Your political and moral imagination in hampered by the uber-adversarial and totally transactional understanding of human nature that the liberal worldview presupposes (by "liberal", I mean the hyperindividualistic ethos in the tradition of Hobbes, Locke, and Mill). That's why you flirt with what sounds like socialist-style redistribution as the only option and view capital as an enemy of labor.

In the liberal worldview, private property has prior existence. The common good is understood as a concession, a derivative good composed of that which is ceded from private property. Human beings are viewed as atomized units, and society is consequently viewed as a fluctuating miasma of transactional relationships.

In the classical view, the common good has prior existence, and private property exists for the sake of the common good (we avoid a whole lot of grief and social strife by having private property; properly disposed, it is a successful means of distribution). Capital and labor are not construed as necessarily opposed. Rather, in a society in which cooperative relationships for mutual benefit are the rule (in place of a market driven by exploitation), capital and labor are friends. Both have skin in the game by assuming risk. In the classical view, workers are owed at least a family wage as a matter of justice. If we have a billionaire who fails to pay his employees adequately, then we have someone who quite literally has robbed his employees. Human relationships are not confined to merely the transactional, and we have duties toward society that precede our consent.

According to a liberal view, if a famine strikes ą region and some guy has a warehouse full of food, it would be theft for to take the food in that warehouse to survive, and theft, of course, is not morally permissible (it is absurd to claim otherwise; it's theft!). Meanwhile, according to a classical view, private property is not fixed absolutely. As you recall, it exists for the sake of the common good. So, in such a case, the food in that warehouse is not absolutely determined as private property. Private property is derived and ordered toward the common good. It would not be theft for the starving to take food from that warehouse, as the food quite literally belongs to them! (This is an extreme example, but I include it to demonstrate how the consequences of each stance play out.)

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zahlman 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

It took me hardly any effort to find an essay that appears to be arguing that Hobbes' thought is in many ways compatible with that sort of redistribution: https://brill.com/view/journals/hobs/34/1/article-p9_9.xml Some quotes:

> Also notable is Gregory Kavka, who argues, “Though it is rarely noticed, Hobbes is a bit of an economic liberal, that is, he believes in some form of the welfare state and in the redistributive taxation needed to support it.”7 .... But Kavka’s analysis has two significant flaws. First, ... Hobbes dedicates arguably greater attention to the problems associated with excessive wealth. ... The second problem with Kavka’s analysis is that it ignores Hobbes’s rich moral psychology that is integral to Hobbes’s understanding of the problems associated with wealth, poverty, and inequality.

> Hobbes’s political program prioritizes peace above all. Along these lines, it is essential when considering Hobbes on economics that one understands how poverty, concentrated wealth, and inequality can obstruct peace. This is one of the fundamental lessons Hobbes likely learned in the decades leading up to the English Civil War – a war at least partly facilitated by the economic upheaval, the impoverishment of many along with the enriching of others, the concentration of wealth, and the systemic inequality. Hobbes acknowledges some of this in his own history of the Civil War, Behemoth.

> While Hobbes is surely concerned about the problems poverty pose for his commonwealth, he expresses even greater concern about concentrated wealth. His earliest discussion of wealth can be found in his Briefe of the Art of Rhetoric, written in 1637, his summary of Aristotle’s Rhetoric.84

Classical liberals are not the same people as modern libertarians or minarchists.

	▲	lo_zamoyski 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		> It took me hardly any effort to find an essay that appears to be arguing that Hobbes' thought is in many ways compatible with that sort of redistribution Snark aside, my intent was to clarify what is loosely meant by "liberal" - the broad technical sense in the philosophical context and not the partisan/colloquial usage (which is something like "leftist", which is quite different; in the US, both dominant parties are liberal parties, and they disagree on questions like redistribution, with some tending more toward Mill on this issue, others Hayek, for example). It is not my intent to offer an exhaustive treatment of the variations of liberal positions (or an analysis of how they converge or diverge as they develop). Perhaps I should have avoided the term and simply stuck to "hyperindividualism" to avoid confusion. However, I am opposed to redistribution as the basic mechanism of correcting what is a matter of basic justice. I am not arguing for equality or for redistribution as a normal corrective mechanism. I am arguing that if we bring back notions of economic justice, a correct understanding of what economies are for, of the relationship between the human person/society and the economy, and of our moral duties within the scope of economics, then we think less about how to slap a dirty bandage onto an open sore and think more about how not to wound in the first place. If workers made at least a family wage, you wouldn't need to worry so much about redistribution. If we didn't construe capital and labor as intrinsically in competition with one another, but rather as partners working toward a common good, we wouldn't obsess about class conflict and the socialistic impulse to eliminate class distinctions and flatten society. I am suggesting we escape the false categories of our modern paradigm by reexamining our assumptions and looking at what an older and still very much alive vibrant intellectual tradition has to say. Consider "Laborem Exercens" [0], which engages both capitalism and socialism without collapsing into either. [0] https://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/encyclicals/d...

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h2zizzle 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I think you misunderstand. My ideals (and what I suppose to be the closest model to reality) are closer to what you are calling the classical view. Your mistake here is in conflating capital with capitalists. Capital is a tool, capitalists are people who use (some would say abuse) that tool in line with what you are calling liberalism. Labor (the group, not the action; perhaps better termed laborers) can, should, and does use capital, but labor and capitalists in their most elemental forms will always be at odds, because the goal of labor is to do enough work to live a fulfilled and dignified life, and the goal of capitalists is to exploit capital and labor as efficiently as possible in order to acquire more capital.

Circling back, redistribution is necessary because, under Capitalism, capital accrues to itself at a higher rate of return than does labor (Piketty). Without the socioeconomic infrastructure to redistribute regularly in smaller and more palatable amounts, a major redistribution event is necessary to break the positive feedback loop of capital's higher rate of return. This is not pitting labor against capital, it is forcing capital back into the hands of labor so that it can be used towards their ends rather than that of capitalists. Note that collective use is valid in this hypothetical; the difference is whether capital is being deployed for monetary gain or social needs (the "common good").

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lo_zamoyski 2 days ago | parent [-]

> I think you misunderstand. My ideals [...] are closer to what you are calling the classical view.

I'm not so sure, because I reject the idea that capital and labor are always at odds. They are at odds if we take as normative and basic the "liberal" hyperindividualist pursuit of self-interest as the highest aim of a human being.

I also reject redistribution as the primary means of addressing what are first order problems. For example, if employers are paying less than a family wage while they themselves reap handsome profits, then the goal isn't to redistribute later somehow while propping up a culture of normalized greed, but to distribute justly in the first place. Redistribution, like you mention, is indeed an extreme event, but I contest the idea that it must come to such extremes, or that redistribution (even in "smaller and more palatable amounts") should be the norm for addressing bad distribution in the first place.

We needn't be pigeonholed into the false dichotomies that our modern paradigm, with some of its bogus categories and "necessities", imposes. Those clamoring for socialism are asking to jump out of the frying pan into the fire (I don't claim you are calling for this, but a naive segment is). Cultural norms, buttressed by the appropriate laws (the law is a teacher), are perhaps a better place to focus our efforts and our imagination. We should pay attention to the false categories and norms we have internalized that remove the stigma from predatory practices like underpaying or extracting compound interest. When you create a culture that is hostile to such practices, that goes a long way to shaping laws and behaviors.

I do not propose a political program here. I propose that we ought to examine the moral assumptions that box us into a drab range of possibilities. The hyperindividualist "liberalism" in question construes freedom apart from objective moral norms and enjoys privatizing moral questions. But even redistribution is a moral question! This is a larger topic than I have time to explore here, but if there is a take away, it is that we must stop skirting or privatizing discussion of basic moral questions (here of an economic nature and what they themselves presuppose), thinking that this somehow avoids conflict in a heterogeneous society. This only buys time as problems fester and persist.

	▲	h2zizzle 9 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I gather that you're not serious about seeking an actual solution to these problems. You seem to enjoy getting bogged down in a milieu of platitudes that fortify your preexisting status ("Taxes bad! The notion of an objectively good and dominant culture good!"). You do this to avoid engaging with some of the core points of my previous reply, including the disambiguation of "capital" into the group of people who are diametrically opposed to labor and the tool that even labo employs, and the natural rate of return of capital versus labor. If you were to, you would be forced to consider that I'd already broken the false dichotomy of labor and capital, and suggested a moral rationale for redistribution. Write less, consider more.