Re: [GNU/consensus] ZCash (lupa)

[Michael Rogers]

On 01/09/16 09:27, carlo von lynX wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 01, 2016 at 08:17:27AM +0200, carlo von lynX wrote:
>> Yes, and making a cash system that bypasses the tax system means
>> that capitalism will be much harsher with zcash as it empowers the
>> rich to hide their riches and become richer and richer while the
>> poor just get a tool for exchanging digital value they don't have.
> 
> Maybe I can find more accessible words:

In my opinion your original words were great!

> Markets are a natural part of human societies. Wherever people meet,
> even when there is no police and no justice system in sight, they
> will trade goods and establish social norms. I've seen it in the
> outer edges of Indonesia, it's anarchy in the good sense of the word.
> 
> Well, some lucky people will come up with something to sell that
> everybody else wants. Take Michele Ferrero who invented the Nutella
> for example. The normal tendency in an unregulated market for such
> a person is to get richer and richer.

I think we should be careful not to equate an unregulated market where
individuals buy and sell their personal possessions with the sort of
"unregulated" market where an inventor becomes a billionaire. Free
market ideology equates the two but they're actually polar opposites.
The market that allows an inventor to become a billionaire is entirely a
legal construct - it couldn't exist without regulation.

First of all it depends on property rights, in the Marxian sense of
property - that is to say, not property meaning my toothbrush that
nobody else is allowed to use, or my farm where I work to grow food that
I sell, but property meaning my factory where others work on the
condition that whatever they produce belongs to me. Naturalising this
second type of property and confusing it with the first type is one of
capitalism's greatest ideological achievements.

Second, the billionaire's market depends on intellectual property. You
can't build a fortune from an invention unless others are prevented from
copying it (copyright), or forced to give you a share of their profits
if they do so (patents), or forced to use a different name for their
version (trademarks). Personally I think trademarks provide significant
benefits to society - capitalism would be even worse without them - but
there's no denying that they're a form of regulation.

So I don't think we should treat the unlimited accumulation of wealth
via markets as a natural phenomenon or a human universal. Markets exist
everywhere, but not all markets are alike, and a truly unregulated
market would look nothing like the legal constructs that enable
capitalist accumulation.

> I think no person on Earth should have more than a hundred times
> what the poorest person has. My ethical vision however does not
> become reality merely by talking about it. It has to be democratically 
> decided and imposed by a government-like authority,* which you could say
> is also a gesture of anarchism if an anarchist assembly decides to do
> so, but that would mean that democracy is simply an evolution of anarchy,
> which I presume it is.

I see it the other way round - anarchism is (or would be) an evolution
of democracy. But evolution has no up or down, so maybe we're saying the
same thing.

> So Michele deserves to be among the richest people on Earth, but we
> need to take excessive amounts of money away from him and redistribute
> to the poor that deserve a right to exist.

Property rights plus intellectual property rights plus taxation is one
possible set of legal constructs, but let's not forget that there are
infinitely many other possibilities, most of which it's hard for us even
to imagine from our current position.

> This kind of redistribution cannot be implemented if the cash system
> is completely unaccountable to society.

Agreed.

> *) See also the works of Nobel prize winner Elinor Ostrom.
>    She found out that a Commons can only succeed if somebody
>    ensures the rules are respected. A kind of (self-)government.

A commons can exist on a small scale without regulation, just like
markets can. The question for anarchists is either how to make such
structures scale without authority, or how to do away with the need to
scale.

Cheers,
Michael

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