One does not need to go further than this point 2:10 "THEY GOT THE GOVERNMENT to tell the people that the shmoo was unamerican...." which proves that capitalists on their own have no power without government intervention. It's this power that the govt holds that free market capitalists want to get rid of. It's the socialist who insist it's necessary and can not see the connection.
2:30 in and I've already refuted his claim against Capitalism. This is not an example of Capitalism, it's Cronyism. If this were a Capitalism, the "rich Capitalists" wouldn't be able to convince the government to do anything about the shmoos because it's not a pure Capitalism unless there are free markets.
@apell7110:00 of your comment and its already clear that you're blinded by wishful thinking about the relations between state power and capitalism. You cannot simply state that "free markets" is the condition under which no political influence can be exercised, any different scenario being not "true" capitalism. This is apriorism, dogmatic thinking. You have to *demonstrate* that collective action by capitalist is impossible in a competitive economy. Plenty of models asserting the opposite.
@distopiadnb Individualism drives capitalism. Entrepreneurs are rewarded based on how they combine entrepreneurial ability, labor, land and capital. When you allow the state to regulate, mandate, subsidize or bail-out industries, it is in conflict with the free market because the state is a biased arbitrator. A lot of regulations exist not to save your precious environment, but because companies WROTE them to prohibit other people from entering the market and competing with them.
@distopiadnb All exchange is voluntary. But I will embrace the idea that collective action is possible in a competitive economy. Employees - or as I know them to be called, outsourced labor - can collectively unite and demand that an employer raise wages, conditions or benefits. But even this doesn't require a government to mandate to the business what to do or how to do it.
@apell711 you don't need to tell me the story of bad regulation and so on. I'm not friendly with étatisme and i think there is a reasonable way -if far from conventional ones- to argue for free markets. I stand for individualism and the priority of freedom over equality. But an apology of capitalism doesn't follow consequentially at all. Let's proceed by order:
1) Enterpreneurs, Schumpeter-like, are not (=need not be) capitalists. They own skills, not capital. Let us not mix different issues. →
2) Your account of monopolies is really one of an extremely ad hoc, voluntaristic character. Ungrounded political intervention cannot explain secularly growing, economy-wide industrial concentration in pretty much every advanced capitalist country. This, interestingly, doesn't dampen competition. It keeps up with it ex-post. Monopolistic power has an economic rationale in increasing returns, internal and external economies. Political support is more a consequence than a cause.
3) When i wrote abour collective action i was referring to capitalists. The fact you mentioned, that action by individual capitalists may well be bad for capitalism as a system is true. But the existence of this discrepancy doesn't allow you to simply say the first "is not true capitalism". If capitalists, acting as capitalists, under a competitive market economy that can reasonably be called capitalist, are pushed to act collectively to orient state policy, this cannot be assumed away.
4) If you agree that wage bargaining (which is not market-based however, so one should legitimately say that bargaining displaces a free market alternative) is legitimate, you have to admit that the state should be able to guarantee the enforcement of bargained contracts. In fact, without some sort of state power to guarantee the rule of law there would be no market. I can peacefully concede that the state could in many occasions run against the capitalist logic -that's no harm to my argument.
5) Last, Cohen's argument is really different from what you may think having listened just that introductory story. Go ahead, he doesn't rely on silly hypotheses, his critique is not trivial. He pretty much accepts the classical assumptions about capitalism.
@distopiadnb Your arguments are legitimate. Let me correct your idea that monopolies exist naturally. For a monopoly to exist, it means that one company has the control over a product or service for which there are no substitutes. In a free market, any individual aggravated over the price or just feeling adventurous enough has the capabilities to acquire the resources to open up an industry that produces the same product or offers the same service at a cheaper price.
@distopiadnb Capitalism only flourishes in a free market economy in which the government cannot or does not write laws that violate or interfere in a voluntary contract. If capitalists, even collectively, try to impose a law or rule by force that DOES this, it's no longer capitalism, but crony capitalism. Saying capitalism is the problem is like saying you hate oranges because you ate a rotten, moldy orange once. What we have now is the rotten, moldy orange of capitalism.
@distopiadnb Wage bargaining IS market-based. You, as an employee, are arguing that your services are worth more than what's being offered. As a group, you have more leverage to state your case. If the employer gives you what you're demanding, then he's agreeing with you. This is the same thing as haggling.
@apell711: I'm sorry, wage bargaining -in any reasonable sense- is a political process based on relative force of two collective agents. The wage so determined can and almost always diverge from a counterfactual scenario in which no union exist and workers stipulate their contract individually. There is no perfect competition in this scenario and the distribution of income doesn't follow automatically from factor demand. The influence of the price mechanism is thus substantially weakened.
You seem to find the "market" just as you see free will. Things are really different imho. First, unequal initial distribution of means of production imply de facto unequal freedom on the labour market, as wokers don't have any alternative to wage labour. A minimum definition of freedom implies at least a reasonable alternative: for wage earners there is no such alternative under capitalism. So the contract cannot be viewed as a guarantee that wage labour is a choice.
The suggestion that contractual part are naturally, as such, inclined to cooperation is unjustified, even in liberalism's own terms. Each part has an interest in relating with the other only insofar that this benefits his self-interest. That being the case, the endurance of cooperation is the case to be explained, not the intuitively obvious. Workers and capitalists need each other for their own purposes, but in issues such as hours and working conditions they are clearly opposed.
Then, the difference between interference and enforcement is all but self-evident. You cannot simply rely each time on the one that fits your argument well. You must discern the two concepts clearly and identify a benchmark against which one can judge real cases. I defy you to do this. Under different historical circumstances and/or in different countries, the very same measures have been either attacked as interference or praised as enlightened enforcement.
The state do not just "interfere" with voluntary contracts, it can simply state what can be written into it. The state did it when slavery was abolished, when child labour was abolished, each time minimum working conditions changes and so on. This is *potentially* threatening for the system. But it can be very well threatening for just some individual capitalists, and functional to the system's need as a whole. Shaping incentives, law creates as much markets as it abolishes them.
On monopoly: as a matter of logic appearance of substitutes is not an argument against the existence of monopolist tendencies. At least it can -legitimately in my view- support the idea that monopoly power is temporary. But to rule the very idea of monopoly out of capitalism you have to demonstrate that such a situation cannot even exist. In fact, you should have to argue that the need to substitute never manifest itself. Innovations, locations, skills, all them prove the contrary.
I could reply to all of this but i think it's enough, we are monopolizing comments^^.
I can just strongly suggest you to read Cohen's "Self-ownership, freedom and equality", because it adresses exactly the kind of arguments you're arguing for. Roughly speaking, the libertarian pursuit of individual fredom and autonomy is the right one. Marxists like Cohen simply accept those prescriptions but claim that capitalism is not the better way to realize them. You might disagree but you will enjoy it.
@apell711 hehe yes i did, I'm not dismissive in any way of those kind of positions, though i think they are substantially wrong. I've read some Hayek and Mises, quite interesting and coherent view. Some methodological premises are not so far from Marx, you may be surprised from that.
@distopiadnb If a monopoly exists, then the consumers have accepted the price the business has offered. This is their free will. The more unfair the price, the more driven the consumer population will be to erect a competitor. But when your company has somehow become a monopoly, it's in your best interest to keep prices down really low so as not to encourage competition which will lower your profits even more. That's pro-consumer and pro-business.
@distopiadnb If the need to find a substitute product never manifests itself, then that means the product the monopoly offers is adequate. Inadequacy in quality, price, convenience, promptness, friendliness: all of these are incentives to find a competitor.
@distopiadnb Abolishing slavery was interfering but it's interfering in a way that protects the property of those slaves. It's the same thing as theft, but on a larger scale.
In defense of human rights, I'd argue that a child does not have the judgment to determine the fairness of contracts. It is for this reason that in a free society, there can be interference against child labor.
@distopiadnb That's fair. To interfere on behalf of a union means to force an employer into making a decision he isn't obligated to make because his business is his property and to force someone to agree to a contract is not a valid contract. It's like forcing someone to say something. The unions fight for this and it's coercion.
@distopiadnb To interfere on behalf of the consumer means to forbid a merchant from offering a product to a consumer or the means with which he acquired that product, regardless of whether the consumer would have accepted the terms of the deal or not. This is also coercion. To interfere on behalf of the company means you're forcibly taking money from people through taxes and diverting that capital to the company. This is also coercion.
@distopiadnb Enforcement is just punishing theft. If two parties agree to a contract but one withholds his end after the other has already given it, this is theft. You took his property through deceit, which is coercion. If the robbed party can't acquire it on his own, it's the state's responsibility to protect your property and return it to you.
@distopiadnb Good point! But his self-interest tells him to cooperate. If he doesn't, he has gained more than if he had done nothing. He has both the object he created of lesser value plus the object of greater value that he stole. But if he does cooperate, he not only has a greater absolute value, but he also has the opportunity to profit from his partner in the future. If he hadn't upheld his end of the contract, that opportunity would have been lost.
@distopiadnb It is in the self-interest of a capitalist to provide the hours as the workers (they're really both capitalists: one trades money, the other trades time, effort and talents) demand them and the conditions as the workers demand them because meeting these demands raises morale/productivity, keeps them working so they can improve their skills/provide the capitalist MORE revenue (than constantly training new workers).
@distopiadnb There is no unequal distribution of means. You are born into the world with usually two arms, legs and a brain. You have your physical effort, your mental effort and your passion and how you combine them transform into property. Either you use your body to stock shelves or you use your mind to cure diseases or use your passion to create art. You exchange the products of those skills for products that someone else created.
@distopiadnb The workers stocking shelves stock shelves because they've made the choice to accept that job. Regardless of whether they're happy, they've accepted it. If they didn't, they wouldn't be there.
@distopiadnb Don't be sorry. It's not your fault. Let me explain it another way. An employer pays his employees a certain wage. One worker feels his effort is more valuable than the wage you give him. He confronts the employer (haggling), he disagrees and asks him to return to work. He runs the idea to his coworkers. They agree with him. They all confront the employer in union and threaten to stop working.
@distopiadnb His revenue ceases and has three options: shut down because he can't afford raises, hire new people for less (end operations/revenue until he hires new staff at current/in-between wages), try to negotiate (pause operations/revenue, plus slow-down future revenue from higher wages) or cave in and meet demands (no pause, slow-down of future revenue from higher wages).
@distopiadnb Because he owns the business, it's his decision to make. Would he be "free" with his property if the government forced him to raise wages?
@distopiadnb I can definitely admit that the state has the right to enforce legal contracts. That's not interference, that's enforcement. The free market doesn't guarantee compliance of both individuals after the contract has been agreed upon, but it suggests that since both parties entered it voluntarily, they will be inclined to comply.
If Cohen is trying to argue against a company or industry's right to have the government pass laws in its favor, I agree with him.
@kdo2300 Did you watch the rest of the video? He actually addresses the problems with capitalism itself such as the concept of private ownership and the inevitable and insatiable need for profit.
@s0673451 He is using what puilosophers call a "thought experiment" - imagining a situation that helps us see the true situation as it exists rather than the way we have become to accept things as "normal" or "the only way".
To be fair, if anyone besides Gerry Cohen told the shmoo story you would probably view them as preachy and a bit cracked. But he's so likable and charismatic it's like your uncle's talking to you.
For liberals, his book: "Rescuing justice & equality" is a collection of essays which amount to probably the most sophisticated critical work on Rawl's theory of justice.
For `libertarians': "Self-ownership, freedom and equality" is a collection of essays in which he clarifies Nozick's libertarian philosophy, irons out his inconsistencies, exposes the notion of self-ownership on which it is based, and shows that it cannot deliver the freedom it promises to secure.
OMG so much fail! this is the poison of rhetoric rather than discussion. In discussion this putz would get destroyed by even the most base libritarian.
Go on /r/anarchism, furiously upvote and like this video. Repost it on your facebook. Preach about the revolution all day long on bulletin boards and forums.
At the end of the day, you accomplish nothing. You are all a bunch of jealous children slacktivists.
@megustaface And you are a submissivist who forgoes his right to greater liberty because, despite perhaps knowing capitalism is wrong, the forces backing it are too strong, and it's easier to jump on its bandwagon. "You accomplish nothing" because of what - a metaphysical force of justice? Or repressive and mystificatory ideological forces that place too great a constraint? The first task is to recognize this, the second, from this rational position, is to recognize that there is an alternative.
@megustaface Why not give a decent criticism of Geryy's argument, instead of ranting like an immature fool. At least then, people can engage in a serious discussion.
Didn't the capitalists use the gov't in your little story? And aren't they using the gov't today to impose controls on industry (IPs and patents, example Monstanto and preventing the miraculous replication machine of file-sharing, network TV trying to outlaw cable). Of course capitalists have an incentive to prevent innovation that makes them obsolete, everyone does. But capitalists have always used the state. I'm only 3min in, maybe he'll explain how capitalists could do this w/o a state.
He spelled corporatism wrong.
WerSeidIhrDenn2 2 days ago
Want some truth and history instead o fairy tales?
tomwoods.com
moses.org
pipem4n 5 days ago
@pipem4n
mistyped :D ment mises.org of cource.
pipem4n 5 days ago
when?
MrBillcale 1 month ago
they should just broadcast this video instead of the latest republican presidential debate.
clockworkscott 1 month ago 2
One does not need to go further than this point 2:10 "THEY GOT THE GOVERNMENT to tell the people that the shmoo was unamerican...." which proves that capitalists on their own have no power without government intervention. It's this power that the govt holds that free market capitalists want to get rid of. It's the socialist who insist it's necessary and can not see the connection.
studentofmises 1 month ago
2:30 in and I've already refuted his claim against Capitalism. This is not an example of Capitalism, it's Cronyism. If this were a Capitalism, the "rich Capitalists" wouldn't be able to convince the government to do anything about the shmoos because it's not a pure Capitalism unless there are free markets.
apell711 3 months ago
@apell711 0:00 of your comment and its already clear that you're blinded by wishful thinking about the relations between state power and capitalism. You cannot simply state that "free markets" is the condition under which no political influence can be exercised, any different scenario being not "true" capitalism. This is apriorism, dogmatic thinking. You have to *demonstrate* that collective action by capitalist is impossible in a competitive economy. Plenty of models asserting the opposite.
distopiadnb 2 months ago in playlist G A Cohen
@distopiadnb Individualism drives capitalism. Entrepreneurs are rewarded based on how they combine entrepreneurial ability, labor, land and capital. When you allow the state to regulate, mandate, subsidize or bail-out industries, it is in conflict with the free market because the state is a biased arbitrator. A lot of regulations exist not to save your precious environment, but because companies WROTE them to prohibit other people from entering the market and competing with them.
apell711 2 months ago
@distopiadnb All exchange is voluntary. But I will embrace the idea that collective action is possible in a competitive economy. Employees - or as I know them to be called, outsourced labor - can collectively unite and demand that an employer raise wages, conditions or benefits. But even this doesn't require a government to mandate to the business what to do or how to do it.
apell711 2 months ago
@apell711 you don't need to tell me the story of bad regulation and so on. I'm not friendly with étatisme and i think there is a reasonable way -if far from conventional ones- to argue for free markets. I stand for individualism and the priority of freedom over equality. But an apology of capitalism doesn't follow consequentially at all. Let's proceed by order:
1) Enterpreneurs, Schumpeter-like, are not (=need not be) capitalists. They own skills, not capital. Let us not mix different issues. →
distopiadnb 2 months ago
2) Your account of monopolies is really one of an extremely ad hoc, voluntaristic character. Ungrounded political intervention cannot explain secularly growing, economy-wide industrial concentration in pretty much every advanced capitalist country. This, interestingly, doesn't dampen competition. It keeps up with it ex-post. Monopolistic power has an economic rationale in increasing returns, internal and external economies. Political support is more a consequence than a cause.
distopiadnb 2 months ago
3) When i wrote abour collective action i was referring to capitalists. The fact you mentioned, that action by individual capitalists may well be bad for capitalism as a system is true. But the existence of this discrepancy doesn't allow you to simply say the first "is not true capitalism". If capitalists, acting as capitalists, under a competitive market economy that can reasonably be called capitalist, are pushed to act collectively to orient state policy, this cannot be assumed away.
distopiadnb 2 months ago
4) If you agree that wage bargaining (which is not market-based however, so one should legitimately say that bargaining displaces a free market alternative) is legitimate, you have to admit that the state should be able to guarantee the enforcement of bargained contracts. In fact, without some sort of state power to guarantee the rule of law there would be no market. I can peacefully concede that the state could in many occasions run against the capitalist logic -that's no harm to my argument.
distopiadnb 2 months ago
5) Last, Cohen's argument is really different from what you may think having listened just that introductory story. Go ahead, he doesn't rely on silly hypotheses, his critique is not trivial. He pretty much accepts the classical assumptions about capitalism.
distopiadnb 2 months ago
@distopiadnb Your arguments are legitimate. Let me correct your idea that monopolies exist naturally. For a monopoly to exist, it means that one company has the control over a product or service for which there are no substitutes. In a free market, any individual aggravated over the price or just feeling adventurous enough has the capabilities to acquire the resources to open up an industry that produces the same product or offers the same service at a cheaper price.
apell711 2 months ago
@distopiadnb Capitalism only flourishes in a free market economy in which the government cannot or does not write laws that violate or interfere in a voluntary contract. If capitalists, even collectively, try to impose a law or rule by force that DOES this, it's no longer capitalism, but crony capitalism. Saying capitalism is the problem is like saying you hate oranges because you ate a rotten, moldy orange once. What we have now is the rotten, moldy orange of capitalism.
apell711 2 months ago
@distopiadnb Wage bargaining IS market-based. You, as an employee, are arguing that your services are worth more than what's being offered. As a group, you have more leverage to state your case. If the employer gives you what you're demanding, then he's agreeing with you. This is the same thing as haggling.
apell711 2 months ago
@apell711: I'm sorry, wage bargaining -in any reasonable sense- is a political process based on relative force of two collective agents. The wage so determined can and almost always diverge from a counterfactual scenario in which no union exist and workers stipulate their contract individually. There is no perfect competition in this scenario and the distribution of income doesn't follow automatically from factor demand. The influence of the price mechanism is thus substantially weakened.
distopiadnb 2 months ago
You seem to find the "market" just as you see free will. Things are really different imho. First, unequal initial distribution of means of production imply de facto unequal freedom on the labour market, as wokers don't have any alternative to wage labour. A minimum definition of freedom implies at least a reasonable alternative: for wage earners there is no such alternative under capitalism. So the contract cannot be viewed as a guarantee that wage labour is a choice.
distopiadnb 2 months ago
The suggestion that contractual part are naturally, as such, inclined to cooperation is unjustified, even in liberalism's own terms. Each part has an interest in relating with the other only insofar that this benefits his self-interest. That being the case, the endurance of cooperation is the case to be explained, not the intuitively obvious. Workers and capitalists need each other for their own purposes, but in issues such as hours and working conditions they are clearly opposed.
distopiadnb 2 months ago
Then, the difference between interference and enforcement is all but self-evident. You cannot simply rely each time on the one that fits your argument well. You must discern the two concepts clearly and identify a benchmark against which one can judge real cases. I defy you to do this. Under different historical circumstances and/or in different countries, the very same measures have been either attacked as interference or praised as enlightened enforcement.
distopiadnb 2 months ago
The state do not just "interfere" with voluntary contracts, it can simply state what can be written into it. The state did it when slavery was abolished, when child labour was abolished, each time minimum working conditions changes and so on. This is *potentially* threatening for the system. But it can be very well threatening for just some individual capitalists, and functional to the system's need as a whole. Shaping incentives, law creates as much markets as it abolishes them.
distopiadnb 2 months ago
On monopoly: as a matter of logic appearance of substitutes is not an argument against the existence of monopolist tendencies. At least it can -legitimately in my view- support the idea that monopoly power is temporary. But to rule the very idea of monopoly out of capitalism you have to demonstrate that such a situation cannot even exist. In fact, you should have to argue that the need to substitute never manifest itself. Innovations, locations, skills, all them prove the contrary.
distopiadnb 2 months ago
... And the first monopoly to be mentioned, of course, is the monopoly of means of production by the capitalist class.
ps: don't ask me about Cohen just listen to his speech :D
distopiadnb 2 months ago
@distopiadnb But we're all capitalists! I think I explained that in response to this series of arguments.
apell711 2 months ago
I could reply to all of this but i think it's enough, we are monopolizing comments^^.
I can just strongly suggest you to read Cohen's "Self-ownership, freedom and equality", because it adresses exactly the kind of arguments you're arguing for. Roughly speaking, the libertarian pursuit of individual fredom and autonomy is the right one. Marxists like Cohen simply accept those prescriptions but claim that capitalism is not the better way to realize them. You might disagree but you will enjoy it.
distopiadnb 2 months ago
@distopiadnb Well I hope you at least read my points. I'm unwavering.
apell711 2 months ago
@apell711 hehe yes i did, I'm not dismissive in any way of those kind of positions, though i think they are substantially wrong. I've read some Hayek and Mises, quite interesting and coherent view. Some methodological premises are not so far from Marx, you may be surprised from that.
distopiadnb 2 months ago
@distopiadnb If a monopoly exists, then the consumers have accepted the price the business has offered. This is their free will. The more unfair the price, the more driven the consumer population will be to erect a competitor. But when your company has somehow become a monopoly, it's in your best interest to keep prices down really low so as not to encourage competition which will lower your profits even more. That's pro-consumer and pro-business.
apell711 2 months ago
@distopiadnb If the need to find a substitute product never manifests itself, then that means the product the monopoly offers is adequate. Inadequacy in quality, price, convenience, promptness, friendliness: all of these are incentives to find a competitor.
apell711 2 months ago
@distopiadnb Abolishing slavery was interfering but it's interfering in a way that protects the property of those slaves. It's the same thing as theft, but on a larger scale.
In defense of human rights, I'd argue that a child does not have the judgment to determine the fairness of contracts. It is for this reason that in a free society, there can be interference against child labor.
apell711 2 months ago
@distopiadnb That's fair. To interfere on behalf of a union means to force an employer into making a decision he isn't obligated to make because his business is his property and to force someone to agree to a contract is not a valid contract. It's like forcing someone to say something. The unions fight for this and it's coercion.
apell711 2 months ago
@distopiadnb To interfere on behalf of the consumer means to forbid a merchant from offering a product to a consumer or the means with which he acquired that product, regardless of whether the consumer would have accepted the terms of the deal or not. This is also coercion. To interfere on behalf of the company means you're forcibly taking money from people through taxes and diverting that capital to the company. This is also coercion.
apell711 2 months ago
@distopiadnb Enforcement is just punishing theft. If two parties agree to a contract but one withholds his end after the other has already given it, this is theft. You took his property through deceit, which is coercion. If the robbed party can't acquire it on his own, it's the state's responsibility to protect your property and return it to you.
apell711 2 months ago
@distopiadnb Good point! But his self-interest tells him to cooperate. If he doesn't, he has gained more than if he had done nothing. He has both the object he created of lesser value plus the object of greater value that he stole. But if he does cooperate, he not only has a greater absolute value, but he also has the opportunity to profit from his partner in the future. If he hadn't upheld his end of the contract, that opportunity would have been lost.
apell711 2 months ago
@distopiadnb It is in the self-interest of a capitalist to provide the hours as the workers (they're really both capitalists: one trades money, the other trades time, effort and talents) demand them and the conditions as the workers demand them because meeting these demands raises morale/productivity, keeps them working so they can improve their skills/provide the capitalist MORE revenue (than constantly training new workers).
apell711 2 months ago
@distopiadnb There is no unequal distribution of means. You are born into the world with usually two arms, legs and a brain. You have your physical effort, your mental effort and your passion and how you combine them transform into property. Either you use your body to stock shelves or you use your mind to cure diseases or use your passion to create art. You exchange the products of those skills for products that someone else created.
apell711 2 months ago
@distopiadnb The workers stocking shelves stock shelves because they've made the choice to accept that job. Regardless of whether they're happy, they've accepted it. If they didn't, they wouldn't be there.
apell711 2 months ago
@distopiadnb Don't be sorry. It's not your fault. Let me explain it another way. An employer pays his employees a certain wage. One worker feels his effort is more valuable than the wage you give him. He confronts the employer (haggling), he disagrees and asks him to return to work. He runs the idea to his coworkers. They agree with him. They all confront the employer in union and threaten to stop working.
apell711 2 months ago
@distopiadnb His revenue ceases and has three options: shut down because he can't afford raises, hire new people for less (end operations/revenue until he hires new staff at current/in-between wages), try to negotiate (pause operations/revenue, plus slow-down future revenue from higher wages) or cave in and meet demands (no pause, slow-down of future revenue from higher wages).
apell711 2 months ago
@distopiadnb Because he owns the business, it's his decision to make. Would he be "free" with his property if the government forced him to raise wages?
apell711 2 months ago
@distopiadnb I can definitely admit that the state has the right to enforce legal contracts. That's not interference, that's enforcement. The free market doesn't guarantee compliance of both individuals after the contract has been agreed upon, but it suggests that since both parties entered it voluntarily, they will be inclined to comply.
If Cohen is trying to argue against a company or industry's right to have the government pass laws in its favor, I agree with him.
apell711 2 months ago
...but I'm a shmoo...
Shmoo06 3 months ago
The problem in the schmoo story wasn't capitalism (voluntary trade and ownership) rather it was the government!
His beef is with corpratism, not capitalism.
kdo2300 4 months ago
@kdo2300 Did you watch the rest of the video? He actually addresses the problems with capitalism itself such as the concept of private ownership and the inevitable and insatiable need for profit.
PuissantAlgernon 3 months ago
youtube.com/watch?v=KFXuGIpsdE0
Dullumis 4 months ago
because THERE IS ONLY HONOR, VALUE, AND VIRTUE IN A MARKET BASED UPON PRIVATE PROPERTY AND VALUE BASED OFF OF RARITY.
Dullumis 4 months ago
Cohen: "Take this capitalists!! 2:47"
idgafjavi06 7 months ago 7
i don't understand. what is a schmoo? Why is he talking about them? thanks.
s0673451 7 months ago
@s0673451 He is using what puilosophers call a "thought experiment" - imagining a situation that helps us see the true situation as it exists rather than the way we have become to accept things as "normal" or "the only way".
suefew 6 months ago
His thesis is complete schmooo...
the only one unhappy about schmooo are the capitalist! What kind of a stupid axiom is that!
FreddyFuFu 7 months ago
To be fair, if anyone besides Gerry Cohen told the shmoo story you would probably view them as preachy and a bit cracked. But he's so likable and charismatic it's like your uncle's talking to you.
jimbopumbapigsticks 7 months ago 2
G. A. Cohen against capitalism axford academia edu MohamadrezaRezaee Parasteshnews sync startupgrade
Parasteshnews1 9 months ago
Cohen was brilliant!
For liberals, his book: "Rescuing justice & equality" is a collection of essays which amount to probably the most sophisticated critical work on Rawl's theory of justice.
For `libertarians': "Self-ownership, freedom and equality" is a collection of essays in which he clarifies Nozick's libertarian philosophy, irons out his inconsistencies, exposes the notion of self-ownership on which it is based, and shows that it cannot deliver the freedom it promises to secure.
d0ubtfu 9 months ago 12
Comment removed
d0ubtfu 9 months ago
OMG so much fail! this is the poison of rhetoric rather than discussion. In discussion this putz would get destroyed by even the most base libritarian.
vincenmt 10 months ago
@vincenmt Ha.
DancingTableLeg 10 months ago
Go on /r/anarchism, furiously upvote and like this video. Repost it on your facebook. Preach about the revolution all day long on bulletin boards and forums.
At the end of the day, you accomplish nothing. You are all a bunch of jealous children slacktivists.
megustaface 10 months ago
@megustaface And you are a submissivist who forgoes his right to greater liberty because, despite perhaps knowing capitalism is wrong, the forces backing it are too strong, and it's easier to jump on its bandwagon. "You accomplish nothing" because of what - a metaphysical force of justice? Or repressive and mystificatory ideological forces that place too great a constraint? The first task is to recognize this, the second, from this rational position, is to recognize that there is an alternative.
yohaneuano4 9 months ago
@megustaface Why not give a decent criticism of Geryy's argument, instead of ranting like an immature fool. At least then, people can engage in a serious discussion.
naikee1010 9 months ago
Shmoos are a disruptive technology. you're stupid
shirtfag 11 months ago
Didn't the capitalists use the gov't in your little story? And aren't they using the gov't today to impose controls on industry (IPs and patents, example Monstanto and preventing the miraculous replication machine of file-sharing, network TV trying to outlaw cable). Of course capitalists have an incentive to prevent innovation that makes them obsolete, everyone does. But capitalists have always used the state. I'm only 3min in, maybe he'll explain how capitalists could do this w/o a state.
fringeelements 1 year ago