I am trying to understand libertarianism better. One thing that I apparently disagree with them on is capitalism. I don't believe that the market can regulate everything, though I agree with allowing the market to regulate many things. Anyway, one thing that libertarians are apparently against is "corporatism." What is corporatism?
Websters (which can always be relied on for a lousy definition) defines it as "the organization of a society into industrial and professional corporations serving as organs of political representation and exercising control over persons and activities within their jurisdiction."
Wikipedia says "Corporatism is a system of economic, political, and social organization where social groups or interest groups, such as business, ethnic, farmer, labour, military, or patronage groups, are joined together under a common governing jurisdiction to try to achieve societal harmony and promote coordinated development. Corporatism is based on the sociological concept of functionalism."
This sounds to me like a trade union or a guild, which I think are a good idea, done properly. I'll admit that trade unions in the USA have a spotted record. I'll also admit that guilds will not work in our country the way they did in medieval Europe. But I don't see what this has to do with the USA today, so something tells me I'm missing something.
My guess is when libertarians use the word "corporatism" they have in mind "mercantilism", which Murray Rothbard defined as "a system of statism which employs economic fallacy to build up a structure of imperial state power, as well as special subsidy and monopolistic privilege to individuals or groups favored by the state." I read a little about mercantilism this morning in THE REAL LINCOLN by Thomas DiLorenzo. Here is something Mr. DiLorenzo wrote recently on the topic, in criticism of Pat Buchanan.
As I put THE REAL LINCOLN down this moring before I went to work, I started wondering whether, if we wanted to understand the current financial mess we are in, we have to go back to the war between the states or maybe farther.
Wednesday, August 26, 2009
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11 comments:
A reason for my theory that libertarian's are thinking about mercantilism when they talk about corporatism is that it seems to me that a libertarian would be in favor of a guild. I as a yeoman farmer or shopkeeper don't have much power when it comes to fighting big business or big government, but if all of us little guys get together, we could make things happen. The same for workers and labor unions.
Check out http://quizfarm.com/quizzes/new/Brainpolice/what-kind-of-libertarian-are-you/
I took the Brainpolice's "How Libertarian are You Quiz" and scored "Minarchist".
Minarchists are libertarians who advocate a strictly limited government and usually a more decentralized form of it. Minarchists may vary in the degree to which they think that government should be limited, although the bare bones position is essentially nothing more than police, courts and the military. Minarchists tend to think that some minimum level of government is a necessary evil, or at least an inevitability. The contemporary libertarian movement in America is dominantly minarchist, although it has had a long history of dialogue and debate between minarchist and anarchist libertarians.
Paleo-libertarian
92%
Left-libertarian
83%
Minarchist
42%
Agorist
42%
Anarcho-capitalist
42%
"Small L" libertarian
42%
Geo-libertarian
25%
Libertarian socialist
25%
Neo-libertarian
0%
.
Here is mine
You Scored as Minarchist
Minarchists are libertarians who advocate a strictly limited government and usually a more decentralized form of it. Minarchists may vary in the degree to which they think that government should be limited, although the bare bones position is essentially nothing more than police, courts and the military. Minarchists tend to think that some minimum level of government is a necessary evil, or at least an inevitability. The contemporary libertarian movement in America is dominantly minarchist, although it has had a long history of dialogue and debate between minarchist and anarchist libertarians.
Minarchist
75%
Paleo-libertarian
75%
"Small L" libertarian
58%
Left-libertarian
50%
Anarcho-capitalist
42%
Agorist
33%
Neo-libertarian
25%
Geo-libertarian
8%
Libertarian socialist
8%
I scored the same as Civis and Northron
Thank you for presenting an enlightened perspective on what corporatism is. I was the one who put the definition on Wikipedia. Corporatism is too often assumed to be connected with big business corporations because people nowadays tend to call a business corporation simply a "corporation". But there are many non-business corporations, such as brotherhoods and sisterhoods in Roman Catholicism. Also corporatism was not created by fascists as some claim, as it existed prior to both fascism and the invention of the business corporation. The Italian fascists used an authoritarian economic corporatism to rally in the Roman Catholic vote, as Catholicism officially supported economic corporatism since the 1890s, and corporatism was seen as a safe centrist position that could rally both conservatives and leftists together. Essentially it is a functionalist economy where it views an economy as a body with functional parts (i.e. managers, workers, consumers) that have to cooperate in order for the body to function normally.
Anonymous:
Hmm. Well maybe I wasn't missing something. So libertarians would be against trade unions, guilds, co-ops? You'll have to help me understand why. How is the little guy going to be protected from big business, the state etc if he does not get together with other little guys?
And don't we need networks to get things done? Maybe the old example from school is mistaken, but, as the story goes, at one time a person had to grow and hunt his food, make his clothes, build his shelter, craft his arrows etc. But some people were good at one thing and not another, so the guy who was good at making arrows said, "hey, you're good at hunting; I'm half crippled. I make good arrows; yours suck. Why don't I make your arrows and you give me meat?" But the hunter didn't need that many arrows. Anyway, as the story goes, life became a lot easier with the development of a wider radius of trade and the use of currency. Aren't various organizations an outgrowth of this?
Granted we are too specialized today and people don't know how to do enough for themselves--which (long story) but I think tends to make them more prone to collectivist ideologies, less indepenedent (I guess that's obvious), less free, and less human (long story there too).
I guess I'm still groping in the dark about this whole corporatism thing.
Related to functionalism:
Pope Benedict XVI "has a vision of the human person that transcends seeing us as economic units or raw units to be used for biotechnical development," said John Haas, president of the National Catholic Bioethics Center in Philadelphia.
http://www.usccb.org/caritasinveritate/
What 'we' mean is very similar to mercantilism.
Generalizing about what libs think is fraught with likelihood of error, but in general free market libs are fine with unions, guilds, corporations, even cartels. The thing they don't like is when they curry government influence to gain an anticompetitive advantage.
Put simply there are always a few honest, hard working, and or innovative people.
In a free market everyone mus compete with those people. Hence quality is maximized and cost is minimized. Without government to force (monopolies/monopsonies) or bribe (subsidies) people to buy things or produce things, or penalize the consumption or production of things (taxes) people inevitably pursue the best and cheapest option.
In a 'mercantile' or 'corporatist' or more aptly a 'managed economy' such as we've had over the last century the competition is instead for government influence. Subsidies, monopolies, monopsonies, etc. Of course this has the opposite effect on quality and cost.
Which is where we are now, and why we see the distortion in the health care market, education, the whole subprime bubble.. everything government touches.. and it's a lot.
I have to take issue with that last comment. Even without government intervention (which I certainly do not support), businesses aren't always so apt to compete with one another. If it is more profitable to form a trust, or cooperate to fix prices, businesses without legal restraint would certainly participate in such activity. The goal of any business is maximizing profit, cornering market share, and externalizing cost, regardless of any negative moral consequences. This is why I have a hard time committing to a strictly Libertarian doctrine due to the fact that any concentration or centralization of power, whether it be public or private, is a threat to the liberty of all. I think there needs to be some sort of check and balance system to prevent abuses of power from the state and private interests, such as the doctrines of anarcho-syndicalists or mutualists, but on a strictly voluntary, decentralized, and grass-roots basis. Bookchin's idea of Libertarian Municipalism is about the closest I can get to describing my ideal. I guess appropriately, here are my quiz scores:
You Scored as Left-libertarian
Left-libertarians are libertarians that are more associated with the anti-authoritarian left than other libertarians. Left-libertarians can be minarchists, but many are anarchists who are in alliance with the anarchist left. Left-libertarians are more critical of conservatism and corporatism than most libertarians. They view libertarians in a hsitorical context that is interconnected with the history of the left.
Left-libertarian
92%
"Small L" libertarian
75%
Geo-libertarian
58%
Minarchist
58%
Agorist
58%
Anarcho-capitalist
58%
Libertarian socialist
42%
Paleo-libertarian
17%
Neo-libertarian
8%
Jack:
I'm not familiar with some of the ideas and thinkers you reference, but it sounds like I agree with you. The thing I have had to face is that there really is no way to ensure a free market, and protection from the concentration of economic power, without some government intervention.
I do think that to the extent economic actors are virtuous and civic-minded the need for govermnent and the space for government to restrict liberties is lessened. "The price of freedom is eternal vigilance" and part of vigilance is the individual citizen as a consumer or as a businessman doing the right things on a daily basis.
I tend to think that a "unrestrained" market tends more toward fascist control by the state than toward a truly free market. That may sound paradoxical.
Corporations have blended into mercantilism today through lobbying efforts. The basic principles of a free market are biased in our governments economic system to favor the corporate/monopolistic elite; the market is not shaped through the natural economic determinants of supply and demand, yet laws are skewed to maximize corporate profits not based on 'true market' conditions, yet based on the concept of the best laws corporate money can buy.
I guess I'm a Minarchist
Minarchist
92%
Anarcho-capitalist
67%
Agorist
67%
Left-libertarian
58%
Paleo-libertarian
42%
"Small L" libertarian
33%
Geo-libertarian
25%
Libertarian socialist
17%
Neo-libertarian
0%
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