Analysis, Patrick Carroll and Walter Block

Did He Say It Was Anti-Market? · Analysis, Patrick Carroll and Walter Block

How does Patrick Carroll* tie things together? By the way, what are his credentials?

Patrick Carroll has a degree in Chemical Engineering from the University of Waterloo and is an Editorial Fellow at the Foundation for Economic Education.

You can be a good academic chemist and also a good non-academic, extra-academic, writer on economics. Somehow I think Patrick Carroll has so far missed out on the opportunity of being so. Let's hear him:

According to the leftists, the reason this isn’t widespread is that most owners and managers are selfish and greedy. “Management” has a vested interest in keeping “labor” subjugated, we are told, and that’s why they don’t give workers more pay or decision rights.

I'm so glad he put "labor" in quotation marks, it's spelled labour in the Queen's English! Wait ... is he American, like US American? That might explain a bit ...

Now, it is actually probably more widespread than you think. See the previous article on cooperatives. But let's get on a little bit ...

But the idea that egalitarian business models are avoided because owners and managers don’t like them is simply inaccurate. The real reason businesses avoid more egalitarian models is because consumers don’t like them. After all, it is consumers, not owners and managers, who ultimately decide how businesses are run.

Is it, even with very rich people deciding to run marketing campaigns with very much money?

Part of what Mises actually does well (and no, it's not the ethics or even efficiency of economics) is pushing back against compulsory education. Why are they doing it? If this were the truth (as I think myself it is) shouldn't this be so obvious to consumers (both pupils and their parents) that they didn't need any information from Mises to get it?

Well, no, there is a very rich person who is running a very large publicity campaign for state or local government run schools (how much the sovereign state and how much the local government is involved varies from country to country). That very rich person is in fact a moral but no physical person - it's the state, the local government or the public school itself.

And Mises would arguably admit that this involves the consumers in this case not being able to decide how the schools are run.

But is this only so when there is state power involved, or can this happen with the influence of very rich private fortunes too?

As a Distributist, I think this can also happen when the influence comes from very rich private (not necessarily one-person) fortunes too. Hence, I think the market is freer the smaller the companies are.

But are managers really very adverse to small and democratic companies? Well, perhaps some managers of some big companies are. Or tolerate them only as long as they fit their scheme. Like BlackRock and Warren Buffet arguably love keeping small company owners in the management after buying up their companies, but only as long as these ex-owner managers do what BlackRock and Buffet expects them to do. And some managers of big companies may have been even more adverse than that to small ones, like how Vanderbilt bought up smaller railway companies in order to make a big and rational one. However, managers of small businesses often like staying small businesses and managers of cooperatives often like the cooperatives to stay cooperatives. If Gabriel Sims-Fewer expands to 10 employees in his café, while all may be equally well paid, all may have equal votes in the management, someone would still sign the bills, that one would in a sense be the individual manager, and this doesn't preclude the cooperative model. He's simply chairman.

But there are people who do prefer big companies. Shareholders may prefer the company being able to pay dividends on top of paying wages and suppliers and others necessary to the working of the company. Investers being very large shareholders and banks being more or less investers (except some that specialise in serving small companies). And states. Hilaire Belloc considered** that with the huge bulk of land in the hands of small farmers, the state can only take 25 % taxes, but with huge bulk of land or other property being in distinctly fewer hands these can sustain the state taking 50 % taxes.

This makes it a point that Patrick Carroll made the tag Small Business. If I push it, I get to previous essays on Mises with that tag.

Jon Miltimore and Carol Roth seem to agree Small Business is a good thing. Kerry McDonald agrees when it comes to daycare. Brad Polumbo considers small business needs stabler prices and more people willing to become employees. How many more would the market of labour have revealed if some of the newcomers were cooperatives rather than one man owned companies? Or how much less would the need have been with more one man companies, like the café by Gabriel Sims-Fewer? Anyway, Brad Polumbo thinks the small businesses should exist. He also blames the lack of minimum wages, indirectly:

However, most glaring is the fact that the ongoing federal supplementation of existing state-level unemployment benefits is making welfare pay more than work for millions of unemployed workers.

If there were state-level wage minima, this wouldn't happen. Or ... the system in Sweden has de facto wage minima but not by law, but by negotiation, syndicates of both employers and employees sitting down and deciding together. But a minimum wage per hour work, if you do it full time, will certainly be worth more (if not by extremely much) than full time unemployment. One can also get a half time work and stay half time on unemployment. And there are two kinds of help to the unemployed. Social welfare is available if you have no special benefits, but there are special benefits if you have worked and paid your syndical fees (part of which go to unemployment benefits). If you have worked in a police archive, your unemployment benefit is 75 % of what you earned (including if you earned only a minimum, since you weren't actually strictly speaking employed, but had a combination of wage and dole, as I did. While you have this (at least if you earned better than I did as ALU-worker) you will arguably lose on exchanging this benefit for sweeping streets - but only for so long. If and when you are down at social welfare, you will earn (in monetary terms) by taking a job as a street sweeper. Because the street sweeper has a minimal wage, and that one is for full time work above the level of the social welfare check.

Kenneth Schrupp also implies an agreement on this point, while Brad Polumbo deplores other measures that could hurt small businesses. So, Patrick Carroll might be out of tune, when he's in fact attacking one small business (but never underestimate how Mises could surprise you there!)

Now, I did more than once promoted the idea that more working for themselves is a better idea than many working for a few, because efficiency takes away jobs and pushes more onto the need to get things efficiently offered.

Perhaps Mises, or Walter Block*** might disagree:

What, then, would all these people be doing? We cannot know for sure, but we can speculate. Presumably, they would be butchers, bakers, candlestick makers, farmers, fishermen, doctors, scientists, cooks, and bottle washers. In short, they would be producing more of these ordinary goods and services. Possibly, some of them would be breaking new ground, providing the rest of us with things we cannot now even imagine. Without terrorists in existence we could have had our cake and eaten it too: have just as much air safety as at present (or more! The TSA is hardly 100 percent efficient), plus a plethora of other wealth that these folk would be creating in other industries.

Economic logic demonstrates the truth of this claim. The economic pie is not fixed. The lump of labor hypothesis—that there are only so many jobs “out there”—is a fallacy. ...

Good argument against the idea "we can't make more children, there are no jobs when they grow up" but a very bad argument against the idea that farmers, fishermen, butchers, bakers, candlestick makers should not have their work taken away by more efficient machinery.

Why? Well, the thing is, Walter Block's argument only works if there actually are a lot of works in farming, fishing and so on available, and TSA is usurping people who would otherwise have gone there. But in fact, terror on the one hand and TSA on the other hand, mental patients on the one hand, mental caretakers on the other hand, state enforced pupils on the one hand, teachers of such on the other hand, is what society is dividing into, as jobs in these branches go scarcer. If you want Christian tips on economics from Austria, I'd prefer Mgr Ignaz Seipel° over the Jew Mises.
/HGL

* Quotes here again being from:
FEE : New “Anti-Capitalist” Cafe in Toronto Perfectly Demonstrates Why Capitalism Is Awesome
Monday, April 25, 2022 | Patrick Carroll
https://fee.org/articles/new-anti-capitalist-cafe-in-toronto-perfectly-demonstrates-why-capitalism-is-awesome/

** I forget which work.

*** Quotes are now from:
Why You Shouldn’t Celebrate the TSA for Employing 47,000 Workers
Saturday, April 30, 2022 | Walter Block
https://fee.org/articles/why-you-shouldn-t-celebrate-the-tsa-for-employing-47-000-workers/

° Die Wirtschaftsethischen Lehren der Kirchenväter
https://www.amazon.de/Wirtschaftsethischen-Lehren-Kirchenv%C3%A4ter-Ignaz-Seipel/dp/1113040289