I love this point:
Actually, a free market is the default state of human existence.
Thanks for bringing great #anarchy content to Steemit. :)
You are viewing a single comment's thread from:
I love this point:
Actually, a free market is the default state of human existence.
Thanks for bringing great #anarchy content to Steemit. :)
Indeed, that one seems to be popular. :) Thanks @lukestokes and @kilrathi
But there is no historical evidence of human activity that resembles a market prior to the rise of states. There is no reason to believe this "default state" ever existed outside of the imagination of modern libertarians.
To me, that's not a solid argument because we could go back further to primates and say, "Look, see, that's the natural, default state!" Where do we draw the line in the process of human evolution to have a meaningful discussion?
The "rise of states", to me, gets confused with the rise of agriculture which brought about a more pressing need for property rights which in turn created market forces. To argue all that away with hand-waving is somewhat luddite thinking to me. If you prefer, we could say Given our current state of technological advancement as a species, a free market is the default state of human existence as it exists right now. If anything even closely resembling a post scarcity society can exist (and I have my doubts), then I think things will change and evolve again to something new as the default state of human existence.
The point I was trying to make was not that we can look back into history and find some kind of default state. Any claim that there is or ever was such a "default state" is without basis. It's certainly not one that we can find at any point in history, and at present we are all products of a very complex society.
We are presently conditioned to engage in market behavior, but that's due to the environment in which we developed... to assume that it's essential human nature to behave that way contradicts all historical and anthropological evidence.
I'm also not aware of any free market that actually exists. Though I would be interested in hearing about one.
We're not going to come to an agreement on property rights here, but I'll try to explain my thinking anyway:
Given that property rights exist, the moral (that's a better word to me than "natural") state of human existence in today's technological world lends itself to voluntary exchange (if you prefer that over "free market"). Given the choice, with the number of people we have now who are high up Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, people today choose win/win scenarios over win/lose scenarios. This certainly isn't true everywhere, especially with impoverished peoples or where government coercion and corruption is at its worst.
I make the connection between "moral" and "natural" because of recently reading Steven Pinker's the Better Angles of Our Nature which talks about how humanity is more peaceful now than it has ever been. He's also a big fan of the Leviathan state (which I am not), but I'm not a fan of some of his reasoning or his comparisons of "anarchist" societies and their level of violence to state-controlled societies. Others critique his work by pointing out how all of the "anarchist" societies actually had rulers and weren't anarchistic at all.
I've had enough of these discussions to know they don't really go anywhere. Yes, there are problems with land ownership when it comes to property rights. Yes, if everyone had abundance we may not need money or exchange the way we think about it today and yes, gift/sharing economies that humanity used prior to agriculture were pretty awesome in many ways. Could we still have the technological advancements we currently enjoy (such as Steemit) without a profit motive? Currently, I think, we can not. The default state as of this moment in human history, I believe, is voluntary exchange. It takes coercion, military boot camp training, psychosis, or extreme need/poverty for things to be out of alignment with that default state.
That's my opinion at the moment, anyway. :)