Economic Calculation --- The Austrians' Failure

[ARealConservative]

I can't believe it's not Shaka.

A post referring to some failure of the Austrian school, a demand to speak with random people on a forum and pretend that they are Austrian scholars, bloated diction to the point of incomprehensibility; the only thing missing is a link pimping his book/site, or some sort of comment about "axiomatic" economics.

they both post at debatepolitics.com.

And they both prefer the use of hundred dollar words to hide the true intent behind their ideology.

 

[ARealConservative]

Here, you might like this.

So he thinks I'm you, while you think he's me. Maybe you two are the same person?

fyi ~ Onion Eater = Shaka

 

[Agnapostate]

they both post at debatepolitics.com.

And they both prefer the use of hundred dollar words to hide the true intent behind their ideology.

Really? He says that me, Scucca, and Wessexman are at the head of a market socialist cabal based in England that works on shutting down free market websites. When I start repeating things like that, feel free to compare us.

 

[Deborah K]

I think personally that it is the main aberration in the system. So a resounding yes from me.



Forums are never about action it seems unless the action is already there pushing the agenda on the forums. Trying to use forums to get people refocused on actual action items, I've found to be nearly futile.

Instead of discussing/educating about local banking, alternative currencies, food co-ops and local agriculture, homesteadable land, education in law, etc., we're still stuck on explaining that statism and centrist thinking are both old and generally not good. And many who fancy themselves free-thinkers are content to spend endless hours mish-mashing back and forth half-formed adolescent thoughts about what this system vs. that system, or this worldview vs that, or this metaphysical view vs that means, on these forums.

Instead of educating themselves towards action, they educate themselves towards inaction.

The only time I think it's proper to debate theory, is when you are proposing some kind of actionable item where current theory or 'ways of thinking' are in a state of conflict with the actionable item. In that vein I maybe see what the OP is trying to do, but still unsure really of his aim.

Anyway, that's my half-formed adolescent explanation of it.

Thank you Wizard. I agree wholeheartedly. And when I finally have the neighborhood network project off the ground, I'll be picking your brain about alternative currencies.

 

[tmosley]

Here, you might like this.

So he thinks I'm you, while you think he's me. Maybe you two are the same person?

Ok, now I am lol'ing.

Thanks for that.

 

[Agnapostate]

I don't think we should deluge the thread with off-topic comments of every variety; it would be unfortunate to be bogged down. I responded to the comments related to the economic calculation problem; shoot me a visitor message or a PM if there was a different topic you were interested in discussing, or just start a thread on it, of course.

I have told you repeteadly I dont understand how the system you propose works, therefore I can not give any opinion on it.

I advocate anarchism communism, which involves the elimination of capitalism, the state, and existing managerial hierarchies in favor of a decentrally planned libertarian economy. For an example of something similar, consider this review of the "participatory economics" (parecon) model created by Michael Albert and Robin Hahnel, which I'd describe as a form of "libertarian collectivism." It's theoretically compatible with either minarchism or anarchism, and is collectivist in nature, as it's reliant on the abolition of markets but preservation of remuneration primarily based on individual measurements of labor inputs rather than needs, as communism would be.

This is a model designed to yield Pareto optimal allocation through decentralized planning. It is an effort to overcome the commodity fetishism of markets, market-bias towards private goods at the expense of public goods, externalities, and market failures of all kinds. Additionally, their model attempts to go beyond the hierarchical decision-making inherent in central planning. It is in many respects a well thought-through effort to go beyond markets without succumbing to the domination of central planning.

The model relies on the existence of "consumer councils" organized geographically by neighborhood, municipality, state, and federal jurisdictions. They start out small and local, yet become aggregated until their plans combine into a national system. The "consumer councils" are assumed to be self-interested with each member assumed to act in her/his own individual interest. They are "rational maximizers" as is assumed in neoclassicism. The effective "check" on each unit is the fact that they exist within a network of other local consumer councils, who also want to maximize self-interest. Also, the self-interest of consumer councils is checked by the rational maximizing behavior of "worker councils" in production. "Worker councils" likewise seek to achieve the best working conditions and most income under conditions that are not competitive but that are collectively monitored by other competing workers' councils. The democratically run worker councils are grouped by industry and proceed from the shopfloor upwards to the federal level. Plans are drawn through an iterative process in which consumer councils articulate what they want to purchase and worker councils articulate what they want to produce. Each person, as both consumer and producer, gets to vote according to the extent to which she/he is affected by the decision.

My own preferred "system" is somewhat to the left of that as it's both explicitly anarchist and communist in nature, but the fundamental elements of decentralized socialist economic planning are present in both.

Have Austrians lost the calculation debate? Depends on what you think the debate is all about. To me, it's about the failure of central economic planning. So I think they've clearly won it and beaten its dead horse. The only thing I've think they've lost is their ability to keep up with the times, and a sense of open-mindedness. IDK, I think there is a perversion of language where anything the government does or is involved in is "socialism" and to use the economic calculation argument in some of these cases is not totally valid. And as you mention, they fail to even address other types of "socialisms." I think there are some great insights you can gain from the economic calculation argument, and interesting applications for it--I'm just not so sure about the scholarship in that area nowadays.

From the beginning, the Austrians' commentary was incomplete. Mises's original paper failed to address Enrico Barone's development of a Pareto optimal socialist economic model in his 1908 paper The Ministry of Production in the Collectivist State, for example, instead smugly commenting, "[socialists] have criticized freely enough the economic structure of 'free society, but have consistently neglected to apply to the economics of the disputed socialist state the same caustic acumen." While Hayek commented on the market socialist models that were proposed during his lifetime in his and Lionel Robbins's debates with Oskar Lange, Henry Dickinson, and Abba Lerner, he dismissed decentrally planned socialism without argument, stating that "[t]he earlier systems of more decentralized socialism like guild-socialism or syndicalism need not concern us here since it seems now to be fairly generally admitted that they provide no mechanism whatever for a rational direction of economic activity." There was no elaboration on who "generally admitted" this, though the existence of widespread central planning and nonexistence of widespread decentral planning at the time was probably the chief basis for the Austrians' primary focus on the former. Hayek was undoubtedly an important figure, and though Lange wanted a statue of Mises erected in the greatest hall of the central planning board to honor his identification of problems that socialists had to address, it's Hayek who deserves this honor, as we see the dispersed knowledge problems he identified prevalent in the orthodox firm structure of our present capitalist economy and a clear alternative available in socialism.

No you have not solved the economic calculation problem. People that come up with ideas are not reimbursed. What happens then is that the entire equation for the cost of production of the goods is wrong.

If I can not own property or work on my own terms I am taken out of the competition and there is no way you can set the real price of the good.

You don't seem to understand the premise of this thread, which focuses primarily on knowledge problems identified by Hayek. As for price problems, market socialism is unaffected by this to begin with since it retains a price system and competitive market exchange. Decentrally planned socialism incorporates coordination between consumers and producers in aggregations of community assemblies and syndicate councils to determine values based on extraction and production costs and consumer utility in a manner similar to that of the aforementioned "parecon" model.

To me economic calculation problem means, there is no one who is better informed what to do with what's mine than me.

That's right, but both market socialism and decentrally planned socialism would facilitate that reality to a greater extent than capitalism can, since actually existing capitalism is itself dependent on a substantial degree of central planning. Your conception of minimal-state or stateless capitalism could theoretically achieve this also, but it remains a textbook abstraction at this point and is likely to remain so because of the integral role of the government as a growth and stabilization agent in the capitalist economy.

I'm actually really glad you showd up, Agnapostate, because you're right about how very little attention has been payed by the Austrian school to people like Bakunin/Kropotkin, Proudhon, Chomsky, etc, as if Marx was the only socialist philsopher to ever exist (although I hesitate to call Proudhon a socialist). I'd personally love to see more discussion between these groups and Austrians, and amonst those groups themselves.

Marx's primary focus was on anti-capitalism rather than socialism and he advocated substantially more decentralization than is generally acknowledged after his observation of the successes of the Paris Commune, so I'm not sure it's just to lump him in with Leninism and its derivatives, as is typically done. I earlier mentioned the Austrians' neglect of decentrally planned socialism aside from baseless assertions (such as Mises's snigger in the introductory paragraph of Economic Calculation about "Proudhon’s fantastic dreams of an 'exchange bank,'" though Proudhon was a market socialist detached from Bakunin and Kroptokin, as you mentioned), but figures such as Peter Boettke, Steven Horwitz, and David Prychitko have now paid attention to the latest development in market socialism that explicitly incorporates Hayek's insights in the form of Theodore Burczak's Socialism After Hayek. We've still seen no focus on decentrally planned socialism, but I'm glad we have that much.

The only well-known critique (itself only an essay) of any of these schools of thought done by an Austrian philosopher was Rothbard's The Death-Wish of the Anarcho-Communists

And it's unfortunate that that rather ill-contrived piece should be at the helm of a ragged literature, since it contains basic ignorance of anarchist theory (Bakunin is described as a "communist" despite the fact that Malatesta and the other communists in the Jura Federation delayed declaring their economic vision until after Bakunin's death out of respect for him, anarchist Spain is similarly described as communist despite being primarily collectivist and retaining money, which undermines his more slanderous allegation that the death penalty was prescribed for the use of money, etc.)

So the good old collective would have to vote on everything regarding every resource in order to just begin working or utilizing these resources? Sounds like the type of formula that would quickly end up with people dieing.

No, there would not be constant votes or management squabbles; there would instead be coordination similar to that of the aforementioned "parecon" model. The rest of your comments seem to be based on that mistaken assumption, so I thought I'd address it here. That said, is this directly related to the economic calculation problem?

There is no 'complete market', there are just markets. People trading goods = a market. If I trade a fish I caught for a hammer some guy forged, I am assigning value. The hammer is competing with the value of everything else I could possibly exchange the fish for, including the fish itself. When people do shit like this it is a market.

No, mere exchange is not sufficient to constitute a market. What also needs to be present is some form of currency and more importantly, competitive exchange, neither of which are elements of anarchist communism.

By the way Agnapostate you are better off going to the mises.org forum for a technical debate. People there do happen to be more familiar with Austrian economics.

Jon Irenicus banned me from there after I criticized Walter Block's ignorance of dynamic monopsony. He apparently did this unilaterally, since at least one mod seemed to believe that I'd be coming back.

There really need to be no technical debate. What he advertises fails miserably in 3rd world countries.

There are no 3rd world countries in which socialist economic models characterize prevailing conditions, let alone any 3rd world countries in which anarchist communism is the dominant system.

He basically wants the industry to be converted to co-ops. That is where workers make all the decisions of how to run the factory. They barely survive in countries like Argentina while their counterparts do much better in comparison.

That is not correct. I chose to address this because worker-owned enterprises and labor cooperatives (particularly the latter) utilize more decentralized organizational methods that render them resistant to the dispersed knowledge problems that Hayek elaborated on and that plague orthodox capitalist firms, which is why Austrian figures like David Prychitko support workers' ownership and management as the optimal form of firm organization. But aside from the fact that the unification of ownership and management eliminates principal-agent problems, what's more important is that there's a substantial empirical literature that supports the premise that workers' ownership and management represent more efficient organization arrangements. For example, consider Doucouliagos's Worker participation and productivity in labor-managed and participatory capitalist firms: A Meta-Analysis:

Using meta-analytic techniques, the author synthesizes the results of 43 published studies to investigate the effects on productivity of various forms of worker participation: worker participation in decision making; mandated codetermination; profit sharing; worker ownership (employee stock ownership or individual worker ownership of the firm's assets); and collective ownership of assets (workers' collective ownership of reserves over which they have no individual claim). He finds that codetermination laws are negatively associated with productivity, but profit sharing, worker ownership, and worker participation in decision making are all positively associated with productivity. All the observed correlations are stronger among labor-managed firms (firms owned and controlled by workers) than among participatory capitalist firms (firms adopting one or more participation schemes involving employees, such as ESOPs or quality circles).

I refer to Doucouliagos's paper first and foremost not only because its status as a meta-analysis endows it with a degree of protection from methodological deficiencies that might affect individual studies, but also because there's clear evidence that workers' democratic management supplements productivity beyond what mere ownership schemes can achieve.

If this was true at all, a lot more people would be shot than we currently see. You'd have to indoctrinate people into your belief for this to have any chance, and you would completely be ignoring praxeology.

We'd be ignoring praxeology to the same extent that Misesians who crow that the dissolution of the Soviet Union was evidence of their master's correctness ignore the fact that he would have disliked the notion that he could be "proven" correct by empirical developments rather than by his logical reasoning from the point of self-evident axioms. But yeah, it's best not to start the devilish socialist revolution with the local college class alone, and I don't know of anyone that plans to.

Only if we allow government to become involved with markets in the first place, which it is , which is your first mistake when you use the word Free Market. Free Market =! Government. Your conclusion is incorrect, you do not understand the proper use of the term free market.

Actually, that's not the case. While "an"-caps and the like frequently tell me that I don't understand that their conception of capitalism is different from the actually existing model and I clearly explain that I do, which is usually followed by their employment of personal attacks, I actually do understand the "proper use" quite well. In fact, my comment that the propertarian conception of capitalism was characterized by a lack of the "expansive government structure required for sustainment purposes" should have illustrated that.

Democracy can be good, it can be bad. The problem is knowing where a democratic process is needed and where it is not. A direct democracy is a bad thing. For instance all the right handed people may decide to vote that all the left handed people should have to do twice the amount of work. Or we can go down the list. In all honesty a direct democracy will end up as slavery for someone else.

I didn't understand this comment. You assumed without basis that direct democracy would lack the liberal mores (such as mechanisms to prevent the tyranny of the majority) that every advanced republican country incorporates.

If we are to take a walk down the road of having government we have to recognize that there are certain things government cannot touch. One of those things should be markets. Now you have your democracy through peoples ability to decide without force were their money should be applied. Nothing survives that the people do not want.

That's not the case. Firstly, there's the obvious fact that one must have sufficient financial resources to exert influence in the capitalist economy to begin with, which many people lack, and then there's the fact of the vastly disproportionate financial resources and consequently vastly disproportionate influence that characterize the capitalist economy. And this is to say nothing of the negative externalities, market power, and asymmetric information that render the capitalist economy seriously deficient, particularly the labor market.

 

[Socratic Method]

I'm actually really glad you showd up, Agnapostate, because you're right about how very little attention has been payed by the Austrian school to people like Bakunin/Kropotkin, Proudhon, Chomsky, etc, as if Marx was the only socialist philsopher to ever exist (although I hesitate to call Proudhon a socialist). I'd personally love to see more discussion between these groups and Austrians, and amonst those groups themselves.

The only well-known critique (itself only an essay) of any of these schools of thought done by an Austrian philosopher was Rothbard's The Death-Wish of the Anarcho-Communists

Well that's the only "well known critique", known by you. Have you looked for others? There are a fair few more on that Mises site. Easy to find. And well known.

As for why their are not more? Probably because for the last few decades socialist movements had been in decline, as a result of the failure of communism, the falling of the Berlin wall, end of cold war etc. And the "success" of "capitalism", which really was just the benefits from the artificial boom period, when Nixon went off the gold standard in 71.

I guess they are now making a come back? Every cat and stray dog thinks capitalism has failed? Teheeh

Cheers,
SM.

 

[Pennsylvania]

Have you looked for others? There are a fair few more on that Mises site. Easy to find. And well known.

Yes I have searched the mises site. That was the only one I could find, as well as the only one I've ever seen posted on this forum when these topics come up. Which ones are you referring to?

 

[Socratic Method]

Yes I have searched the mises site. That was the only one I could find, as well as the only one I've ever seen posted on this forum when these topics come up. Which ones are you referring to?

http://mises.org/article.aspx?Id=1132

http://mises.org/story/3304

http://mises.org/books/socialism/contents.aspx

http://mises.org/humanaction/chap33sec4.asp

Hmm... that's kind of weak I guess. Mises whole book on Socialism is good. Maybe lew rockwell is worth a shot?

Cheers,
SM.

 

[silverhandorder]

You don't seem to understand the premise of this thread, which focuses primarily on knowledge problems identified by Hayek. As for price problems, market socialism is unaffected by this to begin with since it retains a price system and competitive market exchange. Decentrally planned socialism incorporates coordination between consumers and producers in aggregations of community assemblies and syndicate councils to determine values based on extraction and production costs and consumer utility in a manner similar to that of the aforementioned "parecon" model.

Yes but you still distort the mechanism you claim to by pass. Your decentralized model on a micro scale fails all the check. It can't transfer to macro because of that. Within your small community there will be people who will under perform because they do not get rewarded for extra work. In that small community you will have people who will not come up with new ideas because their time is better spent on other things. In that small community you will have a black market run by people who will produce things on their own time and sell to their neighbors without informing anyone else.

Your foundation is already rotten. Soviets tried what you suggest. Granted they went on a totalitarian rampage. But how are you going to enforce your system when 5% 10% or more fight back? Kill them all? Put them in concentration camps? Take away their things?

There are no 3rd world countries in which socialist economic models characterize prevailing conditions, let alone any 3rd world countries in which anarchist communism is the dominant system.

Yeah because the very people who practiced it were like "Fuck this shit, we need managers"

That is not correct. I chose to address this because worker-owned enterprises and labor cooperatives (particularly the latter) utilize more decentralized organizational methods that render them resistant to the dispersed knowledge problems that Hayek elaborated on and that plague orthodox capitalist firms, which is why Austrian figures like David Prychitko support workers' ownership and management as the optimal form of firm organization. But aside from the fact that the unification of ownership and management eliminates principal-agent problems, what's more important is that there's a substantial empirical literature that supports the premise that workers' ownership and management represent more efficient organization arrangements. For example, consider Doucouliagos's Worker participation and productivity in labor-managed and participatory capitalist firms: A Meta-Analysis:

If those firms are traditionally run by a manger there is a reason for that. If workers running it made sense then it would have been like that in the first place.

"He finds that codetermination laws are negatively associated with productivity, but profit sharing, worker ownership, and worker participation in decision making are all positively associated with productivity."

From your own article you are proven wrong. This says that if it is done voluntarily then yeah they are more efficient, they are the product of the free market. Otherwise the laws that try to simulate this reduce worker productivity.

 

[cheapseats]

... decentrally planned ...


... decentralized socialist economic planning ...


... Decentrally planned socialism incorporates coordination ...


... aggregations of community assemblies and syndicate councils to determine values ...


... there would instead be coordination ...

REGULATION, thy other names are PLANNING and COORDINATION.

Regulation is antithetical to Liberty -- we ARE clear on that, yes? Decrees from committees constitute CONTROL, same as decrees from Czars.

Separately, there is empirical evidence aplenty that new and improved Planners, Coordinators and Regulators, even IF they are better initially, are ultimately as bad and not infrequently worse than the previous Planners, Coordinators and Regulators.

Human nature is human nature. To disregard that is folly.

 

[Live_Free_Or_Die]

nt

 

[Zeeder]

I still don't understand this thread.


All I can get out of it is that the poster thinks that instead of one big Soviet Union, we should have a bunch of small Soviet Unions. That way they could compete to see who can get the poorest the fastest.

 

[silverhandorder]

I still don't understand this thread.


All I can get out of it is that the poster thinks that instead of one big Soviet Union, we should have a bunch of small Soviet Unions. That way they could compete to see who can get the poorest the fastest.

Exactly! He thinks size is the problem lol.

 

[tmosley]

Exactly! He thinks size is the problem lol.

To some extent, he's right, but what he proposes is nothing more than a fancy form of tribalism. We tried that for, I don't know, a hundred thousand years or so, and well, it didn't work out that great. It was only when people began respecting other individuals rights that society and technology really began to advance.

Communism is the best possible form of government, so long as the size of any individual doesn't exceed one. Ten at the most (ie families). Even then, you are probably still going to use money to deal with people, rather than force, or your family isn't going to be very cohesive.

 

[silverhandorder]

He is right only to the extend of the management and organization it takes. Obviously it is easier for 10 people to organize and manage them selves then 100 and a 1000. Edit: Even still I would wager that if those 10 people have one exceptional individual that if they delegate him with the authority to decide on how to run the business then they would outperform 10 people with the same asset but greatly diminished ability to provide such council.

But where he fails is the very thing he claims he by passes. That is setting real price for goods.

 

[Knighted]

I think Agnapostate has presented a reasonable argument. I've considered this before, and when you compare capitalism and socialism and examine what exactly makes each one a success or failure, you will find that they are both far more alike than different if you break it down to a micro level.

I believe that on a small scale micro level, the ability of socialism to thrive probably rivals that of capitalism. In fact, it may even be a better system than capitalism in some ways on a small scale. It's only on larger scales where the two begin to greatly diverge. Consider an example. If you have five employees running an employee-owned company and undertaking in equal profit sharing, the motivation of each employee to improve his bottom line is still likely to exist, so long as each employee experiences the fruits of his labor. If one employee puts an enormous amount of effort into his work, he is likely to see the rewards in the way of a fatter paycheck. But if it's a company with five thousand employees undertaking in profit sharing, it makes no difference if a single employee works his tail off or simply snoozes in the coffee room every day - his pay will be roughly the same. I think this is why in a free market capitalist system, which leaves the door open for such socialist organization structures, it's fairly common to see small businesses with profit sharing, but we rarely ever find such businesses successfully thriving at larger scales - because they simply aren't effective.

We also have what could almost be considered small socialist sects already around the country in the form of local governments. It's not uncommon for small local governments to vote on and legislate measures that redistribute money from taxes from the most productive to the least, such as in creating poor shelters, food banks, etc. This is rarely the disaster that centralized large scale socialism has in the past created. The question is why?

Similar to the example above, I believe it's because the less bloated bureaucracy becomes, the more power people have in choosing to support or abandon such collectivist measures. If too many people begin to freeload and piggyback on such a local system, it's well within the power of the productive people of a local government to retract their tax dollars through voting or even to pack up and move elsewhere with relative ease. If such a system begins to fail or become inefficient, it's very possible for participants to mend it. That's because a single vote in a local government among some 10,000 people is far more powerful than a vote in a federal government among 300,000,000 people - especially when that vote only gains you only a 'representative' to decide what is the best use for your money. But in the massively bloated federal government bureaucracy, such inefficiency has the ability to linger on for decades due to the much poorer organization structure caused by extending representation to such a convoluted level that one individual has almost no say on matters involving their own money anymore.

 

[heavenlyboy34]

Since I propose neither the elimination of possessive property nor the existence of state apparatus, these comments are rather inapplicable to me anyway. What can you say to these decentralized socialist models' bypass of the price and knowledge problems...while capitalist economic structure is dependent on central planning and individual orthodox capitalist firms are susceptible to dispersed knowledge problems?

Some forms of capitalism do this, but laissez-faire capitalism, as advocated by most Austrians and anarcho-capitalists, does not.

 

[heavenlyboy34]

I think Agnapostate has presented a reasonable argument.

The reason Agnapostate's argument was unreasonable, IMO, is that he deliberately left his terminology vague, thus misleading the reader.

 

[Apocalypse]

Obviously there are...time constraints on me, so I've tried to offer a limited reply.

Yes but you still distort the mechanism you claim to by pass. Your decentralized model on a micro scale fails all the check. It can't transfer to macro because of that. Within your small community there will be people who will under perform because they do not get rewarded for extra work. In that small community you will have people who will not come up with new ideas because their time is better spent on other things. In that small community you will have a black market run by people who will produce things on their own time and sell to their neighbors without informing anyone else.

What is the basis for these allegations? You've not been very descriptive and haven't provided actual arguments to support such assertions.

Your foundation is already rotten. Soviets tried what you suggest. Granted they went on a totalitarian rampage. But how are you going to enforce your system when 5% 10% or more fight back? Kill them all? Put them in concentration camps? Take away their things?

Are you serious? The political class of the Soviet Union was hostile to socialism and destroyed workers' democracy in the early years of its existence, which was the basis for its condemnation by such luminaries as Peter Kropotkin, Emma Goldman, and Voline. You've confused socialism with state capitalism.

Yeah because the very people who practiced it were like "Fuck this shit, we need managers"

It's a shame that statism is so prevalent, innit?

If those firms are traditionally run by a manger there is a reason for that. If workers running it made sense then it would have been like that in the first place.

You're suggesting that the optimal mode of organization will spontaneously arise before anything else? Did democracy predate monarchism, then? Or perhaps your point is that superior efficiency will cause such firms to arise spontaneously now since they'll be more competitive? But have you not considered the factors of market and wealth concentration as significant barriers to firm entry?

"He finds that codetermination laws are negatively associated with productivity, but profit sharing, worker ownership, and worker participation in decision making are all positively associated with productivity."

From your own article you are proven wrong. This says that if it is done voluntarily then yeah they are more efficient, they are the product of the free market. Otherwise the laws that try to simulate this reduce worker productivity.

What? Codetermination laws entail a specific form of financial structure associated with partial workers' ownership. The reason for their failure was that they merely constituted a little shift rather than an establishment of legitimate ownership and democratic management by the workers themselves...which is why codetermination is distinct from that and why an ESOP is distinct from a labor cooperative.

REGULATION, thy other names are PLANNING and COORDINATION.

Regulation is antithetical to Liberty -- we ARE clear on that, yes? Decrees from committees constitute CONTROL, same as decrees from Czars.

Separately, there is empirical evidence aplenty that new and improved Planners, Coordinators and Regulators, even IF they are better initially, are ultimately as bad and not infrequently worse than the previous Planners, Coordinators and Regulators.

Human nature is human nature. To disregard that is folly.

Decrees from corporate power constitute control in the presently existing capitalist economy, and are an approximation of monarchism in that they entail control of the affairs of masses by a power elite. My proposal entails democratic "control" by citizens of their own lives and surroundings.

When I knew nothing of anarchism except what I read on Wikipedia, I'd see that anarchism was described as involving voluntary organization rather than "government" and I'd angrily mutter, "But that's government!" I'd been deluded into thinking that anarchists legitimately advocated chaos and disorder, as the majority of people are. The distinction between self-management and governance by others, as I see it, lies in the ability to control things to the extent that they affect you. If you are a worker in a factory, you ought to have a say in the way it's run, rather than be subject to the purely hierarchical dictates of upper management, who are less affected by such rules than you are. You ought to have the right to place pictures of friends and family in your cubicle or office because you are the only one affected by their presence to any significant degree but playing a loud radio is another matter and you ought to be legitimately restricted from doing so, because it affects others.