User:Christofurio
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I love the essay below. I created it initially for the Talk page of human nature, but I've adapted it a bit gere, because its one of my better efforts in explaining some of the difficulties I have with any version of socialism whatsoever.
Of course, I was referring to specific points made by a particular editor, who describes him/herself as a Trotskyite. You'll have to imagine the other half of the conversation as you follow along.
The comparison of human individuals with neurons in the brain strikes me as an extraordinarily dangerous one, as if leading up to the decision to treat dissidents as tumor cells, which of course have to be removed (killed) for the good of the whole organ. The humanist high ground? But if we must have such a horribly organicist image, let us acknowledge that these neurons decide how they interact. They can't decide each to live as a hermit, but they can decide to interact by buying, selling, and investing rather than by voting.
After all, that is how skyscrapers generally do get built. Some people invest by buying the stocks or bonds of a construction company. Its managers hire subcontractors, who hire employees, some of whom are architects, others of whom are brick-layers, etc. The neurons interact by buying goods and services from one another, on terms driven by supply and demand, like the purchase and sale of canvases on which painters can express themselves.
Your planned global economy with all sorts of voting-driven levels of majoritarianism down to the town council and up to the Planet Government, is an improvement upon this ... why? Because its more coercive? That's a negative, not a positive. Because it involves voting? Why is that a good thing? Because those who don't like it can leave by opting out of the social contract, as you promised on your Talk page? No sovereign yet has agreed with you in giving such an opt out an institutional reality. I would gladly endorse it -- anarcho-capitalists ask for nothing more. We would expect that the opting outs would soon reach the level that would allow for the opters to build skyscrapers (if and only if the market realities supported them). But I also suspect that as soon as that appeared likely, the opt-out "privileges" would be revoked by the planners, the addicts of sovereignty. There has to be a general withering of the myth of sovereignty for anarcho-capitalism to succeed on the global level.
As to the question whether the saving of a single life can be a misdirection of resources: yes. Of course it can! If you think through what you describe as the utilitarian elements of your own world-view you will soon reach the same conclusion. How much resource use has to be extended in the saving of one life before that becomes prohibitively expensive in terms of other opportunities lost, including the opportunities of other rescues? That is a question for any form of consequentialism, of course. Is the profit motive worse as a way of answering tht question than some alternative? Perhaps. Saying so won't make it so, though.
Do capitalists plan? Yes, of course. Does such planning prove that planning at a greater "macro-level" is required, or even rational? No. Planning within a market framework is consistent with the premise of bounded rationality, with an understanding of the impossibility of predicting the results of all the flaps of the butterfly wings. Planning in a way that would esssentially abolish the market framework requires a coterie of planners with coercive sovereign power -- capable of regarding dissidents as cancerous cells requiring removal, as your analogy indicates. It is the difference between the planning of the kulaks and the planning of those who liquidated the kulaks. Majoritarianism doesn't affect that issue at all -- since even self-appointed vanguardist dictators find it easy to "plan" the liquidation of unpopular relatively affluent minorities, to everybody's loss.
Let us consider your sentence, "too many cooks spoil the broth only if the cooks don't work together properly." Is that anything but a tautology? If the broth is spoiled than we consider that the working-together must have improper, right? The point of the folk saying, though, seems to be that the more cooks there are working on the same soup, the more likely it is that there will be some such impropriety in their working together. Better to have one cook who likes to make salty soups, and another who makes them salt-free, then to have them arguing in the kitchen while the soup boils over. In the case of two competing cooks, the market will decide what amount of saltiness eventually prevails. And that is a bad method of making that decision because...?
Ah, because letting the cooks go their own way subject to market forces leads us to Iraq, Somalia, and Afghanistan. Oh, great logician, I bow in awe at your leaps of faith. The problem in all those places arises not from the general rejection of the myth of sovereignty but from its acceptance, and the competition of different would-be governments to control the levers that this myth creates.
Your appeal to the dark ages in Europe is more interesting. Consider an average serf in France in, say, 799 AD. Compare his lot to that of a slave or other humbly born schmoe in late-imperial Gaul in, say, 299 AD. Is it obvious to you that the former had a worse life than the latter? Is it obvious that the collapse of the western Empire and its sort of planning had hurt the common folk? It isn't obvious to me, although I concede that it is possible.
If bottom-of-the-hierarchy life in France was worse in 799 than it had been in Gaul in 299 (a big "if"), then I submit the most likely explanation was the diminution in trade around the Meditteranean basin. When Rome controlled the whole basin and called it "Our Ocean," there was a lot of trade, subject always to the nuisance of piracy. After the rise of Islam, the basin was in effect split in two, and trade between the two halves became a rare and surreptitious practice. That may have hurt our hypothetical serf much more than the fall of Rome itself. And of course the rise of Islam was a lot of things, some of them positive (the creation of algebra, etc.) but it was not a test of anarcho-capitalism. What was the situation in terms of trade in between the fall of Rome and the Rise of Islam? Ah, a complicated question, see the article on Henri Pirenne, who addressed this point.
Not a bad little essay for a lazy Saturday afternoon. Reply when and if you get the notion. I am, for the most part, simply endeavoring to cure you of your reflex of letting cliches like "the dark ages" or "the humanist high ground" do your thinking for you. Those too-ready phrases, like your usage of italics in other cases, avoid thought and substance.
I may have excluded some points, in that lazy Saturday way of mine, that you would expect me to cover. So here we go. Your comments about how I have refuted myself seem based on the idea that I first (a) put forward a quasi-mystical notion of human boundedness and later (b) refuted it by putting forth a naturalistic account of the same phenomenon based on chaos theory. But this isn’t self refutation at all. It isn’t even a change of emphasis. I never said that there was anything mystical about the idea, and have always been perfectly willing to take it as naturalistic.
You, on the other hand, do seem to be backing off an earlier statement. You said that the “high ground” position was that human rationality is in principle unbounded ("limitless" was your word) if understood collectively. But now you have added that this will only be true when there are an infinite number of humans – which means, I infer, that it will never be true. If you mean infinite population as a real project you must be a fun guy at conventions of the ZPG folks! There will always be an infinite gulf between infinity and any actual finite number, however large, so we’re stuck with boundedness.
Ah, yes, but we have computers! I’m not clear on why they are more important to the principles at stake here than is an abacus, though. Are the computers going to make resource allocation decisions for us, or will humans make them? If the computers make them, then we’ve abandoned the market and abandoned any notion of majority rule, too. Digitocracy is neither anarchy nor democracy. On the other hand, if humans are going to continue to make decisions, then human boundedness remains as important a fact about human nature as it has always been, and the conclusions the Austrian school deduced from it a century ago followed logically then and still follow logically now – despite the availability of abacuses and related tricks.