Hi guys,
What would you guys respond to something like this:
Marxist theory is primarily concerned with the free market's exploitation of the lower class by the capital-holding upper class.
Of course, this guy seems to completely disregard simple concepts like the Comparative Advantage theory. I mean, if that "upper class" that builds the factory, offers a deal to the "lower class" where they make 1/10th of the product output, or whatever, then if the "lower class" accepts it, they are better off, because it means that their old farm work or whatever didn't produce as much.
A free market, in time, would actually improve the situation to the workers side by the creation of more capital that production makes possible, and sequential competitveness for labor.
Anyway, I wonder if there is some kind of good analogy to destroy this argument. Some scenario that you could describe that would show the flaws of this thinking. For instance, I think if we use engineers and space agencies, there isn't much of an emotional attachement for the "engineers class", because, even though each of them would not be able to build a space agency, he always has plenty of other work available, and so the point might come across easier.
But maybe an everyday scenario might prove more effective. I wonder if we could use print shops, and some poor student that needs to print his lenghty essay in special paper or whatever, and so is in the hands of the evil print shops owners. The problem with this one is that communist folks see money has being all-powerful in an exchange, even if you say the poor student has to deliver the essay the next day...
Thoughts?
Equality before the law and material equality are not only different but are in conflict with each other; and we can achieve either one or the other, but not both at the same time. -- F. A. Hayek in The Constitution of Liberty
Marxist and Austrian Class Analysis
Classical Economics vs The Exploitation Theory
Freedom of markets is positively correlated with the degree of evolution in any society...
Jon, thanks for the pointers. The PDF was sweet and I referred that one to the guy. (I'm sure the other is good as well, but just didn't have the time to go through it, and I thought there were more chances he would read something if it was small anyway.)
I neglected to mention one more possible source of information - Boettke's review of David Gordon's excellent Resurrecting Marx (which dissects analytical marxist theories.)
-Jon
Cool. I don't really think this guy is going to reply to me though. He emailed me privately with a bunch of Marx non-sense, because of a free markets defense I posted on a thread after I had enough with the socialist rant (or humanitarian, as some called it) against profits, greed, and whatever in the mailing list of a Google student program. Most replies I got was people patting on my shoulder, so I was relieved there were some liberty-lovers in the middle of what I would suppose were intelligent people.