The foundation of capitalism is exploitation. The wealthy land owner gives the starving serfs a choice between dying on the streets or working for whatever wage he desires. if you are asking about the roots of capital then that comes form workers owning (for lack of a better term) the means of produciton. Farmers "owned" their fields, as did blacksmith's their irons. Only as warlords and thugs began to concetrate power did the idea of absentee property and capital (as seperate from the worker) arose. You system was started by exploitation and continues in it.

In its true sense, what is capitalism?

Capitalism is not markets or money or voluntary exchange. Capitalism is the concentration of wealth to absentee landlords. The idea that anarchism and capitalism can be put together in any way is laughable as the capitalist is no different from the king or the politician.

Capitalism is as natural to the human as sex or breathing. If it wasn’t, humanity would still be roaming the Earth naked, shelterless, and eating only for today. Capitalism wasn’t forced, coerced, or directed.

That's rhetoric over logic. Interaction and trade do not cpitalism make. Not to mention the fact that humanity brought itself up with a variety of states form the tribal hierarchy, to the bloody dictator, and the feudal lord. Capitalism is a modern take on feudalism, no natural office of man.

I, an individual, am the base arbiter of force regarding my property.

Your property only exists either through forcing others to recognize it through violence or by collective institution. We'll skip the absurdity of non-agression in the context of initial aquisition and move on. You are the arbiter only of your own force, you are not arbiter of your property because you can be killed and your property taken.

You might consider spontaneity as the solution to the answer to your question here. When traders met they created their medium of exchange, rules, and took it for granted each would get the best deal they could and it was up to each to defend themselves against being taken.

Yes a wonderufl system by which no man could be trusted save at the point of a knife. My point remains that without objective standards trade becomes primitive brutal barter. You might want to look into the forensics of your average drug deal. No impersonal force to worry about or objective arbiter so you can gain through illicit action.

Time evolved customs and procedures in trading that becme commonly known, but not created by a state no enforced by a state.

Yes, enforced by the state. Customs and procedures that if broken would do what? Bring a third party to bear? And what is a state again? Oh yes, an arbiter beyond the knife-point deal that can deal objectively with both men. You are acting off of a definition of the state that requires a county seal or fancy title. Let's not forget that customs are collective cultural rules for behavior that are enforced by a state, even if that state is the collective will of that culture. Just look at amish justice. When the rules are broken a man is cut off from speaking or trading. That's collective pressure, a state by any other name.

What happens to property if the arbiter is the force? The arbiter of force becomes the de facto owner. More reason to fear the arbiter than to embrace him in my view.

Yeah because losing that land to a system by which you can seek redress is so much worse than a system of where you have to risk your own life employing force.

It worked all over America until it faced a force that it could not comprehend and waited too long to repel.

America was recklessly capitalist during the robber baron age. However it was far from voluntaryist or anarchist. It is simple revisonism to decalre otherwise.

I don’t hold humanism as a highest value. I hold individual freedom as the highest value, therefore any coercion is the ultimate sin.

Except freedom-from is useless and without value in an of itself. Freedom can only instrumental value due to what it allows us to do. The the freedom of speech isn't valued because a lack of censorhip is in-itself good but because it allows us to speak our minds. Freedom-to is far more valuable than simple freedom from and neither deserves to be the highest value. To value freedom-from as the highest value is a brigand's morality.

The state can not create a better life for one without reducing the quality of life for another because the state has no money or resources other than that it steals from the people.

And the lone man can only ever produce a hut and some game. Only by becoming a member of a collective can he become more than a primitive. Government produces value not only in services it offers but the risks it removes. As a matter of fact nothing you make today is free from obligation to the state as without them you could not now (as opposed to ever) produce. The roads, the education, the police, the military, and son and so forth were all used in anything produced today. To simply stop at the individual in whose hands a thing resides is arbitrary and intellectually dishonest.

Not to mention that removing the capability of a person from buying a leer or a solid gold toilet is insignificant compared to the giving the capability to eat, learn, and strive. Taking from the rich their diminishing returns luxury money in no meaningful way harms them but letting the poor starve to death in the streets is meaningful and is real harm. Now do you see why the claim of social darwinism is so often lodged against your philosophy?

This Café has had this discussion and beat this horse for so long and in every way possible that it is amusing and slightly ridiculous to see someone come along and assign rejection of collectivism as “knee jerk”.

I don't think you have ever had this conversation before or are having it now. It's obvious from your tone that you have no interest in debating but rather outshouting. You are knee-jerk in that you step into this discussion with absolute faith that you are in possession of the one true philosophy that will create a utopia.

You're just as bad as fundamentalist christians. Your attitude is knee-jerk and your rhetoric is kneejerk with an outirght dismissal of anything that does not agree with you faith, without even an argument.

In my opinion you come close here, Jimmy D., but you make that collectivist/socialist mistake again of knee jerk lumping rich in with corrupt and greedy. Just isn’t so you know. The rich are no more prone to lapses of morality than the poor. The politicians, leaders, kings of communism and socialism have shown themselves to be equal in corruption and venality to anything a capitalist society ever produced, actually worse because of their hypocrisy of motive.

I find it laughable that you are spekaing fo hypocrisy of motive. Look at you claiming that the concetration of welath is not the concentration of power. That concentrated power is a state, it is the power of the right to control the lives of the poor. By the rich I mean the uber-wealthy, the top 1% who are all corrupt and all their gains are ill-gotten. Those that come to elath honestly are the upper middle class honest small-business man and middle manager with a heart of gold.

I am no foe to competition/markets, no advocate of centralization, or opponent of profit. I am an opponent of capitalism.

Now, I agree with you whole heartedly about the squandering of our resources by the corruption of politicians. I ignore Kings in context of our discussion vis-à-vis America, we don’t have them. Corrupt politicians, the word politicians in my mind automatically draws forth the knee jerk reaction of thinking corruption.

And the rich who pay off the politician and create monopolies, restrict neccesary resources, pillage the coffers of the people, and exploit the worker is no different. I also find it hilarious that you think it was the politicians who seduced the kind onld millionaire to become a special interest and not the other way round.

I think you’re besotted with the word collective. Pairing the word anarchy with word collective is more than a little strange to me. Then the second sentence, just how is a true market a collective endeavor?

I think you don't udnerstand what the collective is and are besotted with the myth of the individual. Imagine the human being born into a windowless room. There he never develops complex language, or the concept of property, or morality. These are inventions of the group experience. Individuals are nothing outside the group just as the group is nothing without the individual, it's interdependance both materially and psychologically. This Ayn Rand Neitzchian superman that will supposedly populated you Utopia doesn't exist.

Perhaps before you play at sociology you look into what creates a man and what creates customs. To claim that man alone is anyhting more than an animal is libertarian creationism, man springing full formed without ever being molded by the collective environment.

Thanks for the reply. Now to keep it up…

First, let me make certain I understand the points you put forth in your reply.

1. That humans, because of lack of perfect information, cannot be judged rational with any certainty.

2. That evolution is not completely random due to the constraints of natural law.

Therefore: Because both processes are semi-random (constrained random, if you will), they are similar.

First, let's agree on a definition for "rational". Webster's defines rational as "a: having reason or understanding b: relating to, based on, or agreeable to reason".

Reason, then, is "2 a (1): the power of comprehending, inferring, or thinking especially in orderly rational ways : intelligence (2): proper exercise of the mind (3): sanity b: the sum of the intellectual powers".

Evolutionary systems, then, are rational only in the sense that they can be understood by ourselves (in an incomplete fashion), as per definition b of "rational". In and of themselves, they possess no rationality (no intelligence). The laws that govern evolution do not, by popular scientific position, arise as the result of intelligence (otherwise we're positing Intelligent Design).

Economics also contains certain "laws", or theorems, such as that of supply and demand. However, these theorems are based upon the observation and generalization of human behavior. As such, lack of perfect information does not change the fact that economics is based upon the action of intelligent beings, however constrained. Limited rationality is not equivalent to irrationality.

Those items produced by humans within a capitalist system are the result of intelligent effort despite limited information. This limited information is also the reason for group efforts: the pooling of information. This helps mask the more limited information of individuals. Altogether, products such as microprocessors can be produced. The issue then, is not whether or not the product survives in the market, but the fact that it was produced in the first place.

One can argue that organic populations seek their own survival, but we're not talking about survival. We're talking about initial creation.

Of course, since this discussion is framed within the assumption that evolution is true and that intelligence has been produced through random processes completely untouched by intelligence, it makes my case that much harder to fully posit.

The only end point I can really make, then, is that economics and evolution compare poorly because of the fact that evolution is necessarily devoid of rationality in its natural operations, while economics is based upon the rationality of humanity, however limited.

Teach me all about government, oh guru.

Preach to me of collectivism/socialism.

I am receptive to your newfound wisdom.

You would have a hard time convincing me that the government would know how to spend this money better than the owners of that money. There are few economists in congress, & fewer scientists. How would they know? Why trust them?

My chief objection to government funding is the violent nature by which the state collect these funds. I object to this on both moral & practical grounds.

& debating whether some historical group had a state or not is pointless without defining what a state is. Barring that definition, the defenders of the state will call anything a state while overlooking just what some of us are objecting to. So I'll ask: apologists of the state, just how, exactly, do you define a state? Only then can a useful debate follow.

What impresses me is the ease with which we all use the words market, markets, and marketplace with no definition. It becomes obvious over time that most of the comments are made from a very personal viewpoint about the words, or from a rote learned view point.

I think this contributes enough differences in our thinking that we have these debates and are probably just tlaking around each other but with no significant disagreements.

"The one difficulty with the argument that evolution and the free market are similar is the factor of intelligence. In the free market, the contributions of individuals amount to a greater whole because of the intelligence of the parts. The belief that individuals are rational and that they will act rationally in their own best interest is core to the operation of the free market."

No one yet has contradicted, in effort or fact, my understanding that each of us is a market and that each of us in our decisions and action are the invisible hand that moves and shapes the economy.

This being the case, even my stupid decisions in a market transaction have an effect on the economy. The truth is, that like most, I don't care or worry about it.

For instance when I go to Walmart to purchase something I do not do so with any other motive in mind than to satisfy my desire or need. I don't do it to ensure the success of Walmart. The same is true of all my market transactions.

I take what I have said as the ultimate proof that attempts to control or regulate markets is the same thing as trying to herd or control 6 billion plus cats.

Enough of the 6 billion plus markets in their random operation become similar enough across a population that a sense of order emerges and some predictable anticipations can be made.

Out of the thousands of buying markets that walk into Walmart on any given day there will a percentage that want a bag of sugar. Walmart can in no way predict that because every day is random. But, each random day over time reveals that X number of bags of sugar should be available to prevent loss of sales.

The growth of the advertising agencies have even shown that markets can be shaped, subtley, and relentlessly directed in certain directions for a profitable time if not permanantly.

It is legal reality here in the USA that corporations are a person in the view of the law. So when I take my buying market to the selling market Walmart I am legally dealing with a person, an individual market, technically no different than if I were dealing with my neighbor.

Forgive me, nearly all of you guys know more about this stuff than I do. I am just expressing my personal street educated viewpoint.

Do you suppose some of us know something about government? Yeah, we do.

If only you acted like it.

So, the two are very, very similar processes, if not exactly the same. The fact that humans are fairly intelligent and try to shape their environment and systems in it to their ends does not make them any different from any other organism that attempts to accomplish something within its system.

"Vidyoh's comments that government could do it better by having private companies bid on proposals."

I intended my comment to be read as private companies responding to an announced desire, with the successful reaping the reward of guaranteed government patronage and potential private patronage, not bidding on a contract.

And, again I state me firm belief that government should not be involved in any enterprise that dispenses money to projects and people it selects as worthy. Why? Because government has no money, it is my momney and I think they should come to me personally to get permission to spend it.

“Without an arbiter of force there can be no capitalism.”

Do an intellectually honest reverse engineer of capitalism and see where you wind up. Nothing exists without a beginning, a source, a foundation, or a root.

In its true sense, what is capitalism?

Yes Marx authored the word capitalism to describe the fruits of that particular tree, but in Marx or any of his disciples I find no intelligent understanding or explanation of how that capital came to be.

Focusing on one end of a system without understanding the entire process has made a misery of more lives than profit ever has. If capitalism is the fruit of the creation tree, what is the root of that tree?

Capitalism is as natural to the human as sex or breathing. If it wasn’t, humanity would still be roaming the Earth naked, shelterless, and eating only for today. Capitalism wasn’t forced, coerced, or directed.

I, an individual, am the base arbiter of force regarding my property. If as arbiter, I choose not to defend it, then it is gone. However, if as arbiter, I choose to defend it then I am free to solicit any assistance I feel necessary and effective. That assistance may be a uniformed town Constable, a private bruiser, or simply knowledge and use of law as my weapon depending upon the circumstances of the attack, as arbiter it is my choice.
—–
“What happens to the market when there is no commonly agreed upon measure of exchange, no rules of engagement, or regulation from fraud?”

You might consider spontaneity as the solution to the answer to your question here. When traders met they created their medium of exchange, rules, and took it for granted each would get the best deal they could and it was up to each to defend themselves against being taken. Trade happened all over the known world between villages, cities, regions, nations, and even inter-continental with no common measure of exchange, no rules of engagement, or regulation from fraud except those that were “on the spot” agreed upon by the two traders. Measures of exchange were discussed and agreed on, rules of engagement were agreed on, and protection from fraud came from the individual’s involved having sense enough to know when someone was trying to take them. Time evolved customs and procedures in trading that becme commonly known, but not created by a state no enforced by a state.
——

“What happens to property if there is no arbiter of force?”

What happens to property if the arbiter is the force? The arbiter of force becomes the de facto owner. More reason to fear the arbiter than to embrace him in my view.
——

“This is why anarcho-capitalism is so utopian, it only works on a small scale amongst those that universally agree.”

It worked all over America until it faced a force that it could not comprehend and waited too long to repel.
——

“If, like myself, you hold humanism as a highest value then the state using coercion to create better lives is no sin.”

I don’t hold humanism as a highest value. I hold individual freedom as the highest value, therefore any coercion is the ultimate sin. The state can not create a better life for one without reducing the quality of life for another because the state has no money or resources other than that it steals from the people.

I just realized a long time ago that taking my concern, care, and humanity, fracturing it into 6 billion plus pieces just to feel good about myself was a really really stupid idea. Then, I asked myself, how many of those 6 billion plus can I rightfully reject before I get to the ones I intellectually think I should be concerned about. Got it down to about four or five as an accepted obligation, and anything more than that I can handle on an individual case of charity.
——
“And so many of you have a knee-jerk response to any collective
action that you fail to see that the government can and once was the arm of the people.”

This Café has had this discussion and beat this horse for so long and in every way possible that it is amusing and slightly ridiculous to see someone come along and assign rejection of collectivism as “knee jerk”. Damn, we never thought or read of the wonderful ideas of socialism until you brought them Jimmy D.! Do you suppose, Jimmy D., that some of us know something about collectivism/socialism?

Do you suppose some of us know something about government? Yeah, we do.
——-
“Just ask yourself what scientific and medical advances could have been made if all the wealth and resources of america weren't being used ot make personal jets and solid gold toilets. The rich, politicians, and kings are all the same class of leeches and overlords.”

In my opinion you come close here, Jimmy D., but you make that collectivist/socialist mistake again of knee jerk lumping rich in with corrupt and greedy. Just isn’t so you know. The rich are no more prone to lapses of morality than the poor. The politicians, leaders, kings of communism and socialism have shown themselves to be equal in corruption and venality to anything a capitalist society ever produced, actually worse because of their hypocrisy of motive.

Now, I agree with you whole heartedly about the squandering of our resources by the corruption of politicians. I ignore Kings in context of our discussion vis-à-vis America, we don’t have them. Corrupt politicians, the word politicians in my mind automatically draws forth the knee jerk reaction of thinking corruption.
——
“Even an anarcho-capitalist commune is collective. What is a true market but a collective endeavor?”

I think you’re besotted with the word collective. Pairing the word anarchy with word collective is more than a little strange to me. Then the second sentence, just how is a true market a collective endeavor? Perhaps before you answer that you might tell me that you view interaction between two individuals as a collective, is that true?

Conversely, evolution argues that there is no guiding intelligence save for random natural processes and that faulty "choices" will be eliminated because they do not fare well in the "market" of nature.

While it can be argued that poor decisions on the part of consumers do backfire and that business enterprises founded upon poor choices will not last, enforcing a kind of "natural selection" upon the market, the base driving forces are still nonetheless based upon intelligence.

So to prove total equivalence, it must be successfully argued that the random processes of evolution are functionally equivalent to the directed, intelligent driving processes of the free market.

Otherwise one winds up in the field of theistic evolution: evolution by small steps directed by a greater intelligence. Sort of, anyway. The intelligence is still consolidated.

Vidyoh's comments that government could do it better by having private companies bid on proposals. This might work better than the current system, but would still only work for applied science where the government knew what it wanted. What about basic research in obscure academic fields? What about the fact that companies, even when they do finance great research, have little incentive to communicate it to the public? I admit that much government-financed research is a waste of time, but the waste is almost certainly worth the relatively tiny price tag just for the few outstanding contributions to knowledge.

My argument is essentially a cost/benefit argument. In the case of basic research, much of it is so cheap in terms of the federal budget that the benefits are well worth the costs. For example, the Javits Gifted and Talented education grant program costs the taxpayers only about 8-10 million dollars per year, yet if that research pushes even one brilliant child from slacker to entrepreneur per year, it is well worth the cost. In many areas it is true that private enterprise also provides huge funding and research, from what I have seen government-funded research tends to be of a different flavor. They are complementary.

Scientific research funding is such a minuscule fraction of the federal budget and has such glaringly obvious benefits. The total basic research budget for FY 2009 is less than $30 billion (http://www.ostp.gov/galleries/Budget09/Fy2009R_DFinal.pdf)!! This amounts to just $100 per person per year. I just can't see why conservatives attack it. It may be true that a world can be designed where all those benefits and much more are reaped from private enterprise alone, but we are far from that world. Today we should focus on the government programs that actually cost something substantial. I say us libertarians should focus on bigger fish and hands off the research budget for the foreseeable future.

The arbiter of law is the state even if that arbiter calls himself a corporation, or a syndicate, or a DRO. Without an arbiter of force there can be no capitalism. What happens to the market when there is no commonly agreed upon measure of exchange, no rules of engagement, or regulation from fraud? We either have to constantly threaten both economic and physical force (two sides of the same coin) or return to individual barter. What happens to property if there is no arbiter of force? You can own your land just so long as you can defend it with your life and no longer.

I do not think that a band of Kiowa in the 16th century thought of themselves as a state, nor do I know of anyone that is ready to make that claim, yet they had property, property rights, capitalism, and markets.

This is why anarcho-capitalism is so utopian, it only works on a small scale amongst those that universally agree. It cannot function on a large scale and without large scale defense it will be absorbed by whatever state rises form the ashes of the last one. A small town of anarcho-capitalists will last only as long as the larger town of state-capitalists, or syndicalists, or marxists allows it to.

A state, an arbiter of force, is the necessary evil to prevent this war of all against all. If we reject freedom-from as an absolute value then anarcho-capitalism makes little sense. If, like myself, you hold humanism as a highest value then the state using coercion to create better lives is no sin. Any realistic modern society must create an environment that caters to the values of the majority and quite frankly the curtailing of your pre-tax income or propertarian dominion is an insignificant loss compared to the greater gain.

Butting into another conversation:
————————————————
Our problem, Metre, as I see it is that we (the vast majority of us – not just Americans) humans are enculturated to automatically think that government is the answer to every question; and, only the rare few ever break through that mental stanglehold.

And so many of you have a knee-jerk response to any colelctive action that you fail to see that the government can and once was the arm of the people.

Just for fun ask yourself what possibilities existed for ancient Egypt, how far down the road of scientific development, mechanical development, industrial development, and medical development; had all that wealth that we see evidence of not been confiscated and wasted on vast glorification of kings.

Just ask yourself what scientific and medical advances could have been made if all the wealth and resources of america weren't being used ot make personal jets and solid gold toilets. The rich, politicians, and kings are all the same class of leeches and overlords.

As opposed to your system where the wealthy prey upon the weak. Our current system and your anarcho-utopianism both share the same problem, those with the gold make the rules. I see little difference in what you are attacking and what you are advocating.

People have been fooled by the supposed nobility of the aristocracy who came to power through conquest and disdained those the had conquered and fed upon.

Strawman, nowhere am I advocating top down hierarchies of control. The state is not necessarily top down or large.

Thanks for your response, but I don't think your suggestions are plausible. No one billionaire or one company could muster the resources needed to develop, launch, operate, and maintain the HST. No one billionaire or company has the knowledge or capabilities to build or operate the HST. In addition to the telescope itself (which is enormously expensive), you need a lauuch vehicle, a launch facility, ground stations to receive and process the data, astronauts and a space shuttle and another launch vehicle to run regular servicing missions, etc. It would take a large consortium of companies to pool their knowledge and resources to make it happen. And selling photos won't pay for the costs (if you think $600 hammers are outrageous, try estimating the costs of those photos). And the risks are enormous.

You may be able to imagine it happening in some hypothetical world, but I don't see it happening in the real world.

You make very valid points in your second paragraph and we have to recognize them as such.

Risk is what it is, a thing that causes some hesitiancy in proceeding without caution and doing due diligence, so I agree that seeing a private company forge ahead recklessly without knowledge that there will be a demand for the product in the end is unlikely.

However, the scenario I set up removed that risk of "no profit" from the equation. Government stated it would buy the product. With that in mind a private company would be then free to approach the matter of how do we build the scope to the specifications offered by the government and at a cost that will allow us to recoup our investment and move to profit in a fashion timely enough to satisfy our investors.

Now, let's take government out of the equation and replace them in the role of the market. Say Bill Gates made the offer and set up the specifications. Then he presented his proposal to private companies with the stipulation that he would fund two of the best proposals submitted up to the point that one became the superior and economical. Again, we see a scenario where risk is removed. What profit could Gates expect on the final product of the scope that he caused to be put into space? Exclusive ownership might make that a handsome piece of property, or perhaps may make a handsome piece of scientific charity if he did not charge for the product.

Our problem, Metre, as I see it is that we (the vast majority of us – not just Americans) humans are enculturated to automatically think that government is the answer to every question; and, only the rare few ever break through that mental stanglehold. It is in government's best interest to enculturate you thus and see to it that you pass that on to your children.

Just for fun ask yourself what possibilities existed for ancient Egypt, how far down the road of scientific development, mechanical development, industrial development, and medical development; had all that wealth that we see evidence of not been confiscated and wasted on vast glorification of kings.

I can think of two ways this could happen.

1. A billionaire finances it to benefit society.

2. A private company finances it and makes money selling the photos.

It's interesting to see what's going on in the overhead imaging market now that Google Earth is around. I doubt they are paying the same prices per satellite as the NRO but their resolutions are comparable (e.g. sub 50 cm resolution).