And if that isn't the case, I still don't understand why the owned and the owner can't be the same thing. There's no definition that says they have to be seperate, yet you still choose to believe that there has to be.

I know why you're trying argue all of this. Because you want to try to provide reason as to why free markets don't have to exist. They're inevitable. It's how the world works. you can't create an alternative system because it isn't natural. You have to allow the market to create an equilibrium itself. This is the only paragraph you need to read rlly lol.

all we are as people is a congregation of chemicals, electrical impulses, and other forms of matter and energy reacting with each other. when one specific congregation of these things cease to combine in certain ways, we cease to exist. i think this point is kind of trivial though.

no they don't, and this is also pretty trivial. i still haven't been given a good reason as to why we "need" self-ownership to be free. it seems a pretty moot point to me at best, possibly even contradictory to freedom.

look, the more i look into this argument the more i realize it is pointless. whether i see myself as in a state of being and so i'm free or i see myself as in a state of self-ownership and so i'm free, we can still come to the same conclusions. i just personally think it's ridiculous to claim self-ownership because ownership in a person is slavery, but we both are staunch advocates of freedom and that's all that matters.

i think you sort of slightly missed the mark on the discussion though. you brought up self-ownership in relation to a comment i made about "selling one's labor power". the issue at hand, and it is one that we disagree on, is that i cannot physically separate myself from my labor power, and therefore when i rent my labor power to my boss, i am also renting myself. this is not up for debate. it is a self-evident fact. all you have to do to realize this is experience life.

i'm a free marketeer. while the free market in my concept is very strange and different, i have no problem with mutualism for example, which is for a free market identical to that found in capitalism, besides that it is based on LTV rather than marginal utility. the more individualist strains of anarchism championed by people like William Godwin and Max Stirner are even appealing to me. i just oppose capitalist markets and concepts championed by people like Ayn Rand and Murray Rothbard.

my new theme song



erikboyd60@hotmail.com

"True poetry can communicate before it is understood"

-T.S. Eliot

battle record:

7-0-0

What does this have to do with what I said and what we were discussing?

It bothers me, though doesn't surprise me in the least, that by the virtue of my beliefs alone you assume that myself and others like me are always either 1: students who slack off when it comes to actual work and cannot possibly sympathize with real workers' struggles because they only study and have other people pay for them to do it or possibly teachers paid by a school to come up with unrealistic theories, or 2: young hoodlums who live in their mom's basements for free, excluding themselves from the world, not working and living off of their parents, who only come out of their lairs to vandalize private property. This is so far from the case that it is absurd to even suppose such an idea. The socialist and anarchist struggles have always revolved around and represented workers' interests and have successfully organized the working class into mobile and active political forces more often and in bigger numbers than any capitalist struggle ever has in the world. Union mobilization, which came out of the socialist movement and came to a head with the birth of anarcho-syndicalism, has been the leading force in achieving workers' rights throughout the world, including in the US. Any contention toward a claim that capitalists "understand" the workforce and cater more to their needs than socialists is utter nonsense.

And btw, I'm not in college right now. I am searching for a job because the scholarship that I did get didn't cover my out-of-state fees and so I owe $5000 to the school and I need to pay it back before I go back to school. In the meantime I am trying to find work, but it's very hard in this society today. And I do, in fact have work experience, possibly as much or more than you. However, I put it on hiatus to go to school and play football and even more so when I went to Mississippi. So don't give me shit like I don't understand the struggles of the common worker.

As for the "wage slave" argument, first off, did I say that? I've pretty much abandoned that term because the term "slave" when referring to this concept because it raises a lot of pointed emotions in people who have an Americanized understanding of the word and also because people like yourself apply very strict definitions to the word that define wage labor out of being a form of slavery and so I find it to be much less of a hassle to simply say that one is renting himself out to labor in exchange for a wage. This is not false. It is truly the way business works here in the US.

What does that have to do with the market? Your labor is not a commodity for sale. In this system, your labor is currency in that labor performed transfers to work credits which you can then use to purchase other items. But assuming that this question was relevant, I'll describe how it would function. Groups of people would congregate in a fashion that is bottom-up, not top-down, and so at town meetings, the Average Price of Products in that economy would be estimated. Using the APP, which would be determined by scientists but decided upon democratically, we would figure out the price each collective will pay workers based on productivity levels, labor time, and difficult of the task as well as APP. Prices would be then determined solely by scarcity.

This is a strange form of market though, and it is radically different from other individualist socialist markets such as mutualism. Try reading up on theirs. It is definitely a free market and value of your labor would be based on supply and demand.

my new theme song



erikboyd60@hotmail.com

"True poetry can communicate before it is understood"

-T.S. Eliot

battle record:

7-0-0

i cant believe how much energy your wasting on this lol

When you leave shit up to the people involved in the trade, someone ALWAYS gets screwed. I think subjective price systems are arguably the most atrocious facets of both capitalist and socialist economies (yes, LTV is subjective too, it's just intersubjective, which simply delays the question). If prices are based on something with more solid grounding, such as scarcity, then fraud will occur much less and ppl will pay for what an item is worth and no more. And no, inflation would not be an issue because 1: workplaces would decide individually, the same way as in capitalism, what prices are based on scarcity, and 2: pay would increase or decrease according to the Average Price of Products in a given economy and so as the money would adjust, so would how much money each laborer makes. This isn't regulation, especially considering everyone would be involved in the decision making process in proportion to how much they are effected by the decision. It wouldn't just be those involved in the business. And this system doesn't regulate trade AT ALL. It simply makes other options easier to come by. If someone wants to trade, they can use simple barter. It's no different than using money except they are instead trading hard commodities rather than money for "trade item a". Does it make it less convenient to trade? Yes, it does, and that's the way I feel it should be. Just like capitalism makes it next to impossible to open a collective, my system makes trade a bit trickier. However, the option is still there. I'm simply preventing people from being jibbed into buying items for twice as much as they're worth or selling for half the true value of an item just because their subjective value allows the price to be such. This is called fraud. If I pay a price that is above what that item is worth, I am being defrauded. An item is only truly worth how scarce it is in terms of price. We may value a diamond at $3000 dollars, but the only actual justification for that diamond's price is its scarcity because just that I value something to a certain degree does not justify that it be priced in accordance with my demand. Price shouldn't be raised just because I suddenly want something more than I had previous wanted it. It should remain the same even when my value of the product increases.

And lol, no. What possible control could come out of it??? I'm specifically in favor of electronic credits that delete with each transaction, like on a gift card. How could that possibly be a regulation????

We haven't been into detail with this before. While there are many similarities, with my old ideology, this is almost completely brand new.

They oppose rent and interest for a damn good reason: rent subordinates the renter to the will of the people renting. I'm dealing with this right now. We are renting from a person who we though was a friend and she understood our circumstances financially, but she decided to charge us late charges from the beginning for every month we were late on rent and now she's threatening to throw us out unless we pay her for 4 rent periods including late charges. My dad works his ass off and makes good money and my mom is making quite a bit herself, and I'm trying to get a job as we speak, but we owe so much debt from when my mom got sick and my father lost his job that he can't always pay for the rent. So she's an asshole about it because she wants to flex authority over us. This is what rent and other forms of usury create. There is no legitimate reason for usury to exist and there are no reasons that don't involve some form of authoritarian relationship that usury exists at all. Rent doesn't have to exist and it shouldn't.

On the contrary, if anyone is wasting energy it is you. You are fighting to maintain an illegitimate status quo. I'm fighting for a future world that is more fair for all.

my new theme song



erikboyd60@hotmail.com

"True poetry can communicate before it is understood"

-T.S. Eliot

battle record:

7-0-0