J Lou

https://mastodon.social/@jlou

#liberal #anticapitalism

An #EconomicDemocracy is a market economy where most firms are structured as #WorkerCoops.

#liberalism
#coops #cooperatives

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Last Notes

2026-02-09 03:22:48 UTC

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democratic companies can make number go up just fine.
In an economy where the legal rights to appropriate the fruits of one’s labor are treated as alienable, there is a collective action problem with formation worker co-ops. All workers have to cooperate to ensure a co-op is formed, but an employer can just individually deal with each worker resulting in a capitalist company being formed. The collective action issue is the same as with unionization

2026-02-08 23:15:26 UTC

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the key to an egalitarian liberalism is inalienability. The idea that there are some rights that persons can’t give up even with consent. These rights will always stay under egalitarian distribution because they can’t concentrate or accumulate. We need to institute more such rights and have more rights that are closer to inalienable on the spectrum to alienable.

2026-02-08 23:05:09 UTC

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I don’t think that liberalism necessitates thinking markets in the real world or people are fully rational. Competitive markets work better than alternatives for private goods, but otherwise capitalism and elite decision-makers under it are irrational and inefficient. This is why changing things is possible at all.
https://wedontagree.net/collective-action-problems-are-not-a-capitalist-plot

2026-02-08 22:55:38 UTC

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monopoly is more inefficient simply because there is no check that the monopoly is doing things efficiently because there are no other providers to compare quality and price to.
Exploitation exists because it is more difficult for poor majorities to cooperate to protect their interests than corrupt concentrated wealthy interests to coordinate. Contra-#Marx #capitalism is deeply inefficient at producing much of the goods that matter like public goods.

2026-02-08 22:54:09 UTC

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there is no evidence that democratically-run companies are outcompeted by capitalist companies. To the contrary, worker co-ops are more resilient once formed, and have a lower failure rate than employer-employee businesses. Withholding property from the market is called the holdout problem. That problem is solvable with common ownership where buyers have an option to compel possessors to transfer property.

2026-02-08 22:48:22 UTC

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Ellerman’s argument against capitalism directly implies a clear alternative. This alternative shows that there are different ways to someone who thinks capitalism is the only way to organize society, but doesn’t like how it treats people or its other outcomes.

2026-02-07 08:10:45 UTC

The fallacy at the heart of welfare economics
https://davidellerman.substack.com/p/the-petitio-principii-fallacy-in
[@economics_that_works](https://fedigroups.social/@economics_that_works )
#Economics #EconTwitter #Econ #PoliticalEconomy #WelfareEconomics #Philosophy #Ethics #Utilitarianism #Utilitarian #Consequentialism #Consequentialist #capitalism #Egalitarianism #Egalitarian #Inequality

2026-02-06 21:35:36 UTC

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wow carnists think killing guardianless children is fine and cites Epstein as a defense. You can’t make this shit up

2026-02-06 21:12:10 UTC

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your dodge appeal to guardianship doesn’t change the fact that toddlers have moral value independent of guardianship.

2026-02-06 21:09:06 UTC

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I’m not going to dox myself for an internet argument. Animals don’t have to demand anything. There are moral patients as is clear from toddlers and infants. The traits that distinguish moral agents aren’t required for having moral value.

2026-02-06 20:56:12 UTC

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Vampires are moral agents. They’re responsible for any murders they choose to commit.
This is also a false equivalence. All we are asking is for humans not to kill animals when it isn’t even necessary for their own survival. Humanity can thrive without killing animals.

2026-02-06 20:35:40 UTC

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the point is the circumstances, under which most meat eating occurs, render meat eating unnecessary

2026-02-06 20:34:11 UTC

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We should interfere in nature to reduce wild animal suffering, but that is more complicated than the straw man you’ve constructed of banning predation. Moral agents shouldn’t intentionally cause increases in total suffering for personal pleasure.
Also, pro-animal people don’t think that eating animals, under absolutely any circumstances is wrong, anymore than eating people is wrong in cases where there is extreme starvation and deprivation. You’re engaged in a straw man

2026-02-06 19:53:24 UTC

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this is a reductio ad absurdum of your position. You literally just admitted that you believe toddlers have no inherent moral value. What if the moral agents whose guardianship they’re under are abusive? How does your faux-morality handle that?
#ethics #philosophy #morals #moral #veganism #vegan #debate

2026-02-06 19:43:00 UTC

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I don’t see why what you’re saying is even relevant. Toddlers have moral value but they can’t argue for it.

2026-02-01 17:33:09 UTC

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Preference utilitarianism also prevents interpersonal comparisons necessary to even notice that inequality is worth solving. The recognition of freedom as a fundamental moral value allows interpersonal comparisons between the rich and the poor, which justify wealth and income redistribution.
Thanks for the compliment. I appreciate your pushing back, and have also enjoyed the conversation.
[@sz_duras](https://me.dm/@sz_duras )
#philosophy #utilitarianism #consequentialism

2026-02-01 17:24:08 UTC

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Depending on the particulars of the #utilitarian argument, the case can work or not. If it is preference/desire satisfaction utilitarianism the case for capitalism follows from that any mutually beneficial transaction improves welfare. Capitalist employment is that assuming full consent. My response to such arguments is debunking #consequentialist #ethics. And rejecting collective preference satisfaction as the good in favor of freedom.

2026-02-01 17:20:08 UTC

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The issues you raise with competition between firms are mostly resolved by worker #democracy. Those that aren’t can be resolve by wealth and income redistribution to address #inequality. Monopolies being inefficient is compatible with monopolies being immensely profitable. They profit at the expense of consumer product quality or unreasonable prices in the long term. Part of capitalism’s inefficiency is insufficiently competitive markets and oligopoly.

2026-02-01 17:13:24 UTC

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You still have to show people that are mistaken how they are wrong to bring them over to the anticapitalist side.
It depends on the grounds they’re arguing for capitalism on.
If Nozick’s arguments worked, they would hold regardless of actually existing capitalism’s practice. Nozick doesn’t advocate actually existing capitalism. Of course, Ellerman shows that Nozick’s #libertarian defense of #capitalism fails

2026-01-26 23:27:14 UTC

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I disagree. Why do you think that?

2026-01-26 07:39:03 UTC

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That’s an accident. The necessity of consent focuses on intentional contractual agreements. To prevent an accident, you have the right to intervene to prevent loss of life or damage to property.
There can be cases with regret where nothing morally wrong happened. For example, selling a share that ends up going up later on. Regret is future information, so how can you decide based on it?
Employees might not regret being an employee but their rights are violated regardless

2026-01-26 07:03:22 UTC

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Voluntariness is a necessary condition not a sufficient condition for moral legitimacy. Ellerman is explicitly arguing for rendering certain voluntary contracts invalid.
Evicting widows can be wrong without the rental contract being involuntary.
So someone who doesn’t feel regret can do no moral wrong?

2026-01-26 06:43:47 UTC

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markets are what enable that. Markets can exist without capitalism

2026-01-25 06:35:59 UTC

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The reason competition between firms is necessary is because there is no way to enforce the firms doing a good job without having other people working on similar projects to compare to. It also prevents mismanagement.
I also think you’re straw manning pro-capitalists. Most centrists support capitalism on #utilitarian or individual rights based grounds. These ethics aren’t rooted in flawed analogies to Darwinian evolution.

2026-01-25 06:33:02 UTC

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I agree that capitalism is bad, but that doesn’t imply that everyone who defends capitalism is bad faith. People can be mistaken and succumb to propaganda. There are entire disciplines of academic study dedicated to producing propaganda in defense of it.
Competition between firms doesn’t necessitate competition between people. Competition between projects is inherent to scarcity. If we use a resource for project Y, we won’t have enough for project Z

2026-01-25 05:55:08 UTC

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Ellerman’s argument is different and simpler. It has more in common with Proudhon’s critique of property. Unlike Marxists that argue that employment is sociologically involuntary, Ellerman shows that employment is illegitimate even when fully voluntary. He also identifies a characteristic of labor that distinguishes it from capital in a morally relevant way. Ellerman is worth reading even if you’ve read Marx.

2026-01-25 05:49:26 UTC

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Workers are responsible for all results of production, but the employers owns 100% of them while workers as employees get 0%. This violates the moral norm that legal responsibility should be assigned to the de facto responsible party.
Source: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/column-the-case-for-employee-owned-companies

2026-01-24 23:10:53 UTC

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That’s a strong claim. What is your proof that all advocates of capitalism are inherently bad faith?
Something feeling wrong and being able to explain why something is wrong aren’t the same. The latter has value even to someone who has strong moral intuitions against capitalism.
Nothing said precludes joining a union. Every worker should do that. Justification for action doesn’t preclude exploring tactics for effective action.

2026-01-24 22:44:58 UTC

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The point is to explain to potential anti-capitalists why to be anticapitalist not to convince bad faith pro-capitalists

2026-01-24 22:43:56 UTC

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Exactly, the capitalist fully understands that agency isn’t transferred, which is why they’re wrong and philosophically incoherent. A major virtue of Ellerman’s argument is that it’s simple and correct. It gets people to what I would call anti-capitalist conclusions much more simply and effectively. It also turn the personal responsibility that is often cited in favor of capitalism against it.

2026-01-24 01:07:45 UTC

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Inalienability follows from something that can’t be transferred not should not. The right to appropriate the positive and negative fruits of your labor is inalienable because de facto responsibility *can’t* be transferred even with consent. Ellerman suggests that anytime an inalienable right is violated the legal system is engaged in institutional philosophical fraud by accepting a contract as fulfilled that is, in principle, unfulfillable

2026-01-24 01:00:39 UTC

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Inalienable ≠ inviolable
You have to understand what Ellerman means. Inalienable, for Ellerman, means consent isn’t a sufficient condition to transfer. That’s it. Just because consent doesn’t transfer the moral right doesn’t necessitate it being inviolable. Another example of an inalienable right is the right to life, but criminal actions can violate this right.

2026-01-24 00:58:45 UTC

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I don’t see how you could argue for or against a given social structure without having some ethical theory you are using to judge social institutions. All idealisms aren’t equally okay.
This is just advocating moral relativism. How could you possibly judge whether Ellerman’s desired system is good or bad without appealing to some moral criteria. Many anti-capitalists keep the moral criteria they’re using to judge the system vague.

2026-01-22 17:52:10 UTC

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communism is authoritarian because economic planning reduces human freedom and doesn’t really work at the scales necessary to sustain a complex technologically advanced society

2026-01-22 17:46:11 UTC

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It really isn’t authoritarian. Redistribution of wealth downwards increases freedom.

2026-01-22 04:06:35 UTC

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I don’t see why postcapitalism must be more authoritarian. There probably should be reparations paid to the working class for the theft of the fruits of their labor by the employer class.

2026-01-20 23:56:07 UTC

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In the postcapitalist system Ellerman advocates, labor has more rights than capital. Ellerman’s system can be combined with other policies as well like collective ownership of means of production, and democratic non-market mechanisms of resource allocation towards public goods

2026-01-20 14:03:18 UTC

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By left, I meant anticapitalist there. I would use center-left to refer to social liberals.

2026-01-20 00:39:06 UTC

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Right-wing liberals are alienist. They don’t support inalienable rights, which are rights that can’t be given up or transferred, even with consent.
Markets are about trading alienable or property rights. Those tend to accumulate and concentrate, so aren’t what satisfy liberalism’s belief in equality. Markets are useful tools, but they don’t solve every problem. Inalienable rights, on the other hand, don’t accumulate because they aren’t tradable.

2026-01-19 16:53:09 UTC

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that’s why I qualified with “the anti-capitalist.”
Inalienable rights theory more broadly has been an idea for a while, but the anti-capitalist implications were only discovered in the late 1970s

2026-01-19 16:03:16 UTC

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Rights can be violated. The fact that rights can be violated doesn’t indicate that those rights don’t exist.
Liberalism has been associated with capitalism for most of its history because the anti-capitalist inalienable rights theory was only discovered in the late 1970s.

2026-01-18 03:02:05 UTC

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Those figures you reference are alienist “liberals” that incoherently treat almost every moral right as a property right. There are many criticisms of them. The most basic of which are the modern liberal inalienable rights critiques of capitalism. Of course, it bears a relationship to actually existing liberals because they appeal to the same moral principles that imply anti-capitalism while incoherently defending capitalism.
https://www.ellerman.org/inalienable-rights-part-i-the-basic-argument/

2026-01-17 16:34:32 UTC

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I’m thinking of the principles of liberalism. There are anti-capitalist arguments within liberalism such as those advanced by David Ellerman. What you’re referring to with the term, “actually existing liberalism,” doesn’t adhere to the principles of liberalism. One reason is that it is capitalist among others. Our understanding of liberalism as a coherent political philosophy can evolve as new arguments are made to be quite different from what most historical liberals have advocated.

2026-01-17 16:19:37 UTC

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that seems true tho

2026-01-17 07:09:26 UTC

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People’s lives are more important than property rights. The right to life is inalienable, meaning it can’t be given up even with consent, while property rights can be.
It is an ideology. So? It’s correct.
Nothing I’ve said prevents needs-based redistribution of property. All property is produced on land. Land isn’t the fruits of anyone’s labor, but the liability for using it up is part of the fruits of everyone’s labor. Satisfaction of these liabilities accounts for distribution by need.

2026-01-17 04:02:41 UTC

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Why do you have your eyeballs? What is the morally relevant difference between eyeballs and a camera you are using? Both conduct your intentions and realize your will when you’re using them. Property rights in the fruits of your labor are an extension of the personal inalienable right to self-determination. Property you use extends the capabilities of your body.

2026-01-17 03:02:35 UTC

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Property rights are something people have. We’re talking about the positive and negative results of production. The right to get those is a property right.

2026-01-16 23:25:16 UTC

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Instead of value, if we look at property rights and liabilities as David Ellerman suggests, the contrast between what workers get and what the employer gets are much greater. Workers as employees get 0% property claim to positive and negative results of production (aka whole product of the firm) while the employer gets 100%. This violates the foundational moral norm behind property rights of getting the positive and negative fruits of your labor.

2026-01-15 20:33:58 UTC

RE: https://mastodon.online/@citify/115900961961050202
Aesthetic value has an objective component for the same reason that moral value has an objective component. Minds are physical systems. A consequence of that is that they can, in principle, be computationally modeled. We can talk about an infinite-time Turing machine running all these mind models and have it search for regularities in behavior in the limit (morals) or aesthetic appreciation.
What do you think is #ethics or aesthetics objective?
#philosophy #metaethics #morality
#note14aa…feh5

2026-01-06 00:49:02 UTC

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I’m not doubting duress exists. I just don’t think duress applies to worker co-ops choosing to rent instead of buy in a business context.
Yeah contracts can be invalid even with consent due to inalienable rights. That is one of the arguments developed by David Ellerman against employer-employee contracts I subscribe to, but I fail to see what inalienable right is violated in renting out capital.

2026-01-06 00:45:24 UTC

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I said it’s difficult not impossible. When proposing a new system, one has to be specific about how the system would deal with issues like this in the presence of malicious actors. I’ve found that most economic planning proposals leave this vague hence my support of Georgism and pro-market #anticapitalism. Of course, maybe there is some clever way to make economic planning work that I haven’t thought of or come across, and I would love to hear it if you know of such a way.

2026-01-05 23:54:51 UTC

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it’s difficult for everyone to coordinate fighting workers that aren’t staying within ecological limits

2026-01-05 23:53:37 UTC

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The party renting it may not want to buy it though because it’s cheaper to rent. Also, renting allows multiple parties to use the resources. Renting makes capital more accessible to less well-funded organizations and people. If both parties agree, what’s the harm?

2026-01-05 23:51:25 UTC

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I’m aware of these issues, but at a bare minimum people’s time is limited. Even if all other resources are abundant, that fundamental scarcity is still there.
Keeping production within ecological limits is entirely solved with #Georgism’s common ownership of land and natural resources.
Note that growth, once it accounts for social costs such as ecological considerations, is good. There are ways to make it take that into account. Economic value is based on people’s desires.

2026-01-05 23:44:59 UTC

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I’m talking about property rights and liabilities/obligations not value here. Market calue is dependent on the preferences of others. Property rights and liabilities are objective not subjective.

2026-01-05 23:42:41 UTC

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What Kropotkin missed is that there is both a positive and negative result to production. Workers are de facto responsible for creating both the positive and negative result. The negative result accounts for liabilities for used-up inputs, which accounts for past production. Responsibility has many different senses. The sense I mean is the sense Ellerman calls de facto responsibility. This is the same notion as is applied in a criminal trial to ascertain legal guilt.

2026-01-05 23:38:32 UTC

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what if workers lie about needing it for necessities? How do you verify what’s actually necessary in a particular part of the production process?
Renting out capital isn’t the job though. It’s producing the capital. Renting it out is one way to get paid for producing it. The present value of capital is the discounted value of all future capital services, so there is no difference in the value you get between renting and selling the capital you produce.

2026-01-05 23:34:05 UTC

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What happens if a group of workers chooses to deviate from the planning committee’s advice and/or squander the resources allocated to them on pet projects that the planning committee doesn’t think are important? How are decisions made between competing uses of resources when the resources in question are scarce?

2026-01-05 23:25:27 UTC

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landlordism is different because land has inelastic supply and no one created it. Capital is the fruits of someone else’s labor and you have to compensate the party that created it.

2026-01-05 23:24:18 UTC

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Capital services (services of the means of production) are a real thing. Why would people use the capital otherwise?
Economic planning in any form is incompatible with workers’ self-management as workers have to obey the plan, which is imposed from on high. I don’t see how a society could be stateless if based on economic planning. The bodies engaged in planning are obviously a states.

2026-01-05 23:14:51 UTC

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Renting out capital doesn’t imply taking a portion of someone else’s labor. They are just paying for a segment of the capital services, which are an input to the production process. The input-maker has to get paid. Selling the capital is just selling all future capital services.
There are ways to bake in anti-wealth-concentration measures into a currency like a fee on holding the currency.
Economic planning doesn’t work, and is incompatible with workers’ self-management.

2026-01-05 18:14:43 UTC

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RE: https://mastodon.social/@jlou/115843625188965297
[@ambiguous_yelp](https://veganism.social/@ambiguous_yelp ) I articulate a different perspective on passive income in this post than your’s:
#note13hv…732y

2026-01-05 17:17:21 UTC

RE: https://infosec.exchange/@JessTheUnstill/115842987515255760
Passive income, by itself, is fine. Passive income rooted in being an employer or landlord is the problematic part of #capitalism. Appropriating 100% of the fruits of other people’s labor is illegitimate. Workers renting out the product of their labor to other groups of workers is another morally legitimate way for workers to exchange their labor’s products. Renting out capital is selling a segment of the capital’s services, which is as legitimate as selling all future capital services.
#note1ms0…hzwx

2026-01-03 07:20:21 UTC

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capitalism doesn’t just optimize for efficiency but also control. These two targets can come into tension, so there are plenty of opportunities to make things significantly more efficient without capitalism.
https://wedontagree.net/we-dont-agree-on-capitalism-(essay)

2026-01-03 07:06:58 UTC

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#Capitalism only works well for private goods. There are systems that can do that while respecting human rights. A worker co-op market economy could serve that purpose. Where it fails to function almost completely is public goods, and externalities. To fix that, we need non-market mechanisms in the middle of the spectrum between markets and #democracy because collective action problems become more difficult with the number of people that benefit from a good.
#economics

2026-01-01 21:22:20 UTC

RE: https://mastodon.social/@Daojoan/115821753230762229
The left should change the argument. Complex systems like economies are difficult to predict. Any complex #consequentialist argument against #capitalism can be refuted by citing a lack of evidence that the proposed postcapitalist alternative produces better outcomes, and the risks of meddling. Rights-based theories avoid this critique. #Leftism must demonstrate that capitalism contradicts common sense principles of justice.
#capitalist #anticapitalism #ethics #leftist #philosophy
#note1mxl…26uf

2025-10-24 18:26:47 UTC

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Transitioning to an economy of worker co-ops. These worker co-ops would form larger multi-stakeholder associations for the purpose of funding cross-firm public goods more efficiently than capitalism. Markets would continue to exist. Land and natural resource would be commonly-owned.
Marx isn’t the only anti-capitalist thinker. Marx got wrong that capitalism is efficient.
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/115/430/536/258/957/958/original/bbc93b9adaaabad4.png

2025-10-18 20:51:26 UTC

No kings. No employers.
Fight for democracy in all human associations such as government and companies.
#NoKings #meme #memes #politics #democracy #PoliticalPhilosophy #philosophy #WorkersRights #labor #unions #liberalism #liberal #postcapitalism #postcapitalist #capitalism #anticapitalism #capitalist #anticapitalist #HumanRights #socialism
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/115/397/072/207/506/822/original/304b81914a54969c.png

2025-10-17 21:38:51 UTC

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Communities can have institutions, such as mechanisms for democratic self-management and accountability for results of intentional human actions. If such an institution exists, then principles of justice are relevant.
You didn’t answer my question about who ought to be held responsible.
A “capital rental” contract that denies workers’ democratic rights in the workplace is not a capital rental contract; it’s an employment contract.

2025-10-17 18:44:08 UTC

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The notion of responsibility is core to morality because it is what distinguishes moral agents from moral patients. The notion of justice is people are held responsible for the results to their own actions. Do you think it is acceptable for one person to commit a murder and an innocent person to be held responsible by the community?
It isn’t equivalent to capitalism because workers get a democratic say.

2025-10-17 16:53:28 UTC

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so you don’t think that the person who is factually response for a result ought to be the one held legally or institutionally responsible? For example, if someone commits theft, shouldn’t the person who actually carried out the theft be responsible rather than some innocent party?
I think a system with a worker co-op mandate and leased capital is fine, but it would need social ownership of the means of production through venture communes to make getting start up capital easier.

2025-10-17 01:31:50 UTC

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It means the property rights and liabilities that workers create in production. Those ought to belong jointly to the workers in the firm. This inalienable right entails all firms must be worker co-ops to be morally valid.
The moral intuition is that the right to appropriate the positive and negative fruits of your labor is just the principle that legal responsibility ought to be assigned to the de facto responsible party applied to property.
Source: https://youtu.be/fvWJ10ONPkY

2025-10-16 13:52:59 UTC

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okay, that is a major disagreement. Wage labor/employment contracts are always invalid and inherently violate workers inalienable rights to appropriate the positive and negative fruits of their labor and to workplace democracy. The alternative is individual or joint self-employment as in a worker cooperative.
Going back to the quibble about consent. In the hypothetical, we would be starting with a roughly equal distribution of wealth. I was focused on critiquing labor contracts

2025-10-16 02:18:45 UTC

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just to be clear, I’m anti-capitalist. I’m arguing that consent vs coercion isn’t the right framing for arguing against capitalism. In that context, I was pointing out capitalism+Georgism+UBI could enable capitalist employment to be voluntary because it eliminates the work or starve aspect.

2025-10-16 01:04:29 UTC

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I disagree that they are equivalent because I can treat them morally differently by giving different moral reasons for why they’re invalid.
I don’t think this attack is permissible because people holding the same financial instrument are economically coordinated.

2025-10-16 00:48:23 UTC

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what I mean by selling voting rights is trading them like shares not having certain economic interests that cause you to vote a certain way. I do have moral objection to these types of attack, but it just isn’t that it is fraudulent. It’s a false equivalence to suggest that both situations are equivalent.

2025-10-16 00:30:14 UTC

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yeah I understand. You’d have to give a large portion of the population these options depending on how popular the policy is without manipulation. I also think another mitigation a system can have is to have elements of sortition as well.

2025-10-15 23:58:12 UTC

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Giving people assets whose value will change, if a certain policy is enacted, is not equivalent to paying them to vote a certain way. You have to give people an economic interest in those ventures.
If this proves to be a serious attack against the system, I would just use a voting system that takes into account how coordinated agents are. I don’t see the issue with using such a voting system.

2025-10-15 17:58:15 UTC

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Selling voting rights is fraudulent for inalienable rights reasons. If you ignore those arguments, I disagree with your view that it violates informed consent. Voting rights are basically like voting shares when they’re alienable. You don’t necessarily need to know how many other shares someone has to be able to consent to selling your shares.

2025-10-15 02:23:45 UTC

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You’re mixing utilitarian considerations with deontological ones. For the pure deontologist, there is no conception of social good beyond protecting people’s rights. From the point of view of consent, there is nothing wrong with consensually exchanging voting rights in secret.

2025-10-14 17:59:46 UTC

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I don’t think you have to have knowledge about every transaction that is happening behind the scenes to have informed consent.
I don’t see this couldn’t be over the table. The attacker could enter negotiations with each vote-seller than announce when a deal with all of them is secured

2025-10-14 17:40:59 UTC

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wouldn’t they be violating the terms of those voting rights sales if they decided to ignore those legitimate transactions?

2025-10-14 17:39:26 UTC

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How is consent violated in that situation though? All the sales of voting rights were consensual.

2025-10-14 17:20:58 UTC

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You can’t simply take back the voting rights if you sold them. They belong to the person who bought them. You’ve to buy new voting rights. It essentially makes governance into a corporation. Inalienable rights say that such sales are immoral.

2025-10-14 16:59:08 UTC

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I could just as easily come up with an alternative narrative where individuals don’t value political parity that highly due to the initial equal distribution of voting rights, they can expect other voters to have similar interests. By the time the attacker has bought up a large share of voting rights, it’s too late to do anything.
Also, you don’t know that social norms would create transaction costs higher than the benefit to the attacker. You’re speculating. That isn’t evidence.

2025-10-14 15:56:55 UTC

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source?

2025-10-14 12:38:20 UTC

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I’ll concede that violations of social etiquette constitute social aversion. However, there are problems that make this limited in its effectiveness at preserving egalitarianism.
1. Social etiquette violations don’t merit as strong of a response as moral rights’ violation.
2. Social etiquettes are difficult to preserve in the presence of strong economic incentives for breaking them.
3. What is economically incentivized transforms culture.

2025-10-14 01:25:30 UTC

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Why would there be a social aversion if there is nothing morally wrong with selling voting rights?
“If you don't have inbuilt social mechanisms against the concentration of power, if political power is just another commodity that can be bought and sold without raising eyebrows, you don't have an economically egalitarian society.”
Exactly, inalienable rights are essential to economic egalitarianism.

2025-10-13 20:42:59 UTC

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Of course there would be mutually beneficial incentives. I buy your voting rights and you get paid. Seems mutually beneficial to me.
Do you have any evidence to support the claim that no buyer would be able to afford any sellers price? That’s a pretty strong claim.

2025-10-13 15:02:42 UTC

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There are still incentives to engage in voting rights transfers, even in egalitarian circumstances, as a risk reduction through diversification strategy or because the seller doesn’t get much value out of their individual voting rights. Even if you start out egalitarian, without inalienability, rights will eventually concentrate and accumulate resulting in an inegalitarian situation. The only way to truly prevent an inegalitarian situation is non-transferability of rights.

2025-10-13 15:00:05 UTC

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In a self-sale contract, you relinquish your labor rights for your working lifetime but retain your right to life, etc. Irreversibility isn’t unique to self-sale contracts. For instance, transferring material property is also irreversible, as the purchaser can transform it or refuse to sell it back. This argument doesn’t rule out self-sale in all cases. After a self-sale, the person can still buy themselves back. Inalienable rights actually rule out these abhorrent contracts.

2025-10-13 14:03:25 UTC

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A deontological theory without inalienable rights would have a hard time criticizing self-sale contracts, non-democratic governance and coverture marriage contracts. It would be hard to critique capitalism because you’d have no objection to workers selling their voting rights in firms and any organization to the highest bidder.
Workers consent to the employment contract with their particular employer. Labor monopsony is solvable with unionization like capitalist Nordic countries.

2025-10-13 03:41:17 UTC

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Those are legal or institutional rights not moral ones, which is what I meant. These arguments claim having a certain set of institutional/legal rights enforced leads to better consequences such as increased happiness. With rights-based, I mean deontological ethics. I used this because it seemed more intuitive. Consent is a deontological paradigm. Committed consequentialists override consent if it leads to better consequences.
Neither of us seems to believe rights are primitive.

2025-10-13 01:23:11 UTC

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Yeah it does. Non-rights-based ethical systems like consequentialism have no concept of rights whatsoever.
The ethical system I advocate derives the rights it argues for from moral principles. You could just as easily call it responsibility-based because it centers personal responsibility. It would lead to the same conclusion regardless of whether you emphasize rights or responsibility principles.

2025-10-13 00:37:21 UTC

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Yeah I don’t see how this isn’t a rights-based system as it has a conception of rights. Rights aren’t primitive. The primitive notion is moral principles. Rights are established with a moral argument from these moral principles.
Rights can be violated though. The existence of a right doesn’t necessarily compel anything from immoral or amoral actors. This suggestion doesn’t seem to handle inalienable rights, which are rights that can’t be given up or transferred even with consent.

2025-10-12 20:37:22 UTC

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What would it mean for consent to be primitive here?
Rights aren’t a primitive notion. They’re always derived from moral principles. Also, there are rights that are non-transferable even with consent, so consent doesn’t capture all rights.
In metaethics, there are 3 types of ethical theories: rights-based/deontological, consequentialist and virtue ethics. Consent is from the rights-based/deontological tradition. There is no consent-focused ethical theory that isn’t rights-based.

2025-10-12 18:36:13 UTC

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what you could oppose = you have a right to overrule
Consent is a consideration from rights-based deontological ethics. The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy defines rights as:
“Rights are entitlements (not) to perform certain actions, or (not) to be in certain states; or entitlements that others (not) perform certain actions or (not) be in certain states.”
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rights/
#deontology #deontoloigical #ethics #philosophy

2025-10-12 15:59:17 UTC

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This is incorrect. Of course, consent is based on rights. Consent is about alienable rights. By consenting you give another party the right to do something you’ve got the alienable right to do.

2025-10-12 15:40:49 UTC

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The state can violate people’s rights and it does so quite frequently. Anti-state arguments often appeal to rights arguments based on lack of consent to the social contract to delegitimize the state.
Well, I just don’t see why you believe that rights have to be enforced by the state. If I protect someone from violence, surely, I’ve protected their rights, but I’m not the state. Moral rights can fail to be enforced, and still be valid.

2025-10-12 15:30:10 UTC

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I don’t see how people’s moral rights are necessarily being trampled always.
You’re conflating the state’s system of rights with moral rights. The two concepts are different.