My reasons for preferring it are moral. I think it is wrong and unjust to control people, to confiscate the fruits of their labor, or to impose someone’s will upon another’s if they do not deserve it. Anything else is tyranny, injustice, oppression, exploitation, slavery. If you or I or any group of people acted as a state official or agent does, they’d be rightfully dragged through the street.

The same applies to matters of trade and enterprise. If anyone rigged the game in their favor as much as states have done—skimming, stealing, exploiting, extorting, racketeering, money laundering—he’d be thrown in jail.

Because of this, and because the state increases its own power in proportion to the decrease in the power of the people it rules, it is an anti-social institution worth opposing.

As for roads and government services, no government is required to flatten earth and lay asphalt. No government is required to tell me which products I should buy, or with which group of people I should engage in common enterprise with.

No laissez faire regime has failed because no such regime has existed.

So I’ve read your objections and still prefer the idea of separating the state and economy.

Would that include laissez-faire on drugs, (Mexican cartels, veterinarian pharmaceuticals, etc)?

The freedom to pay workers $15 an hour, rake in billions in profits on their backs, and distribute 90% of those profits to major shareholders— while giving CEOs 350 times what the average worker makes.

What all the “laissez faire” talk is cover for. A cute story to tell the masses you’re fucking over at every turn.

I think it is wrong and unjust to control people, to confiscate the fruits of their labor, or to impose someone’s will upon another’s if they do not deserve it. — NOS4A2

Lmao you don't give a shit about any of this. Libertarians like you simply want to make sure these actions are privatized, nothing more.

My reasons for preferring it are moral. I think it is wrong and unjust to control people, to confiscate the fruits of their labor, or to impose someone’s will upon another’s if they do not deserve it. — NOS4A2

Who's going to enforce that though? If there's not a government what is the replacement? That's the question I keep asking. The world is not shaped through good intentions and an emotional desire that we all get along. If there is no government, I posit, as has happened throughout history, that a bunch of gangs and warlords are going to rape and pillage your property for themselves. They will not be swayed by your moral objections. You alone will not be able to stop them.

The same applies to matters of trade and enterprise. If anyone rigged the game in their favor as much as states have done—skimming, stealing, exploiting, extorting, racketeering, money laundering—he’d be thrown in jail. — NOS4A2

But the state is the one who throws people in jail. Absent the state, no one gets thrown in jail. People who do these things to others just don't disappear if the state is gone. What do we have to stop them if the state is gone?

No laissez faire regime has failed because no such regime has existed. — NOS4A2

And yet this is despite the theory being around for over 100 years. Why is this? If its such a successful theory that is obviously to the benefit of mankind, why hasn't this happened anywhere in the entire world?

So I’ve read your objections and still prefer the idea of separating the state and economy. — NOS4A2

I would have preferred you explain why you think its better for a company to inject lead into gasoline knowing full well the dangers to health and society, and lying about it for profit. Maybe explain why its more beneficial to have meat packing plants with unsanitary conditions and horrid working conditions. Do you think zoning should be done by businesses? That they should be able to dump chemicals in rivers or land fills that cause harm to people who live in nearby homes?

Finally, you didn't address the point I made that often times business steps on the rights and liberties of other people in pursuit of profit. Government regulation can help minimize this. Without government, what is going to help this?

It would really help if you address the potentially negative sides of laissez-faire. If you only insist on seeing the positive, can you really say you've thought about it? No. Here on the philosophy boards we cannot love our own ideas. We put them to the test, try to prove them wrong, and see what comes out at the end of it all.

No laissez faire regime has failed because no such regime has existed.

So I’ve read your objections and still prefer the idea of separating the state and economy. — NOS4A2

And you're too obtuse to recognize that the latter "idea" is invalidated by the former "fact". :sweat:

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I’m pretty sure you can enforce your own behavior, as can most adults. If you need an official caste of moral busybodies to govern how you treat and cooperate with others then you are no different than the warlord or gang member.

I don’t care for your points or your hypotheticals. Your system is fundamentally immoral, little different than the warlord or a gangs you describe, except you promote one form of despotism because it is preferable to the other. I’d rather take my chances and have none of it.

Nonetheless, despite our disagreement, your examples of why you fear of laissez-faire is all I really wanted to know. So thank you.

I would think so.

My reasons for preferring it are moral. I think it is wrong and unjust to control people, to confiscate the fruits of their labor, or to impose someone’s will upon another’s if they do not deserve it. Anything else is tyranny, injustice, oppression, exploitation, slavery. If you or I or any group of people acted as a state official or agent does, they’d be rightfully dragged through the street. — NOS4A2

I'm with you so far.

The same applies to matters of trade and enterprise. If anyone rigged the game in their favor as much as states have done—skimming, stealing, exploiting, extorting, racketeering, money laundering—he’d be thrown in jail. — NOS4A2

And here we may depart. Who do you think "the state" is?

Because of this, and because the state increases its own power in proportion to the decrease in the power of the people it rules, it is an anti-social institution worth opposing. — NOS4A2

Yep.

As for roads and government services, no government is required to flatten earth and lay asphalt. No government is required to tell me which products I should buy, or with which group of people I should engage in common enterprise with. — NOS4A2

True again. But if you want to have roads, someone has to build and maintain them. We usually give that task to people who we think they know what they are doing and who we think they are impartial.

So I’ve read your objections and still prefer the idea of separating the state and economy. — NOS4A2

The way you formulated it, I can agree 100%. Keep money out of politics!

It all comes down to the question I asked in section 2. Who do you think "the state" is? And you seem to have a diffuse antipathy towards a group you have, in theory, elected yourself. How do you think "the state" got the power it has? Where is the evidence for your image of "the state"?

My theory of the state and state formation is the so-called conquest theory of state formation, as written by Franz Oppenheimer. In his formulation the state is the organization of the appropriation of the labor of others. It forms to maintain the power of the victors over the vanquished. The ISIS caliphate is one recent example which supports my image, but empire is another.

The state has no power or wealth of its own. It confiscates power and wealth. Exploitation is its means of subsistence, violence the means of maintaining it. One can try to keep what he has earned from his labors to feel the force of this. And voting is merely a concession because the transient power of our representatives is always negated by the absolute power of the institution itself.

Never heard of Laissez-faire. Any chance of a quick summation?

Laissez-faire: You have two cows. You sell one and buy a bull.

[Laissez-faire] is an economic theory from the 18th century that opposed any government intervention in business affairs. The driving principle behind laissez-faire, a French term that translates to "leave alone" (literally, "let you do")

I don’t care for your points or your hypotheticals. — NOS4A2

Then I suppose you don't want to have any further discussion.

Nonetheless, despite our disagreement, your examples of why you fear of laissez-faire is all I really wanted to know. So thank you. — NOS4A2

As long as you have received other view points and considered them, that's really what's important. At the end of the day, people are going to believe what they want to believe. Here in these forums, we hopefully push ourselves to consider that the world is bigger than those beliefs. I appreciate the engagement up to this point.

Never heard of Laissez-faire. Any chance of a quick summation? — I like sushi

Not much to it, in general it means "leave it be", "don't do anything on the matter", tending towards anarchism in political contexts, "none of your business", sometimes perhaps "live and let live" in social contexts, something like that.

Querying google with "define laissez-faire" gives:

Thanks! I assumed it was the name of some philosopher or something :D Guess I may as well have googled it after all.

I was using the phrase “separation of economy and state” to describe the fundamental principle, much like the separation of powers and the separation of church and state. Some have implied that such a separation is not possible, or that the fact of state intervention invalidates the philosophy of state non-intervention, though one has to struggle to find reason in these objections.

though one has to struggle to find reason in these objections. — NOS4A2

:lol: No -- you struggle to find reason.

The state necessarily manages the economy. That is the job of the state or there is no state.

It does, and it does so poorly and unjustly. So maybe it shouldn't.

The argument made no sense. There is no economy without government therefor laissez-faire is nonsense. Not a strand of bubble gum can connect the premise to the conclusion.

The state is mostly controlled by Capital to moderate, or manage, the economic imbalances produced by Capital's exploitation of Labor and Nature. The larger the scale and more complex / dynamic the economic activity, the more dependent dominant economic actors are on "the evils of the state" for more (cyclical) periods of stability in markets and society than would occur without the state; thus, it's not only in their respective and collective class interests to capture state policy-making but also to perpetuate the state's 'Capital-facilitating' functions (e.g. corporate welfare, socializing costs/debts of private profiteering, etc).

In this current corporatocratic, post-mercantile era, NOS, advocating "separation of state and economy" – pure ideology (Žižek) – is no less delusional than the notion of "separation of structure and dynamics" in engineering (or no less incoherent than "separation of mind and body" in theology / metaphysics). No amount of rightist-libertarian sermonizing can change this political-economic fact (vide A. Smith, K. Marx ... J.M. Keynes ... D. Schweickart).

My theory of the state and state formation is the so-called conquest theory of state formation, as written by Franz Oppenheimer. — NOS4A2

Even with that hypothesis (which I don't ascribe to), you haven't justified your preference for economic liberties over civil liberties. In fact, for most states it describes how the already rich and powerful conquered the masses and keep them down. The system is already working in their favour.

As with all such arguments, yours is flawed by a fundamental contradiction over the management of communal resources. If you posit that communal resources will be managed sustainably because people are fundamentally moral, then you've no legitimate concern about government (the people constituting it will not "steal" anything since to do so would be immoral).

In order to collectively manage communal resources, we can rely, either on using collective power to force solutions onto all users, or we can rely on the goodwill of all users to voluntarily engage in fair use.

If you assume the latter is possible, then you've nothing to fear from government since they will, by their goodwill, voluntarily use the power they have only in a fair way.

If you don't assume goodwill, then you clearly need some other mechanism for the fair collective management of communal resources.

So what mechanism do you propose which does not rely on goodwill?

I’ve never understood the criticism of laissez-faire. Economic history, if there is such a thing, has invariably been one of statism and state intervention. Fascism, communism, progressivism, socialism—all demand the regulation of the economy, providing posterity with examples spanning the gamut of oppression and exploitation, ranging from annoying to despotic.

So what’s to fear in the separation of the state and economy?

Poverty, overconsumption, monopoly, wealth inequality, seem to me the common objections. Keynes said as much in his essay “The End of laissez-faire”. But all of the above are apparent in all systems, including in those in which Keynes was the architect: capitalism “wisely managed”.

But why should it be managed at all? Why should one serve the interests of the state instead of his own and his neighbors?

Upon thinking about it, Oscar Wilde was at least honest when he said that “Socialism would relieve us from that sordid necessity of living for others”. This attitude, I believe, represents the inherent egoism beneath the fear of the separation of state and economy. Without a state tending to the ills of the economy we would be required to confront that “sordid necessity” and to cooperate with each other based on our own personal initiative and resources. Instead of passively paying a tax or promoting this or that government service we would need to act and to do so voluntarily in order to affect any change. To “let us do” would be to lay bare our conscience and morality for what it really amounts to.

The state wedded to the economy is by now ubiquitous, and state intervention commonplace. It has absorbed all spontaneous social effort, as Ortega Y Gasset once predicted, leaving us to not fear the social ills, which are still with us every day and in every society, but the absence of the state and what we are to do in its stead. — NOS4A2

I'm pretty sure other forum members may have said similar things to what I'm about to, but I wanted to put my two cents in anyways.

Whatever you call it whether it be laissez-faire economics, objectivism, libertarianism, etc. there are people out there who want the state to be there for their needs but to stay out of their way when they are committing crimes, taking advantage of others, and/or abusing the environment around them.

It is kind of funny that it is is almost always the "haves" and not the "have not" that are arguing for less government interference since it is a given those who are already taken care of are in a position that they need less help and/or protection from the state then those who are not as well off as they are. Because of their status it is easy to see that their argument is not really about state power but more about maintaining a type of status quo where the "have nots" have less of a chance bettering their position because the state can not interfere with those with power/wealth/position from taking advantage of those that do not have any of this.

IMHO, things like laissez-faire economics and objectivism are really just mickey mouse versions of Machiavellianism, might make right, and the end justifying the means. The only difference between the two is that those that believe in the former and not the latter are just kidding themselves that such beliefs don't lead to the super rich having all the power (such as in a plutocracy) and/or incredibly wealthy families or members of such a country dictating what is and isn't accepting for a society while at the same time not being accountable to any authority themselves (such as Trump, the Koch brothers in the US and Russia's Putin and China's Xi Jinping).

It is almost a given that any time you have rich/powerful people preaching something like the "state shouldn't interfere in this" and/or "corporations and businesses can regulate and police themselves" it is really about such people wanting to dismantle any checks and balances in place that may lead to prosecution if they break certain laws or run into trouble for other reasons.

The state isn't a perfect entity, but it is one of the only things that can at times protect the the people that are not part of the elite %5 or %1 of the population who have their own private army of bodyguard, lawyers, etc. Don't be fooled into thinking that if there wasn't any government interference that you would be better off than you are now. History has shown that it is a given that those who are no supervision and no accountability in a very short period of time are willing to do awful things to others if it may make their life a bit easier. And of course the truth is there are examples of this going on today in Russia, China, and in the US.

There is no economy without government therefor laissez-faire is nonsense. Not a strand of bubble gum can connect the premise to the conclusion. — NOS4A2

Yes. Laissez faire is nonsense because "free markets" don't exist and cannot exist. Period. So the very idea is nonsense. So to is trying to separate "economy from state."

The state is always involved in the economy.
Thus, getting the state "out of" the economy is nonsense.

That you're struggling with this is telling.

Yes. Laissez faire is nonsense because "free markets" don't exist and cannot exist. Period. So the very idea is nonsense. So to is trying to separate "economy from state." — Xtrix

"Free market" is a reference to the way prices are set. So there can be quite a bit of government intervention in an economy that still has free markets.

"Free market" would only refer to the kind of markets that existed in medieval times if medieval history was the context. Just a heads up.

The state isn’t the only agent acting in any economy. There are black markets that actively work to avoid state interference and involvement, for instance. The delusion lies in believing the state and the economy are somehow the same or inseparable, as if all trade, production, consumption, and enterprise would stop should a bunch of bureaucrats suddenly stop going to work.

Even with that hypothesis (which I don't ascribe to), you haven't justified your preference for economic liberties over civil liberties. In fact, for most states it describes how the already rich and powerful conquered the masses and keep them down. The system is already working in their favour.

I don’t prefer economic over civil liberties. In fact I think the proper role of government is to protect human rights and civil liberties. I just don’t think the proper role for government is to meddle in the economy, and for the reasons I stated.

I get a similar feeling about statists. Since there are ways to care for others that do not involve state authority, I lean to the belief that those who are dependant on the state to care for others don’t really care for others. It’s just that they’d much rather have someone else do it for them. This isn't a liberal or objectivist critique of statist charity, as far as I know, but a Marxist one. As I mentioned earlier, the absence of a state would lay bare your compassion for what it really amounts to, and so far it’s not looking pretty.