There is no difference between the power of the whip and the power of the dollar. If you don't follow orders in order to obtain dollars, you are forcibly deprived of the necessities of life. Starvation and freezing are forms of corporal punishment too, you know.
As to the idea that the purpose of coercive political systems is to obtain stuff that couldn't be obtained in the "marketplace", this fails to appreciate that the "marketplace" is itself a creation of coercive systems. Free people who preceeded the last 10k years of control-freakism didn't go about their business in any kind of "marketplace".
Just as I predicted, the first zombie signs on.
I'm not a zombie. You are a half-zombie because you have only seen thru half of the control mechanisms standing between us and our freedom.
hehe.
Dev, seriously. How do free people decide how to give stuff to each other without a market? (or some sort of superstitious rules that simulate a market?)
Your question seems to presuppose the slavethink idea that resources are intrinsically scarce and require hateful work to obtain, and so they must be rationed in some way. If you get past this idea, such questions do not even arise.
Suppose a bunch of hunters go and kill a deer and then eat it. Suppose they share some of it with others on the grounds that they have more than they need and they haven't sacrificed anything since hunting is fun. What about this necessitates any kind of "market"?
Um, Devlin, I don't see anything in Adem's question that implies any state of resources, etc. I strongly suspect that Adem's, jomama's, and my definition of "market" may be substantially different from the definition you're using. (Not to suggest that all our definitions are the same, but I'd wager they're conceptually closer to each other than to yours.)
You have a think about it. He asked how people would decide to give stuff to others. Under most circumstances, couldn't they just do so because they wanted to? His question would only become an issue if they had to do hateful work for the stuff they had, and so only wanted to give it up if they got something of greater perceived value in return. This implies a state of scarce resources, and all manner of other things.
I don't think our definition of a market is much different - I just seem to have a wider understanding of it than you.
Ok. Let's assume you have 'a wider understanding' of it.
Begin communicating.
Somehow I've missed something:
How are most of the resouces we consume so abundant? Which ones? Who is giving them away? And those who don't choose to give them away...what will you do to make them do so? What do you have in mind to make them more generous?
I smell control here.
Tell me why I should change my mind.
Of course resources are abundant. Sun shines without us putting coins in a meter. Land exists without us doing anything. Tasty plants and animals propagate themselves without our intervention. Converting these into food, shelter etc is easy and *fun*. It is very rare for animals to starve in the wild. Starvation is a property of human institutions such as markets.
If we were part of a hunter-gatherer group, we would go about our business and help each other out as required. It wouldn't matter if one of us contributed less than the other because, since all our activities would be fun, the greater contributor would not be out anything. Apparently, in societies without the evil "work" concept, it is common for individuals to live their whole lives without doing anything at all, and no-one thinks to resent them. The issue of measuring and proprortionally rewarding contributions (by way of "property", "markets" etc) would only arise in times of scarcity.
Slave societies are predicated on the idea that scarcity is a permanent and inevitable condition. Regulations, laws, markets etc. are a way of managing this perceived condition. If we want to overcome slavery we are going to have to get past this idea.
Dev gets 5 stars; Jo and Adem get 2 each; Sunni gets 4 (for asking the right question, thank you).
Dev you are kicking some serious butt.
Jo, Dev's right: the market approach is the other side of the statist coin - both of these (and your mindset) are control geared, whereas Dev's approach isn't ... you're smelling control because you can't imagine it working without control (market or political, same stuff). Whip OR dollar - same framework, same values, same end-game.
I didn't explain that. The free market approach (capitalism, what have you) is an attempt to reverse-engineer freedom by postulating a desireable end: a free market. But actual freedom doesn't "lead to" a free market as we conceive it.
Another attempt: Our perception of a free market is predicated upon our present condition (from within a nonfree context for the past 10k years). In our attempt to project a free market, we are carrying, integrated into that projection, a lot of nonfree, experiential values that we have accumulated over millenia.
Fred Reed's recent article (http://www.lewrockwell.com/reed/reed88.html) on religion suggests that, because of where we are sitting presently, we are no longer in a position to ask sensible questions about religion - as something outside conventional institutional ideology. We are focused on knowable outcomes that derive from our present state of affairs, not from human nature or the nature of the universe. We can scarcely even begin to understand the QUESTIONS we should be asking, let alone the answers. Our answers - for religion or for economics - are based on an alienated experience that is out of touch with what's relevant to our humanity (i.e., the questions).
Thus, when we talk about religion or about a free market, we are making a lot of culturally ingrained assumptions about what those things "should" consist of, often in opposition to some of the things we don't like about what presently exists, but without being - quite - able to postulate human potential. We are limited by what we think we know about ourselves, based on 10k of cultural experience living as slaves. Just a tiny bit clueless.
The primitivist approach blows off this baggage of slave-values and cultural expectations. I am not saying the primitivist approach is an end-all and be-all of approaches. I see primitivism as a technique for accessing viable questions. Without presuming to think I know what the answers will look like. This approach opens some windows that we are otherwise culturally afeared of opening. Mostly because, if we open those windows, we will find that we don't know the outcome - can't predict it - can't control it - can't anticipate what it would be like with individuals innovating their relationships every-which-way to suit themselves from a premise of individual sovereign authority. What would that look like? I have no idea, but I suspect it would retain nothing of the clan values that we have become dependent upon - sci-fi cannot imagine such an outcome - and a "market"? - there's no guessing.
Again, from the book I promise not to publish:
".... we do not have the experience to extrapolate or postulate a society of sovereign individuals. We have become very dependent upon the group and group relationships. We don't KNOW anything else. Unless we go back to primitive societies, we have no examples of anything else. ....
"The groups that presently form around the concept of sovereign individuals premise themselves in collectivist arrangements - and take their definition and structure from these experiential premises rather than from the remote and nonexperienced ideological premises of individualism. This includes their economic arrangements and their defensive arrangements (with private agencies). They don't "get it." Can't. Sovereign individuals do not cluster. This does not compute to collectivists.....
"If sovereign individuals do not cluster, then what happens to economics, what happens to society, what happens to families ... and other questions that miss the point. I didn't say they don't associate, respectfully. I said they don't cluster. There would come into existence rather a large variety of unfamiliar associations and odd manifestations of cooperation. But, in health, and without the social disease of submission, the meme would include a strong aversion to clustering interdependently. "
The topic was all about command and I see you too are full of distractions, Rieben.
When the planet has exhausted all the resources and the command meme has expired, I expect we'll all be scratching out a living with our hoes and donkeys, the few that are left, without $ or anything else to trade except what each of us can produce or hunt for...necessity and invention and all that.
Why would I rail against what I consider the inevitable?
In the meantime, I'll trade in $ or whatever I choose in any manner
I choose, absent "command" when I can get it. You will, of course, do as you please. You will anyway. Screw the ideology.
Scarce resourses?
You ain't seen nuttin' yet.
And, no, resources weren't scarce when the planet had a population of 6 figures, or whatever it was 8,000 years ago.
That was then.
It may seem like you are trading the regime's ration tokens in any manner you want, but in fact the range of products available, the prices thereof and so forth are mostly determined coercively behind the scenes. Just because no-one is constantly telling you what to do shouldn't lead you to think you are free. Also, the flunkies handing you beer, manufacturing your electronic goods etc. most definitely are not free, but likely face the threat of starvation on a daily basis if they don't do demeaning crap they hate for peanuts due to coercive systems exculding them from resources. Your quasi-freedom comes at the expense of the total enslavement of others, which is what the market model necessitates.
As to resources being scarce, I expect resources available to free people to become much more abundant as regulatory systems break down and lose their ability to deny them to us. Resources for sheeple, however, will become very scarce indeed, and in fact billions of them will starve to death, which is all to the good of course. If you don't want to be one of them, you would be well advised to make the next mental leap.
Way ahead of ya, Dr. No.
I know where to grow pot and hunt deer, wild turkey, and wild pig and do anything I like...without anyone bothering me.
You're the hunter gatherer. Do you?
Yes, well enough. Although if you know of any techniques for hunting wild pigs without dogs, I'd be interested to hear.
Put a little corn in the same spot every day. Every day put up another wood stake. The last nite lay in waiting. When the pig enters, put the last wood stake in while he's eating.
I've heard that works. Haven't tried it.
Works for humans under a bit different circumstances but we both know that.
Most all us animals like the easier life.
There lies danger.
Hunter-gatherers will freely share with members of their own tribe, because of the psychic benefit and social credit they receive for doing so. The mental accounting to perform for psychic benefits and social credit doesn't scale well for group sizes larger than about 100 people. Thus property rights, thus markets, thus money.
I agree that these kinds of rationing devices are needed if you want to go against human nature and maintain large slave societies. The question is whether doing so is a good idea in the first place.
no no no...
no one is maintaining anything.
I am not going to maintain any kind of society. I don't care to, nor to support the maintenance thereof.
I just want to interact with people in the most advanced complex way that I can. If I make something, X, that is awesome, I should spend all day making that, instead of fishing and hunting, etc. The fishermen and hunters, and leatherworkers and stuff, can trade me their goods for X. But then there is a confusion at a certain point, so it becomes easier for me to price everything in terms of fish, and work it out that way.
It's not really that formalized, and if you enforce formalization on other people, that's the beginning of the decline right there.
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