“A free market with a few monopolies is the ground state.”

Wild ideological assertion, unsupported by evidence, in contradiction with the historical development of capitalism. Also totally irrelevant to the discussion on this thread, which is about what the left’s strategy ought to be, not about what the right want.

I have had to repeat because you have not dealt with the argument, you have simply ignored it.

Sunny plans will not cause more competition but less by restricting the sorts of companies that can form so that they are “fairer”. More regulation of the type of company that you can form = more state interference = bigger state.

As for the shareholders, you cannot really give them any more power because they already have it. They may lack the will to exercise it but it is theirs none the less.

“Policing competition would require an active effort”

Nothing more than a trades description act and a monopolies commission are required for policing competition. To have greater competition, cut back on all other areas of regulation. If you’re for that, then I very much agree.

Re the unions, as I pointed out above, you want to slant the playing field in their favour. Leaving aside the damage that will do to the economy, (including to the union members eventually), you still want to regulate the companies. Or are you arguing for a free for all? Secondary strike action allowed but no job protection while on strike? Dismissal for becoming a union steward?

A free market with a few monopolies is the ground state. If you want to change it then you have to intefere in the economy, that requires a state. To cause the changes you and Sunny have suggested, (ie. f’ing big changes), requires a large state. There is no other possible mechanism.

If you dissagree with the above then by all means describe how you will effect these changes without using the state. If you manage it then, verily, I shall bow down to your towering intellect.

“No it wouldn’t. For example, take unions – all you have to do to give the unions much power is to lift the restrictions that exist (e.g. the restrictions on general strikes and solidarity strikes).”

Quite apart from the advisability of such an action, (for which read utter idiocy), how are you going to maintain the control you obviously desire over the companies that the union members work at? Would that be by law? With the power of a large state?

Your aim is to change the relationships in the economy, to do that you will need considerable power and the only place that becomes available is the state. The more power you require, (and you certainly have ambitions that require great power to satisfy), the larger the state you need.

You can have your socially aimed change or you can have a small state, to believe you can have both is, at best, self deceiving.

Still, since there isn’t a public consensus on the value of positive freedom, but there is one on fairness it’s that we ought to focus on.

Seems sensible. I would like to promote (positive) freedom as a value though, I think it’s important.

Communism (so-called) wasn’t fair or equal, just highly structured inequality.

No, but it started more fair and equal than it became – it was an unstable system was the point I was getting at.

In that sense greater equality ‘means’ more fairness, but we don’t make society more equal by making it more fair, rather the other way around.

But there is, as discussed earlier, ‘unfair equality’.

In terms of the connections. I would emphasise that: fairness [and positive freedom] is good, massive inequalities oppose fairness [and freedom]. I think you’d agree, but then I would argue that these conclusions call for robust state-driven interventions in inequality, rather than your leftist anarchism!

I find the anarchist critique of the state very convincing – it’s an entity that is predisposed by its structure to serve elite interests of one sort or another. That’s what happens when power is exercised from above. Based on this sort of view, anarchists correctly predicted in the 19th century both the failure of Russian communism and that the parliamentary route to socialism would fail to win lasting socialist goals. The welfare state and the NHS appear to be exceptions, but it’s not clear to me that these would have been achieved without the world wars and the revolutionary potential engendered by them. But I’m willing to be convinced I’m wrong about that.

This is, as much as anything, an empirical observation: inequality increases rapidly in a capitalist free-market society,

I think this is an empirical observation which needs to be proven rather than simply stated.

Sure, but this thread isn’t the place for that discussion. If we had to argue our positions from nothing every time we’d never get anywhere.

Health care, education, jobs, incomes, “living wages” and all the other positive freedoms actually have to be provided by someone, somehow.

So do armies, police forces, etc. The right to private property has to be enforced by the state. The right to free association is meaningless unless you have the rule of law stopping other groups from disrupting your ability to associate in practice. etc.

Matt Munro,

I don’t walk around all day bemoning the fact that I’m not as rich as Warren Buffet, nor do I congratulate myself for not being a tramp. Either/both could happen, for most people the odds are neither will. You have to play the hand you are dealt.

Yeah but it’s not like there’s just a vast majority who are fine and a few weird exceptions, there’s a huge majority who live on a tiny fraction of what a small but sizable minority live on.

On “fairness”, my idea of fair is that whatever hand you are dealt, you can acheive something with it.

Depends on what the something is, everyone can achieve ‘something’ with the hand they’re dealt, but some can achieve much bigger somethings than others (through family wealth, social class, etc.).

Falco,

I want our society differently structured then it is now. That means structuring companies differently so they face more competition from each other, shareholders have more power and do unions.

You stretch the language beyond newspeak to say that your plan would not restrict freedom. To acomplish your aims you would require massive state interference, to maintain that situation you would have to maintain that powerful state.

No it wouldn’t. For example, take unions – all you have to do to give the unions much power is to lift the restrictions that exist (e.g. the restrictions on general strikes and solidarity strikes).

Well he does, obviously, otherwise he wouldn’t ask for 100 times more than a carer.

If he’s not enjoying the fruits of other peoples’ labour as much as he thinks he should, maybe he’d feel better making 100 carers better off by doubling their wages and enjoying his money vicariously.

So long as your point is only that social goods that can be achieved by abstaining from passing laws are less difficult to achieve than social goods that require anything more difficult, then I completely accept the distinction. I’m just not convinced that it’s an important one.

It might be better to stop referring to your distinction as ‘negative/positive’ (which has already been used for a totally different distinction), and stop describing the distinction as between ‘things that depend on others and things that don’t’ because that gives the impression that you’re referring to the importance of rights/liberties/demands on others etc. Obviously the distinction between “damned easy” and “needs lots of distribution” won’t do much ideological work for you though.

Because stopping people from denying people a freedom like speech is a damn sight easier than supplying someone with a freedom that has to be supplied.

Free speech is pretty easy “Congress shall make no laws” and you’re pretty much done. “Everyone has a right to a living income” means you’ve got to have a large tax structure, a large distribution system for getting money to those whose market incomes (for whatever reason) don’t amount to a living income, you’ve got to have a system of repression to deal with those who won’t contribute their “fair share” of the money to be redistributed and so on.

I really don’t understand why you cannot see the distinction.

that doesnt restrict freedom in one sense it just re-distributes power institutionally.”

You stretch the language beyond newspeak to say that your plan would not restrict freedom. To acomplish your aims you would require massive state interference, to maintain that situation you would have to maintain that powerful state.

You can have redistribution of power and a massive state, (leaving aside that most of the power would end up vested in that state), or you can move away from state centric governance. You cannot have both and given that you are not utterly blind, you must know it.

A freedom of any sort can be expressed formally as freedom of some-one from some constraint to do something. (This you’ll note requires reference to both positive and negative elements of freedom.) The distinction is arbitrary because if TW because of X is unable to Y you can just as well express this in terms of a constraint or a mere absence of capability.
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To turn to your personal categories though. For one thing, these aren’t isomorphic with the negative/positive categories. Secondly, your own categories are arbitrary in precisely the same way as the above positive/negative ones. Whether something depends on provision by some-one else isn’t an essential category of the universe, it’s true only *under some description.* An income could be called reliant on some-one else buying your wares/keeping his distance/setting up policing… or as dependent purely on your own labour and no-one else depending on what elements of dependence/independence you want to stress. All social actions will always be dependent/independent of positive/negative action depending on what your pragmatic interests are in offering a particular description.

But getting down to the root of your proposal and leaving aside any problems of coherence, whether something “has to be provided by someone” is arbitrary anyway in a quite different way: it simply doesn’t matter. Obviously I can’t guess at what the supposed importance of the distinction is though, so I’ll leave it to you to specify why it matters that “freedom of association” doesn’t need provision but healthcare or life does.

Nothing arbitrary about it at all. It’s a wonderful example of very clear thinking in fact.
Negative liberties are those that do not have to be provided by someone. They exist when we stop someone from preventing their exercise. You do not enable someone, provide them, with freedom of speech or association, you simply don’t prevent them from having them.

Health care, education, jobs, incomes, “living wages” and all the other positive freedoms actually have to be provided by someone, somehow.

Can’t see anything “arbitrary” in that distinction at all.

Note the words “as a trend.” Obviously I’m not proposing opposition to *all* negative freedoms: that would require that everybody literally was totally unable to ever do anything (a rather more problematic conclusion than opposition to freedom of speech).

Also key were the words “advances in it/ *it’s name*.” My point being that negative freedom is predominantly invoked to justify advances in personal liberties at the expense of other goods, e.g. freedom from having one’s property interfered with outweighing literally saving others lives.

(I also stress advances *in the name of* negative liberty rather than negative liberty itself because I’m sceptical about the coherence of the concept per se. Classifying goods in terms of negative liberties, positive liberties or positive goods is essentially arbitrary, so attempting to privilage one “category” over another leads automatically to a permutation problem.)

Freedom of speech, freedom of association, are both negative freedoms. Are you really against both of those because they are anathema to fairness/equality?

Jeebus.

“in the long term, achieving a stable equal economy means achieving a fair one (and the failure of communism testifies to that).”

Communism (so-called) wasn’t fair or equal, just highly structured inequality.
My point about tackling inequality rather than fairness, even if fairness is all we actually care about was intended along these lines. Fairness is a moral property of society, we make society fairer by (among other things) making it more equal. In that sense greater equality ‘means’ more fairness, but we don’t make society more equal by making it more fair, rather the other way around.
In terms of the connections. I would emphasise that: fairness [and positive freedom] is good, massive inequalities oppose fairness [and freedom]. I think you’d agree, but then I would argue that these conclusions call for robust state-driven interventions in inequality, rather than your leftist anarchism!

Tim J: ‘Had much experience of the financial sector? Things generally look very easy when you haven’t the faintest idea of what they involve.’

Had any experience as a carer? Is it 1% as difficult as investment banking? Is each investment banker’s contribution to society a hundred times more than a carer?

These are the levels of inequality we are dealing with.

I think Does it benefit the Republicans? Then count Friedman in is a fair summary of his schtick, whatever personal hobby horses he rode in on.

He may have opposed their loopier puritan crusades, but when the shit hit the fan personal liberty would have to make way for Republican financial shenanigans every time. See also, Patriot Act: Friedman’s opinion on.

Also see President George W. Bush: Friedman’s entirely superficial disagreements with and Libertarianism: historic movement for reduction of top-rate taxation cunningly disguised as campaign for personal liberty for everyone.

I’ve never understood that either – depravity (as in people being deprived of what I consider the basics) depresses me, inequality does not.

I don’t walk around all day bemoning the fact that I’m not as rich as Warren Buffet, nor do I congratulate myself for not being a tramp. Either/both could happen, for most people the odds are neither will. You have to play the hand you are dealt.

On “fairness”, my idea of fair is that whatever hand you are dealt, you can acheive something with it. Governments job is to create the conditions for that to happen, not to “manage” it by socially engineering their particular vision of equality.

On banking it’s not complex. Most people of moderate inteligence could turn £5 into £10 on the stock market. Given £5M they could turn it into £10M. The barrier is acess to capital, not ability (and I’m not exactly uninformed about merchant banking or high finance)

Banking is just bog-standard clerical work carried out by office drones in flash suits who get to take a large cut of other people’s money despite making nothing themselves.

Had much experience of the financial sector? Things generally look very easy when you haven’t the faintest idea of what they involve.