| Nirvana_Nut85 said: |
Even if one supports conscription for extreme cases, which is an arbitrary exception, Mises knows very well that what is considered "extreme" differs from person to person, so it would easily be abusive to add such a proviso. Supporting conscription in the marginal instance denies individuals full self-ownership, but you recognized that with "I can concede that he is not 100% Libertarian in when it comes to that particular viewpoint."
Mises denied natural rights (and therefore self-ownership) quite frequently. This was mostly because natural rights theory was not very popular amongst academics when Mises was prominent. Utilitarianism was the most common philosophy at the time. Rothbard saw it as a deficit of Mises' philosophy, and wanted to fix it. Mises derived all of his politics from the axiom "people act" rather than the axiom "people own themselves." Most of his arguments were consequentialist in nature because of this.
"What you are referring to in pooling resources and or expecting people to hand over sole proprietorship to the worker in allowing them not only a fair share of profit but equal say in the individuals company is more of a pipe dream than a realistic expectation. You’d assume that every entrepreneur/owner would be willing to hand over this without coercion or force. Its rather nonsensical and unrealistic. The majority of individuals who have built their business from the ground up an sacrificed time with family in order to provide financially would never go along with the idea."
I am not talking about the appropriation of any extant institutions that don't greatly benefit from state-privilege, but Rothbard and Mises did say the following:
https://mises.org/library/rothbards-left-and-right-forty-years-later
"Indeed, he would later argue that any nominally private institution that gets more than 50% of its revenue from the government, or is heavily complicit in government crimes, or both, should be considered a government entity; since government ownership is illegitimate, the proper owners of such institutions are "the 'homesteaders', those who have already been using and therefore 'mixing their labor' with the facilities." This entails inter alia "student and/or faculty ownership of the universities." As for the "myriad of corporations which are integral parts of the military-industrial complex," one solution, Rothbard says, is to "turn over ownership to the homesteading workers in the particular plants."16 He also supported third-world land reforms considered socialistic by many conservatives, on the grounds that existing land tenure represented "continuing aggression by titleholders of land against peasants engaged in transforming the soil."17 And here again Rothbard is following that wild-eyed leftist Ludwig von Mises, who wrote:
Nowhere and at no time has the large-scale ownership of land come into being through the working of economic forces in the market. It is the result of military and political effort. Founded by violence, it has been upheld by violence and by that alone "
I agree with Rothbard that any institutions that benefit greatly from state-privilege should be homesteaded, and I agree with Mises that large scale alienable ownership over land would be very expensive to protect without a state to subsidize that protection. Therefore, monopolies over land would be costly, and more people would have access. Combined, both of these set up an environment where market socialism (particularly mutualism) can compete with capitalism. There is nothing wrong with that. I am for markets more than I am for employer-employee wage relationships, and if the latter lose out the prior, so be it. At the same time, abolishing capitalism through force, is obviously illibertarian, no worthwhile libertarian-socialist would argue for such actions.
" Have you ever been involved in business or owned a company that was successful (in terms of millions in profit)?. However, a majority of small business owners who went from a joint venture to sole proprietorship and were successful can admit that cooperation is difficult and holds back the individual from achieving and implementing all of their own creative ideas. That’s why a numerous amount end up dissolving, especially on the small business scale."
I have done contract work as a sole-propriertor, so to an extent. The problem with your argument is that the reason why cooperation is difficult, is because large vertical institutions benefit greatly from economies of scale as well as outright privileges (subisidies, legal monopolies, etc) provided by state. Furthermore, one must consider the economic calculation problem (thank Mises for this one.) The larger the insitution (not just government) the less efficient it is in planning, because the knowledge is not being directly inputed to the person making the decisions in the market. One can argue that large vertical firms only remain healthily profitable because the workers and lower management often ignore central management, because they have more information on the status of the market.
The mutualist Kevin Carson makes a good argument about this.
https://c4ss.org/content/14497
"This calculation argument can be applied not only to a state-planned economy, but also to the internal planning of the large corporation under interventionism, or state capitalism. (By state capitalism, I refer to the means by which, as Murray Rothbard said, “our corporate state uses the coercive taxing power either to accumulate corporate capital or to lower corporate costs,” in addition to cartelizing markets through regulations, enforcing artificial property rights like “intellectual property,” and otherwise protecting privilege against competition.)"
So it is errenous to believe that a free-market would have the same winners and losers as our current one. Without the state, markets would manifest differently in certain ways and similarly in others. Small businesses, and cooperatives would definitely have a much better time if 1. diseconomies of scale took over, and 2. the state did not provide large companies with subsidies, anti-competitive legislation, and legal protections against torts (limited liability.) There is already cooperation within any firm, but it is very hierarchial. Small businesses tend to be less hierarchial and more horizontal, and that is all that socialists want.
"While it would work for an individual proprietorship where the business would only require a single owner such as a small business computer repair shop, multilevel marketing or some small service that can be provided to the public, those who already own a business or who had ideas to create a product on a mass scale would then be forced under the society to share ownership. I personally would not want a society in that manner because the reality is some people are of higher intelligence than others."
I think one important thing to consider, is that the society right-libertarians, left-libertarians, and libertarian-socialists want might be different, but the path to get there is the same -- abolish the state. In order to be a libertarian they can't prescribe unprovoked violence, and that is where all three groups agree. Whatever comes from abolishing the state does not matter, because it would be illibertarian to oppose it. If it is socialism, so be it. If it is capitalism, so be it. If it is something in between or a mixture of the two, keeping eachother in balance (as I suspect it would be), so be it. The ends don't matter as much as the means.
I thank you as well, for the conversation. It is pretty civil and interesting as far as political conversations go.
