Form: Quote Commentary

[A] Month of Quotes on Corporatism by Tom Reeves

—“…how corporations came about — they were all one-off, special purpose and limited-duration monopolies created in the public interest, not charters that the government let you file that were just like limited partnership agreements.”— Tom Reeves

The same is true for Intellectual property (which we need to constrain), and Letters of Marque (which we need to restore).

What is interesting, is that if they are not one-off’s, that means that they are not rational and calculable, right?

—“moral suasion is a meaningful way for people to check each other’s damaging behavior. Before governments started creating corporations “in the public interest,” business enterprises were all intimately tied to communities, their owners were not absolved of potential personal liability, and common law provided effective means of halting damaging behavior entirely.”—Tom Reeves

Restated: moral suasion evolved to raise the cost of each other’s imposition of costs, and therefore preserve the value of cooperation, and incentive to cooperate.

—“We are swimming in moral hazard, risk socialization and needless polarization and conflict — because governments and the corporations they [create] interfere with truly voluntary transactions, catallaxy, and defense of person and property (both private and commons).”—Tom Reeves

—“[Police] act in out-of-control ways largely because they are unaccountable in the sense they have little or no personal liability for what they do (and their departments/politicians will protect them if they misbehave). They’re a lot like crony capitalists, politicians and bureaucrats (all shielded by the hand of government). To fight corruption, bad behavior, “mistakes” and pervasive risk-socialization, we need to alter our institutional structures to demand more skin in the game from everyone. Right now, we are just playing games with who’s fat is in what fire, in ways that systematically advantage some while oppressing others.”—Tom Reeves

—“Corporations are creatures of government; that’s why we keep running to government to beg our politicians and bureaucrats to “fix” things, rather than going to out neighbors to ask them to knock off stuff that harms members of the community.”— Tom Reeves

—“Do you realize that crony capitalism and the mega regulatory state both are fuelled by the dynamic of unaccountability, lack of transparency, moral hazard and risk socialization that have been set in motion by governments selling masks of limited liability etc. to shareholders and those who inhabit the corporations that then grow?—Tom Reeves

—“When law and morality contradict each other, the citizen has the cruel alternative of either losing his moral sense or losing his respect for the law.”—Frédéric Bastiat (By Tom Reeves)

“The term ‘catallactics’ was derived from the Greek verb katallattein (or katallassein) which meant, significantly, not only ‘to exchange’ but also ‘to admit into the community’ and ‘to change from enemy into friend’. From it the adjective ‘catallactic’ has been derived to serve in the place of ‘economic’ to describe the kind of phenomena with which the science of catallactics deals. The ancient Greeks knew neither this term nor had a corresponding noun; if they had formed one it would probably have been katallaxia. From this we can form an English term catallaxy which we shall use to describe the order brought about by the mutual adjustment of many individual economies in a market. A catallaxy is thus the special kind of spontaneous order produced by the market through people acting within the rules of the law of property, tort and contract.”
(Hayek, F. A., 1982, Law, Legislation and Liberty, Vol. 2, pp. 108-109).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catallaxy

—“Catallaxy” is just a term used to describe certain transactions (transactions where markets exist). It’s a tool, not a dogma, and has no tenets.I used the term the other day in a comment thread to point out that markets are destroying the environment, primarily because of property theft and risk externalization via government claims to own the oceans and indigenous resources and because government-made corporations are machines of risk-socialization. Austrian economics is quite useful to understanding how crony capitalism is destroying both society and our natural world.”—Tom Reeves