Economic justice is one of the oldest aims of libertarians and anarchists. The schools split over how to reach it, over prices, interest, money and land, but most meet on one point: they are against capitalism, not against markets. This part argues that the two are different things, and that much of what is defended as the free market is privilege no market ever granted.
Price. Josiah Warren’s rule, cost the limit of price: where entry is open and costs can be seen, prices fall toward cost, and what stays above it is mostly a toll. Then what prices carry besides knowledge, the rules they were set under: who owns the land, who may issue credit, who is allowed to compete. Prices weigh every want by money, so whoever holds the money decides whose wants count. And the mutualist case against interest.
Markets versus capitalism. Fernand Braudel’s line between the everyday market and the capitalism that sits on top of it, tested against the right and the left, with the tariff, oldest of Benjamin Tucker’s monopolies, and the commons that neither markets nor states supply.
Size and finance. How a lead becomes a bigger lead: size that wins bids and terms, leverage as debt and as power, and Wall Street’s casino, where everything rides on growth. Then who a company is: a person in law, or the people who work in it.
Costs pushed outside. The people inside nothing: the family downstream from the mill, the village under the bombs, the generation that repays a dictator’s loan. They can’t leave what they never entered, so the leaving test can’t reach them. The rule beneath it can. If a deal’s costs fall on people who had no say in it, the deal isn’t voluntary, however freely the parties inside it signed.
The tests. Each chapter adds a question, and together they sort an honest margin from a toll:
- Can the buyer see the cost?
- Can they leave?
- Does the giant still win with its subsidies, privileges and rescues taken away?
- Who carries the loss: the people who chose the bet, or someone who didn’t?
- Who is outside the deal, and were they asked?
Under all five is one rule: no one is anyone’s input, and no one is anyone’s subject.
Still to come. The Austrian school’s best case for profit, and what gets built where knowledge costs almost nothing to copy.
Chapters
24. Cost the Limit of Price
25. What Prices Carry
26. Markets Versus Capitalism
27. Size, Leverage and the Casino
28. Costs Pushed Outside
more to come