Comments by "BlackFlagsNRoses" (@blackflagsnroses6013) on "Sad Billionaire Whines Over Paying 'Fair Share'" video.
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@joansparky4439 I see we also agree on social democratic policy not being enough to solve the problem. It’s a band aid that doesn’t attack the root problem. And highly dependent on trusting which government is in charge and the good of government. We have to be more realistic than that. I am a libertarian socialist, and I am supportive of both libertarian communism, and market socialism. Us libertarian socialists subscribe to the most radical form of market socialism, mutualism, or free market socialism, free market anti-capitalism. We have to stress what constitutes real free markets, which socialism does, not capitalism. Capitalism is just the distortion of liberal enterprise and economics that places the agenda of a ruling capitalist class that functions the same as the old merchant class Adam Smith opposed. Not many still realize that what Adam Smith was opposed to wasn’t government intervention in itself, but the capture of the government by mercantile monopoly interests. The mercantilist equivalent of modern capitalism and Corporatocracy. We have to bring free markets where they belong on the Left, and show it’s revolutionary and radicalism potential. And by so doing expose capitalism for the statist authoritarian sham it is. One way to start is develop a school of actual libertine economics that shows the socialistic tendencies of classical liberals. They didn’t support capitalism, they advocated free markets. From Adam Smith’s staunch opposition to monopolists, and his detest for parasitical landlords and speculators, to David Ricardo’s socialistic classical theories, John Stuart Mill’s support of workers cooperatives over capitalist production, Thomas Hodgskin’s defense of the labor classes to obtain their own productivity and exposing the capitalists exploitation etc... Since many listen, specifically on the right, when you give a veneer of patriotism to the argument, we should use that. Such as the first credited American Anarchist (libertarian socialist) that developed the framework for a free market socialist system previous to, and contemporaneous with the French free market anarchist Pierre J Proudhon. A return of the American Individualist/Free Market Anarchist school could also capture people’s minds towards a market socialist bent.
For the Left, we should stress our history of market socialism that is rooted in classical liberalism and developed into market socialism. In the words of one such market socialist, Benjamin Tucker:
The economic principles of Modern Socialism are a logical deduction from the principle laid down by Adam Smith in the early chapters of his Wealth of Nations,—namely, that labor is the true measure of price. But Adam Smith, after stating this principle most clearly and concisely, immediately abandoned all further consideration of it to devote himself to showing what actually does measure price, and how, therefore, wealth is at present distributed. Since his day nearly all the political economists have followed his example by confining their function to the description of society as it is, in its industrial and commercial phases. Socialism, on the contrary, extends its function to the description of society as it should be, and the discovery of the means of making it what it should be. Half a century or more after Smith enunciated the principle above stated, Socialism picked it up where he had dropped it, and in following it to its logical conclusions, made it the basis of a new economic philosophy.
This seems to have been done independently by three different men, of three different nationalities, in three different languages: Josiah Warren, an American; Pierre J. Proudhon, a Frenchman; Karl Marx, a German Jew. That Warren and Proudhon arrived at their conclusions singly and unaided is certain; but whether Marx was not largely indebted to Proudhon for his economic ideas is questionable. However this may be, Marx’s presentation of the ideas was in so many respects peculiarly his own that he is fairly entitled to the credit of originality. That the work of this interesting trio should have been done so nearly simultaneously would seem to indicate that Socialism was in the air, and that the time was ripe and the conditions favorable for the appearance of this new school of thought. So far as priority of time is concerned, the credit seems to belong to Warren, the American,—a fact which should be noted by the stump orators who are so fond of declaiming against Socialism as an imported article. Of the purest revolutionary blood, too, this Warren, for he descended from the Warren who fell at Bunker Hill.
From Smith’s principle that labor is the true measure of price—or, as Warren phrased it, that cost is the proper limit of price—these three men made the following deductions: that the natural wage of labor is its product; that this wage, or product, is the only just source of income (leaving out, of course, gift, inheritance, etc.); that all who derive income from any other source abstract it directly or indirectly from the natural and just wage of labor; that this abstracting process generally takes one of three forms,—interest, rent, and profit; that these three constitute the trinity of usury, and are simply different methods of levying tribute for the use of capital; that, capital being simply stored-up labor which has already received its pay in full, its use ought to be gratuitous, on the principle that labor is the only basis of price; that the lender of capital is entitled to its return intact, and nothing more; that the only reason why the banker, the stockholder, the landlord, the manufacturer, and the merchant are able to exact usury from labor lies in the fact that they are backed by legal privilege, or monopoly; and that the only way to secure labor the enjoyment of its entire product, or natural wage, is to strike down monopoly.
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