Skip to main content

Glossary for Easy Reference


Here I am dumping that list of terms from a previous Commentaryism post cos I think I'll rely on some of these in the near future. By all means have a look-see and tell me where there might be errors or oversights.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

DROarbitration agency, & private court are synonymous. These agencies can be organised as for-profit or non-profit corporations, or as for-profit or non-profit co-ops (community, worker, customer, whatevs).


Corporation is taken to mean body of persons organised in such a way that its owners and workers are functionally distinct - in practice some people might own shares in a corporation that also employs them, but the positions are distinct nonetheless. People gain and lose ownership by buying or selling shares respectively.


Co-operative is taken to mean a team in which owners acquire and lose ownership shares on the basis of their interactions with it, whether as workers, customers, or just local neighbourhood dwellers. Any one co-op could be organised on any of these ownership principles or any combination of them.


Cartel means an alliance of people in an industry with the purpose of raising its price above market level, making this near enough a synonym of oligopoly.


Price is the ratio at which two goods are traded; three elephants for one cruise missile, etc.


Market or marketplace means the setting for trade.


Trade is any practical exchange of goods or services in which both parties give something up to each other, thus closing the debt loop to each other, which is why in business the term 'to close' is so often used to refer to the completion of an exchange. Any economic obligation between the parties re the objects traded begins and ends with that specific trade, so neither is in debt to the other.


Debt loop is taken to mean the opening between Person A giving Person B something and Person B giving Person A something in return. For example, in a common property gift economy the debt loop is infinite, & can never be escaped.


Industry is defined here as a set of social and productive activities in production of a specific good or service, or a specific type of good or service, say footwear, insurance, or dispute resolution.


Liberalism is taken to mean the ideology of individual liberty, that political force - if it exists at all - should be employed in the protection of people's liberty.


Socialism is taken to have two meanings;

a. The materialist political philosophy placing normative priority upon equality of circumstance and -somehow- luck.
b. The economic practice of social ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange, which in a statist/archist context means state ownership and control, and in an anti-statist/anarchist context means community or union ownership. A whole lotta community co-ops or communes should result.

Anarchism is defined as the ideological preference for anarchy over archy. This one really should be obvious, but even in 2015 people are still trying to claim that a word from a root meaning 'no archon' in ancient Athens somehow HAS to mean anarcho-socialism. Yes, this means certain people should drop the quote marks in "anarcho"-capitalism. It just makes them sound petty.


Liberty is defined as autonomy, self-direction, the in-practice exercise of self-ownership by moral agents.


Self-ownership is the de facto inalienable self-control that any human being enjoys over their own mind and body absent certain actions taken upon them by other human beings e.g. murder. This exists by default due to other possibilities being logically absurd and relying on physical space and laws being organised in some way other than the 3-dimensional excludable space that exists now.


AgentActionLocationTime are the four primary components in assessing practical and moral significance of actions. When speaking of humans the four questions expressing this are Who, What, Where, When? often used in, say, a murder case or deciding who does and does not get a particular house. Socialism actually constitutes a grand denial of this universal law.


Moral agents are people, basically. They are distinguished from trees and frogs by their moral agency, or ability to tell that their actions have consequences for the continued self-direction of others - that they either do or do not respect others' self-direction.


Allocative efficiency is responsiveness of the process of resource allocation to changing circumstances as they change. Since statist socialism is not up for discussion the only problem here is the absence of money.


Predatory pricing is the practice of drawing on one's reserves of resources / money by lowering the prices one charges in trades below the market rate for whatever type of trade we're talking about.


Money is whatever people accept in trade more as a store of value for future trades than for any other use it may potentially be put to.



Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Iain McKay, Bryan Caplan & the Case of the "Anarchist" Anarchist

In the past I have written blog posts disputing claims contained in the online document called An Anarchist FAQ principally written by Iain McKay. I spent those posts trying to contend with Iain's claims re  the ancap question  and  the mode of production called capitalism . McKay has a bee in his bonnet re anarcho-capitalists' insistence on referring to themselves as anarchists, that much is obvious. Every reference to ancapism runs something along the lines of "an"cap or "anarcho"-capitalism. I find this very amusing because 'anarchist' or 'anarchism' are words (articulate mouth-sounds) first and specific concepts second.  Ditto 'socialist' and 'socialism' friends. Speaking of socialism... In  the comment section of one of his videos  the Youtuber called StatelessLiberty responded to a criticism by linking to Caplan's work  on the Anarchist adventure in Spain in the 1930's . The critic shot back with a  critic

The 'neoliberal optimism industry' industry

A podcast, Citations Needed , forgot that poverty, violence, hunger and infant mortality are declining and decided that all of the media folk saying positive things about the major trend of our time (modern economic growth) are all wrong. The neoliberal optimism industry is hard at work pushing a cherry-picked slab of bias in our faces and we fellow optimists are all being bamboozled. Of course this is completely wrong, per abundant scholarship and evidence, some even tweeted by Pinker himself on November 24th 2018, four days before this podcast was released. At 05:00 into the podcast they seem to suggest that liberal capitalism = alt-right and fascism! You might wonder why I bother mentioning this since they say they don't take the fish hook theory very seriously themselves. It's because they insist on reading things Pinker isn't saying into Pinker's public statements, so I will work from the assumption that I am supposed to read things these podcasters aren'

Doomer Eternal?

Youtuber Sarah Z talks about the Doomers, those who despair of the world. I am not trying to criticize Sarah Z's take since it is remarkably similar to mine, but I will dump my thoughts below anyway. [ 1 ] ~ ~ ~ The media has broadcast nothing but wall-to-wall doom-and-gloom for a-hundred years and then some. If things feel more hopeless now it's because so much of that media is social media generated by us, so that we are sharing the doom-and-gloom meme with each other AS WELL AS getting it from the mainstream media. Human life is in less peril than ever before (barring the possibility of WW3 between China & Russia v. NATO & SEATO) as economic development makes comfortable civilized living more and more accessible to more and more people every year, and the carbon intensity of every unit of GDP is continually declining. CO2 emissions could plausibly lead to specific calamities with identifiable bodycounts in the near future, and preventing CO2 emissions by the one plau