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John Quiggin 
@rog
I think ‘charity’ is an anti-egalitarian anti-communitarian idea that comes from the rich who really need – for their own self-respect – to believe that they are decent people and have actually earned their wealth in a meritocracy.
The notion of charity does not recognise that every person has a right to all the resources it takes to give them the opportunity to be an admired and respected part of their society. It is a crap sort of society when people are forced by an economy that makes no provision for their abilities, to be sorry for being born, to be suppliants and beggars and try and suck at the teat of the rich which is a cold cold teat with very little generosity.
@Julie Thomas
There is an extensive history of administration to the needs of the poor most well documented in the UK (before it was the UK). The history is generally divided into periods of the ‘old’ (commencing in 1601) and ‘new’ (1834) poor laws:
A further Royal Commission on the Poor Laws and Relief of Distress 1905–09 was held in which a majority and minority reports were presented. The minority report, prepared by Fabian socialists Beatrice and Sydney Webb, argued for an understanding of the causes of policy and the provision of:
The majority report held that the poor could be divided into the deserving and undeserving; the latter should be taught the meaning and benefits of individual responsibility; it also held that charitably led provision would be undermined by the state. In other words, those of a charitable disposition would be robbed of the opportunity to proselytize and otherwise admonish the poor.
The minority report informed the Beveridge Plan (1942) which provided the foundations for the the UK’s welfare state. This was part of the great post war compromise between labour and capital which saw the establishment of National Insurance and the NHS.
This old argument echoes through time to the present. Scott Morrison, who believes that he can manifest God by speaking in tongues, as the current minister for social services, would, I hazard, were he sufficiently capable or interested, be able to trace his own intellectual antecedents back to about the sixteenth century.
But Terje, apparently sprung fully formed and dewy eyed from the earth, would be unaware of this history and therefore content to inflict his own version of charity on those in need all the while, no doubt, holding himself up as a fine exemplar of those virtues to which they should and could only ever aspire.
@Julie Thomas I had an aunt who did data entry for a charity who remarked that a large number of wealthy people were making donations anonymously.
In the US Arthur Brooks observed that it was the religious that gave to charity (“they give like crazy”) and as there were far more religious conservatives than religious liberals it is conservatives that appear to be more charitable. As he puts it, “religious conservatives make conservatives look really good”.
http://www.acton.org/pub/religion-liberty/volume-17-number-2/culture-charity
Indeed they do. This is of great concern. It is one of the reasons I prefer a small limited government. Rent seeking behaviour by corporations is one of the engines driving us towards an ever larger state. It suits the rich and well connected to dictate what we must buy and who may produce what, rather than have a free market.
The wind industry is a current case in point. It is an industry that would almost entirely disappear if not for legislation that mandates that we buy it’s product.
Cartels may exist without the agency of the state but they are rarely of much consequence. The taxi cartel in NSW and most Australian states relies on government made market restrictions. In libertarian circles the likes of Uber who brashly challenge this closed shop are celebrated. Uber is a transnational corporation but their efforts towards a more open market (whilst clearly motivated by self interest) are to be celebrated.
Sydney has for years had a single casino with monopoly status not because of the free market but because of state intervention in the sector.
Western Australia has a Potato Corporation which artificially restricts the supply of potatoes in WA because of legislative intervention not because of a rampant free market in potatoes.
Federally our taxes still fund an Egg Corporation. And of course the ABC has a massive grip on the media sector because of favourable treatment by the government. Essentially I manages to rack up a loss of $1 billion dollars every year without any commercial consequence. Talk about socialising loses.
The TPP deal does seem unsavoury in several regards but I’m not across the detail (much of which is secret).
The close relationship between banks and governments is a major topic of discussion and concern in libertarian ranks. Bailing out banks directly or by buying junk debt, such as by the U.S. government and the German government in recent times, is a classic example of governments that are operating beyond what their limits should rightfully be.
If you think such problems are fixed by having a larger more interventionist state then I think you are sadly mistaken. The bigger the pot of money the government has at it’s disposal the more corrupt commerce and society will be.
I don’t regard the USA to be a libertarian paradise. Jailing people who feed the poor is not a libertarian idea. If you think libertarians want to jail people who feed the poor then you are seriously confused about who is who in the political zoo.
@TerjeP
Yes I am seriously confused by what you mean by libertarianism. I am sure that you are even more seriously confused about what libertarianism is and I think that libertarians of whatever flavour spend their lives seriously confused and I predict that you will become even more confused and irrelevant over the years.
So is Sarah Palin is not your libertarian pin-up girl then?
@Julie Thomas
Anecdote is always edifying but data is more reliable. The US publication The Chronicle of Philanthropy notes that:
It goes on:
It is complicated:
Rog well yes the religious may give generously but from the research I have read the donations go only to the causes that ‘their’ church approves of. There is no requirement to be fair and unbiased.
And I do believe that the ‘old money’ do give to charity as that is an obligation or a responsibility that is part of their culture.
But really all charity does is give people a fish every so often rather than giving them a chance to earn the money to buy a fishing rod and feed themselves. People need work not charity.
And as Jungney says those in the church who dispense the charity just love the chance to proselytize and otherwise admonish the poor which is so counter-productive because it destroys any pride that people may have left in themselves after whatever it was that happened to take away their ability to make it on their own.
Wouldn’t it be wonderful if all the rich and the libertarians were just like Jesus Christ?
@jungney
Yes the whole idea of charity sucks big time and is not good for anyone; the giver or the receiver.
It is much better when the state provides support in a non-discriminatory way.
Anecdote here; the most useful help for me when I was a single mother with 4 children was a home loan from the Qld Housing Commission enabled me to buy a house and only pay 1/4 of my income toward the loan.
That provided the security that I and my kids badly needed. Having to cope with private rental market is the most expensive and difficult thing about being poor with children and wow you meet some nasty selfish landlords.
@TerjeP
I take your points and tend to agree with some of them to a degree. However, in my view you ever only look at half of the picture. You only seem to see abuses of power coming from government. You never see abuses of power coming from capitalist or corporate power (mostly when it is oligopolisitic).
Why, in your view, is government uniquely prone to misusing power and causing or inducing corruption? Apparently, you dismiss the notion that business (as corporate oligopoly mainly but not exclusuvely) might abuse its power. In times not so long past, people used to talk of the “unholy trinity”. This “unholy trinity” was Big Government, Big Business and Big Unions. Depending on one’s ideology, one would focus on one or two of these as the source of many economic problems. Few would focus on all three though anarchists and libertarian socialists might.
In the USA, which is the vanguard in these matters, Big Unions are largely defeated. Unions are not a significant power in national economic and politics in the USA. There might be some regional and sectoral exceptions but by and large this statement is true. Big Unionism is beaten for the time being. So the argument today comes down to Big Government and Big Business. In the USA, by far the largest obsession, and not just by Libertarians, is with Big Government. Big Government is seen as the main problem (except of course when Big Government is making big orders and procurements especially from/for the Big Military/Industrial complex).
Big Business seems to have managed a kind vanishing act as a target for political concern. Big business is like the elephant in the room that has its skin painted with the wallpaper pattern. It is right there in the room taking the most space but manages to be part of the background scenery or decor rather than part of the obvious furniture of the room.
I just wonder how you think large transnational corporations and conglomerates will behave when government is minimised? Certainly they will lose subsidies and special treatment which you heavily focus on to the exclusion of the other side of the coin. At the same time they will be exempt from even more taxes (they often pay little enough now anyway) and spared much regulation. The tendency to wealth inequality will increase as will the tendency to oligopolistic power.
The tendency to negative externality damage and exploitation of nature (an unmanaged commons) will increase unless all of nature is privatised. The dangers of total corporate privatisation of nature will then have to be faced. Among the issues then will be the one where a new born human will have no “hereditary natural rights” like a right to freely breath air. Some corporation or corporations will own the atmosphere. Infant breathing would be imputed as a debt owed by the parents to the corporation.
The above are some of the directions that full privatisation and corporatisation of the world could take. It is not too fanciful to suggest they will want to own the air we breath eventually. Corporations already want to own all of the (mostly natural) genetic code and all of potable, deliverable fresh water in the world. These are clearly already among their goals.
I once talked to Giblets about how government welfare was required because private charity wouldn’t necessarily help those who need need it most, and he said that government welfare should be funded entirely through a tax on private charity.
@Julie Thomas
I think that the experience of receiving charity is summed up by the phrase ‘as cold as charity’. Given a choice between receiving charity or state provided aid – who would choose the former? How anyone can fail to understand the deep human experienced embedded in this simple phrase is beyond me.
As to landlords – after decades of renting I finally got to the point where my only response to the greasy classes of landlords was to stand over them until we reached a compromise. Telling them you’ll drag them backwards for years through whatever tribunal it takes usually had a sobering effect on their attitude; loud voice required.
@jungney
My dad told me we would starve to death before we took any bloody charity. It never happened :). It’s cultural; he had Highland Scots blood. He used to play the bagpipes in full regalia – I just loved the sporran – in a Queensland summer whenever there was a parade like they used to have to keep the public amused.
That Housing Commission loan was all I needed to never have to rent again.
Reading Hayek one can see where the mixed up psychologising that libertarians base their economic theories on comes from. The quote below shows that he really has nfi how people feel; perhaps he was an aspie?
Reading about him, it seems to me his life was very ordinary and he seems never to have had any adventures or fun and apparently his father was a ‘public servant’ and yet Hayek rails against these people.
So he writes, in The Road to Serfdom:
“Inequality is undoubtedly more readily borne, and affects the dignity of the person much less, if it is determined by impersonal forces, than when it is due to design. In a competitive society it is no slight to a person, no offence to his dignity, to be told by any particular firm that it has no need for his services, or that it cannot offer him a better job. ”
What nonsense. And then hayek shows another aspie behaviour by the programmatic way he returns to the verry thin straw man of Socialism that he sets up every time he admits to one of the very real problems that would result from his economic system, only to knock this straw man down with impeccable hearsay and wild speculation based on his very own superior intelligence – or not?
Hayek tells us in the introduction that he knows he could be biased about his ideas but he’s pretty sure he’s not because he’s thought about it and he’s just not biased
Even back then there should have been enough evidence around to show that ‘man’ is not rational and not capable of objectivity when one is very enthusiastic and certain about things. But you come across this sort of silliness all the time in the reasoning of the people on the right about human nature and how people ought to be.
Charles Murray was very silly when he imagined that prehistoric men used to sit around the fire discussing who is the most intelligent man in the tribe. That was in the introduction to his masterpiece of dishonest writing “The Bell Curve”. I can’t even read the stuff because it is so full of irrational thinking.
@jungney
I have lost some of my sources now but I wrote a paper in 2000-2001 about Howard’s welfare “reforms”. This 50 page paper (single-spaced) was written essentially just to get my own thoughts straight and to find at least a private intellectual outlet for my near-apoplectic outrage and frustration. At the time I working in DSS which then became Centrelink. It was an enormously infuriating experience to go through the utter destructive and unecessary (at all levels) nonsense of Howard’s welfare “reforms”. Here is a quote from my own paper about the charity issue.
“If one studies even a little Australian social welfare history, one soon recognises the potential correlation of these new charity entrepreneurs (like Mission Australia) with the private charity proprieters of the late 19th C. Some of these state subsidised insitutions became so blatantly corrupt and tainted by nepotism and abuses (some unmentionable in reporting due to Victorian era sensibilities) that public outcrys and newspaper exposes lead to Royal Commissions in the states of Victoria and New South Wales. These Royal Commission in turn lead to reforms (in the correct sense of the term) which involved the return of the funding to state administration to implement the proper provision and supervision of these services. This was so they could be carried out in a relatively un-authoritarian, non-sectarian and non-paternalistic manner compared to the former gross abuses.”
Unfortunately, I have lost my references to the actual Royal Commissions involved. Anyone of the right research skills and access to the right databases could find these Royal Commission transcripts from the late 19th C for the colonies of Victoria and New South Wales.
My mention of abuses is timely. We now have financial abuse scandals and other abuse scandals (failure to train, failure to pay and so) coming up right now in relation to these private providers of various employment and training services. At the time of Howard’s “reforms” I and all the coal-face and system support colleagues I knew from DSS/Centrelink and CES predicted exactly this currently shambles. It was indeed so predictable – private enterprise and private charity corruption, so regular and predictable you could set your watch by it!
so, what came first, the chicken or the egg? or the legislation? or the organic foodies? or howard johnson’s?
Do you really think female politicians should be characterised as pin up girls?
Sarah Palin has some interesting attributes. But her fiscal record as governor wasn’t so great. I believe she increased taxes and increased government spending. Although I’m no expert on her track record.
The government is unique because it has unique powers. Neither unions nor businesses can lawfully lock you in a cage if you refuse to comply with their edicts. You are not forced to use their services. Except where government has granted them special powers through legislation. Unfortunately there is quite a lot of that going on.
@Ikonoclast
The irony is that the system is that DSS/Centrelink is staffed by people, white collar proletarians, who take every opportunity to make decisions in the client’s favour, I am told. I guess that it is the managers who have drunk the kool aid? That was my experience in NSW child protection – that staff could be talked around to a reasonable response but that managers would stake their all as a person on achieving the outcome on which their next promotion depended, regardless of moral or ethical considerations. You position as a left libertarian is more readily grapsed now I know that you also were bit by the viper of state bureaucracy. I watched a long doco on ABC, last Sunday, about Nugget Coombs and his relationship with Judith Wright. Australia was so much more an open society then than it is now.
@Julie Thomas
I think there is substance in the suggestion, re Hayek, that he and those who devise such crude schemes for all of humanity as they do are more than likely suffering from some sort of empathy and compassion deficit. Not to mention a privileged and unworldly family background.
One of my mum’s bitter stories about charity derives from her experience, during the depression, of being denied the bowl of soup that the Women’s Auxiliary of the Miner’s Federation doled out daily to her local primary school. On the grounds that, because she wore shoes to school rather than bare feet, there was clearly enough money in the home to feed her. It wasn’t the shoes. It was being socially isolated as different that cut her.
I think large sections of nature should be privatised. IMHO the prohibition on trade in certain species is counter productive in terms of conservation. I understand the logic behind banning the ivory trade but I think it is misquided and makes the situation worse. Saddly it may even be what ultimately drives the rhino to extinction. I prefer the model adopted for the wollemi pine. And the model Australia John Wamsley championed which ultimately floundered because he could not get the law reformed to make conservation areas viable tradable assets with a market value attached to the species contained within.
If you pollute your neighbours property, or the commons, you should face legal consequences. Assuming of course that the damage is identifiable and significant. Where you and I disagree on pollution is probably limited to a few specific cases such as CO2. And even there I’d be open to a pigovian tax if we could agree on the size of the externality. But we probably won’t agree on the size so I’d rather not digress in that direction.
Transnational companies that damage the environment usually do so in places where property rights are weak or exploited territories are government owned. For instance a lot of the destructive logging practices in Brazil are based around government incentives to create farmland.
That said I don’t think nature should be locked away forever untouched. We should harvest the bounty that nature offers in a sustained and managed way. Where property rights can’t be easily established, such as with the ocean, then solutions such as fishing quotas make sense.
@jungney
There is nothing wrong with aspies that a good upbringing and a supportive society can’t ‘cure’. If we are properly socialised we can learn to understand how others feel but perhaps we may not be able to understand how ‘neuro-typical’ people think.
Some people are not blessed with lots of social intelligence genes at birth and in socially isolated families the children don’t develop these abilities and rich families have increasingly isolated themselves from the rest of us so their aspie children do not develop any understand of working class and welfare class people and can’t see them as in any way equally deserving of respect for their achievements or appreciate why they might not have achieved what they could have.
Australia used to have integrated neighbourhoods so that the children of the relatively poor could if they had good manners be invited into a middle class home and see how things worked there. It wasn’t much but it was better than now.
Even children with psychopath genes are not destined to be problems for society if they are socialised properly. Have you seen that article about the neuroscientist who looked into his own genetic inheritance because his mother told him there were bad men among their ancestors?
http://www.salon.com/2014/03/09/this_is_your_brain_on_murder_what_the_mind_of_a_psychopath_looks_like/
@TerjeP
What about the East India Company? Does it not show what can happen when corporations (joint stock companies) rule parts of the world?
“The East India Company (EIC), more properly called the Honourable East India Company (HEIC), was an English joint-stock company, formed to pursue trade with the East Indies, but which ended up trading mainly with the Indian subcontinent and Qing China.
Originally chartered as the “Governor and Company of Merchants of London trading into the East Indies”, the company rose to account for half of the world’s trade, particularly trade in basic commodities that included cotton, silk, indigo dye, salt, saltpetre, tea and opium. The company also ruled the beginnings of the British Empire in India.
The company received a Royal Charter from Queen Elizabeth on 31 December 1600, making it the oldest among several similarly formed European East India Companies. Wealthy merchants and aristocrats owned the Company’s shares. The government owned no shares and had only indirect control.
The company eventually came to rule large areas of India with its own private armies, exercising military power and assuming administrative functions. Company rule in India effectively began in 1757 after the Battle of Plassey and lasted until 1858 when, following the Indian Rebellion of 1857, the Government of India Act 1858 led to the British Crown assuming direct control of India in the form of the new British Raj.”
Note the last paragraph. Especially the sentence; “The company eventually came to rule large areas of India with its own private armies, exercising military power and assuming administrative functions.” We know they jailed people too. The Black Hole of Calcutta was an infamous example. There is clearly historical precedent for joint stock companies (corporations) ruling countries and even empires, running armies and policing and jailing people. It is a feasible danger once again if national governments are so weakened that corporations once again begin controlling and ruling regions in various ways.
You seem to have the belief that only formal governments use power and violence on people. The historical record shows many events very different to this picture and corporations are clearly capable and even likely to be involved in using violence, private armies, policing and incarceration if thay attain adequate power and licence to do so.
Whereas more or less democratic governments under a constitution and with courts have checks and balances on their power (the people, the law and the courts), businesses and corporations will have no such checks on their power other than checks of other comepting businesses. What is to stop literal corporate war (meaning with guns) breaking out between rival corporations if little significant state power is left?
Correction: The Nawab of Bengal, Siraj ud-Daulah, held British prisoners of war in the BHOC after the capture of Fort William on 20 June 1756. The East India Company was not responsible.
However, my point about a joint stock company (corporation), The East India Co., imprisoning Indians is correct.
“.. the British (meaning the East India Co.) continued to oppress Indians. In 1818 they had passed regulation III, under it, an Indian could be jailed without trail in a court.” – Wikipedia.
This is a flagrant example of a corporation acting improperly, when uncontrolled by negligent, weak or minimalist government, and jailing people without trial. This is an example of what we can expect again with minimalist government and businesses and corporations possessing almost untrammelled power. Effective democratic government is a check on excess violence and greed. To the extent that the US government and even the Australian government are failing in this regard, the main cause is the buying and suborning of government by corporate money and the consequent circumvention of the democratic will.
@TerjeP
One day, maybe, you’ll appreciate the irony of your commenting here on a blog by a man who coined the term ‘zombie economics’.
Zombie idea:
This idea died in the mid 1990’s but keeps on coming back like vomit over the edge of a sink. If only the market could assign a proper money value to an entire species’s survival then all would be good. Well, it hasn’t and it wont, which is why some English Royal is currently trying to beg the Chinese to execute anyone who imports Rhino horn or Elephant ivory.
Market fail, with big consequences for the children of the future who will only get to see such animals via wildlife photography and footage.
@jungney
Yes, Terje’s ideas about privatising nature are anathema to me to the extent that I could not face the strain of replying. Glad you did.
@TerjeP
Spluttering over the concept that
But “irregardless” (as Micallef would say) of that:
Ivory comes from elephants, mostly (and is teeth). Rhino ‘horn’ is a lump of hair more or less (it’s keratin), but it isn’t ivory.
Sorry, too much spluttering!
I am spluttering over the concept that: “large sections of nature should be privatized”.
Enormously large sections have already, and it hasn’t worked out well for “nature” or for humans (being distinct from “nature”).
@Ikonoclast
Never mind some possible future scenario:
Fascism (broadly, the corporatised state/meld of state and corporations) is here, now. And it’s growing. Fast.
@jungney
I think you refer to an idea propounded by Alasdair MacIntyre in his 1981 book “After Virtue.” As summarized by communitarian philosopher Michael Sandel, MacIntyre “gives an account of the way we, as moral agents, arrive at out purposes and ends.” Opposed to the idea that we humans are individual, self-directed persons (in the Kant/Rawls mode), MacIntyre “advances a narrative concept. Humans are story telling beings. We live our lives as narrative quests. ‘I can only answer the question “what am I to do?” if I can answer the prior question “of what story or stories do I find myself a part”?'”
It is easy to see how this appeals to the communitarian, but not to the Rawlsian who says we humans have the intellectual capacity put aside any such constraint.
@Ikonoclast
I had to fortify myself to do so 🙂 Hence the crap tabulations.
@JKUU
MacIntyre’s magisterial summation of Western philosophy is frequently a turning point for those who apply themselves to reading it. It does emphasise the necessity, if you want a meaningful life, of narrative coherence. Most scientists I’ve ever known were able to locate themselves meaningfully within a tradition of the Enlightenment; most doctors used to be able to do the same before the profession turned into technocrats. The same applies to many other professions but not all. The ability of people to position themselves within a long form narrative is diminishing, it seems to me, with a subsequent increase in incoherence and confusion – see the current Liberal and Labor parties.
But I neglected to add that the NZ practice of life narrative in geographical space over time is a Maori practice now taught by some institutions.
I don’t see narrative coherence as a constraint on my actions or sense of self. I find it enabling. It gives me, for example, both the capacity and interest in playing ‘whack-a-mole’ with libertarian demi-philosophers who know not whence they came nor whither they go.
I advocate small and limited government. That is not the same as weak government.
The example you give of the East India Company is fair enough and in the case where a company acquires the powers of a state then obviously it should for many purposes be treated like a state. But I note you had to reach back a few hundred years to find an example. No corporation is going to have that level of power anywhere foreseeable today. But if you see a corporation assembling a security force on the scale of an army then let me know and I’ll give it consideration. But I suspect you will only ever see it in places where property rights are weak.
Good of you to acknowledge that fact.
That does not make him wrong. People pay millions for a Picaso because they know it will hold value over time and can be sold later. They can donate to private conservation to be charitable but so long as you can’t own and trade an estate valued because of it’s species content then charity is the only finance that will be forthcoming. Running conservation on the basis of charity is a poor option.
I don’t know anybody that thinks this behaviour should be considered anything other than criminal. Nor anybody that would seek to repeal the laws that make it so.
“But I suspect you will only ever see it in places where property rights are weak.”
“Weak” property rights?
To consider property rights as being either weak or strong is another example of the dysfunctional either or way that libertarians set up the problems that human beings face when organising themselves to achieve ‘good’ government.
Property rights in real societies – as opposed to the abstract and unreal societies that libertarians imagine – are more complex and dependent on the narrative that the society has constructed to explain the way people can own property or share it.
These ways of managing property rights are not ‘weak’ until a corporation run by dysfunctional libertarian thinkers comes along and trashes the society for their own profit which is the ultimate good in libertarian ideology and the only measure of a person’s worth.
” People pay millions for a Picaso because they know it will hold value over time and can be sold later.”
Really? That is the way the ‘entrepreneurs’ that you admire as the every model of good human being, think of a Picaso or even a Picasso, but collectors do not collect Art – with a capital A – in the expectation of a profit.
Again Terje, you show how inadequate your understanding of how real people operate on their environment is and how impoverished and limited for practical applications, any analysis you make about societies will be for the rest of us not-libertarian people.
You really should go sea-steading and convince those libertarians to live like you think people should live.
Terje why don’t you check your implicit biases and your actual ability to be objective?
Implicit biases are unconscious negative (or positive) attitudes towards a person or group. Most people who claim (and believe) they are not biased because they don’t show explicit bias will nevertheless have implicit bias that affects their actions.
https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/takeatest.html
You do have to fill in a survey before you get to the test but you will be surprised at how uncontrollable your biases are.
@TerjeP
Again, I take your points. I did indeed have to reach back several hundred years to get an egregious example of the kind I needed for my demonstration. I would argue that my need to reach back that far was due to progress (and revolutions) and in particular to the progress in democratic governance. I will come back to the issue of democratic governance.
I am sympathetic, to a measured extent, to your emphasis on property. I am a realist and I know that if one doesn’t own or at least have access to property (as real physical things) one can’t do things, make things, have a livelihood or enjoy personal space, peace and security. I am very sympathetic to the notion that a man’s or woman’s home is his/her castle. To me, the corollary of that last statement is that every man, woman and child should have a home. Clearly, there will be arguments about which political-economic system (pure or hybrid) will best deliver a home for every man, woman and child. I am greatly in favour of a personal property system. This is quite different from and does not extend as far as the full private property relations (with capitalists workers) under current RECD (Really Existent Capitalism and Democracy.)
Returning to the issue of democratic governance. I believe myself to be a realist also about the issue of power. Power can be defined as the ability to force, coerce or “remove” people. “Remove” in this context can mean imprison, expel, exile or kill people. The realpolitik of power so far as I can see is that power does always concentrate to some extent. This has been the real outcome in the great majority of cases in all historical epochs which we know about. It seems to become an ever more reliable law as society develops politically and technologically. The methods of centralising power become ever more effective and the power process seems to flow naturally in the direction of centralisation and concentration into fewer and fewer hands.
It seems to take a concerted and continuous effort to find methods and techniques to re-diffuse or devolve power and autonomy back out to the bulk of the people. The history of democracy is the history of just such processes where a great many expedients and institutions are created to act as checks and balances on the centralisation of power and to re-diffuse power and autonomy back out to the bulk of the ordinary people.
I would label genuine democracy, or at least the rough approximation(s) of it we have achieved so far, as the key principle and process for fighting the excessive centralisation of power. Where we have a democratic or mostly democratic government it would seem to me that minimising government ipso facto minimises democracy and increases dangers of power centralisation and authoritarianism.
Business on the proprieter or owner model (as opposed to the family or worker cooperative model) is a non-democratic, hiearchical system. It is an autocratic system. Owners and bosses rule the enterprise and employed workers do what they are told. Owners and bosses also make the decisions on what to make, what to advertise and promote and how to treat the environment and general populace with the only immediate limits being law and regulation by the (democratic) state. Minimise the state without other attendent changes and you will minimise democracy and increase autocracy.
A somewhat minimised state would be reasonable and sensible if the owner or proprieter model of business (capitalism) were substantially replaced by a worker cooperative and worker democracy model for enterprises. Clearly, this makes me a “libertarian socialist” in the old-fashioned sense of these terms.
Whether my views need to encompass “market socialism” I do not completely know. I strongly suspect that at least “market socialism” would have to exist for a long time if not indefinitely. It is actually extremely difficult or impossible to envisage how a modern society could run without a market. I think that an edict completely banning and abolishing markets would not be in any way democratic or free or just or even economically viable.
Note: I regard all markets as in practice regulated markets (that is, free within bounds). No market is absolutely free nor would any conceivable society tolerate an absolutely free market. An absolutely free market would allow people to trade for example in slaves, in all weapons up to personal M1A1 Abram tanks or fighter jets for the assertive billionarie and in all drugs safe and unsafe, medicinal or not, known to man.
@TerjeP
Yes, it does, according to the logic of the market which I assume is the only logic that counts in your purview.
You clearly know nothing of the social and political history of Picasso’s em>Guernica.
Many of the privately owned Australian nature conservation projects raise funds by offering tourism and accommodation services at premium rates. People who go there don’t do so in order to buy a bettong but in order to be in the place where bettongs reside, even if they don’t see one. This behaviour is apparently beyond your imagination.
In fact it appears to me that any human behaviour outside the parameters of the sort of self interest that can be measured in dollar terms is alien to you. It’s like dealing with someone who, having successfully managed a McDonalds franchise, is utterly convinced that if the world were just run along such rational corporate lines then we would all be better off. All that remains for you to do is to convince the rest of the world that a diet consisting solely of McDonalds constitutes ‘the best of all possible worlds’, as Dr Pangloss argued:
Ikonoclast – firstly let me thank you for your continued civility. You’re current avoidance of cheap shots and petty criticism seems, from my perspective, quite uncharacteristic for this community. I thought it worthy of acknowledgement. To everybody else in this conversation I’d like to say thank you for the ongoing free character assessments. My skin grows thicker by the day. 🙂
I see a lot of trends in companies away from excessive hierarchy. Modern management practice is more about open plan, flat structures and accountability. But to be sure some change faster than others and plenty of places are less than pleasant.
In terms of workers cooperatives I think these are better in theory than in practice. But in so far as they have good governance and satisfy real consumer needs then there is no reason they can’t prosper and proliferate in a small government, free market environment. Where they seem to lose out is in scenerios where industries are best served by a small number of suppliers and consolidation is in the winds. Traditional corporations seem to be more adept at take overs and mergers. Although plenty of these are disfunctional exercises that destroy value so maybe it’s not such a disadvantage.
I do think there is a lack of innovation in the corporate governance space. But it may be because existing approaches work about as well as can be expected. If somebody comes up with something better than that’s fantastic. But I don’t think such innovation is likely to be achieved in a top down dictated fashion that some socialists seem to dream of. I prefer systems of production and social organisation to emerge by trial and error through voluntary communities engaged in commerce and cooperation. Not imposed using legislative means.
My personal experience in owning a small business was that employees often just want to be workers and any attempt to offer them ownership in the enterprise and share in the associated risks and rewards doesn’t match their appetite. They prefer regular hours and a set income. They want to be led but will readily vote with their feet if they don’t think the leadership is organised and reasonable or if they think the rewards or conditions are better elsewhere.
* your
Meanwhile, back here on Planet Earth this 2014 Salon article provides a roundup of work practices within Amazon with the header Worse than Wal-Mart: Amazon’s sick brutality and secret history of ruthlessly intimidating workers:
http://tinyurl.com/n5g3xdg
Terje, do you perhaps have a definition of “cheap shot” and a “petty criticism” or is this more of that secret libertarian knowledge that is not accessible to other people?
Your cheap shots are not even reality based. You just make stuff up, like you say “some socialists seem to dream of”. But who are these socialists and do tell us how their dreams are a problem for you or anyone? That is such a cheap and useless shot meant to deflect from the real issue.
Are you irrationally focusing on these socialists because it is easy and doesn’t require you to re-assess your belief system? It does take work and it’s not well remunerated to look into your self and see where your belief system came from and that it might not be very useful or applicable to all people?
This is the sort of work that co-operative individuals do for no pay if they want to be part of a society. People ‘here’ have spent a lot of time and effort over the years explaining to you how and why libertarian ideology is flawed in so many ways and yet you have ignored or dismissed all of these discussions.
Your “personal experience in owning a small business was that employees often just want to be workers”.
So what? My personal experience of being part of a family business that became ‘libertarianised’ at some stage during the ’80’s – that was when I left – is very different from your experience. Why do you regard your experience as enough information about the way things are.
Why do you imagine that this limited experience that you had – an n of 1 – is all the knowledge that is needed to understand ‘workers’ and how to organise workplaces?
According to a Guardian “Exclusive” the Australian government has secretly contracted for the delivery of at least ten boats that look just like the stereotypical vessels used by refugees:
The infamous orange boats made in China which they have been using cost $46,000 apparently. So, let’s say “multi-million” is at least more than $1,000,000 – that still works out at more than $100,000 each for the “new” ones designed to look like “illegal” refugee boats.
Now, adjusting the metallic kitchen wrap headwear, is it not at least plausible that a government of pathological liars given to secrecy and dirty tricks might want to keep a stash of “illegal boats” handy for “interception” as proof of their ability to “keep us safe”, should the need arise to fabricate some “newsworthy” story for a pre-election shot in the arm?
The propagandists at News Ltd and their ABC would gleefully regurgitate unquestioningly the heroics of our brave protectors.
If it doesn’t seem at least plausible, why? How low WON’T they stoop?
http://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2014/dec/05/new-csiro-boss-larry-marshall-says-scientists-must-think-like-entrepreneurs
“Speaking at the sidelines of the 2014 Edges of Astronomy conference in Canberra this week, Marshall said staff at the agency needed to hear that “we’re done with cuts”, but said he could not rule out further job losses.”
WTF? But it gets better.
“But the entrepreneur, who has started six companies in the US, added: “You don’t hire a guy like me to cut. You just don’t. And I think that was the best message that the board and the government could’ve given the organisation, to hire a guy like me, who’s a company builder.””
or worse?
““We need more scientists to start companies. We need to teach scientists that its OK to start a company. It’s your duty,” he said.”
@jungney
Who was paying for the ambulances and medical costs? Correctly speaking, Amazon should have been paying. They were the cupable party morally and even legally one would think. Of course it all depends on US Labor and OHS laws but one would think somebody should be sueing Amazon for the entire ambulance and medical costs of this fiasco. The costs would not be inconsiderable.
@Ikonoclast
Remember, this is the country where people in full time employment can be eligible for food stamps. Yet no-one accuses Walmart, Maccas etc of rorting the welfare system.
Oh the irony. Very clever.
Income supplements, funded by taxpayers in general, are a better market intervention than higher mandated minimum wages that create unemployment. However cash would seem more sensible than food stamps. Both because cash is fungible but also because it carries less needless social stigma.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income
@TerjeP
There is no general empirical evidence that higher mandated minimum wages reliably create more unemployment. Most fair minded economists who study the empirical outcomes widely say the evidence is mixed. Given that that is the reality, then it makes most sense for the minimum wage to be a liveable wage. Of course defining and determining a liveable wage is a complex process in itself with outcomes best decided by a tribunal which reviews all the data and takes submissions from interested parties.
The belief that very low minimum wage limits or no minimum wage limits increase employment is not reliably backed up by the data. Very low minimum wages often lead to a lack of effective demand and this can actually depress economic activity and cause more unemployment in some cases.