Try looking in a dictionary; l don’t have mine to hand.
From their Libertapedia: “Freedom is control over oneself. The opposite of freedom is tyranny, which is control over others.” The link has many examples.
I’m a bit shocked to see this kind of argument from you. That’s just fucking pathetic.
You’re not making sense. Yes, I know what a zero-sum game is, which is precisely why I brought it up in the first place, and you cited what was supposed to be a counter-example that exactly proved my point – the issue of slavery. It might seem self-evident that slavery is an abrogation of freedom, but you conveniently ignore what should be the libertarian-endorsed freedom of plantation owners to run their businesses in any way they see fit, as they were doing for generations, and wherein slave labor was an essential part of the business model. Indeed one of your fellow libertarians, to repeat myself, stated that “the power to collectively force people to stop doing something you find morally reprehensible is wrong” – so that maybe a libertarian might help a slave escape, but he’d never tell a slave owner what to do. This is the sort of contradictory morass in which libertarianism always finds itself.
The thing is, this tradeoff of freedoms – repeating myself again because it didn’t seem to get through the first time – exists in all our relationships – in employer-employee relatioships, in marital relationships, in relationships between neighbors and between countries – there is no such thing as this nirvana of “absolute freedom” that libertarianism seeks. As a neighbor your freedom to make loud noises has to be balanced against my freedom to peaceful enjoyment of my property, and so forth in every area of human relationships. What makes this libertarian la-la land of absolute freedoms so silly is that it’s ultimately meaningless; any pragmatic effort to ensure fairness and justice in human relationships has to be stated in terms of rights, not abstractions about “freedom”. Thus an employer has the right to run his business as he sees fit, but this has to be subject to the rights of others: the right of customers to honest representation of the product and the right to not get cheated, the right of employees to fair compensation and safe working conditions, and so on. But the libertarians here seem to decry the need for any of these things – I wonder if words like “fairness” and “justice” – which imply law and regulation and thus an abrogation of freedom by government – even exist in the libertarian vocabulary.
To the libertarian, the only position (to take the latter example) seems to be that the employer can do whatever the hell he wants, and the employee has the “freedom” to quit (and, presumably, the cheated customer can go elsewhere). This position was stated here explicitly. So my question is, why didn’t they? Why didn’t the exploited workers of 19th century industrialization just quit and go off and get fantastic new jobs? Why didn’t the exploited workers for the robber barons just quit and start their own oil and railroad empires? Why don’t workers today making less than a subsistence wage just go off and start their own billion-dollar multinationals? Dogmatic libertarians truly live in a delusional fantasy land. The only rational libertarians I know are the ones who just use the term loosely to mean that they believe government is wasteful and could be smaller.
What about the freedom to enter the land that another person has legal title to? Is that covered?
If so than I agree that the OP has no merit, although I would say that that doesn’t sound like what I have heard from most libertarians.
If not than I think it is fair to say that Libertarians value freedom except when it conflicts with property rights.
[QUOTE=wolfpup]
You’re not making sense. Yes, I know what a zero-sum game is, which is precisely why I brought it up in the first place, and you cited what was supposed to be a counter-example that exactly proved my point – the issue of slavery. It might seem self-evident that slavery is an abrogation of freedom, but you conveniently ignore what should be the libertarian-endorsed freedom of plantation owners to run their businesses in any way they see fit, as they were doing for generations, and wherein slave labor was an essential part of the business model. Indeed one of your fellow libertarians, to repeat myself, stated that “the power to collectively force people to stop doing something you find morally reprehensible is wrong” – so that maybe a libertarian might help a slave escape, but he’d never tell a slave owner what to do. This is the sort of contradictory morass in which libertarianism always finds itself.
[/QUOTE]
So, what you are saying is that if a non-libertarian government/system set up the slave trade in the first place (which is what happened), then a libertarian government came into being, that those libertarians wouldn’t halt slavery by forcing the slave owners to stop because it would be an infringement on their rights as business owners? Presumably it would be up to the religious types to actually do that, as happened in our own universe.
Well…ok. I guess that you’ve found a flaw in libertarianism, since you are probably correct…once it started under the auspices of a government in bed with certain business concerns then the new libertarian government that springs into being from the mind of Zeus or whatever would probably not force the slave owners, by government fiat to halt it, even if that’s pretty much how it got started in the first place. What they probably would do is, as individuals, boycott or otherwise not patronize or use the goods or services from those slave owners and probably put up all sorts of other blocks (‘Oh, you want to transport those slave produced goods or services across my land or the public land? Sorry.’).
The point is that under a utopian libertarian ideal society, slavery would never come into being in the first place. If there WAS slavery, it would have been a hold over from an earlier system. What’s interesting to me is that you think you’ve made some sort of point here that shows an obvious (to you) flaw in libertarian thought, while to me it shows that any system could be nitpicked with vertical ‘what if’ scenarios. I mean, slavery, for instance, has flourished under just about every political system that man has ever devised, in one form or another. Even communist countries have had bouts of slavery (in all but name). Democracies as well. And monarchies. The fact that under a libertarian system (in theory since there never has nor probably never will be one) you can create a scenario where there is a less than optimal outcome is…well, militantly unsurprising. YMMV of course.
You do know that in past systems some people DID do those things, right? I mean, not ever railroad baron or shipping mogul or rich capitalist fat cat was born with silver spoons in their yaps. Many people in the past that became successful started out in crappy jobs and decided that they didn’t like it and to do their own thing. Many, many more did not, of course, but it did happen.
As to your view on rationality, I agree. People who take things to the extremes are often in delusional fantasy land, as you put it. I feel exactly the same about many liberals on this board…and many of my dad’s conservative friends as well. And socialists, communists and libertarians…even people who support democracy can take things to the extremes and go off the deep end.
The employee has the freedom to take his labor and skills to a competitor, or to start his or her own business, or to change careers. Just like in reality. They ALSO have the freedom to provide and produce information telling the general public about unfair or unethical practices the employer is doing that caused the worker to want to leave. The main difference in libertoipa is that the government isn’t going to be a club on that workers head to force compliance or silence, as has been the case in our actual, real world past. And, of course, that worker can always organize a union to collectively bargain with that owner for better pay or better working conditions. True, the government is not going to force that union down the businesses throat, but on the other hand, it’s again not going to be a club over those workers to force them to comply or submit.
Would this work perfectly in the real world? Probably not…there would have to be some sort of check on the business to prevent them from hiring their own muscle to do what the government has done in conjunction with businesses of the past. Even in libertopia there has to be SOME government and some checks and balances. Only the most fanatic of people don’t concede this. But threads like this and responses like this allow for no middle ground, and they are basically scripted and set up questions with vertical scenarios designed to ‘prove’ that, in this instance, libertarianism can’t or doesn’t or won’t work (like we don’t know that already, considering there has never been a libertarian society)…and, of course, free form slams at anyone who even remotely agrees with some of the libertarian tenets. Sort of like your rather glowing endorsement of what was essentially a drive by slam from Subterraneanus in your post #74.
Exactly so! This is the whole point of having some government: it is the only known force that can produce an environment of safety, peace, security, and freedom. Without some policing, a community lives in fear, and nobody dares go outside because of predators. A measured degree of government restriction maximizes individual freedom.
Nearly everyone agrees on this principle. There are only a very few actual anarchists wandering around. However, the principle is difficult to calibrate. It’s like the Laffer Curve. Where exactly on the curve are we?
Some say we need more regulation of, say, financial markets or environmental pollution, and that this would lead to more freedom (we could invest meaningfully or go swimming.) Others say we have too much regulation, and reductions would lead to more freedom.
I alluded to one: the hikers wanting to cross a stretch of private property – because of desperate medical need. One of their party is in heatstroke, and if they don’t get him to a doctor fast, he could die. But the only shortcut is across a farmer’s newly-ploughed field.
Does Libertarianism allow life-and-death exceptions to property rights? (My experience is: some do, and some don’t.)
Actually, no. A country with slavery cannot be said to be Libertarian. Period. If the government was set up to be Libertaria in every aspect except that involuntary slavery was allowed to exist, it would be something else, not Libertarian. That’s just too big of an anti-Libertarian issue to fly.
It’s like saying you have a democracy where people aren’t allowed to vote. Imagine a monarchy being overthrown by a dictator, where no one has the right to vote. The dictator doesn’t get to call his country “a democracy” if we are using any reasonable definition of that term. In your scenario, the slaves would be freed or else you could not call the government Libertarian. How they would go about the process of freeing the slaves-- issue a proclamation or compensating the owners for loss of property or something else-- might be an interesting discussion, but isn’t particularly germane to Libertarianism, I don’t think.
Ok. How would it work? Obviously, they are positing that slavery already existed and that somehow libertarianism just sprang up from whole clothe. Assuming it did, would a libertarian government actively interfere or intervene in the workings of an existing business? What would the mechanism be? HOW would they free the slaves?
To me, it’s a ridiculous scenario, devised to show a supposed flaw in libertarianism, but if you work thought the internal logic and make a whole bunch of assumptions and such, what’s your take on how it would play out?
I honestly don’t know, nor do I think there needs to be only one answer. It’s really a policy issue, not an issue to be worked out from first principles.
Indeed. It’s a problem that would be encountered by any change of government where slavery exists. Do we keep slavery or not? Some governmental systems would not and some would. Libertarianism is one of the former. It may seem like a dilemma to people who think property rights are paramount in Libertaria, but those people need to check their premises.
Libertarianism doesn’t require that the ‘market’ solve the problem. You’re creating a straw man that you can knock down or sneer at.
This is the way a libertarian would formulate this issue:
- A man owns a business (i.e. voluntarily chose to invest his own resources in the production of something for sale). As part of that business, he is willing to offer a contract to other free people to work for him in exchange for a mutually-agreed upon salary. If both sides agree, the other person goes to work for the businessman. If they don’t, the businessman is free to find someone else, and the prospective employee is free to find another way to make a living.
The nature of that business relationship will be codified in the contract. If the employer can’t find workers at his terms, he’ll have to modify his terms. If his beliefs are so repugnant that no one will work for him, he’ll starve or shut up about his beliefs. If no one will hire the worker at the salary he’s demanding, he’ll have to improve his productivity or lower his demands.
Nothing in the libertarian social contract stops people from organizing into unions. And if an employer can’t find good non-union workers, or can’t withstand the cost of losing his entire workforce to a strike and having to hire-retrain new ones, he’ll have to deal with the union. Or, maybe the union will figure out that the best way to enhance its collective bargaining potential is to make its members more productive and to offer services to the employer that justifies its premium. Either way, BOTH sides are a right to freedom of association, and that means the employment contract must be voluntary.
FULL STOP. Libertarians describe the nature of the relationship between people. You are born a free person, and no one has the right to compel you to do something you choose not to do. However, you are also responsible for supporting yourself and upholding contracts you sign. That may mean you have to do things that you’d rather not do. That’s not coercion, it’s reality.
Libertarians no more have to make the case that ‘markets will fix the problem’ than people against slavery had to make a case that freeing the slaves would leave to higher plantation profits. It doesn’t matter, because slavery is wrong even if it’s economically efficient (which it isn’t).
Again, your last two sentences are a non-sequitur. Libertarianism is about a contract between the people and the government. Businessmen are people too. You are setting up a dichotomy whereby you’re casting the business as an agent of force/power equivalent to government so you can make crazy claims like not being able to find a job while espousing obnoxious views is somehow a violation of your political rights.
Let me ask you - should a Jewish businessman be required to hire an employee who supports terrorism against Jews or who denies the holocaust? Should an abortion clinic be forced to hire a Catholic receptionist who is overtly and vocally hostile to abortion? Does that employee have a right to demand that the clinic stop giving abortions, because she has a ‘right’ to that job on her terms? And if you think so, what have you done to the right of free association that presumably the owner of the abortion clinic or the Jewish shopkeeper also enjoys? Or are political rights only for people who don’t employ others?
What a ridiculous idea. No one is looking for a ‘market solution’ to the problem of hikers wanting to trespass. The only answer needed is, “No. You may not hike across my property.” Likewise, we don’t need a ‘market solution’ to the ‘problem’ of the local gang wanting to take your television and your car. You can just say “Screw off, and the police will arrest you if you try.” You don’t have to provide a good reason to the thieves for why you want to keep your TV and car. Even if you have two and they have none. It’s your property. End of story.
I knew you’d manage to knock down those straw men at some point. Nice job.
What a load of nonsense. Of course there are utopian libertarians, just as there are utopian liberals and conservatives. But the vast majority of them understand that there is no perfection in life, and no simple solutions to complex problems. We may think that on balance libertarianism will lead to a stronger economy or solve other specific problems, just like progressives and conservatives do, but that’s not the point of libertarianism. Libertarians are not utilitarians.
Ask yourself about your belief in, say, the first amendment. Assuming you believe that the people have an absolute right to free speech, is your argument based on the belief that free speech will lead to the end of all conflict? Or that we’ll eventually understand everything about each other and live in peace and harmony? Or do you support it simply because you believe it’s a fundamental human right, even though they are plenty of cases where speech hurts people’s feelings or spreads bad information?
This may be a bad example, since the left seems to have only been champions of free speech when they were the ones on the outside. Now they seem perfectly willing to limit it. So feel free to pick some other human right you feel strongly about, and tell me whether your support of that basic human right is conditional upon being shown that it leads to the best economic outcomes?
As for the primacy of property rights - libertarians generally do believe in the primacy of property rights, but that’s not because they’re a bunch of greedy materialists. Rather, libertarians recognize that without a fundamental right to own property, all other rights are moot because you are beholden to the group for your very survival.
Forcing a citizen into the collective as a matter of survival because you’ve taken away the ability of the citizen to support himself makes a mockery of concept of basic inalienable rights. All rights then flow from the whim of the party in power - and often at the point of a gun.
It is core to the libertarian belief system that if I create something, no one has a right to take it from me for the ‘greater good’. I am a free person, using my own labor and resources. No one else has a right to interfere or to claim the output of my labor for themselves.
And we don’t believe that our participation in society means that somehow we ‘owe’ society a portion of all we create. In a free society, no one is forced to help anyone else, and therefore no one has a claim on anyone else’s stuff. Sure, I moved my goods to market on a road that someone else made. But I assume that by fulfilling my social contract in paying my road taxes and meeting my other contractual obligations I have fulfilled that debt already. And if I wasn’t given a choice, I have no obligation either.
If I make a billion dollars, I don’t ‘owe’ the workers who helped build my product, because they are working for a wage that they voluntarily agreed to. Of course, if profit sharing was part of the contract, I do owe them. But if it wasn’t and I choose to offer them some profit sharing anyway, I do so for my own reasons. Perhaps they are philanthropic, or perhaps I believe it will make my workers work better and faster. But I don’t have to justify that choice to anyone else, because it’s my money and I’ll do with it as I please.
Notice in none of this did I make the claim that this will ‘solve’ any great social problems. Nor did I invoke a magical ‘market’ to fix whatever injustice you seem to think freedom creates. Freedom is an end to itself. Now, it’s totally fair to ask if a system like this would lead to social breakdown or unrest, or be fundamentally unjust in some way. THEN we can talk about libertarian solutions and how they might work,
I think there’s a fundamental difference in how libertarians think that makes it hard for progressives to understand us. Progressives aren’t about fundamental philosophy of government. To them, the government is just another tool. Progressives are about fixing what they see as injustices, prejudices, backwards thinking, and other ‘problems’ of society. They see oppressors and the oppressed. Racists and the victims of racism. Women and oppressors of women. The environment, and its despoilers.
Progressives are on a constant quest to make the world ‘better’ by ridding it of the flaws they see. So when libertarians talk about property rights and freedom, progressives translate that through the progressive filter of employers and abused employees, rich people hoarding stuff that poor people need, etc. And they think that Libertarians believe that libertarianism offers answers to all these perceived problems. Otherwise, what good is it, right?
But liberty is an end to itself. Libertarians would rather live in a free world even if it meant that some ‘problems’ go completely unaddressed. Liberty is not a price they’re willing to pay for ‘progress’.
Why not? What would the libertarian answer be if we found out that an employer was locking his employees in against their will? The answer would be to shut the employer down, by force if necessary.
Of course a libertarian government would not allow slavery to continue. No one has a right to property gained through force. No one has a right to keep slaves as employees, no matter how entrenched the practice is or how much economic dislocation will happen as a result of ending it.
A truly libertarian government would immediately end the practice of slavery, regardless of how many businessmen were hurt and how much economic dislocation there was. Even if it resulted in a a national depression so deep that people starved to death. A libertarian government would know that the freedom of blacks is not a bargaining chip or a variable in an economic forecast. It’s an absolute.
One might ask the questioner how his preferred system “solves the problem” of hikers wanting to cross someone’s land.
One thing I will say about Libertaria is that a group of folks who wanted to set up a Communist system would be perfectly free to do so. They could contract to take from those according to their ability and give to those according to their need. Or, one could set up a community with a mixed economy, like the US. Join Community X and you subject your businesses to certain rules and regulations. But I’m not sure there is any system that would allow a group to opt into a Libertarian system-- e.g., opt out of Min Wage laws.
Not that I think Libertaria would be a stable society, but there are some pluses, and I like to use that as a starting point, then interjecting anti-Libertarian ideas (like some taxes) where I think they are needed in order to make the society stable. But my own personal felling is that the Libertarian situation should be the default, until we determine that it cannot practically work to produce a stable society. Call me cray, but I don’t reject Libertarinism out of had just because it’s too simple to be a good model for society in its pure form.
So 18th century coal miners could become railroad barons and fat cats, and were just too lazy to do so?
You don’t base a socioeconomic system on astronomically unlikely probabilities, nor do you base them on ideological scams where everyone can supposedly becomes a fat cat (which naturally begs the question of who there is left to exploit). Unless you believe that financial planning should consist of buying lottery tickets, and what the hell, maybe we will ALL be rich!
The reality is that as industrialization progressed, the working poor were exploited to the ends of their miserable lives until government intervention stepped in, and the then-essential counterbalance of collective bargaining came into force. It has never been as simple as the libertarian mantra of “go get a better job or start your own company”, and it never will. The libertarian attitudes expressed so far seem at odds with that reality.
Yep. There might be a few pure Libertarians on this board, but there are many, many libertarian-leaning posters and this is what we generally are interested in debating.
I’m not sure what the issue is. Let’s say Libertaria does not allow this. What’s the consequence? A fine? BFD. Now, if someone comes along and says you should be able to shoot someone doing so, then I’m not sure I’m seeing a lot of difference between Libertaria and the USA. That would be an extreme policy position to take on a matter of principle (property rights), regardless of which political system you are talking about.
[QUOTE=wolfpup]
So 18th century coal miners could become railroad barons and fat cats, and were just too lazy to do so?
[/QUOTE]
That would be your strawman. I didn’t use the word lazy anywhere, and was merely pointing out that there are examples of people coming from extremely humble origins to great wealth in the past. You decided to specify ‘coal miners’, the ‘18th’ century and ‘lazy’ in order to build up a strawman argument you could then tear down.
Again, it’s your strawman. I was merely pointing out that it has happened, not that this was the basis for a socioeconomic system. Since it’s your strawman it really has nothing to do with my beliefs, merely something for you to take pot shots at…oh, and to get the echo chamber going. Surprised no one has jumped on board yet.
And yours seem to be strawman arguments that you can bat at. 
Or they became family farmers, or shopkeepers, or bicycle makers, or… People on your side keep accusing libertarians of believing in extreme scenarios, but you’re constantly characterizing society as a struggle between the exploited and exploiters, between the rich and the poor, between the worker and the employer. It never seems to occur to you that workers become employers, that the rich become poor and the poor become rich, and that one person’s ‘exploitation’ is another person’s fair days’ work. Or that when a worker and employer voluntarily agree to trade services, both may in fact do better. You’re the ones dealing in caricatures and strawmen.
Taken to its extreme, you believe that anyone who succeeds must necessarily have done so on the backs of others, that any value in a product is merely the result of the worker’s labor and therefore if the owner becomes wealthier than the worker it must by definition be ‘exploitation’.
You believe that libertarians are the unrealistic utopian ones while you’re merely ‘progressive’, or perhaps believe in ‘scientific socialism’, while the evidence of history is that societies that move too far in your direction devolve into tyranny and economic ruin, while the countries that have enjoyed the most liberty have generally been the most successful.
I’d say that the history of capitalism’s success puts the burden of proof on you to show why your preferred policies are better, and that those of us who believe in markets and freedom have history on our side and the primacy of liberty should be the null hypothesis.
If you’d like to compare extremes, consider the 19th century United States as the closest society we’ve seen to the libertarian ‘ideal’. Now contrast the quality of life of its citizens to any communist country we’ve seen. Note that the U.S. had immigrants flooding into it, while communist countries have generally had to erect barriers and machine gun emplacements to keep their citizens from leaving.
Closer to home, have you checked out how Venezuela is doing these days? I do recall that when Chavez took over there the left on this board was hailing a new era of progressive success, and those of us on the right were claiming it would be a disaster. Who was closer to being correct?
See? There you go again. ‘Fat cats’ can only exist by exploiting others. Got it. So who did Steve Jobs exploit? How about Elon Musk? Jeff Bezos? Richard Branson? Henry Ford? The Wright Brothers? You don’t seem to understand that in a capitalist system, the ‘fat cats’ generally become very wealthy because they have figured out how to make the lives of a lot of people better, and that those people voluntarily pay them for their lifestyle improvement. No one is ‘exploited’.
Do you know where you find fat-cats who HAVE exploited others? In government. I just read today that the average congressman’s investments have more than a 6% per year higher return than the market average. That’s better than the best stock pickers in the world manage. Do you know why? Because they exempted themselves from insider trading laws. And on the other side of every one of those crooked trades is a citizen losing money.
Look around the world at the most ‘progressive’ countries. They have huge political classes, and those classes make out like bandits. Europe is awash in politicians being chauffeured around in limousines and private jets. Washington has a revolving door where regulators take lucrative jobs in the industries they used to regulate, and help those companies avoid the regulations they helped pass. The speaking-fee racket ensures that politicians who favor certain industries can leave public office and earn tens of millions of dollars. The crooked financial system is dominated by a few very big players who are intricately entwined with Washington.
Harry Reid grew up dirt poor, and has spent all his life in public service, earning modest salaries. Yet according to Open Secrets he has between $3 million and $10 million dollars. Ever wonder how that might have happened? Profiting from insider trading and land deals that benefited from knowledge of upcoming regulations, mostly.
These are the people you would rather entrust with running society. You think concentrating power in the hands of a few elites and giving them the power of force is somehow going to lead to a more egalitarian society. You’re the one living in a fantasy land.
Not everyone can be rich, but in America almost anyone can make it into the comfortable middle class if they try hard enough. The secret of wealth is that there’s no secret. Go to school, Get a job and stay in it. Get married and stay married. Work constantly to improve yourself. Save your money and don’t get yourself deep into debt.
And I should point out that by world standards, even the poor in America are rich. Would you rather live in a country where there are billionaires but even the poorest person makes two or three times the world average income, or would you rather spread all the money around so that everyone made the world average?
I come from a very large extended family that started out dirt-poor. We were living with our grandparents in a small apartment when I was a kid, and my 50 year old grandfather was working pumping gas. They could have afforded a nicer place by then, but they were saving their money to buy a small farm. We eventually moved there, into a house that didn’t even have running water or central heat - in Saskatchewan. Winters were fun. Anyway, they saved everything they had for over a decade to put that down payment on their farm, then they worked their asses off and sunk every extra penny they had into it to improve it. Those were the rules that their kids were taught. Every single one of their five kids had a successful life without any financial help, and their children are doing even better.
When my grandparents died, they were worth close to a million dollars. They still drove a 20 year old car and retired into a small house in a small town when they sold their farm.
This is just historical revisionism. The vast improvement in working conditions in that era did not come about because of unions or government - it came about because as worker productivity grew they could afford to negotiate for better working conditions. Or if you think it was all unions and government, perhaps you could explain how Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong and Japan all became 1st world nations with high living standards and high per-capita incomes, after being sweat-shop countries just a few decades earlier. Perhaps you can explain why the U.S. outperformed Europe dramatically in terms of worker standard of living when Europe had much higher rates of labor unionism? Why did the U.K. perform so poorly economically when it took a more socialist path than the U.S. after WWII? Do you think their choices made their standard of living better?
It’s never been as simple as, “Tax the rich people and give the money to the poor, and everyone will be better off.” I don’t think that’s ever worked, anywhere. On the other hand, improving yourself, working hard, and being responsible for your own actions has a pretty solid track record for bettering the lives of workers.
Not coal miners, but some of the navvies working on the London Underground and the canals and railways became well off. Navvies were actually well paid for the time. They became well off by avoiding drink and being swindled, banking their wages, and forming groups called butty gangs that cut out the gang masters and dealt directly with the subcontractors.
Cite: Ben Aaronovitch, Rivers of London ~56% way through.
That’s every political theory ever, the rest is haggling. Minus the anarchists, I 'spose. I’m sure the self managing worker co-ops will save us all any day now.