, dictates thusly the outcome of each exchange of value, and product, which as a whole embodies the purpose for which all forms of market likely stand. This bears truth on account of the universality of our kind's proneness to seek out order, whether by means that are forceful in nature, or even passive, when confronted with what lies contrary thereto((disorder)), in those affairs of life with which we occupy ourselves. Furthermore, the urgency which is demanded by the need for such forces of mediation to remain present, at all times, is greatest when the resources of one's livelihood, that which allows one to subsist, are compromised, or at all without the assurance of being regarded as sacrosanct((and might therefore be infringed upon with greater frequency than is the case when set procedures of conduct are in place, and enforced without exception)); that is to implicate their exploitation for the sake of the gain of another, as though its finding were certain, and eventual, without those entities((the state, government; any party whose function is applicable to the generality, and mediative in effect)) which, provide to the machinations of society, a firmness in position, and sense of stability by which to proceed forth, in a way that reflects due confidence in what benefits have since been garnered in relation to any other, remaining within the field of one's ownership, unless voluntarily relinquished, by oneself.

If there is some way that a market might work, such that it is dependent upon the existence of the State in order to work that way, then obviously it would not work in that way in the absence of the State. But I don’t see this as particularly problematic. It’s true that the markets of our acquaintance are intimitely involved with the State, but that does not imply that a market is eo ipso dependent upon the existence of a State – which it is not. — Virgo Avalytikh

I would argue that the conditions of the market's dependency upon the state, are broadly found, yet to some degree, are isolated; in the sense that only when the latter is disconsidered, is the fullest weight of its necessity made known to one. Which is to say, without cause for equivocation, that we have become accustomed to the state's presence in our lives, and to that end, cannot imagine even the vague, in portrayal of a world, nor any fundamental aspect thereof, for which the state, and the influence which it exerts, are truly concealed from view. Without being able to entrench oneself in the experience of such forces of tradition being deprived of their power, one can only gaze upon instances of past, within which developments arose, of comparative similarity to that which we hold as worthy of deliberation in the same respect. Yet, herein, we find much variance as to the result of each such instance, that adheres to the constraints, and parameters of our inquiry. This, is attributable to the fact of the initial stages of development exhibited by any society under consideration, often deviating from those which characterize our own((the central point of reference, in our judgement(s) as to what constitutes a society, and how it ought to manifest)), and that of any other beyond itself, in addition to demonstrating amongst themselves, an individual distinctiveness of equal magnitude to that manner of variance which was mentioned, previously.

One might speak of the following as illustrative of such decline, and regression; https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/13/world/americas/Venezuela-collapse-Maduro.html

I can recall of no other nation, that in our time has assumed what one may rightfully describe as a functional collapse, in the case of its own government; wherefore the burden of responsibility for its people, assigned to the state, is relegated on a vast and near-systemic scale to other parties; lest their needs all persist unfulfilled, except for those of the most privileged few.

1. In the state of nature, where power is divided roughly equally among all persons, it is most rational for the individual to engage with her fellow human being violently rather than peacefully.

2. Where power is distributed unequally, with enormous coercive power concentrated around a single person or agency, it is most rational for the individual to engage with her fellow human being peacefully rather than violently (this includes the persons comprising the State as well). — Virgo Avalytikh

My reading of Hobbes differs from your breakdown in two respects.

Any condition where people cooperate instead of fighting each other is a "state" of a kind. How this condition is brought about is not a product of "roughly equal" participants. There is no equality in the state of nature. Inequality and equality only make sense in the context of some kind of social contract.

The observation made above is separate from Hobbes's argument that Monarchy is the best possible state. Every other kind of social organization is a state but is inferior to monarchy because it introduces multiple agents. Hobbes argues that one agent is the best solution to the problem of conflicting interests. His argument stops there. That's it. The whole enchilada.

Eat the rich.

Lol. You’d better hope the State never dissolves because it’s what is standing between you and your property and the unwashed masses armed with their rage and AR-15s.

In the complete absence of a state, I don't think currency would function as it does. — fdrake

Currency certainly would not function as it does now, in the world of central banks, fiat currencies and periodic financial crises. But this does not imply that it would not work simpliciter. Legal tender laws exist for the purpose of extracting taxation, and are totally unnecessary beyond this. Good monies are good monies precisely because they exemplify properties which make them marketable as monies (divisibility, portability, and so on); there does not need to be (and should not be) a law which compels people to settle debts in any kind of currency in particular.

In these kinds of discussions, there always seems to be the assumption that the way goods and services are provided under Statism is the ‘correct’ way, and the burden is on the free-marketeer (who, I believe, ought also to be an anti-Statist, as I am) to answer the challenge of how they would hope to ‘match’ the State’s performance. But why think this way? In fact, the State is truly miserable in all that it does. There is just no reason to think that an association of persons who have a monopoly on force are going to provide any service remotely competently.

The historical record weighs quite heavily against this; economies that rely on currencies have (always to my knowledge) regulative bodies (states/governments/social institutions) that deal with the currency and the legal structure surrounding production, property rights and individual rights. While this doesn't make it impossible that a market cannot operate without a state, it makes it implausible that such coincidences of markets will not occur. — fdrake

With respect, I don’t think this argument amounts to much. The mere fact that currency-based markets have (always or nearly) always been Statist societies does not imply that a currency-based market is dependent upon a State. In fact, the history of money is a history of depreciation, as governments have involved themselves more and more in monetary systems. See Murray Rothbard, What Has Government Done to Our Money? https://cdn.mises.org/What%20Has%20Government%20Done%20to%20Our%20Money_3.pdf

When you envision extraction rights as bestowed by the state, and that extraction rights in your stateless imaginings do not have exclusive ownership, what do you imagine actually happens? Two oil companies have equal designs on an oil field, the oil field is public property; the transition from public property to making private property on it (granting access rights) ultimately is consistent with the laws of the state (in ideal circumstances), but without that transition; it could only be private property. The two oil companies both really want it, what happens? — fdrake

What happens is ultimately determined by whose property the oil field is. If the oil field belongs to one of the oil companies, then that company may extract oil from it, and sell it, without anyone’s permission. If the field is owned by someone else, then they may choose to grant the oil company permission to extract oil, for a price, or it may choose not to. If the field is owned by a community of persons, then the field’s fate is determined collectively by the co-owners. None of this requires the instrumentality of the State.

Another thing you are eliding is a market's natural tendency towards the concentration of wealth and power. If a business succeeds, it gets more money, if it gets more money, it gets easier to make more money; to employ workers and buy infrastructure to capitalise on investments, to use its money as leverage in lobbying, bribery and lawmaking. — fdrake

It is true that a successful company (that is, one which has satisfied consumer preferences successfully) now has more money than its competitors. This money then allows it to make still more money, but only by continually satisfying consumers. To invade this process, however benevolently, is ultimately a paternalistic act, for the effect is to deny consumers goods and services which they would otherwise have voluntarily purchased. You are correct that this accrued capital may then be used for corrupt ends, which serve to entrench its privileged position through lobbying and law-making. But it seems to me that it is precisely the State which presents these opportunities, and which makes them profitable.

Just as with patents and franchises, these are government-granted privileges. If the problem is that these firms have excessive political influence, then the surest antidote is surely the abolition of the very institution which they use as their instrument for such! In the minds of many, the answer to corporate corruption is to afford even more power to the State, but this is a movement in precisely the wrong direction. The reason why private firms and the State have the kind of corrupt relationship they do – and this relationship is one of which you are clearly aware – is because it is so profitable for both of them. Affording more power to the State is not going to change the incentive structure. As long as the State exists, those who are most able to benefit from it are going to continue to do so.

You artificially limit the operation of power by constraining it to violating a property right! — fdrake

There is a rationale for this, though it takes us rather far afield, as it leads into a positive defence of libertarian anarchism, which is not what I intended to do here. Fundamentally, all rights are really just property rights; to engage in any activity in particular is just to make use of certain scarce resources in such a way that deprives others of their full use. A full philosophical justification for this commitment would take excessive space, but the best defence of this idea may be found in Hillel Steiner, An Essay on Rights, or his shorter article, ‘The Structure of a Set of Compossible Rights’. A less rigorous but more accessible defence may be found in Murray Rothbard, The Ethics of Liberty, ch. 15: https://cdn.mises.org/The%20Ethics%20of%20Liberty%2020191108.pdf

This thesis is one which I consider to be very much in keeping with old liberalism, which saw a close connection between the exercise of individual liberty and private property rights. If I am right about this, and I believe it is right, then the power structures we see in firms are entirely justified, because they are the product of peaceful, consensual relations between persons, exercising their right of ownership over their resources and over their own selves. The obligations which are placed on employees are voluntarily assumed; they undertake obligations in return for their wage, to which they are not entitled otherwise, and they are better off having entered into the arrangement than not. The power structures are justified, in other words, because firms are not essentially coercive institutions.

An aside: in terms of basic necessities, most resources are not scarce now. — fdrake

I am using ‘scarce’ in the sense in which economists use the term. ‘Scarce’ does not mean ‘short’ or ‘not plentiful’. They are merely rationing phenomena. Rather, ‘scarcity’ is concerned with the capacity of a good to satisfy human wants. Suppose there is a resource, which is such that it may be exploited endlessly by as many people as you care to stipulate, without exhausting it. This would be a non-scarce resource. ‘Ideas’ would be an example of such. Unfortunately, the vast majority of goods are scarce. Everything (as far as I can think of) that occupies a physical location is scarce. There may well be enough productive power to feed the world twice over, but this does not render food non-scarce; the resource ‘food’ is not such that everybody may consume as much of it as they like, without depriving anybody else, or their future selves, from doing the same. The reason is that food is the result of production, and the production process itself involves the use of scarce resources, including time and labour. A resource does not become non-scarce merely because there is enough going around.

Markets in this regard create a global situation of artificial scarcity. — fdrake

‘Artificial scarcity’ also has a precise technical definition, and I don’t believe you are using it accurately. A resource is ‘artificially scarce’ if it is non-rivalrous and excludable. This means that my exploiting the resource does not deprive anybody else from exploiting it, and yet it is still possible to prevent people from having access to it. Examples would be pay-for-view television, cosmetic ‘skins’ for video game characters, software updates, etc. Once the technology is in place to make it available to one person, it can be made available to all people boundlessly, with no additional investment. Food and housing, however, do not satisfy the definition of artificial scarcity. They are just scarce in the ordinary sense (which, as I mentioned, does not mean that there is not enough going around).

Take the example of a law. Establishing a law of a country is not a predication of the aggregate on the basis of its individuals, it is an intervention which may only ever be applied to an aggregate of people; citizens, immigrants, business owners etc. IE with a logical gloss, is a relation of an aggregate to another aggregate, and can only be thought in those terms. Most of our "rights and freedoms", even constitutional ones, apply to denizens of a country in the aggregate. Person of type X has status Y (citizen has this rights, Schengen zone passport member can do this... Firm must do this...).
When someone changes or introduces a law, it affects the aggregate. If someone changes the corporate tax rate in a country, it effects firms, then it effects people. The causal arrows go law change -> firm change -> individual change. You simply can't interpret this kind of thing without appealing to emergent properties of aggregates, and the ability of aggregates to act on aggregates. — fdrake

Laws are essentially threats, threats of incarceration or worse, issued by human associations. Rights and freedoms are proper to persons, for persons are the agents of action. There’s no doubt about the fact that events can occur which affect many people, and it may affect them in virtue of a common, unifying characteristic, like being citizens of a country or members of a corporation. But that does not mean that there is a kind of emergent entity which hovers over the world of persons, with a mind and purposes and an agency of its own. There is no such thing as that.

Check this paper out for a thorough demonstration that aggregate properties (macro behaviour/macroeconomic properties) are relatively insensitive to broad classes of individual behaviour (read: microeconomics underdetermines macroeconomics). Emergence in general is a thing. — fdrake

I am not taking issue with the fact that it might sometimes be appropriate to engage in macro-level analysis. But I am not talking about methodology here, I am talking about ontology. Collective action designates the reality that individuals may act in concert with one another, towards some common end. It does not mean that there is a subsistent entity, such as you and I are, called a ‘collective’, which acts by the power of its own agency. That is poetry only.

In similar vocabulary to what you used, interacting parts can have wholes which have properties (and activities) which those parts don't have. Gas molecules don't have pressure. Only aggregates of gas molecules do. Gas molecules don't have temperatures; only aggregates of gas molecules do. — fdrake

That’s fine. To be sure, there are things that are proper to a part that are not proper to the whole, and vice versa. My heart pumps blood around my body, I do not. I stand in a field, my heart does not. The problem is that the kinds of things that are predicated of a human collective are not proper to it, but are really proper to individuals. Any kind of purposeful action, desire, intent, any kind of activity or psychological state at all, are predicated of a collective improperly, because they are proper to persons, and collectives are not persons. ‘The country is in mourning’, etc.

I think you parsed the example I gave as an emotional appeal, which it was in part, but it shows that the interests of the company can greatly diverge from the interests of their workers. — fdrake

But the interests coincided with the interests of consumers. Who decides what makes money, and what doesn’t? Consumers decide. If a less profitable business closes and is replaced with one that is more profitable, this is only because the latter more effectively satisfies a consumer’s wants. The firm exists to make money, and it does this most effectively when it is most effective at satisfying consumers. Why should the interests of the workers be paramount? Why should that trump all other considerations? A worker may feel dissatisfied with his job, but he is certainly better off for bread and milk being as cheap as they are. As a consumer, he wants things to be as cheap as possible. But we cannot have it both ways. The fact that they are cheap is owing the very same market processes which have seen him hired, and which have placed him in the conditions in which he works. There is nothing stopping 'ethical' businesses from cropping up organically, which pay their workers a living wage, see to it that they are placed in adequate working conditions, etc.; nothing, that is, except the consumer. If only the consumer were prepared to pay more, such that 'ethical' businesses were profitable, then there would be no impediment to their existing. But that is not what the consumer wants (I would be delighted to be proved wrong about this).

This is before you start to consider so called "externalities" like climate change and tobacco's influence on health. Stakeholders often care very much about things like having breathable air (choking smogs in industrial London or the current ones in Beijing), knowing whether their purchases are slowly killing them and a living wage, ability to spend a lot of time with their families. Firms don't always (read: usually have to be forced tooth and nail to) care about these things, and sometimes benefit from the immiseration of their workers. If there's no social safety net, firing creates destitution, which makes the uh... labour market very liquid, eh? In these circumstances, it doesn't matter so much how you treat your workers because you'll find someone who will do the work because they need to.

"Work here in terrible conditions or have your family starve" is not in any worker's interests. A rational utility maximiser (being tongue in cheek; we don't behave like that at all) would organise with their co workers and make a union, funny that these get beaten down and undermined as much as possible. "Have a global climate and production policy that non-negligibly risks ecological and humanitarian catastrophes" is in no one's best interests; no stakeholder's. But for the firms who profit from such replaceable labour or by maximising their short term profit rates? Yeah, works for them. — fdrake

Forgive me, I’m still struggling to tease an argument out of all this. There is so much packed in here. Governments produce their own externality problems, some of which I talk about in my other discussion, and which David Friedman discusses here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bpn645huKUg&t=1112s

In a Stateless society, workers would be perfectly within their rights to unionise. Indeed, voluntary collectives would be commonplace, as they were before the State became involved in the provision of Welfare: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jug_AcVjeAM

It just doesn’t ring true that firms are coercive institutions because they tell their workers that they must ‘work or starve’. When a State demands ‘your money or your freedom’, as it does when it taxes you, the State itself is the source of this destructive dilemma. The threat of having to hand over your property is provided by the State, and the threat of incarceration (or worse) is provided by the State, too. The State is precisely an invader of the lives and the property of their citizens (and, when it wages wars, the citizens of other countries as well). They are functionally indistinguishable from a protection racket in this respect (which do actually provide you with the service of protection). This is categorically different from being faced with the dilemma of working or starving. As you correctly point out, we must work in order to eat. One might say ‘I should not have to work in order to feed myself’, but obviously this is impossible to universalise, since at least somebody must work, or else everybody starves. The fact that you must engage in resource-gathering in order to survive is simply a fact of nature; firms are not the source of this ‘threat’. So, when the firm offers you the means of employment, which you would not have had otherwise, it is quite skewed to understand this as the firm providing you with a destructive dilemma. They are offering you a means of escape from starvation (indeed, the most effective means that the world has ever known).

I feel that the way you use the term the "state" is very unhelpful for the topic being discussed here. — Judaka

I have defined ‘State’ in a way that is quite conventional in political theory. There are alternative definitions, but they don’t alter my analysis in any important respect.

Just look at the US, if use your terminology, wouldn't it be fair to say that the "state" is trying to impeach the "state" right now? You say that the "state" wants to become more totalitarian but in fact - in democracies - most of the state is terrified of the state becoming more totalitarian. — Judaka

To be sure, the State is a collective entity, a composite of persons, and these persons may have differing purposes, intents and goals. So it is simplistic to speak of ‘the interests of the State’ unqualifiedly. But I haven’t done this; I have spoken of the State’s incentive structure qualifiedly. I have drawn attention to the separation of powers, and that it may sometimes be the case that the regulatory influence of one branch of government is exercised over another. But I have also argued that, in general, it benefits a given branch of government to grow in power and influence if it has the ability to do so, and that all three branches of government have a common interest in this respect. Why should the State fear its own increased influence? I don’t see why this should be.

This kind of thinking is a symptom of the problem of talking about the "state" as a single political entity. — Judaka

This is why I have made qualifications like these:

(note that, when I speak of the State ‘acting’, I refer to the actions of those persons who comprise it, for collectives do not of themselves have the capacity to act).

Branches of the government are not co-equal, they are neither competitive nor collaborative. — Judaka

The branches of government are service-providers (law-producers, law-interpreters, law-enforcers), and they are indeed economically complementary in the sense that I outlined above.

What motivates those who hold power isn't primarily acquiring more power but rather the preservation of their power, status, wellbeing, wealth and so on. — Judaka

This seems completely arbitrary to me. Is power attractive, or isn’t it? If it is, then why should one seek merely to maintain power, but not to gain more of it? In fact the government in the US has grown in power enormously since its inception. Its history is one of periodic power-grabs. I doubt the founding fathers could have envisioned the monster that their originally libertarian project has created.
If you really believe that the State does not have an interest in growing in power, and that it even fears such, why are checks and balances even necessary at all? Should we even be concerned about the possibility of totalitarianism?

Any condition where people cooperate instead of fighting each other is a "state" of a kind. — Valentinus

This is not correct. A State is a particular kind of human association, one which holds a monopoly on physical force over a given territory. It is not helpful to describe any peaceful state of affairs between persons as a ‘State’, because this does not bear any resemblance to the things which we ordinarily designate ‘States’. States are precisely non-peaceful and non-cooperative: they endure by initiating force, invading property, and benefiting special interests at the expense of others. Their very existence is a predatory existence.

How this condition is brought about is not a product of "roughly equal" participants. There is no equality in the state of nature. Inequality and equality only make sense in the context of some kind of social contract. — Valentinus

The equality which Hobbes speaks of is a roughly equal equality in physical capacities. The point is that, if you were to imagine a person who is uniquely adapted to living in the war of all against all – supremely strong, quick, cunning, and so on – even he would be in perpetual danger in such a world, for he may be ambushed at any time, or may simply get unlucky in one of his twice-daily fights to the death. The work that this does in Hobbes’s argument is that it shows that we are all better off for escaping the state of nature, and thus better off for handing absolute authority to the State.

Eat the rich. — Noah Te Stroete

Lol. You’d better hope the State never dissolves because it’s what is standing between you and your property and the unwashed masses armed with their rage and AR-15s. — Noah Te Stroete

Do you do any philosophy here, or do you just say things like this?

Nope.

Whilst I can attest to the need for maintaining a certain brevity, at times, I nonetheless fail to see how my preceding exposition is of fault. Of greatest importance however, is that one caught in my position is likely to be unable to determine at all the finer meaning of any response, as given, inasmuch as it prove as briefly stated as yours. I ask then, that the nature of my error, as you regard it, be identified, such that I may have the opportunity to address those concerns which pertain to it, and if possible, amend its content, in full.

Just write like a human being. English is not my first language, and I'm not going to take the time to read something that's purposefully obscure. But ultimately you can do what you want.

Oh. I am sorry for that, truly. My intention was not to render any depth of understanding difficult to achieve, nor was it to impede your recognition of what had been said, on my part. Though, I must remark upon the extraordinary aptitude which you seem to have developed, in that regard. Unfortunately, I can only lay claim to my own usage of those non-native tongues for which I have some faculty((Latin, German, Spanish)), as being rather tenuous in standing((much unlike yourself)).

In these kinds of discussions, there always seems to be the assumption that the way goods and services are provided under Statism is the ‘correct’ way, and the burden is on the free-marketeer (who, I believe, ought also to be an anti-Statist, as I am) to answer the challenge of how they would hope to ‘match’ the State’s performance. But why think this way? In fact, the State is truly miserable in all that it does. There is just no reason to think that an association of persons who have a monopoly on force are going to provide any service remotely competently. — Virgo Avalytikh

With respect, I don’t think this argument amounts to much. The mere fact that currency-based markets have (always or nearly) always been Statist societies does not imply that a currency-based market is dependent upon a State. In fact, the history of money is a history of depreciation, as governments have involved themselves more and more in monetary systems. See Murray Rothbard, What Has Government Done to Our Money? https://cdn.mises.org/What%20Has%20Government%20Done%20to%20Our%20Money_3.pdf — Virgo Avalytikh

My intentions are simply to point out that historically, states (and other social institutions) and markets interface strongly. A lot of what social forms do concerns their economy (questions of access, distribution, production and exchange of goods) and who owns what. A lot of what economies do is provide a means to change who owns what . This is rather unsurprising. When we think of a state, we think of a state involved with a market economy. We have to look either quite far back in time or to quite isolated communities to find a social form which does not have something like a state and something like a market.

Notably, this doesn't mean that states and markets have to overlap. Nor does it mean that the ways central government interface with an economy are the right ways, nor does it mean that the ways markets interface with governments are the right ways. It's simply an observation that we have to imagine something very dissimilar to contemporary industrial societies, or modern merchant societies to drive a wedge between the two ideas.

As it stands, you've not done that. Does this demonstrate that the wedge you're driving between market and state is unimaginable? No. Does it mean that there can't be social forms with markets but no states or states with no markets? No. What it does suggest strongly is that you have to imagine something completely different from all common examples of states and market economies to drive a wedge between them.

A consequence of this difference is that reading the real world in terms of whatever notion of state and market you have is a category error; it's simply not relevant to the intertwined nature of states and markets that we have today. You can't have your cake and eat it too.

I'm willing to entertain that your notions of state and market are merely stipulative, insofar as they don't correspond to social form similar in any relevant respect to what we have now, and what we came out of. This doesn't limit your imagination, just the applicability of your ideas to how things are.

I am not taking issue with the fact that it might sometimes be appropriate to engage in macro-level analysis. But I am not talking about methodology here, I am talking about ontology. Collective action designates the reality that individuals may act in concert with one another, towards some common end. It does not mean that there is a subsistent entity, such as you and I are, called a ‘collective’, which acts by the power of its own agency. That is poetry only. — Virgo Avalytikh

This is an invalid argument.
(1) X depends upon Y for its existence.
(2) Therefore Y does not have its own behaviour.

The causal structure of Y is simply depends in some sense on that of X. Atoms have novel behaviours from particles, compounds and molecules have novel behaviour from that of atoms, chains of chemical reactions have novel behaviour from that of compounds and molecules and so on. If you apply your argument in the general case, it would preclude the existence of compounds because they depend upon their constituent atoms. It would also miss a lot; chemistry and particle physics study different things. This is all there is to emergence as I am using it:

Y is emergent from X if:
(A) Y depends upon X for its existence.
(B) Y has its own behaviour which individuals of X lack.

Some examples of emergence in this sense, in addition to the previous ones: people negotiating (you can't negotiate with just one person), wars (This would never happen "New story just coming in, Chad declares war on America is equivalent to a Chad government official having a sudden desire to kill all American tourists due to an obnoxious tourist over the age of 40 wearing a cap backwards").

You seem not to be clear on this point, so I will spend more words on it.

That’s fine. To be sure, there are things that are proper to a part that are not proper to the whole, and vice versa. My heart pumps blood around my body, I do not. I stand in a field, my heart does not. The problem is that the kinds of things that are predicated of a human collective are not proper to it, but are really proper to individuals. Any kind of purposeful action, desire, intent, any kind of activity or psychological state at all, are predicated of a collective improperly, because they are proper to persons, and collectives are not persons. ‘The country is in mourning’, etc. — Virgo Avalytikh

The examples you gave seek to demonstrate that some properties of parts do not transfer to their wholes, not that wholes have no behaviours of their own. We could even be in the situation that no properties of parts transferred to their wholes, and still have properties of wholes which parts lack. EG, no properties of the subatomic particles of a wasp suffice to explain the shape a wasp have. Subatomic particles just don't have stable shapes in any sense. Adding to the list: wasps don't have electric charge, spin, quantised properties...

We can tell similar stories for people's jobs. No properties of subatomic particles determine what a manager does on a day to day basis. Managers allocate tasks to people (among other things). On your view this would be impossible, because subatomic particles can't allocate tasks to other subatomic particles.

They key concepts here are aggregation and interaction/arrangement. Properties of (interactions of people) are not properties of people. Properties of (interactions of atoms) are not properties of atoms.

When someone writes "Will America declare war on Iran?" what this means is that will the political authorities of America mandate violence on an institutional level against the people of Iran. Then this strongly suggests* that American soldiers will take action against the individuals of Iran. As we've seen, not even the president of the United States has the sole, unchecked ability to mandate "America will go to war with Iran", there is no representative individual who solely suffices to explain the situation, only individuals interacting and producing some output (a negotiation which results in a declaration of war with Iran) would go some way to explain the situation.



So all of that talk is at once shorthand (no one who says "America declares war on Iran because America is angry with Iran" would impute a collective consciousness to America) and a recognition that aggregates can behave in new ways from their parts, due to the parts relating. Negotiations are relations, social organisations are relations. Laws are enforceable claims on people's conduct deriving from an (often clumsy and corrupt) negotiations of ruling bodies, forming a system of interaction unfolding forward in time between the actions of lawyers in interpreting the codes, the applicability of the codes changing over time with interpretation and circumstance, new laws being introduced through political action, laws being changed through political action. And so on.

You can't even talk about firms and private property[/i[ without some construction like this going on in the background. Firms are aggregates of people with their own behaviours and properties!

It just doesn’t ring true that firms are coercive institutions because they tell their workers that they must ‘work or starve’. When a State demands ‘your money of your freedom’, as it does when it taxes you, the State itself is the source of this destructive dilemma. — Virgo Avalytikh

And a firm has no responsibility for firing workers attempting to unionise to stick up for their interests? Weird huh?

‘Artificial scarcity’ also has a precise technical definition, and I don’t believe you are using it accurately. A resource is ‘artificially scarce’ if it is non-rivalrous and excludable. This means that my exploiting the resource does not deprive anybody else from exploiting it, and yet it is still possible to prevent people from having access to it. — Virgo Avalytikh

Ok. A landlord buys houses to rent in a community. Anyone (not really, systems are usually prejudiced) who can afford the rent can go in. Those who can't afford the rent can't use it. Under this definition, food can never be artificially scarce precisely because consuming food is "rivalrous" (you can't eat the same food twice). This definition is entirely independent of access and distribution of resources.

Two stories:

A village starves to death. They have no access to food. Food was scarce. They could not distribute food because there was no food.

Someone is homeless. There are enough homes for all homeless people. Homes were scarce. The homeless person had no access to a house. Homes could not be distributed to homeless people because...

Scarcity is better defined as insufficient access to a good for a purpose or group. How a social form distributes goods (partially) determines who has access to what.

Artificial scarcity - if a good is scarce not because of being unavailable (like water in a draught), but because of how access and distribution work and are constrained in a social form.

Everything (as far as I can think of) that occupies a physical location is scarce. — Virgo Avalytikh

Fuck me, air is scarce**? I'll start stockpiling.

I have no real problems with your definition of the state and I read that you - which I really didn't need to read - are aware that the state comprises individuals and that collectives can't act. The problem is that despite your definition and your qualifications you continually talk about the state as a single entity.

Why would the state fear it's own power? I was being facetious in talking about the state, I'm going to stop using that word because I think your keenness on it is half of my problem. I live in Australia, most of my government is a sprawling bureaucracy charged with overseeing mundane things like providing services, overseeing projects, planning, overseeing the regulation of various sectors, dealing with legal problems and so on. Unelected officials who aren't plotting the subjugation of other components of the government. I am sceptical that they even have a clue what's going on in any department besides their own.

Across the ladder, people are primarily concerned with keeping their jobs, doing their jobs and maybe even getting a promotion. Corruption isn't even a viable option for most of them and where it is - they're being regulated by more government bodies that aren't elected, aren't motivated in any of the ways you're talking about.

In the higher levels of government, we have two different parties, liberal and labour that can fill them. A big scandal here is somebody spending tax dollars on an unnecessary or unnecessarily expensive means of transportation. Do politicians care about advancing their career, avoiding a scandal and being elected or advancing the power of a government body that they know they're only going to be in charge of for a small portion of their career? For what?

Corruption exists but it's people using their position to make themselves rich - there's really very little incentive to attempt to empower the part of the government they're working for. They won't be there forever, it's a huge risk, there's no unilateral support and there's likely no support from higher levels of their party - if they even belong to the one that's in power - or one at all.

A totalitarian government is the worst possible thing for pretty much everyone except the ruling elite.
It's not that we should take for granted the checks and balances - also I think Australian democracy is wildly better than many other democracies around the world. So in some countries, the risk is extreme.

I think the concern with totalitarianism is not a gradual and collective descent into power-hungry behaviour by the government. It's power-hungry individuals in the government or often outside of it, who are hellbent on having absolute power. Most democracies that fail have rampant corruption, limited control over the military and haven't been a democracy for long and likely never operated as a true democracy.

What it does suggest strongly is that you have to imagine something completely different from all common examples of states and market economies to drive a wedge between them.

A consequence of this difference is that reading the real world in terms of whatever notion of state and market you have is a category error; it's simply not relevant to the intertwined nature of states and markets that we have today. You can't have your cake and eat it too. — fdrake

The distinction I have made is simply that between human activity which involves the initiation of force and the invasion of private property, and that which is peaceful, involving no such activity. This maps onto Oppenheimer's distinction between the 'economic means' and the 'political means'. If I understand your argument, you seem to be saying that, because the markets of our acquaintance are all Statist, whatever market would exist in the absence of the State would be so different from the things we usually call 'markets' that it is inappropriate to describe it as a market at all.

I don't see any reason to agree with this, since economists do speak of markets independently of the State (David Friedman, for instance, examines how the Stateless market for law would operate), and the way economists define 'markets' tends to be quite straightforward and non-stipulative. There is little more to markets than what I have drawn attention to: they are just exchange processes between buyers and sellers of goods and services.

But, even if you are correct, and the definition of 'market' somehow incorporates a State implicitly, this is more of a semantic issue than a substantial philosophical one. Choose a noun which you think appropriately designates a process of exchanges in the absence of a State, and we could use that word instead. Creating a Stateless 'market' is not the primary libertarian goal: the goal is to oppose and prevent the initiation of force and the invasion of property. There is no 'structural vision' which the libertarian is seeking to usher in, beyond this.

This is an invalid argument.
(1) X depends upon Y for its existence.
(2) Therefore Y does not have its own behaviour. — fdrake

Granted. But this is not the argument I presented. I pointed out that there are properties of my heart which do not trace to me unqualifiedly. And yet, I still exist, and engage in actions of my own. My point is that the kinds of things that are predicated of human collectives are not really proper to human collectives, but are really proper to persons. Countries per se do not mourn.

Some examples of emergence in this sense, in addition to the previous ones: people negotiating (you can't negotiate with just one person), wars (This would never happen "New story just coming in, Chad declares war on America is equivalent to a Chad government official having a sudden desire to kill all American tourists due to an obnoxious tourist over the age of 40 wearing a cap backwards"). — fdrake

But this argument - about what you would be likely to hear on the news - is only a linguistic convention. It doesn't have any ontological bearing. It is conventional to speak of human collectives as though they have their own independent agency; this does not mean that they really do. What is 'Chad'? If it includes all the country's citizens, then it is untrue that 'Chad' has literally declared war. 'Declaration' is an act of a purposeful agent, a person. Rocks, trees, planets and photons cannot 'declare'. Persons declare. Can multiple persons all engage in an act of 'declaration' together, in concert and for a common purpose? Certainly. But this does not produce a 'macro agent', hovering over and above the individual members. To say 'the football team is drinking beer' does not imply the literal, concrete, ontological reality of a twelfth agent called 'the team', on top of the eleven players. 'Drinking' requires a mouth, a gullet, and so on. Individual persons are the only things which have these. Just so for any kind of purposeful activity. Such requires a mind, which is proper to persons only. The non-literal predication of conscious activity to human collectives does not imply that there is a subsistent entity, with its own agency.

The examples you give of collective action are ultimately reducible to actions of individual persons. We just don't describe them in this way because it is inconvenient. It is easier to speak of a country mourning than it is to enumerate every individual who is mourning; even though, really, individuals are the only things that can mourn.

When someone writes "Will America declare war on Iran?" what this means is that will the political authorities of America mandate violence against the people of Iran. Then this entails that American soldiers will take action against the individuals of Iran. — fdrake

Yes, this is exactly it: if you want to know in what the truth of 'America declares war on Iran' concretely and literally consists, you must translate it into the actions of persons. America, here, does not mean a country, a landmass, a citizenry, which is what 'America' is usually intended to mean. It refers to the actions of particular persons, the soldiers. The soldiers are fighting with 'Iran'. What does this mean? Are they fighting with every Iranian citizen? With the soil, the sand, the buildings? No: they fight with persons. The truth of these statements of collective action consists in the actions of individual persons. Note that this does not mean that every man is an island, a floating wraith, whose actions can be analysed apart from everything else in the world. But it does mean that only individuals are the agents of purposeful action, and the language of collective action which we use to describe this reality is a poetic and non-literal abstraction.

And a firm has no responsibility for firing workers attempting to unionise to stick up for their interests? Weird huh? — fdrake

Why should any person be obliged to continue to employ another person, if she doesn't wish to? The right to freedom of association by which workers are allowed to unionise is the self-same right that is being invoked when I decide that I no longer wish to employ someone. If you have the right to decide whom you wish to associate with, and whom not to associate with, and under what terms, then so do I.

A village starves to death. — fdrake

Not the point here, I know, but this is a prime example of the linguistic phenomenon I am talking about. A village starves? Not really, obviously. Starving is something which happens to an organism, like the individual members of the village. There isn't literally a 'starving village'. A perfectly acceptable way of speaking, but we ought not to exaggerate what this commits us to, ontologically.

Scarcity is better defined as insufficient access to a good for a purpose or group. How a social form distributes goods (partially) determines who has access to what. — fdrake

Why 'better'? It is certainly a less helpful definition in economics, since the entire discipline is addressed towards scarcity in the sense I spelled out above. Moreover, economics is a wertfrei discipline, and I am doubtful that 'insufficient' can be spelled out in a wertfrei way. Besides, we have other concepts like 'shortage' which may put in work in expressing what you are wanting to express.

Artificial scarcity - if a good is scarce not because of being unavailable (like water in a draught), but because of how access and distribution work and are constrained in a social form. — fdrake

This certainly will do not do. Because we live in a world of scarcity, and because virtually all consumer goods are the result of production, all such resources exist in the quantities they do precisely because that is the amount that has been produced. For any such good, more or less of it might conceivably be produced. On your definition, all produced consumer goods are artificially scarce, because it is always possible to produce more. 'Labour' would be artificially scarce, because as we speak I am choosing not to enter into the labour market. It is a much too permissive definition.

But I really don't want to discuss this. These terms mean what they mean in economics, and I don't see anything wrong with them.

Fuck me, air is scarce? I'll start stockpiling. — fdrake

Absolutely - if air were non-scarce, then it would be possible for everyone to use the air for whatever purpose they see fit, without denying anybody else, or their future selves, from doing the same. This clearly is not true. If air were truly non-scarce, we would have no fear of air pollution, and it would not be necessary to take an oxygen tank with you when you go deep-sea diving. There are all sorts of ways in which air must be rationed, which speaks to its scarcity.

Granted. But this is not the argument I presented. I pointed out that there are properties of my heart which do not trace to me unqualifiedly. And yet, I still exist, and engage in actions of my own. My point is that the kinds of things that are predicated of human collectives are not really proper to human collectives, but are really proper to persons. Countries per se do not mourn. — Virgo Avalytikh

What you have said functions when aggregate behaviours like negotiations, which are interactions of individuals that output states ("should we all do this?" "This law will be amended thus...") are analogised to individual properties. The functional relationship between a law and individuals, say, is that an aggregate of individuals acts together in the production of a law. An individual simply cannot produce a law through negotiation, as individuals cannot negotiate with themselves. The process of negotiation (an interaction of individuals) is what produces a law, not each individual.

Put another way; the outputs (like properties obtaining, propensities to be effected) of interacting aggregates need not be reducible to the isolated behaviour of individuals. The interaction is important, the individuals only enable and contribute to it.

The same principle applies in the paper I linked; macro policy influences how people interact, it's a "top down" process which works on interacting aggregates and thereby changes the individuals actions. Say an office has "friday casuals" day, then the workers can turn up in casual clothing. "Friday casuals day" is a firm policy, not reducible to the workers turning up to work in casual clothes, because it is what allows the workers to turn up on Friday in casual clothing and not be in breach of company policy.

Macro properties are "proper" (as you're using the word) of aggregates. A law which effects firms acts on firms

Individuals X composing Y does not mean Y behaviour is reducible to X behaviour. Wasps do things atoms can't. Collectives do things individuals can't - like have laws, negotiate, organise economic activity, form markets (themselves emergent in this sense) etc. Market behaviour is not reducible to individual behaviour. Microproperties don't uniquely determine macroproperties - this says the same thing.

I don't see any reason to agree with this, since economists do speak of markets independently of the State (David Friedman, for instance, examines how the Stateless market for law would operate), and the way economists define 'markets' tends to be quite straightforward and non-stipulative. There is little more to markets than what I have drawn attention to: they are just exchange processes between buyers and sellers of goods and services. — Virgo Avalytikh

You can speak of a market as an abstraction independent of a social form, you can also speak of a social form as an abstraction independent from a market. Real states and real markets are hopelessly intertwined.

.

Why should any person be obliged to continue to employ another person, if she doesn't wish to? The right to freedom of association by which workers are allowed to unionise is the self-same right that is being invoked when I decide that I no longer wish to employ someone. If you have the right to decide whom you wish to associate with, and whom not to associate with, and under what terms, then so do I. — Virgo Avalytikh

You make it sound like these "rights" are somehow imbued by a God. They're fought for. People establish rights through collective action; rights are really what people are entitled to under a given social form. That "entitlement" is a codification of hard won principles which applies to everyone in an aggregate, and acts upon the aggregate in constraining its behaviour. "Workers rights", "consumer rights" etc are only established through collective action; and every single one has been hard won. Your ability to reason like this, to have studied what you have, would not have occurred without establishing basic education as a right. Established as a right through successful collective bargaining, through establishing social institutions which are mandated to enforce the right. When we don't take care of these social institutions, the rights they enforce waver and die, as do the people who depend upon them.

In the absence of these rights, markets are extremely bad for workers. 14 hour days, children with black lung, perpetual immiseration as an alternative to starvation, slavery... If you want to see markets as the sine qua non of human freedom, note that the freedoms we have within them were established through collective action against their incredible power and those who wield it.

Your overall perspective sees markets as limited abstract mathematical devices, ways of matching individuals to available goods through the satisfaction of a constrained utility function. There's no history in it, no study of the social processes that markets are, where they come from, how laws interface with markets, how people collectivise to ensure that they are treated well in them. This has been shown to (1) not uniquely determine the behaviour of emergent properties (see the paper) and (2) has absolutely nothing accurate to say about markets as a form of human activity, and of how peoples and social institutions relate to them.

The foundations of this approach do not predict individual behaviour, nor do they describe it very well. Moreover, they are entirely unnecessary to explain individual or behaviour even when they produce the right things. That is, they are either redundant or wrong. Useless!

Say an office has "friday casuals" day, then the workers can turn up in casual clothing. "Friday casuals day" is a firm policy, not reducible to the workers turning up to work in casual clothes, because it is what allows the workers to turn up on Friday in casual clothing and not be in breach of company policy. — fdrake

I think we are talking past each other. This was my initial statement with which you took issue:

we must never fall into the trap of thinking that 'States', 'firms', 'corporations' or 'markets' subsist. These are aggregations of individual persons, and it is only these persons who are the real actors, the conscious agents. Neither States nor firms have their own inherent agency.

I still see no reason to think that this is false. Your examples seem to be concerned mostly with analysis, or providing causal explanations of things, not with what kinds of things there actually are in the world of purposeful action. In your example, the 'policy' is that which explains and gives rise to the workers turning up to work in casual clothes. Explanatorily, then, the policy is not 'reducible' to the actions of the individuals. But the policy itself has no subsistence, nor does it have a mind or any purposes of its own. It does not act. It is not an agent. The only concrete agents at work are persons, as is the case of all the other examples you have raised.

Human collectives, considered as such, can indeed have properties which are not exemplified by any individual; my scrabble club exemplifies the property 'has four members', whereas I do not. But whenever you try to predicate any kind of purposeful action or intent of the collective, this is improper, because it does not have agency.

You can speak of a market as an abstraction independent of a social form, you can also speak of a social form as an abstraction independent from a market. Real states and real markets are hopelessly intertwined. — fdrake

If by 'real markets' you mean the kinds of markets which currently obtain, then of course this is trivially true. But, as I have pointed out, I see no reason why the kind of market which obtains in the absence of the State need resemble these. Why should it?

You make it sound like these "rights" are somehow imbued by a God. They're fought for. People establish rights through collective action; rights are really what people are entitled to under a given social form. That "entitlement" is a codification of hard won principles which applies to everyone in an aggregate, and acts upon the aggregate in constraining its behaviour. "Workers rights", "consumer rights" etc are only established through collective action; and every single one has been hard won.

In the absence of these rights, markets are extremely bad for workers. 14 hour days, children with black lung, perpetual immiseration as an alternative to starvation, slavery... If you want to see markets as the sine qua non of human freedom, note that the freedoms we have within them were established through collective action against their incredible power and those who wield it.

Your overall perspective sees markets as limited abstract mathematical devices, ways of matching individuals to available goods through the satisfaction of a constrained utility function. There's no history in it, no study of the social processes that markets are, where they come from, how laws interface with markets, how people collectivise to ensure that they are treated well in them. This has been shown to (1) not uniquely determine the behaviour of emergent properties (see the paper) and (2) has absolutely nothing accurate to say about markets as a form of human activity, and of how peoples and social institutions relate to them. — fdrake

I don't believe I have ever attempted to give an economic analysis of markets, beyond the broad-brush definition which economists conventionally employ. 'Markets' as such do not play a particularly central role in the argument I have presented, except to point out that, in general, peaceful exchange, which allows for competition, is more conducive to the separation of power than an agency of monopolised coercion, which does not. My preoccupation is less with 'markets versus the State' than with 'non-aggressive behaviour versus aggressive behaviour'. It just so happens that the State is the aggressor per excellence.

Any anaemia you detect in my analysis of markets is owing to the fact that I have not set out to analyse markets in general, or to promote one kind of market in particular. This avenue is one which you have brought into the discussion, and does not have an immediate bearing on the thesis for which I have argued. I should not like to say that markets are a condition of freedom, as you seem to suggest. That is, I do not say that we must first seek to establish a particular kind of market, and then individual freedom flows out from that. It is rather the reverse. If people are free from coercive invasion, both in their persons and their property, then their interactions will be confined to those that are peaceful and voluntary. 'Market' is just a description of what this would look like, after the fact. It is more of a posterior analysis than a structural vision to be strived for. As I mentioned before, libertarians have no structural vision. They merely object to the initiation of force and the invasion of private property.

There is a terrible tendency to declare as a 'right' what is really only an interest. Is there a 'right' to a 15-minute break after every 3 hours of work? I don't see any reason why there should be, though it would certainly be a nice thing to have, and to insist that you are entitled to have. Ultimately, any acceptable system of rights must be jointly-realisable; that is, everyone's rights must be non-overlapping (Hillel Steiner calls this property 'compossibility'). The reason is that the purpose of 'rights' is to determine who may do what, and when. Or, to put it another way, their purpose is to determine what you may not do to other people in pursuit of your own interests. If you were the only person in the world, talk of 'rights' would hardly be necessary. It is only because we must temper our behaviour so as to accommodate other persons that a system of rights is necessary. We cannot all achieve all of our wants all of the time, and this is why we must have a way of determining who may do what, when.

The only way in which a system of rights may achieve compossibility is if we understand all rights to be rights of use and ownership over scarce resources. Otherwise, my 'right' to engage in such-and-such an action may involve the use of a rivalrous resource which you also wish to use in the exercising of your 'right'. This would make our rights competitive, and in-compossible. Only if we understand the object as being proper either to me or to you can we achieve compossibility. If it is mine, then I may do what I like with it (provided that I not invade anyone else's property in the process). In other words, the domain of my rightful action maps onto the domain of objects which are rightly considered 'mine'.

So, rights may not be straightforwardly God-given, but there are certainly constraints on what can and cannot be a right. One cannot have a 'right' if that right affords one unbounded access to a scarce resource. But it also gives us clarity when it comes to 'workers rights', 'gay rights' and so on. You have the right to do as you please with your own property, or with other people's property to the degree that they have consented to it, on the condition that you do not invade other people's property in so doing. But you do not have a 'right' to anything of mine, beyond what I consent to. This is why there cannot be an unqualified 'right not to be fired if you unionise'. If it is a stipulation of our contract that I not fire you for joining a union, then of course it is a violation of your rights if I were to do so. But, beyond this, you have no such right.

This, ultimately, is the philosophical justification of libertarianism's non-aggression principle: that rights-violations consist in invasions of another person's property.

It’s a fact of life that blows up your entire philosophy. I’m just illustrating the FACT that your philosophy is ridiculously naive.

It’s a fact of life that blows up your entire philosophy. I’m just illustrating the FACT that your philosophy is ridiculously naive. — Noah Te Stroete

Where I come from, arguments are considered the stuff of philosophy.

If the State were dissolved, there would be massive unrest.

There are more guns in the US than people.

If there is massive unrest, there will be massive bloodshed.

If you value your property, you should not dissolve the State.

You value your property seemingly above everything else.

Thus, the State should not be dissolved.

QED (That’s smack talk for philosophers.)

If the State were dissolved, there would be massive unrest.

There are more guns in the US than people.

If there is massive unrest, there will be massive bloodshed.

If you value your property, you should not dissolve the State.

You value your property seemingly above everything else.

Thus, the State should not be dissolved. — Noah Te Stroete

This is not to engage at all with the argument which I have presented, but simply to ignore it. The assumptions you make in this argument are precisely those of Hobbes: that the absence of the State is that which gives rise to disordered, animalistic aggression, and it is the presence of the State which serves as the principle of peace and order. But this is precisely wrong at both ends, as I argued at length. Did you read the the OP? It is no serious objection to an argument, simply to assert that its conclusion is false. I provided game-theoretic reasons for thinking that Statelessness does not give rise to the kind of war of all against all which you and Hobbes envision, and I also provided reasons for thinking that the State has no reason not to aggress against us in the manner of a criminal gang or protection racket, as it in fact does when it extracts taxation, prohibits peaceful associations, depreciates currency, and wages wars.

If you have an objection to make against the presentation I have made, by all means make it. But it is not a challenge in the least for you simply to repeat back to me the position which I have already argued against in my original post.

QED — Noah Te Stroete

Not exactly.

Obviously, you’ve never lived in the ghetto. I lived in one in Chicago and Madison. You clearly don’t understand the downtrodden like I do. There is a simmering rage ready to be unleashed at the slightest hint of societal (State) breakdown. Hobbes was right.

Society is not the State. States, as coercive institutions, are precisely anti-social in their working. The fact is, those whom you identify as 'downtrodden' are downtrodden on the State's watch. But I am sure, in your mind, it will be be laissez faire which receives the blame.

If you look at those goods and services which markets, and not the State, are presently responsible for providing, they are of almost exactly equal price and quality in less affluent and ghetto-ised areas as in more privileged areas. Goods like food, and clothing.

Meanwhile, there is an enormous disparity in quality between richer and poorer areas, when it comes to State-provided services. Education and policing are considerably and consistently worse in the very places you are describing.

If you are an egalitarian and have a concern for the poor and downtrodden, you might just consider being ancap.

I don’t know what “ancap” means. I know what’s keeping the “downtrodden” from eating the rich. It’s the police state. People are not rational. They will lash out at the target they blame for their lots in life. That’s people like you.

I don’t know what “ancap” means. — Noah Te Stroete

Ancap = anarcho-capitalism

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarcho-capitalism

They will lash out at the target they blame for their lots in life. That’s people like you. — Noah Te Stroete

Should I be taking this as a threat?

Furthermore, perhaps I grant you that the resources of the rich are merely of higher quality. Why do you think you are entitled to more property and higher quality?