This passage implies that there are two simply unconnected groups of people. The first group, the government, has somehow appropriated the power to coerce everyone else to do whatever it wants. (What does it want and why?) The second group, the Polesotechnic League:
does not exercise any coercion (?);
is an effective check on government (?).
The League, of course, also sells both necessities and luxuries - but this does not involve any coercion.
The government is not just a group that happens to have assumed power and that coerces everyone else to obey its arbitrary commands. It performs a social function. Its laws, courts, police and prisons prevent a war of all against all by protecting private property. League merchants need it to do this. They do not exercise direct coercion because the state does it for them and has performed this function throughout history since priesthoods controlled granaries.
No one is coerced to buy necessities from any particular company but everyone is obliged to buy them from some company or at least to acquire them somehow. No one is coerced to work for any particular company but most people most of the time do have to work for someone else in order to survive economically. Economic necessity precedes and underlies legal and political coercions.
Effective checks on governments are democratic institutions, popular resistance and a free press, not the Polesotechnic League.
6 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
Democracy is only possible if the right ideas, institutions, social preconditions, etc., exists to allow that to come about. And this "popular resistance" thing is too vague for me to take seriously. It's still trying to wiggle in the "popular movement" fantasy.
And the US is having less and less of a truly free press because of the dominance of the left in most media outlets. So I'm skeptical of that too!
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
Periodically and currently, populations courageously resist political and military dictatorships.
Paul.
Paul: yes, and often it's because they want -tbeir- dictatorship -- cf. the "Arab Spring".
Too true. A mixture of good and bad motives. But we can only struggle on. An Iranian I knew in Lancaster went back home and was immediately killed. I would have been much more cautious about returning. But I would have wanted to continue opposing the regime that succeeded the Shah.
Commendable, but note that the mullahs took over to much popular and international acclaim… surely they must be better than the corrupt and brutal Shah…
The old parable of King Log and King Stork comes to mind; also of being careful what you wish for.
Mind you, the mullahs have at least discredited theocracy in Iran for a good long time.
Kaor, Paul and Mr. Stirling!
Paul: Courageous, what your Iranian acquaintance did, but what GOOD did it do him or Iran? He just made it easy for the tyrannical Islamic Republic to knock him off. Far better for him to have worked slowly, patiently, even indirectly, at undermining the brutal theocracy. From abroad, if necessary.
And, as Stirling pointed out, many people WANT tyranny, as long as it's their kind of tyranny!
So, I don't put all that much trust in many, if any "popular movements" for "liberation." Yes, they find out too late how much worse King Stork was compared to King Log!
Mr. Stirling: King Log is always better than King, President, or Commissar Stork! And I certainly hope the opium dream of a Muslim theocracy in Iran has been discredited for a long time.
Ad astra! Sean
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