Fabio G.@jlou You have no moral argument against the sale of voting rights, because you've said that manipulation of a vote by distributing option contracts is admissible to you, and that is materially equivalent to the purchase of voting rights.
J LouGiving 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.
@jlou That's what an option contract does: it lets the holder buy an economic interest in the venture. Venture becomes unprofitable = the option becomes worthless. For the holder to cash in, the venture has to stay profitable, thus the holder is economically interested in the outcome of the vote.
@magitweeter 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.
@jlou Of course, but the point is that you don't have a moral argument against that type of manipulation. “Very expensive” ≠ “fraudulent”.
@magitweeter 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.
@jlou Materially, they are equivalent. A sufficiently wealthy interest group can engineer a financial instrument that lets them chase any sufficiently favorable electoral outcome. If this type of arrangement is permissible, then full institutional capture is permissible.
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.
@jlou Yes, you've said you don't regard it as morally equivalent. They are materially equivalent because their material outcomes are the same: an exchange of a vote for an economic benefit.
«I don’t think this attack is permissible because people holding the same financial instrument are economically coordinated.» I'm not following. Would you clarify?
@magitweeter 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.
@jlou I'm aware. I don't think there's anything automatically wrong about labor contracts as such. The problem here is that labor contracts are embedded in a greater system that is founded down to its core on violations of consent. I've been trying to point out that Georgist/UBI institutions are capturable. That means an attacker can impose their will against the polity's consent.
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
@jlou I have no idea what “the right to appropriate the positive and negative fruits of one's labor” even means. It does not appeal to my moral intuitions in any sense.
@magitweeter 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
David Ellerman on Mistakes and Metaphors in Economics
@jlou I haven't watched the whole video, but the argument that the presenter seems to be setting up is not one that's intended to address one's moral intuitions. (And i have no moral intuitions about “legal responsibility”, no).
Regardless, i'm interested in your moral stance on a setup where all productive firms are worker co-ops with no productive capital while all capital goods are owned by private individuals. No labor contracts, only rental contracts for capital goods.
@magitweeter 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.
@jlou More accurately, legal or institutional responsibility is not how i go about framing ethical problems.
I think you may be conceding the admissibility of an arrangement that is materially equivalent to labor contracts under a sort of state capitalism.
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.
@jlou Responsibility, yes, just not legal or institutional responsibility. No, a community is not the same thing as an institution.
Workers would get as much of a democratic say as the rental contract said they get.
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.
@jlou Sure, communities can have institutions, but those are far removed from my moral *intuitions*. Of course i have positions on how an institution ought to work, but i don't draw those from intution, i draw them from analysis.
Sure, call it an employment contract, but the co-op's options are to sign it or find a different state to rent capital from. If you have no moral objection to worker co-ops renting state capital, you have no moral objection against this.
Some aspects of how institutions ought to be comes directly from moral principles. Other aspects are up to the democratic decision of the people involved and no right or principle is violated doing it some way.
What is there to analyze here? This is basic aspect of justice. Any system that holds innocent people responsible for the results of other people’s intentional actions is inherently unjust. You still haven’t answered the question of who ought to be held responsible.
@jlou See, the thing is we're not talking about “innocence”. Innocence is morally intuitive. We're talking about “appropriating the negative fruits of one's labor”. That is not morally intuitive, so my moral judgments around it can come only from analysis.
Ellerman’s analysis shows the two concepts are equivalent. If people should be held responsible for the results of their actions, they should appropriate the positive and negative fruits of their labor. Since workers are jointly de facto responsible for productions’ positive and negative results, they are guilty, while employers are often innocent. Holding employers responsible for production results, as the employment contract does, is holding an innocent party guilty.
@jlou That is a very silly idea. Maybe there's just something i'm not seeing and i really need to watch the talk and let the analysis defeat my intuitions. But on the face of it, that sounds really silly. If malpractice insurance is morally fine, then employment contracts under that conception are morally fine.
@magitweeter The argument isn’t talking about who gets the value. It’s a labor theory of property not labor theory of value. We’re talking about assigning property rights and liabilities created in production not who ends up getting the value. Ellerman explicitly mentions insurance to illustrate that the role of the employer isn’t, in principle, risk-bearing.
If you’re fined, you can, in principle, get someone else to cover the cost of the fine. That doesn’t mean you weren’t held responsible.
@jlou The material effects of such an arrangement are, under most circumstances, the same as those of an employment contract.
We keep coming back to the same spot. Your moral objections to certain arrangements seem not to apply to certain other materially equivalent arrangements.
@magitweeter They aren’t materially equivalent. In one arrangement, workers own 100% of the product of their labor. In the other, workers own 0% of the product of their labor. 0% is quite different from 100%.
I think an economy where all firms are mandated to be worker co-ops is materially different from capitalism.
@jlou In both arrangements, ownership of the produced goods is transferred to the provider of the capital. In both arrangements, the liabilities are economically and legally (i.e. materially) transferred to the provider of the capital, even if the workers cannot morally divest themselves from them.
Materially equivalent.
There is no legal or institutional transfer of produced goods under the employment contract. The employer owns it at all points during production, which is what alienates management authority from the workers to the employer.
In a worker co-op, the workers appropriate the liabilities.
They’re obviously not materially equivalent.
@jlou You list a series of differences that are not material and then say “they're obviously not materially equivalent”. That is a non sequitur.
@magitweeter Those are material differences. Who owns property is a material difference. Why are those not material differences? Please explain in detail. Also, please define what you consider a “material” difference.
Mandating worker co-op structure on all firms effectively acts as a minimum-wage-like regulation where the “wage” is expressed as inalienable voting shares in the firm. Do you think having a minimum wage is materially different than not having one?
@jlou I'm thinking of a “you can use my machines for this long, and you give me these amounts of these finished goods, and i'll insure you for these and these liabilities” contract.
Ownership of the goods is transferred only when determined by the contract.
Voting rights for the co-op mean little if the only materially relevant vote is on accepting or rejecting these terms.
This situation is bad because it’s monopolistic. Markets need competition to function. If this is the only choice available to them, there must be very limited competition in the market.
Insurers only get the return to risk-bearing not the entire pure profits. Any profit leftover after pricing out risk-bearing would go to the workers. This is what I was alluding to when I said that Ellerman argues that the role of the employer isn’t the same as the risk bearer.
@jlou Call it very little competition, but i don't see a moral objection there. Collective ownership of the means of production is monopolistic. That's not necessarily a bad thing.
@magitweeter That is a moral objection. Markets with limited competition are bad. We ought to maximize people’s freedom, quantified as number of economic opportunities available to them while protecting human rights. Collective ownership of the means of production can be done in a decentralized fashion where the possessor handles day-to-day asset management and investment while a large percentage of the value flows into a collective fund such as through common ownership self-assessed “taxation.”
@jlou More moral considerations unrelated to inalienable rights keep appearing.
From my point of view, that sounds like you're avoiding using the word “consent” to explain why monopolistic markets are bad and why maximizing freedom is better.
@magitweeter These moral considerations are also important.
Every ethical consideration can’t be boiled down to consent unless you’re a right libertarian.
Let me know if you read David Ellerman’s work in more detail.
@jlou That is a very silly idea. Right-libertarians believe in the primacy of private property. They do not care about consent. Anyway.
@magitweeter of course, they do. They believe in voluntary alienation of rights. To the right #libertarian, human rights = property rights. Property rights are transferable with consent.
@jlou A claim to property represents everyone's agreement to respect someone's ownership of some good (typically land or a capital good that allows control of a resource flow).
Such a claim can't be transferred except with the consent of everyone involved.
Individualized private property rights are not consensual.
@magitweeter I disagree. As long as all property rights are initiated justly, property rights can be legitimate moral rights. Of course, no property rights today are initiated justly due to employment contract etc. Part of just appropriation is compensating the community for liabilities for using up land services and natural resources. The right libertarian view doesn’t include these liabilities because their property theory is asymmetric, so it is illegitimate for that reason.
@magitweeter I think the problem with extreme anti-property views is they run into issues accounting for prosthetic and other kinds of body extensions and body modification. Such body extensions clearly ought to be under the control of the individual not the authority of community.
@jlou I don't know if that's “clearly” the case, and regardless, i don't see how that causes issues for a consent-based theory of private property.
if every property claim requires a community decision, people could vote to take away someone’s prosthetics or body extensions. There has to be realm of individual freedom where the individual has right to self-determination over their body and any extensions etc.
@jlou There is no such thing as “initiating justly” a permanent and irreversible claim to ownership.
Personally, i favor usufruct. No such thing as appropriating what belongs equally to all. Ownership is always subjet to recall.
@magitweeter I disagree. Products of labor initially belong to the workers that created them. Everyone has an equal claim to products of nature. Workers that use up products of nature to create their labor products are liable to the community for using it up.