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Externalities vs Illth

April 1, 2024

I’m currently trying to write something on economics and what are called ‘externalities’. I’m not an economist, so am writing this in the hope of feedback telling me how I’m wrong, because it seems obvious I must be wrong.

Initial phrasing of the problem

‘Externalities’ seem to be usually thought of as those parts of an economic transaction which have harms, costs or benefits which affect people who external to that transaction. Externalities are usually described as positive (when someone can benefit without paying) for example clean air away from cities, or a neighbour’s bees fertilising one’s plants. A negative externality should (but often does not) include all forms of social and individual illth produced by economic activity (although illth production could come from the State, or other institutions). One immediate problem of this approach is that externalities as seen as coming from individual transactions rather than being systemic, so it localises and individualises the problem. For me, the major flaw of externality theory, is that it does not seem to be interested in preventing illth, it just wants to make some of the costs internal to the system, or even worse try to pretend illth is already costed and hence acceptable to the people who suffer from it.

In summary, my objections to the way the concept of externalities works, are:

  • Definitions and treatment of externalities appear to aim at removing illth from consideration and confining it by making it local, and fixable through monetary payment (compensation or tax). They rarely seem to see illth production as a norm inherent to a system which ‘needs’ cheapness of operation for the highest possible profit, and so generally do not look for solutions at the system level. They also generally do not see the system as potentially self-damaging. Hence I will define a negative externality as a socially generated source of illth, whether intended or otherwise, expected or not. People, or groups, should be held responsible for the illth that they inflict on others, and we should not pretend the illth problem is solved when people and companies have to pay something for it.
    • Research in the early 2000s by Nicholas Z. Muller, Robert Mendelsohn, and William Nordhaus showed that in some businesses (notably solid waste combustion, petroleum-fired electric power generation, sewage treatment, coal-fired electric power generation, stone mining and quarrying, marinas, and petroleum and coal products), the costs of externalities exceeded any value those businesses, added to the economy.
    • Kapp argues modern business enterprise operates on the basis of shifting costs onto others as normal practice to make profits. [Kapp, Karl William (1971) Social costs, neo-classical economics and environmental planning. The Social Costs of Business Enterprise, 3rd edition. K. W. Kapp. Nottingham, Spokesman: 305–18 ]
  • The standard model uses involves only three people, seller, purchaser and person suffering the illth. It effectively localizes illth (‘spillovers’, ‘neighbourhood effects’) rather than sees it as possibly affecting the functionality of whole systems. In other words writing on externalities generally ignores complexity, system and relationships – other than the price system.
  • Much ‘free market’ economics seems to think that illth can always be reduced to monetary compensation and agreement. Economists don’t have to look at the type of illth involved. Consequently, if people are monetarily compensated, then illth is not a problem and, for practical purposes, has disappeared as it is treated as having no other effects on people or the system.
  • Problems with government charges for illth are discussed below under Pigou, many of these difficulties apply to private negotiations as well.
  • It is not clear how you can always put a monetary cost on illth and suffering, or come to a valid agreement on those ‘costs’; especially if the illth is allowed to continue.
  • Illth is often produced by powerful people, and economics ignores the power and riches relations generally present, and the ways those relations could affect, or distort, any agreements likely to be reached on the monetary cost of illth.
  • Economics often seems to presume that ‘the invisible hand’ with its claimed beneficial emergent order will get rid of the problem, or make everything else so much better it no longer matters. This is simply optimism not a basis for governance or for disregarding harm.
  • Often it seems the theory is attempting to protect companies from any responsibility.
  • The energy and attention costs of cleaning up long term illth is ignored. Apparently it will just go away, as it it were ‘waste.’
  • Free market arguments tend to propose that penalties and regulation always, without exception, make everything worse, but that the market always works out fine for everyone, irrespective of their position in the power relations. This almost certainly fantasy.

There also seems to be a large amount of dispute about what the main hero economists thought on this issue.

History: Pigou, Hayek and Coase

Pigou and his objectors

Historically the idea begins with Pigou, although he does not appear to use the term ‘externality’. Pigou’s basic economic principle was:

the economic welfare of a community of given size is likely to be greater (1) the larger is the volume of the national dividend, and (2) the larger is the absolute share of that dividend that accrues to the poor.

Pigou Economics of Welfare 4th edition p 5-6

Not a currently fashionable position

In a chapter on the divergence between marginal social net product and marginal private net product (Chapter IX), he writes:

It thus becomes important to inquire in what conditions the values of the social net product and the private net product of any given (rth) increment of investment in an industry are liable to diverge from one another in either direction.

174

This is a problem not only when private riches overwhelm social wealth, but when the effects or costs of private investment comes “as a positive or negative item, to other people.” He examples Irish farmers who pay for improvements to farms owned by others.

He suggests that a problem arises because the costs of illth are not borne by those producing it, so they are not discouraged from its production. He argues that an appropriate tax, or price, on illth, equivalent to the harm inflicted on others, would lower the profitability of illth production. For example, makers of alcohol should be “debited with the extra costs in policemen and prisons which it indirectly makes necessary” (p 186).

This charge, assumes the harm can be priced, the damage can be fixed, or that cost discourages illth production, which would probably depend upon the profits being made. This would seem to be best as a matter of experiment, not of dogma.

As we might expect, neoliberal [1] [2] [3] economists think taxing illth production, is government interference in the market and hence bad.

  • It is alleged the government cannot know what the best price is, and hence it will be wrong and produce terrible disasters. The EU Carbon trading scheme can be used as an example of a system which did not work very well at the beginning – largely because it was too generous to business to avoid trouble for the EU, however, some levels of air pollution have now decreased (https://wordpress.com/post/cmandchaos.wordpress.com/11300 and https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/mar/13/air-pollution-levels-have-improved-in-europe-over-20-years-say-researchers). However, this criticism of tax solutions ignores the possibility of experiment, or of gradually increasing charge for the illth with no exemptions.
  • Instabilities, and changes in government, may destroy any such prices, tax or trading schemes, especially (although this seems rarely mentioned) due to the influence of powerful and wealthy industries who want to continue illth production. This problem has been experienced in Australia with the carbon price being repealed by pro-corporate government..
  • Lack of a global carbon price or tax, might incentivize companies to go where pollution is cheapest, which is a particular problem if the pollution diffuses, as with CO2.
  • It is difficult to estimate the cost of damage done by illth. It is difficult to measure emissions from individual factories and across an industry.
  • Another argument suggests that If people want non-polluting energy then, if non-polluting energy is cheaper people will purchase it. This ignores established powers in the market, and their ability to corrupt the information in the price system, or to corrupt people’s response to that information.
  • Pollution can be said to be an engineering problem, not an economic problem, while at the same time suggesting engineering is driven by economics. Spontaneous new technology is the solution.
  • One writer states that a tax/charge is unfair because it only punishes the polluter, and ignores the impact of the polluted, who are causing the polluter damage “by being there and causing a tax to be imposed on the other business.” [cf 3]. Possibly this rather odd idea may come from Coase, who assumes that externalities are reciprocal [check], and that there must be two specific parties interacting for an externality to exist. Hopefully the term ‘reciprocal’ was not meant to indicate the parties are equally responsible (deleting power relations) or that there can only ever be two parties at a time, or that a party cannot harm itself.

[Barnett, A. H.; Yandle, Bruce (24 June 2009). “The end of the externality revolution”. Social Philosophy and Policy. 26 (2): 130–50. doi:10.1017/S0265052509090190. S2CID 154357550.]

In all, the problem with the idea of tax or charge for illth appears to be that economists popular with governments and companies tend to see any governmental planning as the road to serfdom, because it suggests that the market may not always find the best way forward by itself. However, we may wonder how much better private transactions will be in estimating monetary substitutions for the harm of illth, all the time. Again, an expected increase in the charge may help provide incentive to reduce the illth.

Hayek

Hayek by his support for dictatorships in Chile, Argentina and Portugal and his response to criticism on this issue, appears to have thought that governments who murdered, tortured and’ disappeared’ their citizens, as long as they dictatorships did not, or might not, interfere with the market or with business profits, were far less tyrannous than governments who tried to plan for the betterment of everyone. Following this lead many Hayekians propose that free markets may have nothing to do with welfare. In which case, of course we can ask what is their point? Power? Unequal riches? Lack of general welfare? etc. and is that the kind of market they want. It is not clear what Hayek would have thought about climate change, but his apparent concern for protecting companies rather than people’s ‘rights’ (which he always dismissed) and safety, suggest he would leave it to the corporate market, and its power relations.

I follow Shahar here. Some people use Hayek, to argue that politically based responses to externalities are guaranteed to fail. for example::

  • [Carden, Art. 2013. “Economic Calculation in the Environmentalist Commonwealth.” Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics 16: 3-16.;
  • Cordato, Roy E. 1997. “Market-Based Environmentalism and the Free Market: They’re Not the Same.” Independent Review 1: 371-86.;
  • McGee, Robert W., and Walter E. Block. 1994. “Pollution Trading Permits as a Form of Market Socialism and the Search for a Real Market Solution to Environmental Pollution.” Fordham Environmental Law Journal 6: 51-77.]

While other Hayekians argue that Hayek would have supported aggressive environmental protections on the same grounds that he defended liberty, property, and markets in economic arenas:

  • [DiZerega, Gus. 1992. “Social Ecology, Deep Ecology, and Liberalism.” Critical Review 6: 305-70.,  
    • 1996a. “Towards an Ecocentric Political Economy.” Trumpeter 13.
    • 1996b. “Deep Ecology and Liberalism: The Greener Implications of Evolutionary Liberal Theory.” Review of Politics 58: 699-734;
  • Gamble, Andrew. 2006. “Hayek on Knowledge, Economics, and Society.” In The Cambridge Companion to Hayek, edited by Edward Feser, 111-31. New York: Cambridge University Press;
  • O’Neill, John. 2012. “Austrian Economics and the Limits of Markets.” Cambridge Journal of Economics 36: 1073-90.]

In treated useable resources Hayek was blatantly optimistic. He noticed that “fertility of the soil, can only be expected to endure permanently if we take care to preserve them.” (2008, Pure theory of Capital: 72). This preservation is said to be part of the problem of maintaining and reproducing capital so as to permanently elevate prosperity (??102). As Shahar shows, for Hayek, this does not really mean conservation, but replacing “each resource that is being used up with a new one that will make at least an equal contribution to future income.” There is no need to keep the “total stock of natural resources… intact,” as used up land can be abandoned and this is not reprehensible or wasteful, because it is in the nature of monetary capital to be used (Constitution of liberty 1960: 323 [collected works 496]). However, while land can function as capital, it is not just capital or money and using it up does not always have no effects. Hayek states:

most consumption of irreplaceable resources rests on an act of faith. We are generally confident that, by the time the resource is exhausted, something new will have been discovered which will either satisfy the same need or at least compensate us for what we no longer have, so that we are, on the whole, as well off as before. We are constantly using up resources on the basis of the mere probability that our knowledge of available resources will increase indefinitely.

(constitution 1960, 319)

We might say that the pathology of capitalism is based on sentiments like this. However, as some resources have been replaced in the past with different ones, this does not mean we can assume that all resources can always be so replaced. Judging by the awkward phrasing Hayek realises there is a potential problem, but wants to embrace a magic pudding economy.

As well as potentially encouraging harm, Hayek also warns about protections against harm:

Industrial development would have been greatly retarded if sixty or eighty years ago the warning of the conservationists about the threatening exhaustion of the supply of coal had been heeded; and the internal combustion engine would never have revolutionized transport if its use had been limited to the then known supplies of oil (during the first few decades of the era of the automobile and the airplane the known resources of oil at the current rate of use would have been exhausted in ten years). Though it is important that on all these matters the opinion of the experts about the physical facts should be heard, the result in most instances would have been very detrimental if they had had the power to enforce their views on policy

(constitution 320)

Experts get in the way of capitalist know-how? Hayek also threatens us with the tragedy of the commons:

no individual exploiter will have an interest in conserving [commons], since what he does not take will be taken by others (1960, 319).

But, for once, he relies on the well managed commons principle. Commons may work out, if people “agree to be compelled, provided this compulsion is also applied to others” (Law, Legislation, and Liberty, vol. III: The Political Order of a Free People. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1981: 44)

Hayek also argues that while people should have regulations that force them to use the market (probably as the price system is the only information system he trusts, and failure and misery should be allowed to occur, if you are not rich), the market should not be told what to do, as actors would have:

“no chance to use their own knowledge or follow their own predilections. The action performed according to such commands serves exclusively the purposes of him who has issued it” (1960, 132)

having direction or paying charges is not the obstruction of use of knowledge. This is just hyperbole to stop capitalists being constrained, to demonstrate faith in markets.

A free market approach is said by some to mean that people would see the dangers, rebuild cities on higher land, use fish farms, invent profitable heat tolerant crops and so on. This assumes there are not unintended consequences of fish farms, that there is land inland which is not already being used, and that heat tolerant crops do not prove vulnerable in some other unexpected way. However, the main objection to the proposal is that nothing like this is happening in market societies, and that cannot just be blamed on governments. And if we need ideal free markets, then we might as well give up, as they will never happen, due to plutocrats buying governments to support their advantages.

Free marketeers are relying on top down planning from corporations who only are concerned about profit and appearance. We may need to rely more on local movements.

  • Steve Rayner, “How to Eat an Elephant: A Bottom-Up Approach to Climate Policy,” Climate Policy 10, no. 6 (2010): 615–21, https://doi.org/10.3763/cpol.2010.0138.
  • Steve Rayner, “Uncomfortable Knowledge: The Social Construction of Ignorance in Science and Environmental Policy Discourses,” Economy and Society 41, no. 1 (2012): 107–125.

Coase

Ronald Coase [“The Problem of Social Cost Journal of Law and Economics, Vol. 3, No. 1, pp. 1–44], objected to Pigouvian taxes, by alleging that all externality costs, could be resolved by strong property rights and market bargaining, and hence made ‘internalities’ in the market.

  • The first obvious objection to this kind of procedure is that the atmosphere, rivers, oceans and migratory animals are not generally private property, and can range across countries. It would also be unpleasant to be charged for breathing. Hence it is hard to negotiate over the main forms of climate illth due to its dispersion.
  • If the polluter owns what is being polluted or the owner does not care, then it becomes impossible to reduce pollution.
  • Property and borders are also rendered complicated by the fact that multiple organisations all over the world are polluting, and those companies who can avoid Coasian bargaining can benefit from pollution. Examples of this occur in Carbon Accounting whereby the burning of, say, Australian originating fossil fuels, does not count against Australia’s emissions totals – even if it profited from that transaction.
  • Another objection is that the more powerful the illth maker may be with respect to the harmed, the more they will be able to refuse participating in a genuine transaction. This happens commonly when people have been poisoned by work, and it takes what is usually a massively unequally funded court case to get anywhere, and people may be dead before they are compensated, as with Australian asbestos cases.
  • Or someone may be able to come up and say. “I’m founding a polluting business, down the street that will possibly drive away your customers. It would be sad if your business got broken, you know what I mean, I want [blah] a month to stop.” The transaction is essentially a bribe, or protection.
  • It may also be impossible for me to pay the cost of not polluting to the polluting company if they do stop polluting.
  • There is no guarantee market participants will know the value of not-polluting either. That does not make whatever agreement we come to the best possible agreement.
  • In some cases the full costs of the pollution may be paid by unknown people, or people who have not been born yet, for example those people born into our future, a world of completely out of control climate change.
  • In most cases we might think that the purpose of taxes and charges, is to stop the pollution, rather than to have people to decide on what compensation they want for the pollution, or how much money or cost a polluter wants to stop polluting.
  • There is no reason to assume that a monetary cost can always be imposed upon the illth, or the trouble of bargaining, agreed to.
  • If the illth is diffuse then, the actual short term cost might be so small that no one can be bothered to sue the company for restoration. Hence the illth continues to grow.

Some have argued that Coase is arguing that after transaction costs are taken into account, then there is no problem, even if the illth has not gone away. Dahlman adds, in “The Problem of Externality” (1979), that once we recognise levels of uncertainty then we cannot easily claim the Externality wasn’t internalized by somebody or other. Note this says nothing about the illth, even though it attempts to make it vanish, it just says that no one is financially responsible, ever.

A writer for the ‘free market’ Cato Institute writes without any apparent irony after giving an example of Coasian trading in action: “well‐​defined and tradable property rights abolish externalities, even if the pollution remains.” We will apparently get the least monetarily costly arrangement, even if it leaves the illth alone. It appears for these economists that there is no real world other than the price system. James Buchanan apparently adopts the position, that if the polluted don’t notice the pollution, then its not harming them. The obvious consequence from that position is not to lower the pollution but the amount of information about its harms.

  • Externality,” by James M. Buchanan and Wm. Craig Stubblebine. Economica 29(116): 371–384 (1962).

Buchanan also argues that comparison of the current word with a world in which illth of the type under discussion is not present is a fantasy.

To argue that an existing order is ‘imperfect’ in comparison with an alternative order of affairs that turns out, upon careful inspection, to be unattainable may not be different from arguing that the existing order is ‘perfect… [There is] nothing in the collective choice process that will tend to produce the ‘ideal’ solution, as determined by the welfare economist.”

Politics, Policy, and the Pigovian Margins,” by James M. Buchanan. Economica 29(113): 17–28 (1962).

Yes but it is also a fantasy to assume that illth can always be ignored.

Saying that the market cannot solve, or has not, solved these problems can be dismissed as thinking the government could do better – which is presumably obviously untrue [Externality: Origins and Classifications,” by Donald J. Boudreaux and Roger Meiners. Natural Resources Journal 59(1): 1–33 (2019)]. It can hardly do much worse.

Another Free market writer states:

What is called “pollution” is the use of a non-owned resource without compensation. In some situations, there are no private owners, as with the air. If there were, they could demand compensation for permission to use the resources, as with ordinary purchases. The consequences would be “internalized” on the responsible person, and pollution might be avoided or reduced

This argument functions as a way of protecting companies who destroy commons, or ‘public goods,’

In a similar mode, Candela writes that when ‘externalities’ occur “[i]t simply implies the failure of the conditions of the market process to exist, not the existence of market failure” (see Candela and Geloso 2020). But this is happening in a market, and no market is perfect, so its just a way of saying that when markets fail, there are no real markets, which is a sleight of hand to excuse harmful business activity in real existing markets.

Expectations

Some say that externalities must be unexpected, because people will always (if sensible) factor expected costs or harms into their lives.

“Externalities exist only when another party’s actions create unexpected spillover effects,” “Insofar as no one’s legitimate expectations are upset,.. no externality occurs.” The bargains have been made and the receivers of negative externalities indirectly compensated. “The problem, if one asserts there is a problem, is the structure of property rights” [Externality: Origins and Classifications,” by Donald J. Boudreaux and Roger Meiners. Natural Resources Journal 59(1): 1–33 (2019)]

If you move near a motorway then you have no right to demand compensation for the pollution you suffer, as that pollution (possibly) gave you a cheaper house price, or you figured that other benefits of the area compensated you for the financial ‘cost’ of breathing polluted air. There is therefore no need to reduce illth produced by the motorway’s use. In this system it appears that no one should be able to claim that climate change is unexpected so companies should bear no cost for the climate change that they have generated. If I am reading this correctly, then this theory seems to be another way of protecting polluters from their responsibilities.

Another fundamental part of the issue, is there can be uncertainty or incomplete information about who is responsible for damages or contract restrictions. Coase apparently implies that complete information must exist for his solution to work, along with rationality. However, uncertainty and incompleteness are normal in complex systems, so to imply that perfect and complete information is needed for something to work, is one indirect way of saying it will not work.

Technologies of corporatism

One question that might be worth asking is: “Is it market failure, or market success that increases illth?” Increasing illth increases profitability in the short term.

Is the presence of corporations as a technology which structures a group so that investors only have a limited liability for the harms they are profiting from, part of the cause of illth?

Liability and the Known Unknown”. Duke Law Journal. 68: 275–332. doi:10.2139/ssrn.3121519. ISSN 1556-5068. S2CID 44186028 – via SSRN. Hansmann, Henry; Kraakman, Reinier (May 1991). “Toward Unlimited Shareholder Liability for Corporate Torts”. The Yale Law Journal. 100 (7): 1879. doi:10.2307/796812. ISSN 0044-0094. JSTOR 796812.]

If fossil fuels do not get more expensive to produce, the fossil fuel companies do not issue propaganda, or buy or threaten governments, and renewables do not get more profitable, then the illth of GHG will continue if left to the market.

The theory of externalities seems largely designed to avoid the problem of illth production or to avoid reducing it.

The failure of market economics to apparently get the problem, means that the only plausible remedies seem legal and governmental ones.

  1. A government charge for illth production, that gradually and regularly increases, until the illth production is no longer profitable. The monies raised from the charge to be used for illth remediation.
  2. Defining economically produced illth as illegal, with a period to allow adjustment to this proclamation. Followed by other sources of illth, with people having the right to bring government subsidized cases against illth production and to fund remediation.

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On Capitalism

May 15, 2023

Capitalism

Capitalism is an organised system of domination, politics and economic power, not just a system of trade.

Capitalism tends towards producing vast inequalities of wealth, that depend upon a person’s place in the system, and not a person’s hard work or talent.

Riches are largely, although not always, decided by birth.

.Accumulation of riches tends to lead to oligopolies, in which small numbers of business control most of their specific markets, and deliberately wipe out competition.

If capitalist ‘free markets’ could exist they would destroy themselves.

In capitalism profit is the only virtue and only mode of evaluation

Capitalism is also a system in which profit is the main virtue and main goal.

If it helps make profit, then pollution, ecological destruction, low wages, industrial accidents, deception, low income misery, low income bad health, and political marginalisation of the populace will be encouraged.

Capitalism reduces all virtue and tradition to profit.

Religion becomes a way of justifying the extraction of riches from the world, or a promise that God favours the saved with riches, and hence that the rich are, as a class, the favoured of God.

This glorification of monetary profit, leads to a sociopathic system which has little care about the damage it produces. The system rewards, and selects for, those people who find it easy not to care for others or the world. Those people then select people who are like them. Consequently the system selects pathologically harmful people to lead it, which intensifies the problems with the system.

A fundamental drive of capitalist profit making is maximising cheapness of production (through low wages, cheap destruction, cheap pollution, cheap resources, cheap dispossession of poorer people etc.) and raising the price of sales.

Capitalism, government and the State

This accumulation of riches leads to plutocracy, where riches can buy any other form of power, and the rich dominate over everyone else and structure the market in their favour.

Capitalists will collaborate with each other and the State to achieve the aims described above, which benefit nearly all of them, because this is how business has to behave within the system.

Collaboration amongst capitalists makes what is called ‘crony capitalism’.

Crony capitalism is not an addition to, or blemish on, capitalism, but fundamental to its political workings and its domination over the State and over government.

As a system, capitalism cycles through boom, bust and bailout.

The rich arrange it so that ordinary citizens and tax payers protect their companies from their unrealistic, destructive or deceptive profit making practices, and the rich have bought the power and credibility to make this assumption fundamental to capitalist practice.

If poorer people suffer from the bust, that is just the price that has to be paid to keep the system going, so who cares?

Without the State to prop it up, capitalism would collapse, or decay into the rule of open violence.

To protect capitalism, the populace have to be misinformed (which is normal given corporate ownership and control over the media, advertising and PR), and people have to be convinced not to co-operate to constrain capitalism in any way.

The people are then led to find scapegoats for the troubles of the system – this can be people of other ‘races,’ other religions, other sexualities, other politics etc. It does not matter who the scapegoat is, as long as it is not the capitalist class in general. It can easily be a billionaire who makes it clear they do not worship capitalism.

Consequently, capitalism destroys social trust, constructive co-operation and compassion, as a matter of course.

Responses

If it seems impossible, or too dangerous, to overthrow capitalism, then for society and its individuals to survive, some other group must organise to restrain capitalism’s destructiveness.

The ‘easiest’ way is to take back the State, and liberate it from lobbyists, corporate bribery and the assumption that corporate elites are the only important part of society, know how to run things and know how to organise every possible process.

Taking back the State, can lead to laws which apply to all business, and encourage sharing of wealth with the workforce, making work places safe, halting environmental destruction and pollution, increasing worker representation in parliament or congress. lessen inequalities of wealth and protect people from busts and the inevitable misfortunes of life as much as possible. This all lowers the likelihood of plutocracy and increases quality of life for most people. This is a minimum.

This actually happened in the 50s, 60s and early 70s of the last century, so it is not impossible.

It should be pretty obvious that some people and parties who pretend to be taking back the State for the people, are deeply embedded in capitalist processes and have no intention of cutting back its normal excesses, even if they criticise some sectors of the economy.

Other systems of resistance, suggest that people should withdraw their support from capitalism, and become self-providing and self-governing communities that deliberately exclude big business (shopping malls, polluters, arms manufacturers, mining companies etc) from their areas, and try to constrain local riches from taking over. When a few such self controlled communities exist, they can start teaming up to become a political force, struggling against surrendering control to capitalism.

There is no reason these two constructive responses to capitalist destruction and domination cannot work together.

Summary

To repeat capitalism is a system of power relations build on top of crimes an dispossession. It needs checking if we are to survive both social and economic collapse, and the collapse of the world’s ecologies.

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Against Libertarians and Neo-liberals again

November 13, 2022

There are significant problems with modern formulations of ‘free markets’ by libertarians and neo-liberals. This is another attempt to express my discontent with these positions

There is no evidence that capitalism can exist without government. It has not done so, so far.

  • Libertarians are not real anarchists, as they ignore the power differentials in capitalism or assert that with real free markets the State will collapse – a bit like communists insist that after the dictatorship of the proletariat the State will collapse, sometime in the future, and that imagined collapse justifies whatever is happening now.
  • Capitalist markets have never existed without a State.
  • Some libertarians and neoliberals try to avoid this problem essentially by asserting trade is capitalism, and that therefore lots of Stateless capitalist societies have existed.
  • But there are many modes of exchange and not all of them are capitalistic.
  • If we accept that capitalism is trade, then communism is capitalism. Both systems engage in trade. Capitalism does not encourage free trade, but trade according to the rules of the rich elites.
  • Capitalism is a particular set of political organisations of production and restrictions on trade and property, that stops most people from being self-supporting and demands they engage in wage labour, favors hoarding by the rich elites, and suppresses opposition to those elites.

Capitalism promotes wealth inequality

  • Most libertarians and neoliberals celebrate inequality of riches.
  • They argue that massive inequality of riches is reward for talent alone. Power has nothing to do with the inequality.
  • But one possible part-definition of capitalism is that it is a system of exchange organised to benefit the rich elites and increase their power over everyone else who has to depend on them for survival because everyone else has to engage in a market controlled by those rich elites.
  • The fundamental social relationship in capitalism is not liberty but obedience to a boss who is wealthier than you are. Capitalism is about submission to wealth.

Riches buy power

  • Riches can buy all forms of power, especially if riches are considered good in themselves. they can buy control over: Violence, Communication, Information, Energy, Religions, organisational power and so on.
  • Riches can also buy liberty for those who have riches.
  • Therefore the more unequal the riches the more unequal access there is to power and liberty.
  • Libertarians and neoliberals support liberty for rich people, and the rights of rich people to not be hindered in any of their activities, including those which impinge upon poorer people.
  • At the extreme point, the legal system (courts, judges, lawyers, police etc) is up for sale to the highest bidder, so there can be no challenge to the rich at all.
  • In neoliberal or libertarian capitalism your rights are what you can pay for.

Capitalism tends towards plutocracy

  • Humans tend to collaborate with each other. You could not have corporate capitalism if this was not the case.
  • Therefore it is likely the hyper-rich will collaborate to either set up government in the unlikely event that there was no government previously, or take over the government if there is a government.
  • Once they take over the government, they will promote government for their collective interests, and collective liberties, and suppress other needs or other liberties which conflict with theirs, or their riches. This is what people often do.
  • They can stack government with their supporters, and make legislation which supports them and makes it harder for others. They can repeal legislation which impinges on their liberty, but keep legislation which impinges on the liberty of others.
  • As they control information and support generation of information which supports them, they will attack the best truth we have, if it conflicts with their dominance or wealth generation for themselves.
  • They suppress other modes of power which are not capitalistic. Which means there is little in the way of division of power – capitalist States tend to become mono-powers, and encourage capitalistic organization for everything.
  • Capitalists will set up plutocracy, and curtail the liberty of other ‘classes’. It is very hard to find a capitalist system in which this does not happen.
  • Indeed, we have had forty years of talk about free markets and we now have a straightforward plutocracy. The plutocracy is unstable, because it has ignored and suppressed inconvenient people and the working classes, and has suppressed the needs and dynamics of the ecology we live within. But corporations and their interests come first (although they may pretend not).
  • Libertarians seem far more comfortable with authoritarian capitalists, authoritarian religions, and State removal of the rights of workers than they seem comfortable with democratic socialists, or communal anarchists, who want to overcome the suppression of people in general. Given capitalists, in practice, use the State all the time, this comfort has nothing to do with getting rid of the State or increasing liberty.

The origins of capitalism do not reside in hard work but theft and violence

  • The libertarian, neoliberal and capitalist origin myth asserts that inequalities of riches (and the other inequalities these buy) arise from hard work and talent.
  • But capitalism arose in theft and oppression.
  • It started in aristocracy which depended on the taking of land, usually through violence or conquest.
  • Capital developed by stealing. People’s lives were stolen through slavery, indentured labour, truly terrible and often cheap but lethal working conditions, and so on. Land was stolen by ‘colonial’ violence from people who already used the land as in India, the US, Australia, and in the UK by theft of commons. It originated in the theft of treasure from India, and South America, or more accurately in the South American case, from British pirates stealing from Spanish treasure ships. It originated in massive cheap pollution, poisoning and environmental destruction which stole people’s lives and health.
  • Wherever it was arrived, capitalism stole property and self-sufficiency from people and turned them into wage laborers, depriving them of basic liberty.
  • Capitalist colonialists would often impose monetary taxes on people to force them to engage in otherwise meaningless wage labor, and submit to the colonial forces.
  • There is no reason to think that this is no longer the case, and that capitalism is now not structured by riches inherited from that violence, or that if violence and ecological destruction can be got away with profitably it will not be engaged in.
  • Libertarians and neoliberals are really good at seeing that ordinary people can co-operate to inhibit the market and they seem to want to suppress such movements. However, they are pretty useless at seeing the normal violence of capitalism or the ways that capitalists can cooperate to interfere with the market, both with the State and outside the State, for their benefit and power.
  • Libertarians often seem to define their “non-aggression principle” to exclude normal capitalist violence and suppress real rebelliousness, or demands for recompense for capitalist theft as aggression, probably because they support the establishment more than then people.

People are not just driven by profit or power

  • While in actual life libertarianism and neoliberalism reduces everything to profit and the liberty of the wealthy humans have many other drives
  • Libertarianism and neoliberals essentially dismiss these drives. If it does not make money, its of no value or use . If it does make money it is of value of use.
  • We may example: not very good art, non-capitalist religion, co-operation, care, love etc are all downplayed by libertarians and neoliberals in favor of the market.
  • It might be that everything worthwhile in life comes from outside the capitalist market and is destroyed by that market, as everything is reduced to money and profit.

Capitalism damages people

  • Historical theft and violence continues to damage people today, as colonialism and its racism, class distinctions and so on continue to affect peoples lives and allocate life chances. This does not mean people cannot triumph against huge obstacles, but they face those obstacles and structural inhibitions, because of previous and continuing capitalist theft and violence.
  • It has already been stated that capitalism damages and poisons ecology. People need functional ecology to live well, so damage to ecology damages people.
  • Capitalism encourages obedience and submission with the threat of being dumped into poverty.
  • Capitalism requires most people to have no relationship to what they produce, or to take no reward in what they produce, and have no control over what happens to what they produce. This is what Marx called alienation. It harms people’s involvement in their own lives.
  • Capitalism encourages machine production, and therefore, for most people, discourages craft production or the development of holistic skills and the use of their body and mind and feelings etc. This damages them. Adam Smith while encouraging division of tasks and labour, recognised that it inculcated mental and ‘spiritual’ stultification.
  • Capitalism encourages exhaustion, not just of land, but of people through overwork, media saturation and so on. This lessens their ability to respond to life and problems, or to reject capitalism.
  • People can nearly always be replaced, as they have no intrinsic value. This also damages people and shows they are of no real worth, as bosses cannot be bothered to treat them like ‘human beings’.
  • Possibly all the major problems in the West have been generated by capitalism and its markets.

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Wage Labour in Capitalism

June 27, 2021

The Capitalist view of wage labour

The ideology is simple. In an imaginary free market, both employer and employee only ever sign voluntary agreements. There is never any differential of power or need, and the market always values labour and skills at exactly the right value, or the contract would not be signed by either party, who are perfectly free to turn the contract down.

No contract, no matter how exploitative, can in this sense be defined as unfair or exploitative – because it is ‘voluntary’.

In neoliberalism, the same kind of argument is used to try and persuade people that everything they do in a free market is voluntary; from being homeless, having no access to education, not being able to afford medical treatment, to having to risk covid to earn an income.

In reality this is a largely motivated delusion. It suits employers and helps make them virtuous almost no matter what they do.

Objections to the Capitalist view

Self-sufficient Labour?

The capitalist argument about employment contracts might approach truth where the worker has a guaranteed source of food and shelter independent of their labour for an employer. But in capitalist societies this is exceedingly rare. Indeed capitalists have historically tried to stop that situation of freedom from arising, especially in colonial societies because they have repeatedly found that people will not submit to work for hire if they can avoid it. People’s apparent reluctance to hire out their labour and skills, if they don’t have to, is important to acknowledge.

Working for bosses, only possibly becomes voluntary where workers can survive without having to work for others. An aim of capitalism, particularly neoliberal capitalism, seems to be to make workers precarious, with as little support and independence as possible, so that they do have to work for bosses. This inability for most people to control their own labour is one of the primary causes of lack of responsibility, lack of self-reliance, lack of care, and what Marx called ‘alienation’.

Suppression of connections across hierarchy

This worker ‘precarity’ is reinforced if there is no other kind of relationship between worker and boss, other than the contractual relationship – no friendships, no obligations of wealth, no protections. That is, there is no mutual obligation on the bosses’ part to support workers in hard times. Conservatives like GK Chesterton were, as a result, often nostalgic for feudalism, where lords did have obligations towards their workers. This, fundamental human obligation to each other, is something which is usually suppressed in capitalism and reduced to contracts. When capitalists talk about mutual obligation, it nearly always means the obligation of the poorer person to the richer person (in return for an income, or even potential income, no matter how small). In Neoliberalism, any ties between non-related, non-elite, people are a potential impediment to the market.

This suppression of human ties and mutuality, is a break up of community responsibility and another cause of lack of responsibility, lack of self-reliance, lack of care, and what Marx called ‘alienation’. Max Weber seems to argue that Protestantism tended to make this breakage of connection much easier, because in extreme Protestantism you had no responsibility to others, and all that counted was your own salvation, which was won by faith not by charity.

Capitalist team-ups

Employers in a town (or country if they are big enough) can team-up to decide wage ranges. As Adam Smith wrote:

People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the publick, or in some contrivance to raise prices.

There is no reason to assume they will not keep this agreement between themselves unless, perhaps, there is a labour shortage and they get desperate for workers. If there is a labour shortage in an area, workers elsewhere then have to decide whether it is worth losing contact with their friends and support networks, and familiarity with the local system to get a job which may not last more than a week or two, or run the risk that enough workers have also moved and turned up to compete to run wages down again.

Most, perhaps not all but certainly most, employers have more capital than workers, enough to borrow money anyway. That is why they can employ people. So they have more power, and more ability to hold out. So they tend to win in negotiations, unless workers can organise. At the least workers who try and organise to get decent wages or conditions will be blamed, through the capitalist media, for any problems that arise. The bigger the corporation the more power it normally has. Smaller businesses are much more desperate, and find organised labour much harder to deal with.

Fundamental liberty?

All this appears to mean that the fundamental capitalist social relation is between boss and worker. It requires that the worker obeys and submits to the boss in exchange for survival. That is capitalist liberty, and some libertarians argue that people should be free to sign contracts of slavery, presumably if they are desperate enough to work for nothing but food and shelter. Remember, in capitalism, no wage work contract can be exploitative if the winner can say you did not have to sign it. In general, your only choice is between who to submit to, if you manage to change, or get, other work.

Socialists usually require that it be relatively easy to obtain unemployment benefits so people can survive unemployment, and get some power of choice over who they decide to sign up with – a basic provision for liberty. Capitalists usually oppose this, just as they oppose workers organising and striking, to get better wages and conditions, but don’t actively business people organising to suppress wages, or support their own power and influence. In practice, pro-capitalists usually do not object strongly to tax payer subsidies for business, even if not needed, even if the companies were corrupt and stupid, and even if it interferes with the market. This has been demonstrated over and over again; recently from the 2007-8 financial crisis to Covid.

Socialists also try to encourage workers (and everyone else in a low power position) to self organise, to balance out the power differences, but these workers’ organisations always run the risk of selling out to big business if the members are not actively involved and resistant to such sell outs, and media demands for such sell outs. On the other hand, capitalism rarely encourages democracy or self-governance for everyone. It pretends we are like it should be (individuals without ties beyond our families), just as it encourages deep hierarchies and inequalities to avoid the possibility of challenge to wealth and profit.

Connections

Because some employers are much, much, wealthier than workers, they tend to have better political and economic connections, so they have much more influence over regulations and the use of state violence. They buy the regulations which make it easier to protect their property and lifestyles from workers who get fed up with the system. They make it harder for workers to organise. They control the media so they largely control the workforce’s ideas about the world. They make the system of exploitation part of every day life, and enforced by the rules, the law and people’s understanding. It is hard for workers to challenge this ‘everydayness’, with their own experience and interests. There is, nowadays, little in the way of media which is not tied to capitalist forms of organisation, and which can give people non-capitalist ideas – especially not Fox, Breitbart or OANN etc.

Workers and working conditions

Workers are a cost on business, so the general (not everyone but general) business drive is to get as much out of them for as little as possible in expense, to get maximum profit. Hence the urge for cheap dangerous working conditions, hence workplace injuries, insecure work and so on. Capitalists usually try to deskill, or AI, work as much as possible so they can hire anyone for any job, which results in a race to the bottom for wages as well as higher profit. Conservative Adam Smith famously argued that repetitive, cheap labour destroys the moral, intellectual and other ‘human’ capacity of workers – but that, apparently, is a consequence of profit and so cannot be challenged. It may also render workers less capable of figuring out what the contracts they are signing actually mean for their lives, which further benefits employers.

As a result, capitalists generally support cutting back workplace inspections and health regulations as it is a supposedly unnecessary interference in business. Again this is capitalist liberty. Just as it is capitalist liberty for pollution to be dumped on poor areas of town without cost to them – it helps increase profit. Anything which restricts profit is an interference with the market.

Your contract to work in murderous, exhausting conditions, is still fair by capitalist definition, even if you did not know about those conditions in advance. Socialists tend to want more equity in working conditions, and ensure (as best as possible) that people are not incapacitated or poisoned by work.

Hierarchy and the value of labour

This downwards pressure on wages and conditions is not always the case. People higher up the capitalist hierarchy such as high level executives, usually have enough power to be able to transfer some of the savings brought about by cheapening most people’s labour to increase the value of their own labour, and give themselves class luxuries even when these luxuries are a cost on business. Conservative David Hume argued, the value given to labour is a function of the labourer’s power as much as, if not more than, the value of what they contribute.

If such high up people lose a position through company failure or their own incompetence, they are likely to have enough money to hold out for a while, rather than have to rush to the meat packing works for income, and they probably have good elite social networks that they can use to ensure they get another well paid job of roughly the same level. So they are much more immune than the average worker to precarious conditions.

Marxism – to some extent

The Marxist argument is that capitalism is inherently exploitative, as workers have to produce more value than they get paid for, otherwise business could not make a profit. In other words, capitalist business needs to steal some of the fundamental human resource of labour from workers to be viable. This is not because bosses are inherently malicious (even though capitalism may encourage selfish malice and promote sociopaths who feel no obligations to others), but because it is what the system demands from them. They cannot act in any other way. In capitalism, labour is essentially extracted by violence, and the property and capital which results from this theft or extortion is then protected by the State.

Capitalism requires a State. There has never been a form of capitalism which has existed without a State, and it is rare for the wealth elites not to be dominant in that State, making sure the legislation and arrangements help preserve their power from challenge

This Marxist argument, it strikes me, is not entirely fair. The employer risks capital and their own labour and that risk could require some kind of return to make it worthwhile. If the employer does not succeed in making profit then (assuming they were not wealthy to begin with, with the right connections), they risk having to sell their own labour and becoming a worker themselves and being subject to the exploitation that other workers face. With that risk it is no wonder that employers are prone to authoritarianism, to cheating and malice, whatever their intentions otherwise. Hence the permanent presence of class warfare, directed from employers downwards towards people who have to seek employment to survive….

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Responsibility for climate change: Companies vs. people

February 2, 2021

Are customers of fossil fuel companies more to blame than fossil fuel companies, themselves, for climate change?

I almost think this is a distracting question.

I guess there is a possible argument, that the poor little fossil fuel companies are just satisfying customer demand and should not be held responsible for anything they do, as they are complete victims and slaves to the market, but I don’t hear that very often. It is, for example, not as apparently common as refusal to acknowledge there is a problem.

However, if we think ecologically at all, then we know that companies and customers are bound together in systems. Without people buying the stuff which the companies promote and try to sell, then the system collapses, or transforms. Without people selling, promoting and profiting from the stuff, then people could not use it.

If customers move into electric cars, or ‘green energy,’ then demand will lower, and ideally fossil fuel companies will move into more profitable areas, or go bust – especially as it gets harder to find profitable fossil fuel sources (as it becomes more dangerous and more polluting, with more energy required to get the fuel).

In this case, customers include large customers, like factories, steel makers, aluminium manufacturers, coal powered electricity generators and so on. So the economic system that supports fossil fuels does not just involve people who put petrol in their cars, but other large corporate entities. Change (should we want it) has to involve them as well.

Unfortunately, we know that, if companies own the government (or significant politicians), are established and seem respectable, they will get massive taxpayer subsidies and bailouts to allow them to continue trading. Or they may get government support for continuing fossil fuel use, such as governments buying supply in the national interest, or subsidising purchasers – this is, after all, how capitalism works in practice, and the more pro ‘free market’ the government, the more free they often seem about transferring taxpayers’ wealth to the big corporate sector to keep the market going.

It should also be reasonably obvious that over 100 years of fossil fuel usage, will have set up systems of habit, regulation, distribution, technology and so on, that favours the use of fossil fuels and the happiness of high level people in fossil fuel companies and stock holders.

If you want to change the system, then you need to look at all components of the system, which includes consumers, companies, government, technologies, energy availability, pollution, ecologies (and undoubtedly other factors) and try to work out the least painful and quickest way of avoiding mass damage, or total system failure.

This is difficult, and often unappealing, because there is:

  • huge uncertainty in change
  • usually a large cost in change
  • powerful people and groups who don’t want to risk loss of that power or profit
  • a media which tends to support established corporate power
  • the possibility that, if we go first, other people will take advantage of us
  • huge cultural and symbolic resonance with fossil fuels, the founders of modernity. Heroic miners and entrepreneurs, lucky breaks, huge riches and so on.
  • potential acknowledgement that we, ourselves, are partially responsible for the problem, which can be morally unnerving
  • hope that we really don’t have to risk anything, or suffer anything, to get by.

Few people would want change from fossil fuels, if it was not for:

  • increasing difficulty finding and extracting fossil fuels (it is possible ‘peak oil’ has already occurred)
  • wanting to clean up poisonous pollution and smog
  • wanting to lessen environmental damage
  • wanting to stop climate change.

If you don’t care about these factors, or are taught not to care about these factors, then moving out of fossil fuels is low priority, and the potential loss seems extreme.

The problem is, in this and many other cases, if we don’t attempt controlled change, then we will have uncontrolled change thrust upon us, as the existing system breaks down.

As I have argued previously, in working with systems, we cannot proceed by dogma. We have to proceed experimentally, and observe what the results of actions are, and change our actions and responses as we go along. This is something people, in the West, seem to find difficult. That is another reason why practicing Dadirri might be useful, as is the joined process of sitting with our fears and griefs so we do not run away from them and the problems they know about.

Allocating blame is not the answer, but helping the system to change could be.

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Some questions about markets

December 15, 2020

This is a continuation of the previous post on ‘Praxeology’. But its self-sufficient, you don’t have to read the other post.

This post is just a series of questions about markets to those who believe in the possible existence of ‘free markets’ and the virtues of corporate ‘free markets’. The indented parts are usually comments on the questions.

Questions

Does wealth give power? Does this power increase with increasing inequalities of wealth?

  • If people have less wealth it could seem they have less power and less ability to influence others, or buy the services of others.
  • Great wealth is one of the things that gives States power.

Does capitalism magnify differences in wealth? Does it lead to accumulation of differences in wealth? [Perhaps due to inheritance laws?]

  • Are there systems which act to prevent accumulating differences in wealth?

Do wealthy people and businesses normally team up to get even more co-ordinated power and market control?

  • As far as I can see, the corporation has its origin in this capacity of people to team up to support individual and collective interests. If people were just ‘isolated individuals’ then we would not have corporations, or families, etc.
  • States could likewise originate in both team ups and fractures.

Do some corporations currently have assets and resources greater than some countries?

  • Are corporations are as big and powerful as some States?

Do corporations and wealthy people get priority access to politicians and government, to put their views on how governments should behave?

  • Is there a form of ‘government’ in which other people might get priority of access?

Does wealth buy lobbyists, whose job is to influence government policies?

  • and who sometimes end up running government departments?

Does wealth enable the wealthy to buy politicians through donations of money and labour to the campaigns of those politicians, or by promising well paid easy jobs to them after they retire from politics?

Does wealth allow people to fund the semblance of political activity, and give a false impression of what is popular?

  • Astro-turfing, push polling, bought trolling and votes etc.

Do Big business and government naturally ally? Who is likely to be dominant and under what circumstances?

Does wealth buy positive ‘information’ through the funding of think tanks, or university research centres, which primarily exist to justify ideology and research which supports the interests of wealth?

  • A think tank is never surprising. It is run on the market principle of giving the backers what they want, to continue to get being paid.

Do corporate lobbyists make use of this think tank information to influence the ways that people and politicians see and understand the world?

  • Hypothesis. Information whether true, false, or partial, influences the way people seek to act in the world. If you control the information a person accepts then you have some control over how they act, and what they will support. Rhetoric, or the art of persuasion, is not a minor consideration in social life. It is nearly always present in communication.
  • States also frequently try to control the means of information and the content of information.

Have corporations acted as major sponsors of ‘free market’ thinking since the 1930s, and can we hypothesise that one reason is because they find it useful to help maintain their power?

Do wealthy people and corporations own and control media (large and small), and hence control the information that the media circulates, does not circulate?

  • Does this create what passes for common sense and ethical behaviour?

Does wealth buy the law? Not just which laws that get passed by the government, but the actual legal process itself and the lawyers to execute it, making taking on a corporation way too expensive for most ordinary people?

  • It seems hard to challenge a corporation in law. It could be even harder to imagine how you would challenge a corporation without law and a State to enforce it.
  • Obviously States can also try to own and control the law for their own convenience.

Do corporations often have mobility which enables them to set up wherever the conditions are best for them, and thus have States bidding for their presence, by lowering demands or regulations on those corporations?

  • This seems well demonstrated to me.
  • States are rarely that motile. Most people who can leave a State’s area of land, will be left alone by that State, but not always.

Do small States, imply that people can probably make less resistance against corporate power, by attempting to take control of the State?

How do people control a corporation without being able to purchase heaps of shares? ie do wealthy people and organisations end up being the only ones who can have impactful input into a corporation?

Does wealth allow people to buy violence, organised or otherwise?

  • People can make money from being mercenaries. We can also think of the East India Company, the Opium war, and the dispossession of indigenous people by business, which seems to imply violence could become a normal part of trade, or of setting up points of trade.
  • States also usually try to gain the power of organised violence.

Do jobs (which are the mainstream way of surviving in capitalism) usually involve submission to the employer, and therefore not encourage liberty in daily life?

Who constrains your daily life more, your boss or your government?

Are jobs a cost, so that it is in the apparent interest of any particular corporation to lower that cost, or dispose of jobs, to increase profit?

Does death or sickness from pollution tend to be distributed to poorer areas of the country or the world?

Is this distribution of pollution affected by the corporate advocacy for laws, and buying of laws, which enable them to pollute or suffer no consequences from making pollution and poisoning people and environments?

Is not polluting and not destroying those environments subject to extraction a cost, so that it is logically in the interest of any particular corporation to lower that cost and increase pollution and destruction?

Does liberty for the wealthy ever impinge on the liberty of the less wealthy, because of inequalities of power and resources?

Given the inequalities of wealth, power and survival is it possible that all exchange in a capitalist market is inevitably voluntary and equally satisfying for all participants?

Do corporations and the wealthy try and engineer the existence of governments that will allow them to structure the market to help them survive and prosper?

Do corporations aim to get taxpayer subsidies, if they are doing badly for some reason?

Is all trade the same as corporate capitalism?

  • If not, in what ways do they differ?

Is corporate monopoly bad? If not why not?

  • Does free market theory end up supporting monopoly and more corporate power?

Is corporate planning bad?

  • If corporate planning is not bad, then why is government planning bad?

Do corporations not care about ordinary people, or the so called ‘90%’?

  • Should anything make them care?

Does capitalism need a State to enforce property rights, hierarchies, wealth inequalities, contract, law, favourable order, labour and so on?

  • If so, then corporate capitalism will never not have a State which exists to support it, help it, and be taken over by the wealthy.

Is it likely that hyper-wealthy people will team up to set up states, to protect their perceived interests?

Do corporations, themselves, involve government over participants, power differentials, formal organisation, planning, internal economic transactions and so on?

  • It seems that businesses can resemble States, without a necessary basis in a country.

Can you tell me any basis of Government power which is not also possessed by the corporate sector as a whole, or by a corporation?

  • It seems to me, that if you object to governments then you should object to corporations, or at least to corporations over a certain size.
  • Corporations may fail, but so may governments. It does not necessarily change the system, or bring liberty.

Conclusion

If people continue to support free markets, which is their right of course, I would just ask them to consider the high probability that free markets are not free, and are never going to remain free, while we have vast inequalities of wealth, and while we have corporate forms of organisation and planning.

It seems plausible, that when we have these forms of organisation being dominant, then we have the possibility of a growing tyranny of wealth or plutocracy. Under those circumstances, the demand for free markets seems to be largely a demand to get out of the way of corporate and wealth power and action, and to be subject to that power and action.

If anyone really wants free markets then we probably have to start from scratch, not only destroying the State, but destroying the power of the mini-State, which makes up the corporation, and the plutocracy which makes States. If we don’t do that then it seems probable that we will just get increasing power of the wealth elites, and their liberty will remove your own.

No neoliberal is ever going to suggest that corporations are as deadly to liberty as States, because the whole function of their argument is an attempt to increase corporate power and plutocracy.

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Free markets? Praxeology? Individualism?

December 15, 2020

This blog post is an attempted contribution to Mises’ Praxeology, because the questions I’m going to ask in the next blog post, lead to observations which seem to contradict those of Austrian ‘free market’ economics.

Praxeology

Praxeology is the study of what the ‘Austrian’ form of economics considers to be those aspects of human action that can be grasped a priori, or which seem immediately obvious without any further testing or exploration. The idea is that anything we deduce, or derive, from these axioms has as much truth as the original axioms. As we have assumed the original axioms are obviously true then the derivations must also be true.

However, if the axioms are incorrect or incomplete, then propositions which have been derived from them, will (at best) be misleading.

I am extremely dubious that we can simply take apparently obvious axioms about human nature as true, without investigating them. Anthropology repeatedly shows that different societies have different ideas of what is normal human behaviour, so it is probable that what seems normal and obvious to a person is most likely a cultural phenomena, reinforced by their society and not necessarily true for all (culture can be mistaken, biased or limiting). However, to Mises, historical and anthropological research are irrelevant to understanding human dynamics and functioning. He argues that Praxeology’s axioms:

are, like those of logic and mathematics, a priori. They are not subject to verification or falsification on the ground of experience and facts. They are both logically and temporally antecedent to any comprehension of historical facts.

Mises 1998 (original 1949) Human Action: A Treatise on Economics. Mises Institute p 32

I’m not quite sure how any person’s axioms about human nature, can be ‘temporarily antecedent’ to their knowledge and experience. The simple fact would seem to be, that by the time we get to thinking we can deduce everything important about a subject from obvious axioms correctly without error in the deduction process, we have done a lot of learning, and had a lot of enculturation.

That these axioms are not falsifiable, or verifiable, is of course handy for producing dogma, but not as handy for finding truth. Heading towards even relatively accurate understanding takes work and testing. The beginning point of Mises Praxeology simply seems lazy. It is at least likely our learnt knowledge of history and our cultural expectations, lead us to consider some propositions about human nature as being obvious when they are not.

The point seems to be that Austrian economics should not ever be tested, unlike a normal science, where you change the theory if the evidence shows it is not correct. As Austrian Economics is based on a priori truths, then no amount of evidence can ever show it is wrong. It is essentially a dogma. We should probably be skeptical of his assumptions.

We may need to know what histories we are taking as true, to understand what axioms we might take as true.

A theory should be logical or derivable and systematic but, if we want accuracy or truth, we should be able to abandon the theory, if the evidence does not support it, otherwise we are just heading for a beautiful delusion.

He implies that the assumptions of mathematics are a priori as well, independent of our experience of the world. I’m skeptical about that proposition as well. However, we do know that you can get quite interesting results by challenging the apparently obvious axioms of mathematics, and that some of the new mathematics that has resulted is useful for analysing real world situations which were previously resistant to mathematical description. Non obvious, non a priori formulations, such as irrational numbers, imaginary numbers, non-Euclidian geometry and so on, should have been familiar to Mises. Non-obvious multi-valued Logics were being explored in the 1920s and 30s. We can assume he was not inevitably going to be familiar with these, but that does not mean they do not exist, and do not contradict his point. What seems to be obvious can be wrong, or just a special case. We would hope no one would make a similar mistake today, but who knows? It can be easier to make that mistake, or there can be other incentives to make it, because we have already decided what our ‘science’ is aimed at.

Mises states Praxeology‘s:

scope is human action as such, irrespective of all environmental, accidental, and individual circumstances of the concrete acts.

Mises 1998 (original 1949) Human Action: A Treatise on Economics. Mises Institute p 32

For me, one of the problems with this form of immediately obvious human action, is that it appears to deny interaction, when that seems basic to human action. That is, human action almost automatically involves interaction with something else. I wonder if human action can be extracted from all environmental, accidental, and individual circumstances? Surely we act, at least in part, because we are reacting to circumstances and the properties of the environment we find ourselves within? We are nearly always reacting to, or with, other people for one. For instance, in reading Mises, we are reacting to Mises – that is one relevant circumstance. In an economy we are reacting to what is happening elsewhere. It could be argued that we develop our sense of self, or our ego, through our interaction with the world (including people), and through learning the ways the world resists us and the ways it supports us.

Mises proposition takes advantage of the historical Western neglect of environment and interaction. This would seem not to be an a priori truth, but a historical/cultural assumption. Other people do not have to make that assumption.

Mises justifies his approach by what he calls “methodological individualism”.

Praxeology deals with the actions of individual men. It is only in the further course of its inquiries that cognition of human cooperation is attained and social action is treated as a special case of the more universal category of human action as such.

Mises 1998 (original 1949) Human Action: A Treatise on Economics. Mises Institute p 42.

He recognises there are problems with this, but simply brushes them to one side.

As a thinking and acting being[,] man emerges from his prehuman existence already as a social being. The evolution of reason, language, and cooperation is the outcome of the same process; they were inseparably and necessarily linked together. But this process took place in individuals. It consisted in changes in the behavior of individuals. There is no other substance in which it occurred than the individuals. There is no substratum of society other than the actions of individuals.

Mises 1998 (original 1949) Human Action: A Treatise on Economics. Mises Institute p 43.

This is an odd conclusion from the obvious recognition that humans emerge from “prehuman existence already as a social being.” If this is correct, which seems to be the case, then methodological individualism seems to be a distortion of reality. It could be an acceptable distortion if it leads to testable results, but it is certainly not a priori not matter how convenient it is.

Evolution does not seem to take place in individuals, but in reproduction, which requires at least two people. Evolution and human action, almost always occur in interactions; with other people, with other animals, with plants, with soils, with water, with climate, with weather, with microbes etc. The child learns from its parents, others and its conditions of life. If its genes and experience give it an advantage, it may flourish and reproduce. If its genes and do not give it an advantage or harm it, then it may not flourish and reproduce. It could be an evolutionary dead end, without some other factor. Perhaps it has helped its group flourish and reproduce, by discovering useful things, and thus its genes may get passed on indirectly. In which case again, evolution is not individual.

It would seem that humans are social and interactive beings, and this is not secondary, or to be dismissed out of hand.

This interactivity, leads to the apparent fact that societies and groups do not have firm boundaries, and that people can belong to intersecting and different groups. This is a probable difficulty, but it is a difficulty which has to be faced, rather than avoided. This issue is, as Mises implies before dismissing the problem, normal for humans. It is as obvious as it gets.

He also asserts that the meaning of a crowd “is always the meaning of individuals” (Human Action p 43). But it is not. A collection of interacting humans may not always have the effects each individual member has attributed to the gathering. Social action, or interaction, often has effects unintended by any of the participants. That is also observable and important to human life. Human action may be absolutely involved with attempts to reduce, or take advantage of, the ongoing production of unintended consequences.

Let us note that people who classify themselves as being similar, often co-operate to advance their individual and group interests, and that this has a potentially large economic effect, and is a normal part of human life.

In other words, despite Mises’ claims, we almost never have isolated individuals. We have functional human individuals who exist because of their previous interactions with, co-operations with, conflicts with, and learning from other people and the world. No one is normally a blank slate of desires and instincts, completely free to act through their own uninfluenced reflection. Indeed, it seems an immediately obvious proposition that humans are social, and learning creatures, and would not survive childhood on their own. There are other axioms which seem equally immediately obvious to me, and worthy of research.

As it is popular, we might instance the South African Zulu or Xhosa phrase “Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu”, usually abridged as ‘ubuntu’. This is also apparently ‘obvious’. It means something like ‘a person is a person through other people’, or ‘I am a person through other people’ or ‘I am who I am because of who we all are’. Archbishop Desmond Tutu glosses it as “none of us came into the world on our own.” Even if we were abandoned, we came into a social world. He also points out that being alone is a terrible burden for most humans, they ‘shrivel’, and that a lone child will not develop as well as they might.

For many southern African intellectuals, communion or harmony consists of identifying with and exhibiting solidarity towards others, in other words, enjoying a sense of togetherness, cooperating and helping people – out of sympathy and for their own sake.

Tutu sums up his understanding of how to exhibit ubuntu as:

I participate, I share.

Thaddeus Metz What Archbishop Tutu’s ubuntu credo teaches the world about justice and harmony. The Conversation 4 October 2017

We can accept the proposition that people emerge within a web of other people, as an a priori, and even as a realisation which may build virtue and contentment, but also (at the same time) recognise that humans often tend to be conflictual and selfish – we are both co-operative and competitive. In other words the morality could be up to us, but the recognition of interdependence is not up to us, it just is. Like the Buddhist idea that everything in existence exists because other beings exist, and individual being cannot be extracted from those other existence(s). Everything is interconnected, and everything affects everyone, and this is fundamental.

So let us be clear Mises is starting with the axiom that humans are isolated individuals, not necessarily because it is obvious, or a priori, but perhaps because it appears easy and it seems to be a convenient proposition from which to make the arguments he wants to make.

Given this methodological individualism involves an axiom, or procedure, which could seem a priori incorrect or incomplete, then we could expect that statements derived from it will also be incorrect or incomplete.

So this contribution to Praxeology just begins with questions to Austrians, or free market supporters – because I don’t know the answers. The questions are in the next blog post, to make this a bit shorter than usual.

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An Ignorant Summary of an idea by Martin Hagglund and its relation to ecology and climate action

May 12, 2020

Hagglund develops the idea that religious life is a mode of alienation, but this rather mundane idea has interesting consequences…

If we live life as if our real life was somewhere else after we are dead, we suffer from “a devaluation of our finite lives as a lower form of being.” We tend to assume that “finite life is not enough, that there has to be something beyond it.” Even the potential destruction of everything is trivial compared to eternal life. As St Paul says:

Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth, for you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.

With this attitude, there is no way of relating to the world, to people, or to animals and plants as they really are. Hagglund claims that:

To be invulnerable to grief is not to be consummated; it is to be deprived of the capacity to care.

This is the way the Christian Religion (not alone) has tended to argue – our concentration should be on the eternal not the passing. This focus is magnified because the stakes are so high – either death and/or eternal pain, or eternal life free of misery. A case could be made that this is a Christian innovation, ‘Old Testament’ Judaism is not the same – there seems to be no inherent transcendent immortality project).

This spiritual tradition is probably why it has been so easy for the west to dismiss animals as if they were empty (soulless) machines, and the world as if it was dirt, while simultaneously trying to prevent change and freeze the ideal, when change is the way of natural processes. The world we live in is not a being (or beings) in its own right, with its own necessary imperatives, but something to be abandoned, or bent into the unchanging image of the eternal. Hence, to the religious, action to preserve the world in its fluxing imperfections can seem ridiculous – God will end the world sometime anyway, so what’s the point of trying to preserving the non-eternal.

We can have people assuring us, that the world cannot pass away without God requiring it to be so, when the question is whether a livable world can pass away, and what do we do to prevent this.

He says:

I’m trying to show that it’s not just that eternal life is unattainable. It’s actually undesirable, because if you remove the possibility of death you also remove life, if you remove the possibility of grief you also remove joy. These things go together.

Nietzsche, if I remember correctly, argued that in a religion of omnipotency there can be no tragedy, because everything has to end up as God wills, and that must be good, no matter how much suffering there is – we ultimately loose our ability to relate to others because suffering fits into that demanded good. If people die horribly then God has either taken them to heaven, or damned them to hell. In either case feeling upset, in itself, is an expression of disloyalty to God’s omnipotence and peace. And this is a point made repeatedly by theologians from Augustine to Luther and Lewis.

Hagglund suggests that, in practice, many religious people do care about daily life, and are distressed by the loss of those they love (even if they are supposedly eternal) and, to that extent, they are either non-religious or their religion is undermined by necessity of living and their humanity. Similarly ‘secular’ people undermine their secularity by attempting to deny or avoid finitude and death as is argued by Ernest Becker’s denial of death thesis.

Religious people often suggest that atheism is a religion; here Hagglund is returning the favour and arguing that religious people are really secular to the extent that they are human and not what we might call ‘spiritual cybermen’ – all human imperfections removed.

However, if our finite lives are all we have, then time is the basis of all experiential value – “and the best form of society is the one that maximises our freedom to use that time as we wish…,” “everything depends on what we do with our time together.” There is a sense in which ‘time is life’ as there is no known life without time, and without that life occurring through events. The search for a society which allows maximum free time availability and usage, is part of our way of relating to the world.

Whatever its strengths, Hagglund, argues that capitalism can never be a system which maximises free time and hence freedom, since the system will always tend to enforce the use of whatever time ‘surplus’ you can generate in its service. That is, in service of further growth, more consumption, and further job-work. We can add that your survival, both moral and practical, depends on working at the commands of a boss, or an organisation. Capitalism is a system which is anti-democratic at its heart, although you can be taught to believe freedom involves flitting from one boss to another, and buying products you don’t need.

When we sell our labour, or thoughts, or commitment, for a wage so as to survive in the only way allowed to those who are not independently wealthy, we are selling away our lives. “Capitalism, even if it rewards you with great wealth, will always want more of your life.”

We can notice that despite attempts in the socialist 20th century to reduce working hours and ensure that workers earned enough to feed and house their families and spend time each week off work, that since the triumph of neoliberalism from the 1980s onwards, work hours have increased, many people need to work in more than one job to survive, and in the US people may work and need food stamps to survive. All the “labour-saving devices” we own tend to just free us for more job-work – and this is despite consistent promises during the last 100 years that constructive leisure for ordinary people would increase through free markets and mechanisation.

Given the demands of capitalism, people in our everyday world tend never have any time and feel overwhelmed and empty, even while they are working away their lives in the hope of eventually having free time – which, for most of us, will never eventuate, or eventuate only briefly in our old age, when we probably cannot use it any more, or are saving for our increasingly time starved children.

To lead a free life, it’s not enough that we have formal rights to freedom. We must also have access to the material resources and the forms of education that allow us to own and engage the question of what we ought to do with our time together. What really is our own is not property or goods, it’s the time of our lives.

Capitalism, as an ideal and as a practice, may also be based a need to engage in ecological destruction of the ‘dirt world’ to make cheap goods, and these destructions will eventually end the possibility of free time. It has probably inherited this contempt for ‘material nature’ through our spiritual traditions.

My love remarked the other day that with the COVID quarantine, that as well as us having lower pollution and poisoning, it seemed that people were walking and engaging with their local world and even their children. With some control over their work, or lack of work, they were in some moments, relating to the real world again. She wondered if this might lead to a change of attitude, that could translate into a reluctance to meekly go along with eco-destruction.

I, being a pessimist, think it more likely that once they get submerged in the endless demands of job-work, that they will stop feeling the world, and feel harassed again. Indeed one function of a job, is to fill up your time, stop you from thinking and feeling, and help to allow the system to keep on grinding to destruction, and others to make a profit.

Perhaps people become so miserable in their jobs, that it helps global destruction. People come to want it all to end, as destruction is the only freedom they can see as ever arriving, and hence they ignore the signs, or welcome them….

Freedom in capitalism can also be constrained, because of the apparent ultimate need to make a monetary profit. We cannot engage in the discussion of what we value apart from this need for (powerful people to) profit. So we are inherently limited in our response and our values and driven by the need to cut what may be important away to decrease cost and increase profit.

We have to hold open our understanding of the deeper problems with how we measure value in our society in general… we ultimately need a revaluation of value rather than a mere redistribution of wealth

This is similar to Ruskin’s criticism of capitalism’s destruction of ethics, relationship and beauty. Capitalism cannot be the answer to a question it cannot ask.

Haaglund apparently concludes that democratic socialism is the answer, but this assumes that capitalism has only one “opposite” when there have been many different systems of governance and organisation, although not many geared to maximising free time since we retreated from hunting, gathering and casual cultivating.

The harm is not just in capitalism, it is, for example, clearly possible to have a military society in which your time is totally consumed by training and by war, and you never have time for life.

In any case, the building of possible new ways of life do not “exist independently of the way we are sustaining and devoting ourselves to them.” Which to me is another way of saying the means must be in harmony with the ends – wherever possible.

The ends are also finite ends – there is no theocratic paradise here or elsewhere. The fragility of what we aim for is intrinsic and valuable. Indeed value can depend on the fragility. If we aim at the eternal, there may be no value as it cannot be lost and reality is elsewhere. Perhaps only by knowing we could destroy the world can we come to not take it for granted.

Even if we achieve an emancipated society, we’re always going to have to sustain the forms of justice to which we are committed at the risk of failing to do that, and that’s part of what makes it a living project.

Whatever you think of all this, it seems to me me the question of how we work towards a society which enables us the maximum time to devote to lives that give us meaning, without deflecting the meaning to the transcendental and away from the earth, is perhaps one of the most important questions there is.

Quotations:

From this review:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/oct/02/this-life-martin-hagglund-outgrowing-god-richard-dawkins-review

and this interview:

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2019/05/this-life-martin-hagglund-review-interview

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Margaret Thatcher on Climate Action

February 25, 2020

After excoriating Neoliberalism in the last post. It is only fair to mention the comments of one of the founders of neoliberalism, British PM Margaret Thatcher, to show that in the 1980s things were not this far gone.

After this post, which basically just reports on one of Mrs Thatcher’s speeches, I give another post with a series of excerpts from speeches, which show her recurrent themes. She seems more radical and aware than any mainstream politician in Australia today. In the third post I move into consideration of her early post PM period and her growing turn away from environmentalism. The fourth post describes her largely incoherent but strongly neoliberal position in her final book Statescraft (2002), which basically turns away from the problem altogether. If get around to it, a fifth post will describe what she actually did in office.

To make this introductory post simple I am just quoting from one speech to the UN given on the 8th November 1989, almost exactly a year from her forced resignation. It does not completely cover her ideas, but its clear and to the point. It may need to be emphasised that she made this speech thirty years ago…..

From the end of the speech, because it is surprising:

Reason is humanity’s special gift. It allows us to understand the structure of the nucleus. It enables us to explore the heavens. It helps us to conquer disease. Now we must use our reason to find a way in which we can live with nature, and not dominate nature.

Italics added.

A neoliberal who could admit the aim of policy and reason is not to dominate or destroy nature? This is extraordinary in itself

In this speech, Thatcher claims to have been influenced, in her views, by the photos of Earth taken from space, from which came a powerful realisation.

That powerful idea is the recognition of our shared inheritance on this planet. We know more clearly than everbefore that we carry common burdens, face common problems, and must respond with common action….

[A]s we travel through space, as we pass one dead planet after another, we look back on our earth, a speck of life in an infinite void. It is life itself, incomparably precious, that distinguishes us from the other planets.

Life is precarious. This might be the only place in the universe, at this moment, with intelligent life. Certainly it is the only place we know of. That implies we have a duty to preserve it, and to recognise the fragility of the possibility of life. All present and near future human activity depends upon us preserving this planet, more or less as it is, as best we can. Mrs Thatcher presents no fantasy the elites could leave, or that the world is secondary to economics.

She gets rid of the ‘climate is always changing’ motif quite early on:

Of course major changes in the earth’s climate and the environment have taken place in earlier centuries when the world’s population was a fraction of its present size.

The causes are to be found in nature itself—changes in the earth’s orbit: changes in the amount of radiation given off by the sun: the consequential effects on the plankton in the ocean: and in volcanic processes.

All these we can observe and some we may be able to predict. But we do not have the power to prevent or control them.

However,

What we are now doing to the world, by degrading the land surfaces, by polluting the waters and by adding greenhouse gases to the air at an unprecedented rate—all this is new in the experience of the earth. It is mankind and his activities which are changing the environment of our planet in damaging and dangerous ways.

In this statement she essentially recognises that ongoing ecological destruction is a major problem; our problems are not limited to climate. She mentions previous civilisations that have changed their environments and brought about their downfall, but our current action is undoing the planet not just one civilisation.

We are seeing a vast increase in the amount of carbon dioxide reaching the atmosphere. The annual increase is three billion tonnes: and half the carbon emitted since the Industrial Revolution still remains in the atmosphere.

At the same time as this is happening, we are seeing the destruction on a vast scale of tropical forests which are uniquely able to remove carbon dioxide from the air.

This clearance is massive; apparently an area the size of the UK was being lost every year. This clearly lowered the possibility of what we would nowadays call ‘carbon drawdown’; it forms a positive reinforcer of the problem. She recognises the problem is systemic, ‘things’ interact with each other.

She takes the science seriously and obviously talks to scientists:

Let me quote from a letter I received only two weeks ago, from a British scientist on board a ship in the Antarctic Ocean: he… also reports on a significant thinning of the sea ice, and he writes that, in the Antarctic, “Our data confirm that the first-year ice, which forms the bulk of sea ice cover, is remarkably thin and so is probably unable to sustain significant atmospheric warming without melting. Sea ice, separates the ocean from the atmosphere over an area of more than 30 million square kilometres. It reflects most of the solar radiation falling on it, helping to cool the earth’s surface. If this area were reduced, the warming of earth would be accelerated due to the extra absorption of radiation by the ocean.”

“The lesson of these Polar processes,” he goes on, “is that an environmental or climatic change produced by man may take on a self-sustaining or ‘runaway’ quality … and may be irreversible.”

She knows the situation is not linear. That talk asking how could a small increase in temperature, or CO2 concentrations, possibly have a large effect is rubbish talk.

She also knows that no one on the planet is safe from global warming

the problem of global climate change is one that affects us all and action will only be effective if it is taken at the international level.

As we might expect economic growth is important to her, but this growth has to be bounded and sensible. Not just random proliferation.

we must have continued economic growth in order to generate the wealth required to pay for the protection of the environment. But it must be growth which does not plunder the planet today and leave our children to deal with the consequences tomorrow.

Italics added

In case this is not clear, she continues

We should always remember that free markets are a means to an end. They would defeat their object if by their output they did more damage to the quality of life through pollution than the well-being they achieve by the production of goods and services.

This is not modern neoliberalism, as should be clear. It is also not her later version of neoliberalism

So what action does she recommend. Again it is not trivial

I believe we should aim to have a convention on global climate change ready by the time the World Conference on Environment and Development meets in 1992.

There are obvious difficulties:

no issue will be more contentious than the need to control emissions of carbon dioxide, the major contributor—apart from water vapour—to the greenhouse effect….

the measures we take must be based on sound scientific analysis of the effect of the different gases and the ways in which these can be reduced. In the past there has been a tendency to solve one problem at the expense of making others worse…

we prolong the role of the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change after it submits its report next year, so that it can provide an authoritative scientific base for the negotiation of this and other protocols….

We can then agree to targets to reduce the greenhouse gases, and how much individual countries should contribute to their achievement. We think it important that this should be done in a way which enables all our economies to continue to grow and develop…..

we must not allow ourselves to be diverted into fruitless and divisive argument. Time is too short for that.

The point is clear. In Thatcher’s mind we must act urgently (early 1990s at the latest). If acting means that we ignore fruitless and politically divisive argument then that is what we must do

But it is not just international talk that she wants. The UK has to set an example on its own, not wait for others to do things first. The UK, being successful, has a responsibility. These are the outlines of some of her projected policies.

First, we shall be introducing over the coming months a comprehensive system of pollution control to deal with all kinds of industrial pollution whether to air, water or land…

We are encouraging British industry to develop new technologies to clean up the environment and minimise the amount of waste it produces—and we aim to recycle 50 per cent of our household waste by the end of the century [1999-2000].

Secondly, we will be drawing up over the coming year our own environmental agenda for the decade ahead. That will cover energy, transport, agriculture, industry—everything which affects the environment….

we already have a £2 billion programme of improvements to reduce acid rain emissions from our power stations. We shall be looking more closely at the role of non-fossil fuel sources, including nuclear, in generating energy. And our latest legislation requires companies which supply electricity positively to promote energy efficiency.

we shall look for ways to strengthen controls over vehicle emissions and to develop the lean-burn engine, which offers a far better long-term solution than the three-way catalyst, in terms of carbon dioxide and the greenhouse effect….

With regard to agriculture, we recognise that farmers not only produce food—which they do with great efficiency—they need to conserve the beauty of the priceless heritage of our countryside. So we are therefore encouraging them to reduce the intensity of their methods and to conserve wild-life habitats…

We are planting new woods and forests—indeed there has been a 50 per cent increase in tree planting in Britain in the last ten years…

Third, we are increasing our investment in research into global environmental problems….

Fourth, we help poorer countries to cope with their environmental problems through our Aid Programme…

We shall give special help to manage and preserve the tropical forests.

I can announce today that we aim to commit a further £100 million bilaterally to tropical forestry activities over the next three years, mostly within the framework of the Tropical Forestry Action Plan.

While energy is missing from this speech, she has discussed it in earlier speeches. Perhaps she thought there would be resistance at the UN to talk of cutting down fossil fuel use. Elsewhere she shows her keenness for nuclear energy as it does not emit CO2. However she did not succeed in getting a set of nuclear reactors going in the UK, possibly because they were so expensive to build, the cost of their electricity was much greater than that of fossil fuels, and the cost of proper decommissioning was so great no private company would take it on. She also did not have a feasible or working renewables industry to discuss, or draw to people’s attention. What she might have said if she had, is possible to imagine.

No contemporary neoliberal has this vision, program for action, or grasp of the problems. So neoliberalism has become a lot worse as it has gained in power and as it celebrates its triumphalism.

The point is that for Mrs. Thatcher, at this stage in her life, it is possible to support both capitalism and climate action, whatever modern neoliberals suppose.

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Mencius encounters a President

January 21, 2020

The opening chapter of Mencius reworked slightly….

Mencius went to see President Trump, of the Kingdom of the USA. The President said, “I’ve never heard of you. I guess you’ve come a long way to listen to me, like all the best people do. But my advisors tell me you are a smart guy, perhaps you have something to say about how I can profit my kingdom and business?”

Mencius replied, “Why must your Greatness use that word ‘profit’? If your Greatness asks, ‘What is to be done to profit my kingdom, or profit my business?’ then the great CEOs and Ministers will say, ‘What is to be done to profit our families, and our business?’ and the lesser executives and the common people will say, ‘What is to be done to profit our persons?’
“Everyone will try to make the profit out of each other, and the kingdom, or the business, will be endangered.
“If righteousness be put last and profit first, people will not be satisfied without snatching everything they can. It makes a war of all against all.
“Let your Greatness make benevolence and righteousness your only themes—Why must you speak of profit?”

The Great President replied: “You must be a fucking socialist. Completely impractical. Get out. Who brought this idiot?”

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