Context for the Bailout - Confessions of a Monopolist

[jaqeboy]

...

PS: There's a good book on Insull and the lobbying effort to make utilities monopolies, but I can't remember the title of it. I'll ask my friend who first turned me on to it and has a copy of it.

Ah, found out the name of the book: Power Struggle; The 100 Year War Over Electricity, by Scott Ridley. Avail on Amazon - haven't read it, but I hear it has an answer to a lot of the historical questions about the electric utility monopolies - who, what, when and where.

Scott Ridley's details: http://www.local.org/ridley.html - he's local (to New England) - on the Cape

[John Edward Mercier]

His 'privilege' is land ownership?

I'll have to finish the article. This was just an early paragraph... Better yet, let's both finish the article 

The article wasn't written by Kevin Carson.
Its author, Keith Preston, presented the case that feudalism evolved into corporatism... and thus no free-market capitalism historically existed.

[BillKauffman]

His 'privilege' is land ownership?

Paragraph prior:

Some advocates of free enterprise will respond to such charges by indignantly proclaiming their opposition to state efforts to "bail out" bankrupt corporations or subsidies to corporate entities for the ostensible purpose of research and development. Yet such defenses will often underestimate the degree to which the state serves to create market distortions for the sake of upholding a corporation-dominated economic order. Such distortions result from a plethora of interventions including not only bailouts and subsidies but also the fictitious legal infrastructure of corporate "personhood", limited liability laws, government contracts, loans, guarantees, purchases of goods, price controls, regulatory privilege, grants of monopolies, protectionist tariffs and trade policies, bankruptcy laws, military intervention to gain access to international markets and protect foreign investments, regulating or prohibiting organized labor activity, eminent domain, discriminatory taxation, ignoring corporate crimes and countless other forms of state-imposed favors and privileges.1

[BillKauffman]

from Carson as quoted in the article:

"There were two ways Parliament could have abolished feudalism and reformed property. It might have treated the customary possessive rights of the peasantry as genuine title to property in the modern sense, and then abolished their rents. But what it actually did, instead, was to treat the artificial "property rights" of the landed aristocracy, in feudal legal theory, as real property rights in the modern sense; the landed classes were given full legal title, and the peasants were transformed into tenants at will with no customary restriction on the rents that could be charged...

In European colonies where a large native peasantry already lived, states sometimes granted quasi-feudal titles to landed elites to collect rent from those already living on and cultivating the land; a good example is latifundismo, which prevails in Latin America to the present day. Another example is British East Africa. The most fertile 20 percent of Kenya was stolen by the colonial authorities, and the native peasantry evicted, so the land could be used for cash-crop farming by white settlers (using the labor of the evicted peasantry, of course, to work their own former land). As for those who remained on their own land, they were "encouraged" to enter the wage-labor market by a stiff poll tax that had to be paid in cash. Multiply these examples by a hundred and you get a bare hint of the sheer scale of robbery over the past 500 years.

...Factory owners were not innocent in all of this. Mises claimed that the capital investments on which the factory system was built came largely from hard-working and thrifty workmen who saved their own earnings as investment capital. In fact, however, they were junior partners of the landed elites, with much of their investment capital coming either from the Whig landed oligarchy or from the overseas fruits of mercantilism, slavery and colonialism.

In addition, factory employers depended on harsh authoritarian measures by the government to keep labor under control and reduce its bargaining power. In England the Laws of Settlement acted as a sort of internal passport system, preventing workers from traveling outside the parish of their birth without government permission. Thus workers were prevented from "voting with their feet" in search of better-paying jobs. You might think this would have worked to the disadvantage of employers in under populated areas, like Manchester and other areas of the industrial north. But never fear: the state came to the employers' rescue. Because workers were forbidden to migrate on their own in search of better pay, employers were freed from the necessity of offering high enough wages to attract free agents; instead, they were able to "hire" workers auctioned off by the parish Poor Law authorities on terms set by collusion between the authorities and employers."2

So title was not conferred via Lockean terms of "mixing one's labor" via occupancy and use which would have gone to the tenants or kept land owned in common as an individual equal access opportunity right (see "enclosure of the commons") but rather via privilege confered by the state.

Privilege = Private (private) Legislation (laws)

[John Edward Mercier]

The privileges are corporatism...
But my understanding of Carson's position was the initial entitlement of property to aristocrats would have fallen under this term.

[jaqeboy]

Just an indication of what "capitalism" means to many - a system by a bunch of rich dudes to manipulate the economies of the world through central banking schemes with the intent to control everything (just synopsizing again...) - pic from London on the occasion of the G20 meeting (to take over the world's financial system - uh, to save us...)

[Russell Kanning]

I was trying to wrap my mind around the bailout numbers and came up with this comparison
http://newhampshirefreepress.com/?q=node/370

[jaqeboy]

Good article, Russselll. (See, I gave you your letters back for that one, plus some bonus ones!)

[John Edward Mercier]

Just an indication of what "capitalism" means to many - a system by a bunch of rich dudes to manipulate the economies of the world through central banking schemes with the intent to control everything (just synopsizing again...) - pic from London on the occasion of the G20 meeting (to take over the world's financial system - uh, to save us...)

Central banking relies on the control of the exchange of labor many times by limiting the means of payment to a particular standard legitimized through taxation. A taxation which is driven by the socialistic ideals of those protesters.

[jaqeboy]

Another good piece containing a definition/description of capitalism, ie, why libertarians oppose capitalism:

Salbuchi - Global Financial Collapse - Part 1