But according to this definition, having to pay taxes to pay for policemen, judges, etc to protect you from being murdered is also violence. If no-one would pay taxes however, you could very well end up in a somalia/afghanistan/jemen/etc.- like failed state where more people will be the victim of violence.

At the same time you define capitalism as something that by definition needs a government, because of it resting on a more or less legal principle (the use of violence to obtain something is illegal).

I think that the idea that markets and governments are forces, acting necessarily against eachother (big government=small or unfree market, free market= no or small government) is a misconception. Society´s are complex and cannot be based on any single principle.

Protectionism is not always bad either: laws to ban products from a market, that are for instance, extremely polluting or made by the use of slavery can actually be an incentive for companies to make 'cleaner' or more ethically responsible products, while it could technically still be called protectionism. It´s also true that protectionism against the massive dumping of products on a market or as a countermeasure against protectionism from other governments can be economically effective.

When 'free' is defined as merely the absence of any form of government, then freedom does not mean absence of violence or terror, nor does it mean that you will always have fair economic oportunities for everyone. I also don´t see why there should be a principally difference between violence used by a state or violence used by private parties: when slavery is not forbidden, by this definition, the labourmarket would be free. So the right to take, keep, trade or use slaves would because of the absence of government interference, be a form of freedom, showing that one persons freedom can mean the end of another persons freedom...being a slave means that you´re not free.

I think the ideological views on capitalism (or government interference), whether pro or con, are not realy productive for society. Being non-judgemental allows for a greater intellectual flexibility, i think.

Actually...capitalism is systematic intimidation/force/violence/coercion. You pay rent and taxes and for things that were free at one point (food/clothes/shelter) because if you don't there looms the threat of a person with a gun, wearing a uniform putting you in an 8 x 12 box for "breaking the rules."

Things like private property are nonsensical, because there exists a paradox in the creation of private property. Private property can only exist through stealing (or 'privatizing' something that was once the commons and then declaring it illegal to violate this now sacrosanct 'private' property. So, those who have the power (through force/the the threat of violence) to steal something and then declare it theirs and hold it against all challengers then establish private property laws, which they claim to be legitimate...but nothing could be further from the truth, as that property exists only as a direct result of some initial robbery.

Capitalism, as a system that keeps food from the hungry, clothes from the naked and shelter from the homeless so that men in fancy suits, driving fancy cars can turn an ever-increasing profit is an inherently violent and destructive process. To argue otherwise is to ignore not only the historical evidence, but the world that is falling apart (literally and metaphorically) all around you.

Capitalism, even in theory, leads to plutocracy. Any society where its political system is capable of being bought is corrupt and meritless. As for the incentives of individuals in selecting their careers, I don't believe every person is a competitive person. I think we, on average, evolved from that primitive phase a long time ago. I believe that people, for the most part, are dictated by this industrialist/capitalistic modality from birth, and most people being realists abandon their initial aspirations in exchange for financial security. There are countless individuals out there with careers that are incompatible with their true natures, hence why people are so miserable at their workplace. It really doesn't matter, though; capitalism, be it anarcho, laissez-faire, or crony, is unsustainable because class conflict is inevitable.

Most supporters of a true liberal society advocate voluntary donations to cover these expenses as the ultimate goal.


In the case of corporatism they're very much hand in hand.


Protectionism is a nationalistic scheme that exists to protect domestic products and services (labor) from international competition. The result is that the people who happen to live within the "protected" geographical area are well off, while people outside who'd like to pursue a better life are rejected at the borders and returned to the poor warholes they came from. This is pure evil if you believe in the equality of human beings disregarding race or country of origin.


Freedom (as in liberty) is the absence of violence, not government.


There's no difference between private and governmental violence. One can always justify violence, where imo the only valid justification is self-defence. Slavery is by definition violence, I don't see the discrepancy of opinions here?


So what you are saying is that inspecting the moral justifications for today's societal structures is not productive? How will you ever change the world then.


This is news to me. At what point in time did people make clothes, build houses and cook food to give it all away for free, and what implies that you can't do this in a capitalist society?


Property rights exists, how else would you justify eating an apple? That would be stealing from the "commons".


The historical trend is that the countries that leaned toward capitalism are prosperous, while the countries that favored fascism in some form are worse off.


Plutocracy is a political system in which the wealthy rules. Capitalism does not allow this as it bans the initiation of violence.


I agree. We must fight lobbyism.


Capitalism doesn't imply that you have to be competitive either. There's no mandatory market participation, everyone is free to live a life without ever interacting with other people (although unlikely), as long as it's not on the expense of others.



Capitalism is the one system that minimizes class conflict as it enables high degrees of social mobility. Every other system entails more class conflict than that of capitalism due to the presence of some form of power monopoly who favors groups over one another instead of protecting individuals against coercion as is the case in capitalism.

point 1: voluntary taxes introduce a problem, best examplified by the prisoners dilemma: the free rider: i´m fine if you pay voluntary taxes so i can live safely without paying anything....and when you don´t pay a voluntary contribution, it doesn´t make sense for me to pay either because they´re not gonna built hospitals and schools and from my money alone..i´m not that rich.
point 2 and 3: to ban slavery, you need a strong government of wich it´s rule is not just accepted on a voluntary base. To help banning slavery abroad, you need a trade policy that bans products that depend on slavery...you may call a ban on products made with the use of slavery abroad 'protectionism' in the sense that it would be a prohibition on import (the WTO sees it that way). And i don´t see a moral problem with for instance american protectionism as a measure against european protectionism or vice-versa: europe has all the right to ban american steel as a response to an american ban on european steel and the other way round.

point 6: i think that moral judgements can best be made AFTER an evaluation of all the facts. The longer a judgement will be stalled, the more acurate it is likely to be.

Don't be silly...these things weren't given away for free. They also weren't manufactured in sweatshops from materials that came from a variety of geographically separate locations and shipped to even more diverse locations at tremendous cost to our natural environment. Humans used to have what they (and they family/community group) could make. Things used to be created locally by those who could create them and moved around within the community accordingly. For a family unit or tribe you would wind up with different members playing different roles and each member pitching in for the collective good of the family/community. Look at hunting/gathering societies...look at Amish house construction. You present a straw man here, as you do in the rest of your posts within this post and the thread at large. If you continue to do this, I will not engage in discussion with you as it's quite an intellectually dishonest form of discussion.


You don't need property rights to eat an apple...this is also absurd. Look at the indigenous Americans (or plenty of other indigenous groups...or cooperatives and collectives in modern times). The indigenous Americans lived sustainably while utilizing the 'commons' in a manner that provided them with what they needed to survive and did not destroy the commons. The fact that property rights exist is not justification for their existence. This is a fallacy and your second straw man in addressing my points (2 for 2).


First off, the opposite of capitalism is not fascism, it's a bit disconcerting that you would imply such a thing (straw man...3 for 3). Now, if we examine the "free market" that many would claim the US has engaged in to lead to such prosperity, we also see that this is a lie. Look at South America...every country that engaged in US mandated "free market" capitalism is in horrific shape. The truth is, historically, the free market has never been anything more than a fantasy. The US and other prosperous capitalist nations engaged in widespread and severe protectionist policies for their own industries. They then crammed "free market" policies down the throats of weaker nations in order to exploit them to their fullest abilities. This is startlingly easy to see if you choose to...the evidence is staring everyone in the face.

Secondly, the state system is inherently illegitimate and founded on genocide, slavery and exploitation. This is beyond reproach as even whitewashed history is forced to acknowledge it. Why are capitalist countries prosperous? Because they slaughtered, enslaved and exploited millions upon millions of human beings. This is hardly an acceptable justification for any system. Capitalist societies collapse over time precisely because they are built on atrocities and are unsustainable and pyramid scheme-like in structure. If we examine societies that have engaged in direct democracy and non-capitalistic means of exchange and existence (such as many indigenous groups, the Spanish revolutionaries and others) it becomes apparent that while capitalist societies collapse from within, directly democratic societies must be destroyed from the outside. This is not coincidental.

This anarcho-primitivistic model worked quite well for the smaller tribes. Most modern societies, though, have grown from hunter-gatherer tribes to giant cities, but our evolutionary development hasn't kept up with the transition to allow humans to expand their social circles enough (see Dunbar's number), so unfortunately the primitivistic approach doesn't scale up.


Please point out the straw men so that we can have a fruitful discussion.


Once again, you assume that primitivism scales up to empires. Regarding the "fallacy": when you say property rights are nonsensical, I take it you propose they don't exist. They can either exist or they don't. They can't be valid and nonsensical at the same time. Regarding the argument in your previous post, I'll address it again:


Your attempt to explain the paradox of property rights spawns another paradox as you are using the notion of stealing something from the commons. Obviously 'stealing' makes no sense without first accepting the validity of property rights.


The inventor of fascism, Benito Mussolini, used a slogan: "the state is everything, the individual is nothing". Capitalism/true liberalism holds the exact opposite values (every indivdual is a goal in itself, and the state should exist to protect it).


The world has never witnessed a truly free market. The US came close a very long time ago, and they did very well at the time! In 1913 the degradation of the US started with the Federal Reserve Act, followed by New Deal in the 1930s, The Great Society in the 60s and the biggest expansion of the welfare state ever seen under G.W. Bush in the 2000s. To claim that the US is anything more than a mediocre social democracy drowning in debt and shitty politics is silly. Don't compare it to the free market.


Once again, you believe that these historical events are due to capitalism, and once again I'll point out that there are no capitalist armies. Only governments have armies. Re-direct your anger to corporatism and corruption through lobbying.

1) Already pointed out what I perceived to be the straw men.

2) Who says we should scale up? I certainly never argued for that. Sustaining 7 billion + people on this planet is neither feasible nor desirable, imo.

3) You present exactly my point with regards to private property...theft is only valid if you accept property rights as legit. The commons were restricted...were privatized...were illegitimately claimed to be "not the commons" which is nonsensical...except that men with arms did it in the name of accruing capital.

4) Quotes, while they might sound nice, do not, imo, substitute for actual or working definitions of socio-economic theory. In this case I hear and understand your quote but as applied to the effects on the real world, capitalism and fascism are not opposite poles, imo.

5) Your points on the Free Market are in lock-step with mine...we agree...I assumed you were going to tell me (as many others have) that the US is/was a free market society. I apologize for presuming to know what you were thinking/going to say. If you think I was saying anything else, please re-read my words.

6) As capitalism is the system employed by governments and other ruling instutitions, your attempt to write it out of the equation seems oddly selective. Can you explain why capitalism (in practice, not in theory) bears no responsibility for the state of the world? As a socio-economic system that can really only be employed by large institutions or social bodies, what sense in there in pretending it is separate or distinct, when in practice it's not? Or to frame it inline with your question...I am upset at the governments for choosing capitalism, which inherently breeds corporatism and corruption in this particular global economic order of industrialized states. That being said, I am as much for the dissolution of illegitimate states as I am for the dissolution of capitalism.

Violence isn't necessary for a political system to be bought. Capitalism paves the way for this, thus creating a plutocracy. The U.S. is more than anything else a plutocracy.



The structure of capitalism plants the seed for competitiveness, friend. I wasn't really alluding to excluding oneself from market participation; I was thinking more along the lines of individuals who initially aspire after certain careers, but ultimately feel pressured by the system to choose other careers in order to attain a more financially secure position in life. This system really limits the ingenuity of the individual in this regard by creating a hierarchy of careers solely based on income.



I don't think so. While I agree that some children of a lower class can be fortunate enough to be prodigies and rise above their social rank, this is not the case for most. You also have to take into account that the children of wealthy families automatically have an advantage in society, as they are provided with the most efficient tutors/educators for exceptional cultivation, and have guaranteed spots in Ivy League schools. They endure none of the struggles of the common man/woman. Not to mention the accumulation of wealth of the opulent families allows for the formation of financial dynasties. So, as the ol' saying goes, the rich get richer, and the poor get poorer.

The fact that discussions about capitalism turn into heated debates is exactly what i find so fascinating about the subject. Why is it such a big deal to people to make capitalism the cause of all evil or to make a political ideology out of it.

I would say that capitalism is an economic system. It has some minimal moral foundations in the sense that it indeed is not by definition based on violence, although it cannot be said that capitalism has effectively banned violence from society as a means to obtain goods. Yet, as an economic system, it is pretty neutral in itself. There have been other economic systems that have been more violent, as there have been economic systems that where less violent.

Capitalism tends to turn evil, the moment it becomes a political ideology: it lacks the morals to base an entire society on, so propagating it as the only system that can ever be allowed is propagating a lack or morals.

People who consider capitalism as the source of all evil should consider how just the single term 'capitalism' can explain all the misery in the world. I think it lacks the explanatory power to do that by itself.

When capitalism is considered an ideal system, and the market is being hailed as the ultimate form of freedom, this is usualy politically motivated: the same political party´s that embrace the market as something fantastic instead of just an economic system, have most of the time been against any emancipatory movement. They have usualy been against democratic rights for women and against democratic rights for workers.

They usually are against labour rights because they claim it makes the market less free. And they usually are for tax models that benefit rich people at the cost of the middle class and poor people. They usually are against environmental laws. They usually don´t believe in climate change and although they usually claim to be for fair oportunities, they are always against things like a good public education system where every citizen has acces to good education.

Capitalism is not god. But for those that do well within it it can certainly look like god. And some of those people are against any measure taken, that would give others the same chances as themselves to do well. Some of those want rich people to get richer and poor and middle class people to get poorer and to work harder for the benefit of solely the rich.

When government has been succesfully reduced to an incometent organ, no-one would expect anything from the government anymore.

That´s when you can get rid of labour-rights and environmental laws. The words 'big government' will be enough to convince the public.
When people are squeezed hard enough, they no longer have the mental ability to look at everything from a distance. Any plan to help the middle class and the ordinary people can simply be labeled 'big government', 'socialism' or 'nanny state' and people will be against it.

Usually these people are also lead to believe that there is a link between socialism and national socialism, wich are realy opposite political movements (and all socialists where for this reason murdered under the fascist regimes of the 30´s and 40´s and during the franco rule in spain).

To say that you´re for freedom sounds nicer than to say that you´re in favor of a strict hierarchic class society. Yet that is ofcourse exactly the ideology of all conservative party´s. What best than to brainwash the common man, to make him believe that the market and the market alone will bring him freedom and most of all....that any real attempt to bring him freedom, like fair chances for his childeren because of a good accessable education system, or a healthcare system that is bound by rules so institutions aren´t allowed to make profit at any cost...what better to make him believe that all of that is socialism and therefore both opression and a one-way street straight to poverty?

Ofourse the common man believes all that crap. Most of the women who´re beaten by their husbants or boyfriends will defend their personal tyran when outsiders tell them not to take it any longer.

Look at some of the criticism against the occupy-movement: it goes like: 'i have three jobs and can hardly get around, my health ensurance won´t pay for the medicines i need....and now these socialists want to give away free healthcare and welfare to anybody who doesn´t work!!!'.

With that attitude, ordinary people will always have to work three jobs, have a healthcare insurance that sucks and no chances for their childeren to do better in life at all.

Because that´s what you get when you won´t allow any government interference in the labourmarket, education or healthcare. And guess what...when all this deregulation, where a bank like goldman sachs can get away with selling financial packages to clients and at the same time can speculate against those very same packages without informing their clients... when that kind of conduct causes an entire financial system to nearly collapse...those banks collapsing are gonna be bailed-out and the bankers will be given bonusses by the same taxpayers money the conservative politicians always promissed not to want to spent on market interfering initiatives.

Any market hallelujah always boils down to that: No rights for the common man, and total freedom for the big corporations and billionaires.

Capitalism is just an economic system. It´s not the essence of freedom itself and it´s not a recipe for a nice society by itself.

To which of the many and vastly divergent theories comprising a capitalist economy do you refer?

The problem with these debates is that everyone has their own idea of what capitalism is, no one defines their terms, and a reasoned argument quickly devolves as participants misinterpret the person they are arguing with, and respond in a way that will also be misinterpreted. It's chaos.

My view is that capitalism is the word we use to describe the present organisational state of most of humanity, which emerged as a result of common genetic imperatives. Capitalism does not require exploitation or injustice to work any more than we do as individuals. There is certainly too much exploitation in the world. Any amount of exploitation is totally unacceptable, but just because it happens in a capitalist world, at the hands of capitalists, does not imply that it is a result of capitalism. There has always been exploitation, much more so in the pre-capitalist world. It gets worse the further you go back. In the classical antiquity period (~700BC - 300AD), even in the richest countries, as many as 40% of the population were slaves. Less developed kingdoms enslaved virtually all but a few families of nobility and an army big enough to prevent insurrection.

Having said all that, there are significant systemic problems with the way we approach capitalism that go far beyond a bad implementation of a good idea. Most of what we call capitalist economic policy today is informed by a corpus of theory called neoclassical economics, which came much later than capitalism itself, as a successor to the "classical economics" used by Adam Smith and other pioneers of capitalism. Notably, Karl Marx was the last classical economist. The new school - neoclassical economics - has extremely shaky theoretical foundations and is arguably responsible for much of the pain and injustice that capitalist economies have produced. Explaining each of them would take far too long for a forum post, but here is a fun list of just some of the fantastical things which neoclassical economists believe:

- General equilibrium: Without government interference the economy will tend towards stability and always be in perfect balance of prices, wages and production.
- Efficient markets hypothesis: Financial markets are perfectly efficient. There are no asset price bubbles, the price of any stock, bond, or other security is a completely true representation of its real value. Note that this requires people, in aggregate, to be able to look into the future with 100% accuracy.
- Say's law: Supply creates its own demand. Overproduction can never be a problem, because there will always be someone who wants to buy any product at some price.
- Principle of greatest utility: The forces of supply and demand, left unchecked, will tend to bring the most happiness to the most people.
- Representative agents: Everyone spends their income in equal proportions. If a student spends a fifth of his hundred dollar income on pizza, a billionaire spends a fifth of his hundred million dollar income on pizza.
- Quantity Theory of Money: If the central bank says prices on everything are going to go up and makes some trades with high-level bankers, then in anticipation of the higher prices tomorrow everyone will try to buy things today, which will push up the prices in a self-fulfilling prophecy.
- Money multiplier: When you go to the bank to try to get a loan, they'll only give it to you if they have the cash on hand, even though they could easily borrow it themselves and still make a profit.

There are many more, but I can't continue. It's too depressing. This is all real stuff, which is really used to inform real policy. The problem with capitalism isn't inherent, it's in this mess of a theoretical framework that has become synonymous with it. Terrifyingly, all these crazy sounding things are valid, logically-sound derivations of a few set of bizarre assumptions which are literally untouchable in the mainstream economics profession. This has some difficult consequences: learning the neoclassical theory well enough to effectively fight it takes years of dedication and hard work, and once you get there, none of the well-respected peer-reviewed journals will publish you. On a more personal level, there's an emotional toll when most of the people you fight for will mistake you for the enemy, and won't ever be convinced otherwise.

Looking forward, there are now viable replacements, taken individually, for most of the broken parts of the old theory. They just haven't been stitched together yet into a coherent set of foundations and vocabulary - that is a job for the next generation of bright young minds in economics, and is already well under way. Don't give up on capitalism just yet. It's still the best economic system we've ever had, and there's life in this old girl still.