chroniclesofrettek asked: re: The Unfreedom of Scarcity, this looks like the usual claim of people's actions are affected by incentives, and sometimes those incentives are ugly and not uniform across the population. Therefore, in order for people to be free from these ugly incentives, you need an all powerful central authority to enforce equality. This is Chomsky's anarchist position.
I think it went even beyond that to suggest that consent was not meaningful in those circumstances. An attack on free civil society has to begin with attacking the validity of consent in some way - suggesting that voluntary institutions aren’t really voluntary for some reason. If some central institution of a free society can be declared coercive somehow, then of course coercion is justified in fighting back against it, and it’s a short hike from there to liquidating the kulaks.
I saw an Internet comment once that joked that every line of argument made by a radical feminist ultimately ends by trying to prove that women are incapable of consenting to sex. Anti-capitalists do the same thing, but they try to prove that workers are incapable of consenting to employment. And then oftentimes the same people will demand obedience to the state claiming that every citizen has freely consented to a wholly imaginary social contract!
You’ve just got to be relentlessly dedicated to truth and critical thought when you’re dealing with stuff like this. Do those ‘ugly non-uniform incentives’ invalidate anyone’s agency? That’s absolutely central to their argument, and yet…no, they just don’t. Imagine if you were in a court of law and someone was on trial for murder and they claimed it was self-defense because the victim offered them a trade they found very difficult to turn down and thus they were being coerced. That’s the core of what the whole case turns on. Everything else they have to say is dependent on that twisted logic. They proceed past it as swiftly as they can and try to cover it with emotional appeals but that’s the cornerstone supporting their entire ideology, and it’s nonsensical.
The first paragraph is entirely correct, except for the “then of course coercion is justified in…”. If you see the world solely as “state coercion is never justified, unless it is always justified” that follows, but it’s dumb. State action should be based on the likely, short term effects. This strongly discourages murder, because the short term effects of murder are very bad (people are dead.) All while aiming for a world where no coercion or state is necessary or even wanted.
The second paragraph is largely correct. Ideology is contradiction, and the best way to fight it is by pointing these contradictions out.
For being “ relentlessly dedicated to truth and critical thought” you’re jumping to “what would be the unpleasant effects of this if it were true” a lot more than “is it true” (at least in the above paragraphs and your previous posts.)
“Agency” is a philosophical construct. We can not measure whether agency actually exists, except for your various intuition-loaded thought experiments. There’s no object to point out and say “now there is agency” or “now you have doubled your agency.” However, the benefits of a free society we can measure. Do people politically disagree with one another? Is rape common or are people having sex with the partners they choose in a free society? Do people offer criticism of people more powerful than them?
Highly unequal fields, even with formal rights and protections, just do not look like free societies. In the actions people take, they look like feudal structures.
If you value intellectual diversity, and disvalue grudingly accepted sex, and want “lots of individuals bopping around doing their thing” that you probably should be more concerned with what reduces inequality, than on shoring up formal rules.
On a separate note, I do find it extremely funny how much you dislike my post (which was dedicated to pointing out a problem) because obviously the post means we should have a strong state, whereas the only other criticism was people disliking it because obviously the post means we should abolish government and then we will be helpless before the whims of social power.
It was @wirehead-wannabe‘s response that explicitly brought up the question of libertarianism being at fault and that was what I was responding to. I don’t dislike the post overall, I think it brings up an interesting problem and discussion, I was just trying to vigorously assert that the problem would be minimized by adopting libertarian policies in my other comment, and I was trying to make a more general point above.
The thing that you’re doing that I feel the need to argue against is when you imply things that are actually voluntary are really coerced and then you go on to imply that we should violate the norms of civil society to correct the problem because they’ve been rendered moot anyway. You’ve done it again there - highly unequal fields don’t ‘look like free societies’ to you. And yet they were stipulated as such! And then you go on to say we should prioritize reducing inequality over ‘shoring up formal rules’ - you’re being incredibly vague here but you explicitly named ‘free speech, consent, and private property’ - pretty much exactly what libertarians stand for - in the original post. So you’re arguing for violating what I’d consider fundamental human rights in order to make people more equal to solve a problem that doesn’t justify that kind of response. There is only one institution with the monopoly on legitimized use of force needed to attempt such a thing. And you want to do it through the notoriously flawed lens of class conflict analysis. I’m sure we can do without another lecture on why that’s a bad idea.
Let’s bring it down to the level of a concrete example. You brought up acting in the original post. Okay, so there’s an aspiring actress - one of many - and a famous and talented director - a much rarer commodity - and she feels like she needs to flatter him and give him sexual favors in order to make sure she gets her big break in his next movie or else she’ll languish in obscurity forever. That’s a good central example of the kind of thing you’re talking about, correct?
When she offers those sexual favors, is she being raped? I think that’s what you’re trying really hard to imply but I think the answer is ‘absolutely not.’ I think she’s perhaps in an unpleasant situation that she chose to put herself into of her own free will and we have an obligation to respect her choice. She is still free. You asked what consent means in that situation? It means everything.
And furthermore, what would you do to change the situation? Your original post ends with: ‘Class power analysis matters, or else you just end up like the Hollywood dating scene.’ How specifically is class power analysis going to fix the Hollywood dating scene? I honestly have no idea what the answer to that question could be. No offense, but I will be extremely surprised if you can come up with anything workable that doesn’t make the situation worse.