Thanks for returning Fry. I’m kind of anti-libertarian, but more anti-Libertarian, so my comments probably reflect that. But you have struck one major heart chamber in the concept with the definition of ‘voluntary’. I remember once discussing with other independent businessmen the concept of ‘wage slavery’ and how we were all free from that. But we also realized we were simply ‘client slaves’. Our survival depended on fulfilling the needs of others. Everybody is sort of in that boat. You may voluntarily work your farm to produce the food you need, but I think a lot of farmers must feel like they are slaves to their fields at times.
I’ve known one person who could be called a true libertarian. He lived in the woods with his family, hunting, trapping, and gardening for food and trade. His wife sewed hand-made clothes to sell for cash. But even then they survived because no one else wanted to live off those woods. There couldn’t have been enough game to support many more people. It’s an attractive philosophy, but last I heard of this guy his wife and kids moved back to the big city to lead a real life. Despite someones ridiculous assertion in this thread I think everybody realizes we live in a world with a diminishing share of resources available to each person. Interaction and cooperation are a necessity. (l)ibertarianism tries to simplify this concept. But in reality there is never agreement on what people should be able to take or contribute.
Nobody wants to be stolen from, and few want to steal. But if you cannot defend your property or have others to defend it for you (i.e., Police), then you don’t deserve that property.
You seem to think of libertarian philosophy as not needing your fellow man and being holed up in a cabin somewhere with a pet bear and the occasional visit from Uncle Jesse. Maybe you could provide a link to what you are describing as libertarian philosophy.
I think in order to see wage slavery you really need more than the three original players.
Start with A, who owns a pig farm, and B who owns a winery, and add in C, D, and E who own nothing.
A can raise an slaughter 1 pig a week, but he finds that if he hires C he can raise and slaughter 2 pigs a week.
B currently can make 2 bottles of wine a day, but finds that by hiring D he can go up to 4 bottles.
A pays C 1 pound of ham a week, and keeps the rest. C has the option of quitting but then A would hire E at the same wages and C would starve.
Similarly B pays D 1 cup of wine a day, and keeps the rest. C has the option of quitting but then B would hire E at the same wages and D would starve. A and B trade with each other so that each gets more or less 1 pig a week and 2 bottles of wine a day, which is about all that they can eat. C and D struggle to survive and E starves.
Now it is possible that E could work for either A or B and produce enough extra to raise the standard of living for himself and C and D but since there is no market for the extra produce there is no reason for A and B to increase production and hire E
But there **is **a market for the extra produce that E would produce, and that market is E. E is currently not producing and not consuming, and so dies. If he worked to produce wine or ham, he could consume some of his wages (wine or ham) and trade the rest of his wages for the other product (ham or wine). Note that this means that A or B is better off if E works for either B or A, because now E can buy ham/wine instead of dying.
And of course, there are more than two products in the world, and more than two monopoly producers of products. As in Chinatown, Jake asks “How many steak dinners can you eat?”. But in the real world there are more products in the world than steak dinners so people continue to produce even though their stomachs are currently full and the rain isn’t currently leaking through the roof.
Lemme clarify something here. The OP is not intended to rely on any particular all-encompassing Libertarian philosophy. It is intended to refer to a minimal concept of “Libertarian,” one which requires just that no one should be coerced into taking any action. Anything else I said about liberarianism further down the thread was only half-serious (note the “if I had to say it went one way or another clause”–the fact is, I don’t think it goes one way or the other) and should not be taken to be illuminative of the intention of the OP or of what is being discussed in the thread, at least by me.
But E is not a market. E has nothing to buy it with. If E works for A, A produces an extra pig and E earns one extra pound of pork a week (the going rate for labor) Then A still has the rest of the pig on his hands with no one to sell it to. He has spent a little extra of his own time in supervising E and buying pig feed, but all he has to show for it is a bunch of pork that no one has any goods to buy except for B who already has all the pork he wants, so hiring E would actually hurt A’s bottom line.
Obviously the situation is simplified and there are thousands of A’s and B’s, and millions of C’s D’s and E’s, but situation scales up so long as there is a concentration of wealth into the A’s and B’s and a glut of labor in C, D, and E.
The problem is that the free market in this case has reached local maxima in efficiency but not a global maxima. All of the individuals are performing their best given the state of the economy but the economy itself is not at its best. To get there you would need to artificially regulate the system to raise wages so that C, D, and E can produce demand for the extra production of E’s output, rather than having all the wealth concentrated with A and B.
This is the situation we are in now. With wealth concentrated as it is, much of it is owned by people who don’t use it for anything other than trying to invest it to get more money, which leads to lower demand, which means that there is no point in hiring workers, which means that wages tank, which means they can’t buy anything which further reduces demand, rinse and repeat. The sad thing is that this isn’t even good for the people with the money since they don’t even have any good investment opportunities
Well then, the debate has to be about the meaning of coercion. I am hungry and if I don’t eat I will die. Does that mean I am being coerced into eating? My answer would be no, coercion must have an agent, someone who is doing the coercing. A person can never be coerced by their own wants and needs, they can only be coerced by someone else. Thus a person who takes a job to earn money to keep from starving is not being coerced. But a person who takes a job to avoid being kicked out of there parent’s house is being coerced.
To apply this to the illustration the asteroid victim is not being coerced, but the others would be coerced if they had to provide for the asteroid victim unwillingly. Since libertarianism is a system of morality as much as a political philosophy, this is where I think it breaks down and is why I am not a libertartian even though I think they are right about most political issues.
I am assuming that a libertarian policy tends to concentrate capital into fewer and fewer hands and ultimately doesn’t even maximize aggregate wealth as fewer and fewer capitalists are engaged in the capital allocation mechanism.
Even milder forms of libertarianism that allow for things like public education and some minimal income security tend to concentrated wealth in fewer and fewer hands.
I think that we need to realize that nature doesn’t confer property rights, it is a social construct. A social construct that is necessary to the advancement of civilization but there was once was time when the social contract underlying these constructs allocated much of the increased productivity from labor to labor rather than capital. Now we allocate almost all increases in productivity to capital.
I happen to think that labor is more than just a variable cost.