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Unfortunately, anyone willing to treat employees horribly, operates cheaper. If using trafficked chinese women were legal, the owner willing to be a psychopath

Unfortunately, anyone willing to treat employees horribly, operates cheaper. If using trafficked chinese women were legal, the owner willing to be a psychopath will put his competition under. Capitalism is an inherently unstable system and only works with good regulation. I think a capitalist system only works as well as its regulation.

jwhitlark 9y ago
Well, a truly unregulated market approximates a war. Just look at the early history of trader/pirates. This doesn't mean capitalism is unstable; it's lowest energy state is the state of nature. Unrestricted warfare is bad for profits, as well as general wellbeing. The trick is to add regulation without adding unnecessary friction, and finding an approximate solution to the free rider problem.
- jules 9y ago
  An unregulated market doesn't mean that you can shoot people. Each transaction must be voluntary. Capitalism is not the same as anarchy.
  - perfmode 9y ago
    Anarchy is not the same as chaos.
  - thephyber 9y ago
    > An unregulated market has never existed in the history of modern civilization for more than 5 minutes. Ironically for your statement, the most unregulated markets are the most violent as they only occur after one government falls before institutions create themselves to deal with the chaotic state of unorganized and fearful humans. It will be interesting to see if the digital economy brings with it any self-created software companies (purely software companies created and administered by self-writing software) which tries to avoid any attempts to shut it down.
    - jules 9y ago
      You are mixing up capitalism with anarchy and chaos. Capitalism requires the rule of law and property rights. An unregulated market is one where any voluntary transaction can take place and no involuntary transaction takes place. It is not a voluntary transaction if I put a gun to your head and tell you to hand over your wallet, and a "market" in which that is allowed is not even a market. It is illegal for me to pay you to deliver a letter to another house. That's not a free market either, because the transaction was mutually voluntary but it is disallowed.
      - s73ver_ 9y ago
        Except that's not true in the least. You say "no involuntary transaction takes place" because in that system, if the transaction takes place, then by definition it must be "voluntary", despite the existence of any coercion that may have occurred. In your unregulated system, you could have me work 20 hours a day, and consider it "voluntary" as long as I did it, ignoring the fact that I and my family would be out on the street starving if I didn't, which would make that transaction far from voluntary.
        jules 9y ago
        The transaction of you working for me is still voluntary. No person forced you to work for me. I did not cause you to starve. If I disappeared off the face of the planet you would still starve. That I offer you a job improves your options relative to what you would otherwise have had. I can only "force" you to work 20 hours a day if all your other options are even worse, and I am the one who improves your options the most. If however I put a gun to your head and tell you to work 20 hours a day I actively make your options worse by force. Capitalism is by no means a perfectly well defined system that you can deduce from a set of axioms. You can have a discussion about which property rights the government should enforce, such as whether it should enforce intellectual property. But certain systems are clearly fall outside of the bounds of what constitutes a free market, such as systems in which I am allowed to put a gun to your head to make you give me your wallet.
  - vkou 9y ago
    There is no such thing as a market with no involuntary transactions, as all externalities are involuntary transactions. When your factory is producing noise pollution around it, is that a volutary transaction you have entered into with your neighbours? What about when it pollutes the air, or the water? What about transactions where both sides don't have perfect information? How can you voluntarily agree to a transaction in which you don't know what you're getting, but your counterparty does? What about the fact that most revealed preferences are largely fiction? Voluntary transactions are pure fiction. Nothing actually operates on that principle. You can't construct a functioning society from them, without requiring an orgy of arbitrary logical and ethical gymnastics.
    - jules 9y ago
      Strictly speaking there is indeed no such thing as a completely voluntary transaction, as every transaction affects a third party, even if in a minuscule way. Similar criticisms can be made of any system, or any word (such as "voluntary") for that matter. The original point of discussion was whether "unregulated market" includes shooting people. As I said above: > Capitalism is by no means a perfectly well defined system that you can deduce from a set of axioms. You can have a discussion about which property rights the government should enforce, such as whether it should enforce intellectual property. But certain systems are clearly fall outside of the bounds of what constitutes a free market, such as systems in which I am allowed to put a gun to your head to make you give me your wallet. In order for language to be useful we have to assign a reasonable range of meaning to a word. The word "voluntary" becomes completely useless with the meaning you describe. You can do the same to any word, even words such as "apple". If you let an apple rot it eventually becomes compost. Somewhere in between it stops being an apple. By the same type of reasoning you can conclude that "apples are pure fiction". These kind of language games are not very useful.
      - jahaja 9y ago
        > In order for language to be useful we have to assign a reasonable range of meaning to a word. It's just too convenient to define the range to what amounts to a modern version of the divine rights of kings. Where certain meanings - voluntary and property rights in particular - become some sorts of theological constants in which the privileges of the king (or property owner in the libertarian case), which have no bearing in justice, are explained. It's basically ad-hoc law in benefit of the privileged. Bottom-up resistance is violence. Top-down violence/exploitation is a voluntary exchange.
  - krapp 9y ago
    >Each transaction must be voluntary. That's a regulation, and for that to be binding, it needs to be backed up by coercion and violence. In an unregulated market, whether or not one can shoot people, or whether or not transactions should be voluntary, would be decided like everything else by success or failure through competition in the marketplace. You can't have free market except for this one little rule... that's just a very weakly regulated market.
    - jules 9y ago
      You absolutely need government force to enforce the rule that you can't use a gun to make somebody give you their wallet. That is not what I disagree with. Calling this a market regulation is what I disagree with. > You can't have free market except for this one little rule... that's just a very weakly regulated market. In what sense is that a market at all? Market implies that the transactions are voluntary. Unregulated market implies that all voluntary transactions are legal. A regulated market is a market in which some transactions are disallowed even if they are voluntary. Minimum wage, for example, makes it illegal for you to offer your services for $5 per hour.
      - krapp 9y ago
        > Market implies that the transactions are voluntary. That doesn't have to be true for all parties. Referring to your earlier comment, that "an unregulated market doesn't mean that you can shoot people," I would claim that, yes it does - all that's needed is for someone to pay you to shoot people. Murder for hire, extortion, blackmail, piracy and slavery are all examples of valid markets with non-voluntary participation. Morally reprehensible, but still valid.
        jules 9y ago
        There is nothing involuntary about the _transaction_ when you hire a hitman. The involuntary bit is when the victim receives the bullet.
kevmo 9y ago
I largely agree. However, I think it is important for regulations to generally (not always) be structured on a sliding scale that is directly related to company size, i.e. the bigger the business, the more regulations it becomes subject to. Otherwise, regulations become a cudgel with which small businesses are beaten down because only the big established players can afford to comply. In today's age of regulatory capture in the USA, we are seeing this play out. Industries have been consolidating, and the productivity gains therefrom are not being passed onto the consumer via price cuts.
- CapitalistCartr 9y ago
  I think complex, arcane regulation is a very bad sign, like spagetti code. Like code, regulation is, ideally, clear, transparent, at the lowest level of gov't. practical, and in plain language.
- jacobush 9y ago
  Easy one. Just outsource to smaller and smaller companies. It's turtles all the way down! Somewhere down there, sick leave and other frivolities start to look more and more quaint.
  - kevmo 9y ago
    Yeah, I am just talking about how you start to generally approach the problem. Government is always going to be an ongoing, adaptive process with back-and-forth struggles and adjudication between interested parties. Maybe we'll evolve into a more inherently cooperative species in the future, but you're definitely right about what the first business response is. :)
- wfo 9y ago
  Actually small businesses (while they vary widely and many of them can be good) can be home to the worst kind of abuse. Small business owners can be absolutely monstrous tyrants to their employees. Have you ever met a waitress at a restaurant who hasn't been sexually harassed by her boss? I've met.. one? and I've met quite a few waitresses. She can't complain to HR, there is no HR, there are no policies, there is just the boss who will fire her (and maybe "forget" to send her her last paycheck, oops). Wage theft is rampant in small businesses that can go underwater and don't have a payroll department. Workers absolutely need help at small business, probably more help even than at large corporations.
jules 9y ago
People trafficking is an entirely different matter because that involves the use of force. The employees can go to another employer if that employer treats them better. That is the main protector against bad employers, NOT regulation. Most of the advances in labour protection have been a result of a general increase in wealth and better alternatives. Take child labour for example. It used to be that almost every child from the age of 10 worked. That that isn't the case any more is not a result of laws, it's a result of increased productivity which meant that a family could survive without the children working.
- crdoconnor 9y ago
  The elimination of child labor was NOT a result of increased productivity, in fact it grew during the onset of the industrial revolution. it came about as a result of a series of fierce union battles. https://www.continuetolearn.uiowa.edu/laborctr/child_labor/about/us_history.html https://www.continuetolearn.uiowa.edu/laborctr/child_labor/a...
  - jules 9y ago
    Children worked at their parents' subsistence farms before the industrial revolution. That is still child labour.
    - mlindner 9y ago
      Children all over the world still do. The families would die if they did not. This is why many farming families have large numbers of children, labor (that gets paid in food and family love).
      - jules 9y ago
        Absolutely, and the solution to this is not a law that makes their best option to survive illegal, but to offer them a better option.
    - crdoconnor 9y ago

jwhitlark 9y ago

Well, a truly unregulated market approximates a war. Just look at the early history of trader/pirates. This doesn't mean capitalism is unstable; it's lowest energy state is the state of nature. Unrestricted warfare is bad for profits, as well as general wellbeing. The trick is to add regulation without adding unnecessary friction, and finding an approximate solution to the free rider problem.

jules 9y ago
An unregulated market doesn't mean that you can shoot people. Each transaction must be voluntary. Capitalism is not the same as anarchy.
- perfmode 9y ago
  Anarchy is not the same as chaos.
- thephyber 9y ago
  > An unregulated market has never existed in the history of modern civilization for more than 5 minutes. Ironically for your statement, the most unregulated markets are the most violent as they only occur after one government falls before institutions create themselves to deal with the chaotic state of unorganized and fearful humans. It will be interesting to see if the digital economy brings with it any self-created software companies (purely software companies created and administered by self-writing software) which tries to avoid any attempts to shut it down.
  - jules 9y ago
    You are mixing up capitalism with anarchy and chaos. Capitalism requires the rule of law and property rights. An unregulated market is one where any voluntary transaction can take place and no involuntary transaction takes place. It is not a voluntary transaction if I put a gun to your head and tell you to hand over your wallet, and a "market" in which that is allowed is not even a market. It is illegal for me to pay you to deliver a letter to another house. That's not a free market either, because the transaction was mutually voluntary but it is disallowed.
    - s73ver_ 9y ago
      Except that's not true in the least. You say "no involuntary transaction takes place" because in that system, if the transaction takes place, then by definition it must be "voluntary", despite the existence of any coercion that may have occurred. In your unregulated system, you could have me work 20 hours a day, and consider it "voluntary" as long as I did it, ignoring the fact that I and my family would be out on the street starving if I didn't, which would make that transaction far from voluntary.
      - jules 9y ago
        The transaction of you working for me is still voluntary. No person forced you to work for me. I did not cause you to starve. If I disappeared off the face of the planet you would still starve. That I offer you a job improves your options relative to what you would otherwise have had. I can only "force" you to work 20 hours a day if all your other options are even worse, and I am the one who improves your options the most. If however I put a gun to your head and tell you to work 20 hours a day I actively make your options worse by force. Capitalism is by no means a perfectly well defined system that you can deduce from a set of axioms. You can have a discussion about which property rights the government should enforce, such as whether it should enforce intellectual property. But certain systems are clearly fall outside of the bounds of what constitutes a free market, such as systems in which I am allowed to put a gun to your head to make you give me your wallet.
- vkou 9y ago
  There is no such thing as a market with no involuntary transactions, as all externalities are involuntary transactions. When your factory is producing noise pollution around it, is that a volutary transaction you have entered into with your neighbours? What about when it pollutes the air, or the water? What about transactions where both sides don't have perfect information? How can you voluntarily agree to a transaction in which you don't know what you're getting, but your counterparty does? What about the fact that most revealed preferences are largely fiction? Voluntary transactions are pure fiction. Nothing actually operates on that principle. You can't construct a functioning society from them, without requiring an orgy of arbitrary logical and ethical gymnastics.
  - jules 9y ago
    Strictly speaking there is indeed no such thing as a completely voluntary transaction, as every transaction affects a third party, even if in a minuscule way. Similar criticisms can be made of any system, or any word (such as "voluntary") for that matter. The original point of discussion was whether "unregulated market" includes shooting people. As I said above: > Capitalism is by no means a perfectly well defined system that you can deduce from a set of axioms. You can have a discussion about which property rights the government should enforce, such as whether it should enforce intellectual property. But certain systems are clearly fall outside of the bounds of what constitutes a free market, such as systems in which I am allowed to put a gun to your head to make you give me your wallet. In order for language to be useful we have to assign a reasonable range of meaning to a word. The word "voluntary" becomes completely useless with the meaning you describe. You can do the same to any word, even words such as "apple". If you let an apple rot it eventually becomes compost. Somewhere in between it stops being an apple. By the same type of reasoning you can conclude that "apples are pure fiction". These kind of language games are not very useful.
    - jahaja 9y ago
      > In order for language to be useful we have to assign a reasonable range of meaning to a word. It's just too convenient to define the range to what amounts to a modern version of the divine rights of kings. Where certain meanings - voluntary and property rights in particular - become some sorts of theological constants in which the privileges of the king (or property owner in the libertarian case), which have no bearing in justice, are explained. It's basically ad-hoc law in benefit of the privileged. Bottom-up resistance is violence. Top-down violence/exploitation is a voluntary exchange.
- krapp 9y ago
  >Each transaction must be voluntary. That's a regulation, and for that to be binding, it needs to be backed up by coercion and violence. In an unregulated market, whether or not one can shoot people, or whether or not transactions should be voluntary, would be decided like everything else by success or failure through competition in the marketplace. You can't have free market except for this one little rule... that's just a very weakly regulated market.
  - jules 9y ago
    You absolutely need government force to enforce the rule that you can't use a gun to make somebody give you their wallet. That is not what I disagree with. Calling this a market regulation is what I disagree with. > You can't have free market except for this one little rule... that's just a very weakly regulated market. In what sense is that a market at all? Market implies that the transactions are voluntary. Unregulated market implies that all voluntary transactions are legal. A regulated market is a market in which some transactions are disallowed even if they are voluntary. Minimum wage, for example, makes it illegal for you to offer your services for $5 per hour.
    - krapp 9y ago
      > Market implies that the transactions are voluntary. That doesn't have to be true for all parties. Referring to your earlier comment, that "an unregulated market doesn't mean that you can shoot people," I would claim that, yes it does - all that's needed is for someone to pay you to shoot people. Murder for hire, extortion, blackmail, piracy and slavery are all examples of valid markets with non-voluntary participation. Morally reprehensible, but still valid.
      - jules 9y ago
        There is nothing involuntary about the _transaction_ when you hire a hitman. The involuntary bit is when the victim receives the bullet.

kevmo 9y ago

I largely agree. However, I think it is important for regulations to generally (not always) be structured on a sliding scale that is directly related to company size, i.e. the bigger the business, the more regulations it becomes subject to. Otherwise, regulations become a cudgel with which small businesses are beaten down because only the big established players can afford to comply. In today's age of regulatory capture in the USA, we are seeing this play out. Industries have been consolidating, and the productivity gains therefrom are not being passed onto the consumer via price cuts.

CapitalistCartr 9y ago
I think complex, arcane regulation is a very bad sign, like spagetti code. Like code, regulation is, ideally, clear, transparent, at the lowest level of gov't. practical, and in plain language.
jacobush 9y ago
Easy one. Just outsource to smaller and smaller companies. It's turtles all the way down! Somewhere down there, sick leave and other frivolities start to look more and more quaint.
- kevmo 9y ago
  Yeah, I am just talking about how you start to generally approach the problem. Government is always going to be an ongoing, adaptive process with back-and-forth struggles and adjudication between interested parties. Maybe we'll evolve into a more inherently cooperative species in the future, but you're definitely right about what the first business response is. :)
wfo 9y ago
Actually small businesses (while they vary widely and many of them can be good) can be home to the worst kind of abuse. Small business owners can be absolutely monstrous tyrants to their employees. Have you ever met a waitress at a restaurant who hasn't been sexually harassed by her boss? I've met.. one? and I've met quite a few waitresses. She can't complain to HR, there is no HR, there are no policies, there is just the boss who will fire her (and maybe "forget" to send her her last paycheck, oops). Wage theft is rampant in small businesses that can go underwater and don't have a payroll department. Workers absolutely need help at small business, probably more help even than at large corporations.

jules 9y ago

People trafficking is an entirely different matter because that involves the use of force. The employees can go to another employer if that employer treats them better. That is the main protector against bad employers, NOT regulation. Most of the advances in labour protection have been a result of a general increase in wealth and better alternatives. Take child labour for example. It used to be that almost every child from the age of 10 worked. That that isn't the case any more is not a result of laws, it's a result of increased productivity which meant that a family could survive without the children working.

crdoconnor 9y ago
The elimination of child labor was NOT a result of increased productivity, in fact it grew during the onset of the industrial revolution. it came about as a result of a series of fierce union battles. https://www.continuetolearn.uiowa.edu/laborctr/child_labor/about/us_history.html https://www.continuetolearn.uiowa.edu/laborctr/child_labor/a...
- jules 9y ago
  Children worked at their parents' subsistence farms before the industrial revolution. That is still child labour.
  - mlindner 9y ago
    Children all over the world still do. The families would die if they did not. This is why many farming families have large numbers of children, labor (that gets paid in food and family love).
    - jules 9y ago
      Absolutely, and the solution to this is not a law that makes their best option to survive illegal, but to offer them a better option.
  - crdoconnor 9y ago