"Freedom" thread or something

thellama73 wrote:   Coercion is force or the threat of force. The example you gave did not involve those. It involved private companies (and the individuals who run them) declining to engage in voluntary activity. How do you not see a difference?

Edited by rogerthat - March 19 2014 at 10:53

One serious flaw I have found is that coercion and force seems to mean for some exclusively the use of weapons or actual physical violence. As long as there is a contract or agreement there is supposed to be no coercion and thus no aggression and thus total freedom of choice. Sadly the world, time has told me again and again, is quite different. 

Let's imagine there's a poor person with a family he has to take care of without a job with bills piling up including medical care. He's unemployed after being laid off due to no fault of his own. There's very few if any employment opportunities in his area. Only a major retail chain offer jobs with very low wages and benefits and times. It's one of the only alternatives for this guy, either he picks this or basically gets ruined forever. So he has to choose it. 

Well said, Theo.  This is the dilemma that I also struggle with.  It's not all on merit, fate and circumstance can deal a raw hand too.  Such a system does not work, and not just for a few people but for lots of them.  And this is precisely why a leftist response emerged.  Now of course left ideologies are deeply flawed on their own but I think we are only going to keep swaying a little to the left and then right and vice versa and so on.  It will probably never again settle down squarely in one half because people have experienced the flaws of both sides deeply enough to distrust it when the pendulum swings too much one way.   Of course, the lefties will find conservatives wherever they look and the conservatives will find lefties everywhere in turn but that doesn't necessarily mean that's the case.

Edited by rogerthat - March 19 2014 at 11:18

rogerthat wrote: Thanks for sharing, JJLehto, will check it out at leisure.  No time for economics reading in the weekdays, sadly.

rogerthat wrote: Er, wait a sec, can you please explain how you jumped several steps ahead to the conclusion that the example I gave did not involve force when I specifically used words that convey the use of it?  Here is what I wrote again: "dominant businesses go to the extent of extorting transporters not to supply raw material to competitors" Er, meaning of extort as per Merriam-Webster: "to obtain from a person by force, intimidation, or undue or illegal power". The plain meaning of the word extort already implies force, so to claim that extortion is not coercion and that the example I cited does not involve the use of force at all is stretching credibility to an extreme.  I hope you will agree that I cannot get the dictionary meanings of words changed to suit your argument.  Please don't waste my time this way, I am not interested in such pointless discussions.  Find some other pretext to soothe your ego, pretty please.  And for the nth time, if for any reason, the meaning of what I said was not clear and you needed more details, you should have asked for those instead of being terribly eager to refute.

My apologies, I misunderstood you and thought you were using extort in a non-literal sense, as people use it to refer to blackmail, for examples.

You will have to provide examples of what you are talking about, but if it is true, then of course I condemn such actions. But I don't see how a corporation breaking the law and using ceorcion justifies the state using coercion.

The T wrote: Let's imagine there's a poor person with a family he has to take care of without a job with bills piling up including medical care. He's unemployed after being laid off due to no fault of his own. There's very few if any employment opportunities in his area. Only a major retail chain offer jobs with very low wages and benefits and times. It's one of the only alternatives for this guy, either he picks this or basically gets ruined forever. So he has to choose it.  For some, there's absolute freedom and liberty in that interaction in both sides. Both employer and employee are in exactly the same playing field and with the same level of free will in choosing and "negotiating" the work conditions. There are no guns pointed nowhere, nobody forces this guy to choose that job or its conditions.  I never fully agreed that this is a free contractual interaction between two free parts free of coercion and never will. But for some this is the free market being free and working for everybody.  The world where there is the same liberty on both sides of that example is an alternate reality.

This can happen, and the other side of the coin can happen too, where an employer has a similarly limited number of options. The balance of power is in the employer's favor because of government price controls that create a surplus of labor.

In any case, what is the alternative? The alternative to the situation you describe? A central authority directing who can be hired and fired and for what reason and for how much? I think that is worse, personally.

thellama73 wrote:   You will have to provide examples of what you are talking about, but if it is true, then of course I condemn such actions. But I don't see how a corporation breaking the law and using ceorcion justifies the state using coercion.

JJLehto wrote: manofmystery wrote: How'd you fall back into a school of economic thought that's collapsing the western world around us? Because: Keynes-lite is what we have, (and have had) and it is indeed wrong. (Part of their belief has been de regulating finance btw). If you want specifics, it's the Post-Keynesian school I'm into. They say things like: Too much private sector debt is bad, the Fed should not tinker with the economy and doing so can be dangerous, (and it should also be more transparent and limited in nature), our current attempts to "prime the pump" are ineffective and would be inflationary, that QE would be ineffective, we keep making bubbles and bubbles never last forever (and in fact predicted our recession as fr back as the early 2000s) crazy sh*t right?? Those b*****ds I'm quite sure you (MoM) won't bother, maybe llama or others will, but here is a quick and dirty summation, and I'd like to see it proven wrong. The blue is private sector, red gov, green our trade balance. Gov deficits balance private sector surplus. The few times we've gotten gov surpluses it's been mirrored by the private sector running a deficit. Coincidence? Of course when this happens, it's bad...we can't run deficits and go bankrupt and all kinds of bad stuff. So do we really want the gov to try and have a balanced budget, or surpluses?? Is it even possible? We look at just the gov deficits, but don't take the whole economy into the picture! I gotta go for now, but basically: the 3 sectors of the economy balance, so trying to "balance" one impacts it all. Imagine if we tried to impose austerity during this time when we're heavily in debt and saving a lot. Raising taxes or cutting spending that benefits us? Europe should be proof of what imposing austerity does in a recessed economy. BTW the post-keynesians also support generally low taxes, and have said a "true" stimulus would've been a full payroll tax holiday. Not that 2% for 2 years sh*t Obama tried, but a complete end of payroll taxes, for as long as needed. They also talk a lot about money, and how things simply work differently under a fiat money system, we all think with a gold standard mentality still but fiat just works differently. We can discuss that one later.

Thing is, about that: I don't want the government having surpluses either. It's not that I just don't want them spending, I don't want them collecting. You seem to have fallen into the school of thought that the economy can be managed centrally somehow (unless I've lazily misread something). When I see "tax holiday" and the addition of the qualifier "for as long as needed" attached to the end of a tax I really see pixie dust glimmering in a Krugman's eye. Bastiat it up man, come on, you're better than the pseudointellectual cult of academia.

JJLehto wrote: And if anyone is seriously interested, (I always took the time to read what you posted MoM) here is a great paper: http://www.paecon.net/PAEReview/issue58/Koo58.pdf [/DIV

That's not fair. I never asked you to read anything that long.

thellama73 wrote: Also, T, why does everyone always make the assumption that the only option is to work for a company or starve? What about self-employment? What about charity? A barely competent street performer can make a pretty decent income in major cities. Why is this never listed among possible options?

Come on Logan, we are talking reality here. So accepting welfare is undignified but accepting charity isn't? So you really, really think charity is available for everybody who might needed in the magnitudes necessary to cover not just one random homeless person but sometimes families in trouble?  Self-employment? Yes, great. How do you do it? You have to have a skill or talent which need at least that you had that little bit of luck in your childhood not even to have been born in wealth or at least not in the gutter but with the education or the love or whatever surrounding you to gain that skill. So you are going to tell the worker who has been employed in a factory for 10 years "go, become self-employed." Really?