By Daniel Elwood of Actual Anarchy
The state of mother nature is “exploitation”.
I often encounter socialists clinging to the Labor Theory of Value, which is absolute garbage that even Marxist intellectuals admit is wrong and distance themselves from.
According to these socialists, “Surplus value” is anything above the wage that is gained from the sale of the good.
So I gotta ask, is all the plant and equipment, labor of others (including management), savings and investment and consequent assumption of entrepreneurial risk just to be donated?
If they truly believe that labor is the source of all value, then it would have to be in line with the value of a good that they can create with their bare hands and without raw materials other than what they find in the commons (tragedy of it and all).
Also, the wage laborer gets paid NOW and does not risk loss in an uncertain future where the price of the good sold is unknown (if it sells at a profit at all).
LTV gets blown up in the first 10 minutes of this:
Bohm-Bawerk and Mises both crushed Marxism.
Here:
And here:
Rothbard dissects the arguments and rebuttals related to the Economic Calculation Problem posed by Mises here:
Marx, even in his writings used two different definitions of “capitalism” to suit his argument.
He defines it two different ways. In the manifesto, he says it is just free selling and free buying. In other writings, he uses government monopoly privileges bestowed upon the well-connected as “capitalism”.
All the critiques were of mercantilism/protectionism, which is where the present day socialists get the “capitalism requires a state”.
Source on this point: https://mises.org/library/marx-and-mercantilism
If a socialist is truly trying to “free” you, he wouldn’t advocate for a system that would require total domination over you.
How much control over people would be needed?
Total.
It is not compassionate.
It is not freedom.
It is utter tyranny.
And it fails on economics as icing on the shit cake.
For the history you didn’t learn in school, check out Liberty Classroom:
