CEO Pay vs. Celebrity Pay: The Irony of Demonization

By Steven Clyde

Not many days go by without each of us hearing about how much CEO’s bring home per each year, of course implying that 1.) They don’t deserve this seemingly “excessive” amount of compensation and have acquired it off the backs of those they exploit 2.) There is something in particular about being a CEO that’s much less noble to that of someone like say, Oprah, who is worth billions.

Walter Williams, the brilliant economist we all know and love, shaped my view on this in a way I probably never could’ve conceived prior. He pointed out that when you take the top ten CEO’s average annual salaries and compared them to the top ten celebrity’s average annual salaries, it paints an ironic picture for your opponents. Could it really be true that celebrities averaged (at the time) $100 million a year, while CEO’s averages $43 million.[1] It only serves Williams legacy justice to update this information and continue this debate with our friends on the left. Continue reading “CEO Pay vs. Celebrity Pay: The Irony of Demonization”

Personal vs. Private Property: Don’t Get Tripped Up By This Fallacy

By Steven Clyde

The modern day Marxist is quite the odd figure. Depending on the day you talk to them, they are adhering to another random school of thought within the socialist/communist movement whether it be anarcho-communism[1], anarcho-syndicalism[2], Maoism[3], Leninism[4], Trotskyism[5], etc. Yet no matter how you try and debate with them, they always want to try and trip you up on one thing: property.

The idea that revolves around pretty much all these ideologies is that there is first to be made a distinction between types of property: that is personal property (consumer goods) and private property (producer goods). Second, there is an everlasting principle ingrained that private property, as a “capitalistic norm” they will say, is theft. Often times, they will go on to say that private property is “violence and murder” as well, really putting on the pedestal with your beliefs.

Personal Property

There are several attempts to justify this argument, one being that capitalists exploit the people they hire because they extract the surplus value[6] (the full value of their productivity in any given setting minus their contracted wage) and thus are guilty of theft on that account. When you bring up the point of “well didn’t they agree to the wages determined in the contract?” their response is often something along the lines of “people are forced to go out and get jobs or starve so none of it is voluntary.”

Arguments like this are trying to persuade you on the notion that its okay to receive whats available from others sacrifices, and that you should resent anyone who feels like you as a person should have to go out and make sacrifices just because other people do. This all tends to cultivate into a self-satisfying diatribe towards the idea that being free to make your own contracts in a free society, would be worse than if society came together to own all the means of production.

“Society”, is but of whom? Are all the people in the building I’m in a small society if we claim? What about all the people on my block? So is it really to say, that if there is a printer that adds productive value to someone in the world, that the printer is now owned by the lot of the 7.28 billion of us? But if everybody owned the printer, what would be the incentive to create a new printer? Would society then be viewed as just continents? But what about mere states? Towns? Society is subjective, and thus we must focus on the individual themselves in any situation to make rational observations.

The individual will take a broom and get productive value out of it, yet no one goes around claiming everyone has the right to other people’s brooms.

Once something is personal property as they claim, namely it’s acquired through self-sacrifice, it cannot then be transformed into another term (called private property) without changing physical form. If it’s simply something that helps another man acquire an end, whether that end is to gain more than they put at risk or to accomplish something like a small task, then what right does “society” have to deprive the individual who simply used their mind and the resources around them to make a change.

But therein lies the true problem: incentives. This is one of the most fundamental differences in how the anarcho-capitalist and the anarcho-communist view how people act; one believes that people act purposefully and use our minds to transform resources to attain certain ends and do so only with knowing that they can attain those ends[7], while the other believes that people would have these same incentives so long as they weren’t simply bound by another capitalist and exploited.[8] Continue reading “Personal vs. Private Property: Don’t Get Tripped Up By This Fallacy”

Would There Be No Education Without A Department For One?

By Steven Clyde

With all the fuss over Betsy Devos’s nomination (which might be in turmoil now)[1] to be the Secretary of Education, many are still asking the same exact questions over and over, yet most seem to bind themselves to this single question:

How would education exist without a single entity controlling it all?

Here’s the thing though: This question has been answered lots of times from lots of different angles. When you have public sectors of education, your main incentives are not to teach but to acquire enrollment. Once you then have your general population of students, your incentives are to:

1.) keep the students enrolled, and

2.) appropriate the funds you’ve been given by the state for what you feel is best.

The abuse of the school boards power run rampant in almost any state you look at. Take for example the high school in McKinney, Texas who thought it would be a good idea to appropriate funds (in the form of a $220 million bond) to build a $62.8 million football stadium.[2] Is this what they mean by higher education? Continue reading “Would There Be No Education Without A Department For One?”

Government Services & Benefits: Partial Theft Is Still Theft Part 2

By Steven Clyde

This is part 2 of a 3 part series on the Social Contract, for part 1 click here, for part 3 click here

One must ask themselves this: What do I GET out of the government in return for what is taken from me? For example, let’s say person “A” in a year’s span calls 9-1-1 twice, drives on roads for an average of 15 minutes a day, and utilizes a government granted student loan: how would we properly assess how much they paid in taxes versus how much they took out in the form of services or benefits?. We can’t, which I’ll explain why.

Let’s start with the student loan example. This is a little different than utilizing an ambulance or driving on a government-funded road, in the sense that in this instance the government is transferring money from others (we can call them “Person’s B through Z”) and giving it to person “A”, rather than the government taking from person “A” to expropriate to (B through Z). You then have to pay back interest on your loans after graduation, and in essence the government has found a way to attempt to profit off their theft, though with everybody drowning in student loan debt the taxpayers pay the current bills while we create a new class of taxpayers in the same instance. This is not the same as a person taking their own capital and investing it with evaluated risk; this amounts to robbers seizing funds to re-invest with no concern for risk. They know that as long as they provide loans, students will flock to colleges under the notion that they need college to be successful, and in turn colleges will charge whatever they want. There is no way to measure the actual costs as they are hoped to be paid off in the future, when factors of our economy have changed along with the price of our money. Continue reading “Government Services & Benefits: Partial Theft Is Still Theft Part 2”

My Social Contract! Part 1

This is part 1 of a 3 part series on the Social Contract, for part 2 click here, for part 3 click here

Social Contract: The Myth

by Steven Clyde

The myth of the social contract1 is one that has been around for hundreds of years.2 Without first understanding how fallacious the idea is, we will never be able to understand why voluntary coordination through private property rights not only is the best way for individuals to assimilate into societies, but that the government forces its citizens to act as partial slaves to the state, demanding that they give up a portion of their income through coercive and sometimes violent means.

To begin, have you ever found yourself cornered in a debate from the notion that you “implicitly” gave consent to be deprived of your property by government because you “stay” in this country and don’t leave? Have you ever found yourself convinced by the plausibility of the (soon to be seen) faulty logic that without government coordination we wouldn’t have things like roads, schools, decent healthcare, help for the poor, etc? Continue reading “My Social Contract! Part 1”