Argument: The commons

Questions about Objectivism
1

Hello,

I’m having an online debate with someone about certain aspects the entertainment industry. I am defending its right to existence, while the counterpoint argument is that it is exploiting the people it “takes” profits from. The person I am arguing with seems to think that once a company gets too big it becomes evil since it then uses its influence on the government. I’ve argued that this is not, in fact, Capitalism, but a form of corruption. The argument itself seems to have devolved into what the nature of Capitalism actually is and the concept of property rights, as well as limited resources, which he refers to as “the commons”. Since I still consider myself a neophyte to Objectivism, I’d like to get some more seasoned feedback on the following quoted argument from the person I am debating. Any help or pointers in the best way to counter arguments like this would be greatly appreciated.

I think you said that the “entertainments” themselves have and create value, and that they are valid capitalism because they produce no “victims”, and that the “profits” they generate are at no one’s expense. Here’s another way to consider this. Suppose you think of the total of human endeavor, the entire “productive capability” of mankind, as if it were a finite thing, which (like the federal budget), in a sense it is. Where is that effort best directed and why?

It is a very libertarian position (which I applaud) to take, which proposes that whatever an individual wishes to do that produces NO victims, should be permitted. But here’s another way to look at those “profits at no one’s expense”. “The commons” is a noun originally used to describe simply a grazing area in agrarian societies, which was available for all to use. As our understanding of ecology (and of capitalism) has matured, that definition has broadened to properly encompass the entire environment.

So the commons now reflects all the earth, all the air, all the water, and most crucially to us now..all the PEOPLE as well. The ORIGINAL (and to my mind only legitimate) function of governments is to protect the commons from uncontrolled predations and to ensure equitable access to limited resources. I say this because there was neither a need for, nor any defacto “governments” present in mans cultures UNTIL the situation arose where competition for limited resources (and thus predations upon the commons) became a fact of life. (A circumstance of population density, permanent settlements, and agriculture.) Water distribution in the earliest agrarian societies was the first function of organized governments because it was principle (literally) in enabling that agriculture which supported the increased populations.

With that as a background I take the position that any and all profits of any and all capitalist ventures derive, ultimately, from exploitation of the commons. And this is why I propose that while the “small” capitalistic ventures of individuals are beneficial, in the sense that they obtain profits for the creative entrepreneur, (re-)distributing some of those profits to the workers who do the work, (returning to the commons); uncontrolled capitalism in the form of “big” businesses, especially of international corporations, is anathema to a free society, because allowing the accumulation and concentration of great wealth is, in and of itself, a danger to a free society.

The hazard lies in the distinction between a large and small business, it’s methods of operation, and it’s ability to be held accountable for it’s predations upon the commons. Once a business reaches the large corporate level, wherein the ownership is of great accumulated and concentrated wealth, the profit itself becomes the ultimate and only real objective, ethics and morality notwithstanding. It is such great accumulations, especially those which are permitted to be transmitted across time, (via perpetual corporations or through the lack of confiscatory estate taxes) that present the greatest dangers to a free society. That money inevitably is used to “tilt the playing field” by corrupting the legitimate government. Which is what we are now experiencing.

By this standard, ALL functions of a legitimate government devolve into a form of “socialism”. And because of this it is desirable to limit also the size and centrality of governments to the least amount and at the most local level which will provide the fundamental responsibility of them, i.e., protection of the commons from uncontrolled exploitation, and ensuring equitable access to limited resources.

How does this all relate to “entertainment spectacles of competition”? In several ways.

Firstly by distraction and deflection. An illegitimate government, (one which has abrogated it’s fundamental responsibility to protect the commons and become corrupted by money and it’s power), does NOT WISH the people to be informed and concerned with those facts…Such a government prefers that people not discuss it’s failures and corruption and thus be inclined to seek redress by it’s removal from power. It prefers to teach blind obedience to dogma rather than critical thinking, the parroting of cant rather than analytical reasoning. And so the power elite provides spectator events to occupy the minds and time of the people so that they spend very little time apprehending the default of the legitimate government and their own enslavement by the power elite.

Secondly, the “competitive” nature of the spectacles is part of the “brain-washing”, of “legitimizing” the cultural meme, according to which the “competitive nature” of ALL things is “ennobled”, espoused, and legitimized, with the (barely) hidden agenda of legitimizing the unrestricted capitalist competition (exploitation) which the power elite desires.

Thirdly by diffusion/dilution. Being that there is a limited potential for human activities, and that the power elite wishes to increase and continue to accrete unto itself MORE of that limited resource, they PREFER to “invest” in those things which maximize their own profits, whether those “investments” provide any real benefit to the commons in any way or not. Returning to the fundamental functions of legitimate governments for a moment, in the same way that it is symptomatic of the illegitimacy of our own government that nearly half of the budget is spent on illegal wars to the benefit of a very limited segment of community, (rather than providing critical infrastructures, education, and health care), it is symptomatic of the squandering of the limited resources of the commons that the power elite supports and provides, instead of the basic needs of a free society to the people, (clean water and air, unpolluted grounds, limited predation upon the people), the spectacles which return it not only a higher profit than actual goods and services of real value to the community, but also aide in perpetuating the corrupted system, by the two means of which I first spoke: deflecting, and distracting; and legitimizing “competition”.

2

He imagines that large companies are simply hoarding massive piles of gold “somehow” and burying it in the ground.

Every penny of wealth that is “amassed” has first been exchanged for something of equal or greater value and is afterwards used to fund the ventures of all the small businesses he is so fond of.

By the time he says anything about the entertainment industry he is so deep in layers of contradictions that any arguement would be forced to concede one of his points. So don’t try.

Convice him of the basic nature of man as a rational being and not a resource converting machine which simply needs the have right raw materials distributed to it. Build up from that to practical applications.

If he persists, I would part ways with an ultimatum that I will defend to the death my property and wealth which I have created without the aid of “the commons” or any need for his sanction.

3

To add a point from his own argument, the “commons” did not exist until somebody created the means and infrastructure to use it. At first, the only resources were food, water, wood. No amount of uranium would have been considered part of the commons until a few decades ago.

Under his proposal, nobody would expand the resources available or try to find new ones, because the fruits of their labor would not belong to them. If he would only get out of the way there would be no practical limit to natural resources, with a theoretical limit at the entirety of the potential energy of every speck of dust in the solar system (and beyond?), and even that is recyclable.

He needs to control the actions of businesses because he sees man as inherently Fallen. He needs to govern the distribution of resources because he cannot discren between the mataphisically given and the chosen. There’s an Ayn Rand quote about dealing with nature by persuasion and men by force, and this issue is metaphysics. Steer things in that direction rather than towards politics.

4

The ORIGINAL (and to my mind only legitimate) function of governments is to protect the commons from uncontrolled predations and to ensure equitable access to limited resources. I say this because there was neither a need for, nor any defacto “governments” present in mans cultures UNTIL the situation arose where competition for limited resources (and thus predations upon the commons) became a fact of life. (A circumstance of population density, permanent settlements, and agriculture.)

Your opponent’s perspective appears to be nature-centered, rather than man-centered: No one can fundamentally own any part of “nature,” so it should be distributed equitably. Governments were created, not to protect men from men, but to protect nature from men. Nature has an inherent value, and violating that is “exploitation.” All this is a fundamental mistake in his entire approach to ethics, nature, and man. You will not win an argument with someone who values an untouched planet over the well-being of people or their moral right to use nature in the pursuit of their own self-interest.

With a little bit of economic training, he might come to understand that the value produced by corporations is real and really was produced, rather than “extracted” from nature, but I doubt that would convince him of anything. His fundamental values seem to place men a tier below nature.

5

He imagines that large companies are simply hoarding massive piles of gold “somehow” and burying it in the ground.

Every penny of wealth that is “amassed” has first been exchanged for something of equal or greater value and is afterwards used to fund the ventures of all the small businesses he is so fond of.

I don’t see this at all from his statements. He seems to take the view that value exists in a static quantity. People extract it from the ground, and distribute it among themselves, and this is fine to an extent. Trouble only comes when too much of it gets into too few hands. This reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of material value on his part, but as I’ve indicated, that does not appear to be his deepest problem.

You will see a fair number of people like this in life, who think that people do nothing but extract what was already there “in nature” for their own purposes. This usually results in a heavily flawed view of economies, production, and material wealth.

6

Suppose you think of the total of human endeavor, the entire “productive capability” of mankind, as if it were a finite thing, which (like the federal budget), in a sense it is. Where is that effort best directed and why?

So the commons now reflects all the earth, all the air, all the water, and most crucially to us now..all the PEOPLE as well.

We know he’s overstepped his bounds logically and morally already. Let us grant that there is some legitimate reason to consider aggregate human production. Why is it then legitimate to ask “where is that effort best directed and why?” I suppose if an answer can be arrived at, then it all of the sudden becomes OK to “direct” that effort? Who has the right to “direct” the efforts of another, to tell them what to do? This proposition stands in direct contradiction to the concept of Rights.

Some commoners drop “people” from their concept of “commons” and propose to just regulate property which accomplishes the same goal since, as we know, the right to property is essential to life. The goal of these commoners is to negate individual Rights in favor of some common good as he says here:

It is a very libertarian position (which I applaud) to take, which proposes that whatever an individual wishes to do that produces NO victims, should be permitted. But here’s another way to look at those “profits at no one’s expense”. “The commons” is a noun originally used to describe simply a grazing area in agrarian societies, which was available for all to use. As our understanding of ecology (and of capitalism) has matured, that definition has broadened to properly encompass the entire environment.

He describes individual Rights in the first sentence and then dismisses that concept in favor of one in which property is commonly owned or owned by the community and we all know where that leads, just look at history. This is an argument supporting current statist policies enacted by both Dems and Republicans. Really it’s just Marxism under another name and he makes that clear here:

[…] (re-)distributing some of those profits to the workers who do the work, (returning to the commons);

It is the exploitation of the proletariat by the bourgeoisie all over again. After all, the workers do the real work whereas creative owners and thinkers are non-essential.

The ORIGINAL (and to my mind only legitimate) function of governments is to protect the commons from uncontrolled predations and to ensure equitable access to limited resources. I say this because there was neither a need for, nor any defacto “governments” present in mans cultures UNTIL the situation arose where competition for limited resources (and thus predations upon the commons) became a fact of life. (A circumstance of population density, permanent settlements, and agriculture.) Water distribution in the earliest agrarian societies was the first function of organized governments because it was principle (literally) in enabling that agriculture which supported the increased populations.

I’m no expert on the history of government but I think this is factually wrong. Ancient Greece had government and I don’t think its function was to “protect the commons from uncontrolled predations and to ensure equitable access to limited resources”. I don’t think they believed in limited resources.

Furthermore the implication being made is factually wrong. First there is the concept “limited resources”, which is practically an anti-concept popularized by the viros to encourage us to be more like cavemen – it is essentially meaningless since for practical purposes there are no limited resources. Water is clearly not limited since it covers 70% of earth’s surface. It may be true in some sense of the word that oil is “limited” (though proven reserves have only increased since this initial cry went out) but “oil” is not the resource, energy is, and there is plenty of that. There is no resource that is limited so much as to threaten our lives.

The rest of the false implication amounts to: man is evil by nature (which we’ve heard before) and is signaled by the use of the word “predation”. As if mining gold or oil is a predation to be stopped. Or since People are included in “the commons” that our society (or a Capitalist society) would not outlaw “predation” of people. Or that since capitalists exploit nature, they are de facto preying on people, which is clearly false as evidenced by the fact that people’s life span has only increased since the industrial revolution.

uncontrolled capitalism in the form of “big” businesses, especially of international corporations, is anathema to a free society, […]

Again factually wrong, just look at history.

[…] because allowing the accumulation and concentration of great wealth is, in and of itself, a danger to a free society.

This false bald assertion ended it for me, I could read no further. The accumulation of great wealth is not anathema to a free society it is a natural consequence of leaving people free. The greatest redistribution scheme in all of history in the USSR proves what you get when you try: you still get some wealth concentration in the hands of the politically connected and you get no wealth among the rest of society. Capitalism raises all boats, the poor in this country would be considered rich in much of the rest of the world.

Here is the best answer you are going to get – from the Q&A of a speech given by Yaron Brook. A commoner asks a question about 42:00 into the Q&A.