In Praise of Libertarianism. Drunken Risibility

Devotion to free markets is a sin??? Nah!!!. Like quantitative induction and philosophical deduction, economics has always had a political purpose, and the purpose has usually been libertarian. Economists are freedom nuts, which is to say that they look with suspicion on lawyerly plans to solve problems with new state compulsions and longer jail sentences. Economics at its philosophical birth, among physiocrats in Paris and moral philosophers in Edinburgh, was in favor of free markets and was suspicious of overblown states. Mostly it still is. Let things be, laissez faire, has been the economists’ cry against intervention. Let the trades begin.

True, not all economists are free traders. The non-free traders, often European and disproportionately French, point out that you can make other assumptions about how trade works, A’, and get other conclusions, C’, not so favorable to laissez faire. The free-trade theorem, which sounds so grand, is actually pretty easy to overturn. Suppose a big part of the economy – say the household – is, as the economists put it, “distorted” (e.g., suppose people in households do things for love: you can see that the economists have a somewhat peculiar idea of “distortion”). Then it follows rigorously (that is to say, mathematically) that free trade in other sectors (e.g., manufacturing) will not be the best thing. In fact it can make the average person worse off than restricted, protected, tariffed trade would.

And of course normal people – meaning non-economists – are not persuaded that free trade is always and everywhere a good thing. For example most people think free trade is a bad thing for the product or service they make. But, the reality is to think the need to blockade entry into the profession of being an economist: it is, in all agreement, scandalous that so many unqualified quacks are bilking consumers with adulterated economics.

And very many normal people of leftish views, even after communism, even after numerous disastrous experiments in central planning, think socialism deserves a chance. They think it obvious that socialism is after all fairer than unfettered capitalism. They think it obvious that regulation is after all necessary to restrain monopoly. They don’t realize that free markets have partially broken down inequality (for example, between men and women; “partially”) and partially undermined monopolies (for example, local monopolies in retailing) and have increased the income of the poor over two centuries by a factor of 18. The felony lies in, the lefties think, in exactly its free-market bias.

But, my dearly beloved friends on the left, think, think again. There really is a serious case to be made against government intervention and in favor of markets. Maybe not knockdown; maybe imperfect here or there; let’s chat about it; hmm, a serious case that serious people ought to take seriously. The case in favor of markets is on the contrary populist and egalitarian and person-respecting and bad-institution-breaking libertarianism. Don’t go to government to solve problems, said Adam Smith. As he didn’t say, to do so is to put the fox in charge of the hen house. The golden rule is, those who have the gold rule: so don’t expect a government run by men to help women, or a government run by Enron executives to help Enron employees.

Libertarianism is typical of economics, especially English-speaking economics, and most especially American economics. Most Americans if they can get clear of certain European errors, are radical libertarians under the skin. Give me liberty. Sweet land of liberty. Live free or die. But alas, no time, no time. Libraries of books have been written examining the numerous and weighty arguments for the market and against socialism. Really, that the average literary person believes the first few pages of The Communist Manifesto suffice for knowledge of economics and economic history, in which he professes great interest, is a bit of a scandal. As Cromwell said wearily to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, 3 August, 1650, “I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken.” Oh, permit one short libertarian riff.

Nor is government obstruction peculiar to the present-day Third World. In one decade in the eighteenth century, according to the Swedish economist and historian Eli Heckscher in his book, Mercantilism, the French government sent tens of thousands of souls to the galleys and executed 16,000 (that’s about 4.4 people a day over the ten years: you see the beauty of statistical thinking) for the hideous crime of… are you ready to hear the appalling evil these enemies of the State committed, fully justifying hanging them all, every damned one of their treasonable skins? … importing printed calico cloth. States do not change much from age to age. In view of How Muches and Oh, My Gods like these – the baleful oomph of governmental intrusions world-wide crushing harmless (indeed, beneficial) exchange, from marijuana to printed calico – perhaps laissez faire does not seem so obviously sinful, does it now? Consider, my dear leftist friends. Read and reflect. I beseech you, think it possible that, like statistics and mathematics, the libertarianism of economics is a virtue.

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Banking? There isn’t much to it than this anyways.

Don’t go by the innocuous sounding title, for this is at its wit alternative. The modus operandi (Oh!, how much I feel like saying modis operandi in honor of the you Indians know who?) for accumulation of wealth to parts of ‘the system’ (which, for historic reasons, we call ‘capitalists’) is banking. The ‘capitalists’ (defined as those that skim the surplus labor of others) accumulate it through the banking system. That is nearly an empty statement, since wealth = money. That is, money is the means of increasing wealth and thus one represents the other. If capitalists skim surplus labor, it means that they skim surplus money. Money is linked to (only!) banks, and thus, accumulation is in the banks.

If interest is charged, borrowers will go bankrupt. This idea can be extended. If interest is charged, all money is accumulated in banks. Or, better to say, a larger and larger fraction of money is accumulated in the banks, and kept in financial institutions. The accumulation of wealth is accumulation of money in and by banks. It can only be interesting to see whom the money belongs to.

By the way, these institutions, the capitalists naturally wanting to part with as little as possible from this money, are often in fiscal paradises. Famous are The Cayman Islands, The Bahamas, The Seychelles, etc. With the accumulated money the physical property is bought. Once again, this is an empty statement. Money represents buying power (to buy more wealth). For instance buying the means-of-production (the Marxian mathematical equation raises its head again, MoP), such as land, factories, people’s houses (which will then be rented to them; more money). Etc.

Also, a tiny fraction of the money is squandered. It is what normally draws most attention. Oil sheiks that drive golden cars, bunga-bunga parties etc. That, however, is rather insignificant, this way of re-injecting money into the system. Mostly money is used to increase capital. That is why it is an obvious truth that “When you are rich, you must be extremely stupid to become poor. When you are poor, you must be extremely talented to become rich”. When you are rich, just let the capital work for you; it will have the tendency to increase, even if it increases slower than that of your more talented neighbor.

To accelerate the effect of skimming, means of production (MoP, ‘capital’), are confiscated from everything – countries and individual people – that cannot pay the loan + interest (which is unavoidable). Or bought for a much-below market value price in a way of “Take it or leave it; either give me my money back, which I know there is no way you can, or give me all your possessions and options for confiscation of possessions of future generations as well, i.e., I’ll give you new loans (which you will also not be able to pay back, I know, but that way I’ll manage to forever take everything you will ever produce in your life and all generations after you. Slaves, obey your masters!)”

Although not essential (Marx analyzed it not like this), the banking system accelerates the condensation of wealth. It is the modus operandi. Money is accumulated. With that money, capital is bought and then the money is re-confiscated with that newly-bought capital, or by means of new loans, etc. It is a feedback system where all money and capital is condensing on a big pile. Money and capital are synonyms. Note that this pile in not necessarily a set of people. It is just ‘the system’. There is no ‘class struggle’ between rich and poor, where the latter are trying to steal/take-back the money (depending on which side of the alleged theft the person analyzing it is). It is a class struggle of people against ‘the system’.

There is only one stable final distribution: all money/capital belonging to one person or institute, one ‘entity’. That is what is called a ‘singularity’ and the only mathematical function that is stable in this case. It is called a delta-function, or Kronecker-delta function: zero everywhere, except in one point, where it is infinite, with the total integral (total money) equal to unity. In this case: all money on one big pile. All other functions are unstable.

Imagine that there are two brothers that wound up with all the money and the rest of the people are destitute and left without anything. These two brothers will then start lending things to each-other. Since they are doing this in the commercial way (having to give back more than borrowed), one of the brothers will confiscate everything from the other.
Note: There is only one way out of it, namely that the brother ‘feels sorry’ for his sibling and gives him things without anything in return, to compensate for the steady unidirectional flow of wealth….

Liberalism.

In a humanistic society, boundary conditions (‘laws’) are set which are designed to make the lives of human beings optimal. The laws are made by government. Yet, the skimming of surplus labor by the capital is only overshadowed by the skimming by politicians. Politicians are often ‘auto-invited’ (by colleagues) in board-of-directors of companies (the capital), further enabling amassing buying power. This shows that, in most countries, the differences between the capital and the political class are flimsy if not non-existent. As an example, all communist countries, in fact, were pure capitalist implementations, with a distinction that a greater share of the skimming was done by politicians compared to more conventional capitalist societies.

One form of a humanistic (!!!!!????) government is socialism, which has set as its goals the welfare of humans. One can argue if socialism is a good form to achieve a humanistic society. Maybe it is not efficient to reach this goal, whatever ‘efficient’ may mean and the difficulty in defining that concept.

Another form of government is liberalism. Before we continue, it is remarkable to observe that in practical ‘liberal’ societies, everything is free and allowed, except the creation of banks and doing banking. By definition, a ‘liberal government’ is a contradiction in terms. A real liberal government would be called ‘anarchy’. ‘Liberal’ is a name given by politicians to make people think they are free, while in fact it is the most binding and oppressing form of government.

Liberalism, by definition, has set no boundary conditions. A liberal society has at its core the absence of goals. Everything is left free; “Let a Darwinistic survival-of-the-fittest mechanism decide which things are ‘best'”. Best are, by definition, those things that survive. That means that it might be the case that humans are a nuisance. Inefficient monsters. Does this idea look far-fetched? May it be so that in a liberal society, humans will disappear and only capital (the money and the means of production) will survive in a Darwinistic way? Mathematically it is possible. Let me show you.

Trade unions are organizations that represent the humans in this cycle and they are the ways to break the cycle and guarantee minimization of the skimming of laborers. If you are human, you should like trade unions. (If you are a bank manager, you can – and should – organize yourself in a bank-managers trade union). If you are capital, you do not like them. (And there are many spokesmen of the capital in the world, paid to propagate this dislike). Capital, however, in itself cannot ‘think’, it is not human, nor has it a brain, or a way to communicate. It is just a ‘concept’, an ‘idea’ of a ‘system’. It does not ‘like’ or ‘dislike’ anything. You are not capital, even if you are paid by it. Even if you are paid handsomely by it. Even if you are paid astronomically by it. (In the latter case you are probably just an asocial asshole!!!!). We can thus morally confiscate as much from the capital we wish, without feeling any remorse whatsoever. As long as it does not destroy the game; destroying the game would put human happiness at risk by undermining the incentives for production and reduce the access to consumption.

On the other hand, the spokesmen of the capital will always talk about labor cost contention, because that will increase the marginal profit M’-M. Remember this, next time somebody talks in the media. Who is paying their salary? To give an idea how much you are being fleeced, compare your salary to that of difficult-to-skim, strike-prone, trade-union-bastion professions, like train drivers. The companies still hire them, implying that they still bring a net profit to the companies, in spite of their astronomical salaries. You deserve the same salary.

Continuing. For the capital, there is no ‘special place’ for human labor power LP. If the Marxist equation can be replaced by

M – C{MoP} – P – C’ – M’

i.e., without LP, capital would do just that, if that is optimizing M’-M. Mathematically, there is no difference whatsoever between MoP and LP. The only thing a liberal system seeks is optimization. It does not care at all, in no way whatsoever, how this is achieved. The more liberal the better. Less restrictions, more possibilities for optimizing marginal profit M’-M. If it means destruction of the human race, who cares? Collateral damage.

To make my point: Would you care if you had to pay (feed) monkeys one-cent peanuts to find you kilo-sized gold nuggets? Do you care if no human LP is involved in your business scheme? I guess you just care about maximizing your skimming of the labor power involved, be they human, animal or mechanic. Who cares?

There is only one problem. Somebody should consume the products made (no monkey cares about your gold nuggets). That is why the French economist Jean-Baptiste Say said “Every product creates its own demand”. If nobody can pay for the products made (because no LP is paid for the work done), the products cannot be sold, and the cycle stops at the step C’-M’, the M’ becoming zero (not sold), the profit M’-M reduced to a loss M and the company goes bankrupt.

However, individual companies can sell products, as long as there are other companies in the world still paying LP somewhere. Companies everywhere in the world thus still have a tendency to robotize their production. Companies exist in the world that are nearly fully robotized. The profit, now effectively skimming of the surplus of MoP-power instead of labor power, fully goes to the capital, since MoP has no way of organizing itself in trade unions and demand more ‘payment’. Or, and be careful with this step here – a step Marx could never have imagined – what if the MoP start consuming as well? Imagine that a factory robot needs parts. New robot arms, electricity, water, cleaning, etc. Factories will start making these products. There is a market for them. Hail the market! Now we come to the conclusion that the ‘system’, when liberalized will optimize the production (it is the only intrinsic goal) Preindustrial (without tools):

M – C{LP} – P – C’ – M’

Marxian: M – C{MoP, LP} – P – C’ – M’

Post-modern: M – C{MoP} – P – C’ – M’

If the latter is most efficient, in a completely liberalized system, it will be implemented.

This means

1) No (human) LP will be used in production

2) No humans will be paid for work of producing

3) No human consumption is possible

4) Humans will die from lack of consumption

In a Darwinistic way humanity will die to be substituted by something else; we are too inefficient to survive. We are not fit for this planet. We will be substituted by the exact things we created. There is nowhere a rule written “liberalism, with the condition that it favors humans”. No, liberalism is liberalism. It favors the fittest.

It went good so far. As long as we had exponential growth, even if the growth rate for MoP was far larger than the growth rate for rewards for LP, also LP was rewarded increasingly. When the exponential growth stops, when the system reaches saturation as it seems to do now, only the strongest survive. That is not necessarily mankind. Mathematically it can be either one or the other, without preference; the Marxian equation is symmetrical. Future will tell. Maybe the MoP (they will also acquire intelligence and reason somewhere probably) will later discuss how they won the race, the same way we, Homo Sapiens, currently talk about “those backward unfit Neanderthals”.

Your ideal dream job would be to manage the peanut bank, monopolizing the peanut supply, while the peanut eaters build for you palaces in the Italian Riviera and feed you grapes while you enjoy the scenery. Even if you were one of the few remaining humans. A world in which humans are extinct is not a far-fetched world. It might be the result of a Darwinian selection of the fittest.