[pdonis]

> the motivation underlying (almost) every transaction in which your goal is to sell things in such a way as to get yourself the largest profit

And the goal of the buyer is to buy things in such a way as to get himself the largest surplus, i.e., the most value for a given cost. So by your reasoning, all buyers are selfish just as much as all sellers are selfish.

> People have moral standards. I think I'm just a cynical ancom with regard to how people would really behave in the absence of all regulation.

Moral standards existed long before any regulation. We have moral standards because we evolved that way--i.e., because they are adaptive for a species that has to form cooperative relationships in order to survive. Cooperative relationships include economic relationships--specialization and trade. That's how we build wealth.

It is true that, as soon as people start building wealth, there is an incentive to plunder it instead of building more. One way of describing a key problem with many (if not most) modern societies is that they are set up to reinforce, or at least not discourage, the incentive to plunder.

> Let's not forget what large companies can still get away with today, and imagine what it would be like with anti-competitive monopolies, oligarchies, and two or three organisations controlling mainstream information sources.

Um, you're describing what things are like today. And the reason they're like that is, in large part, because one of the things large companies can get away with is buying political power and influence, which they can then use to plunder instead of building wealth. But the reason they can do that at all is that political power and influence can be bought, because it's centralized.

[ue_]

>So by your reasoning, all buyers are selfish just as much as all sellers are selfish.

I don't disagree with this. But I think that there is more harm that comes from the corporation to the consumer than there is from the consumer to the corporation, or at least more potential harm. And I think that arises out of selfishness that is unfortunately built into the system.

>Moral standards existed long before any regulation.

I'm sorry; I wasn't trying to make the point that moral standards have anything to do with regulation, but rather that regulation creates a "bare minimum" for the kind of behaviour expected of the participants, regardless of moral views that very much differ from person to person (and of course from sociey to society).

I think that a relationship can be cooperative, but with one side being favoured much more than the other - the capitalist who exploits a workforce. Of couse both need to cooperate - but it does not mean that such cooperation is fair. It is often accepted because there aren't fairer alternatives.

I wish for a different kind of cooperative relationship, one which I view as more equal and participatory. At the moment, I view it sort of like an EULA.

[pdonis]

> it does not mean that such cooperation is fair

"Fair" is subjective. Our moral intuitions give us fairly consistent answers for simple cases, but most cases are not simple.

One response to this problem is to point out that a free market is the best mechanism we know of for maximizing "fairness" in the sense of bargaining power. But free markets are actually pretty rare. For example, large corporations' wage structures, which dictate the terms of many people's employment contracts, are not the products of a free market; they are the products of the corporations' internal processes, which are dictated by top-down centralized control. (To some extent they are also products of negotiations, for example with labor unions, but that just extends the top-down centralized control to the unions.) So an obvious way to make cooperation fairer is to decrease the average size of corporations, in order to expose more transactions to free markets. In the absence of regulation, I suspect that this is what would actually happen, because most large corporations are the products of regulation, not of free market competition.

[ue_]

"Fair" is subjective. But from a utilitarian perspective, I think still it would be fairer for the working class to own the means of production.

From a Marxist perspective, a "free market" in which people sell their labour in order to survive isn't fair at all. Whether or not you have a corporation with a big internal centralised form of deciding wages, you still have the product of labour sold for more value than it was bought at.

It might be fairer if corporations became smaller and there was more bargaining power because there is more accessibility for decision in the free market. But I don't think it's fair in other aspects - the aforementioned exploitation (occurring even in the absence of regulation), there is nobody to defend property or even establish the validity of the concept of property, you probably have to pay to be protected by a police force, and all the egregious institutions of today would probably continue, including needlessly expensive health care, there is still the problem of sweatshop labour (which most people, even though informed, don't care enough about to do anything about; imagine how it is if Apple/Nike/whoever were to own a few news agencies too). On top of that, the fact that few exchanges are truly voluntary for many who are less fortunate.

However I can see that there may be more workplace democracy, as a result of internal practices being opened to the free market.

[pdonis]

> from a utilitarian perspective, I think still it would be fairer for the working class to own the means of production.

However attractive this might seem theoretically (it doesn't to me, but I understand it does to many people), we have run this experiment in practice and it doesn't work, at least not in the obvious sense of "workers own the means of production". The problem is that "own the means of production" doesn't help unless ownership means control; and in practice, if you have large industrial factories organized with centralized top-down control, it's impossible for all the workers to "own" it in any useful sense. So it just ends up being another vehicle for centralized power.

OTOH, if "own the means of production" really means that each worker owns and controls all the tools he needs to produce, and simply trades what he produces for what other workers produce, then what you have is a free market. In other words, for "workers own the means of production" to be true in any useful sense, every worker needs to be an entrepreneur, basically owning himself and his skills and tools as a small business. I would love to see this happen, but unfortunately I don't think it's likely to on any large scale any time soon. (In some fields, though--programming as a free-lance craft is an example--it can already be true for a significant number of people.)

> you still have the product of labour sold for more value than it was bought at

I don't understand what you mean by this. The value of any product of labor is not determined by the laborer; it's determined by whoever is going to use that product. That's not because of an evil plot by large corporations; it's an unavoidable fact of life. Anyone who cannot produce everything they need by themselves has to trade with others; and that means being able to produce something that someone else will trade for at a price that is enough to compensate you for the labor involved, plus whatever surplus you need to obtain other things you need. There is no reason for the someone else to pay you more just because you used more labor, if the value to them is the same either way.

Everybody understands this when they are the user; if you hire someone to paint your house, you're not going to pay them more if they use a toothbrush to do it. (IIRC pg used this example in one of his essays.)

> there is nobody to defend property or even establish the validity of the concept of property

I'm not sure I understand what you're saying here. The need to defend property and property rights is inherent in the idea of trade; if we all need to trade with others, then we all need to have property and property rights, and have them defended if they are threatened. That will be true whether the average corporation is large or small, or even if corporations did not exist at all.

[dragonwriter]

> However attractive this might seem theoretically (it doesn't to me, but I understand it does to many people), we have run this experiment in practice and it doesn't work, at least not in the obvious sense of "workers own the means of production".

The main large scale experiment I am aware of that meets the "obvious sense" of workers owning the means of production is the Mondragon system and similar labor cooperative ventures, which seem at least modestly successful, even when operating in a legal and political environment in which that structure is not the norm around which most rules are optimized.

There are certainly failed experiments where precapitalist states have been overthrown by regimes in which the state, run by a vanguard party acting nominally in the name of the workers, collectively, owned the means of production, which have failed spectacularly for reasons which may be related to the ownership structure (though other explanations are available), but those don't seem to be operating in anything like the "obvious sense" of workers owning the means of production.

[pdonis]

> The main large scale experiment I am aware of that meets the "obvious sense" of workers owning the means of production is the Mondragon system and similar labor cooperative ventures

Um, what about the Soviet Union?

(I'm not familiar with the Mondragon system but I'll look it up.)

> those don't seem to be operating in anything like the "obvious sense" of workers owning the means of production.

If you are including the Soviet Union in this category, you are rejecting the very Marxist terminology that you appeared to be using, since the whole point of the Soviet Union was that the workers would own the means of production. Yes, I know it failed spectacularly; that was my point.