Author: Sam Koritz

Reader Doug Barrett from Edmonton, Canada, suggests that the 9 cases in Nozick’s Tale of the Slave can be expanded upon:

10. They read ‘the Tale of the Slave’ and they are now aware that you feel you are a slave. “We’re sorry you feel that way.” they say. “If you want to, you can go somewhere else and live in a way that you think isn’t slave-ish. Or you can stay with us, and play by our rules, and if you do you are welcome to try to persuade us that you have a better way to live.”

I [Doug Barrett] think once this offer is made, one cannot really claim to be a slave. And continuing further still…

11. You persuade them. “Hey, this living as free individuals is great!” they all say. “By the way, some of us didn’t like being called a 10,000-headed monster. Some of us want to beat you up for that insult.” And they beat you up. Continue reading “Tale of Slave II”

Frederick W. Kagan, author, and teacher of military history at West Point, is a tax-and-spend hegemonist. In “The art of war,” an article from the November, 2003, The New Criterion, which I found on the excellent aldaily.com site, Kagan warns about the dangers of the “search for ‘efficiency’ in military affairs.” Rather than an efficient military, see, the US needs a massive military with intentional redundancy in equipment and functions. Or is he arguing that military defense is possible and inexpensive but world hegemony is expensive in blood and treasure — and futile to boot?

Excerpts:

In each of the periods in recent history in which one might see a fundamental change in the nature of war, it is true that normally one state begins with a dramatic lead. Revolutionary France’s ability in the 1790s to mobilize vast conscript armies and to sustain that mobilization for years gave her an important advantage over continental states unable to match such levels of mobilization. Prussia’s early and enthusiastic development of a dense railroad net and of the general staff structure needed to plan for and control a railroad mobilization led directly to her crushing victories over Austria in 1866 and over France in 1871. The Nazis’ creation of a technologically advanced and highly trained armored force, along with a significantly better armored warfare doctrine, led directly to the destruction of the Franco-British army in 1940.

In each case, however, we must also consider the sequel. Napoleonic France, Imperial Germany, and Nazi Germany all ultimately lost subsequent wars and were destroyed. The reasons for those failures are enlightening about the limitations of the current definition of revolution in military affairs. …

History so far, therefore, has been very clear that “asymmetrical advantages” gained by one state do not normally last very long. Technology and technique inevitably spreads. Other states acquire either similar or counteracting capabilities. The final victors of each new “revolutionary” epoch have not usually been the states that initiated the revolution, but those that responded best once the technologies and techniques had become common property.

It also shows that the initial successes those “revolutionary” states achieved have tended to breed arrogance and overconfidence, hindering their ability to respond as other states began to match their capabilities. Napoleonic France, Imperial Germany, and Nazi Germany all ossified in their techniques after the initial victories, and lost to enemies who, forced by defeat, built on their own advances more successfully.

The search for an indefinite American “asymmetrical advantage,” therefore, requires not merely a revolution in military affairs: it also requires a fundamental revolution in human affairs of a sort never seen before. It requires that America continue to change her armed forces so rapidly and successfully that no other state can ever catch up—indeed, that no other state in the world even try.

…[F]ew if any of America’s enemies will have the vast resource-stretching responsibilities that America has. They will be concerned only with their own region of the world and will focus their efforts on developing communications and target tracking systems only over a small portion of the globe. They will not need a dense global satellite constellation or the ability to project power over thousands of miles. The costs to them of developing systems comparable to America’s, but only in a restricted geographic area, will accordingly be much smaller than the price the U.S. has had to pay to achieve that capability everywhere.

Then, too, other states can reap the benefits of modern communications systems without bearing the expensive burden of basic scientific research and development. Microprocessors, satellites, encrypted laser communications systems, cell phone systems, and the whole host of technologies that form the basis of American military superiority are now the property of the world. It will not cost America’s enemies anything like what it cost the U.S. to develop its capabilities, either in money or in time. Since technology inevitably becomes less expensive as it proliferates and as time goes on, moreover, the situation for America’s would-be adversaries will only improve in this regard. …

When America’s enemies have developed the technology and trained the people who will use it, they will also have to develop the doctrines and techniques to make it effective. In this regard, they have the most significant advantage of all. Much of America’s tested doctrine has been published, much can be deduced from the CNN coverage of America’s most recent wars. Once again, America’s enemies can start from the position of proven success that the U.S. armed forces achieved, and build from there.

Their real advantage in this area, however, results from the fact that they will be developing armed forces specifically designed to fight an enemy with the same capabilities. America’s military has not done so. American military doctrine continues to foresee fighting enemies lacking any significant capacity to deploy precision guided munitions, without dense satellite constellations and communications systems, and without the ability to strike targets precisely at great distances. It is one of the more troubling lessons of the history of new military technology that the states that pioneer the new technologies and techniques generally fail to adapt successfully to the situation in which all major states have the same technologies and techniques. It remains to be seen whether America will do any better than her predecessors in this regard.

We know that conscription is slavery and empire is slavery but what is slavery?

“The Tale of the Slave” from Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia, pp. 290-292.

Consider the following sequence of cases, which we shall call the Tale of the Slave, and imagine it is about you.

1. There is a slave completely at the mercy of his brutal master’s whims. He often is cruelly beaten, called out in the middle of the night, and so on.

2. The master is kindlier and beats the slave only for stated infractions of his rules (not fulfilling the work quota, and so on). He gives the slave some free time.

3. The master has a group of slaves, and he decides how things are to be allocated among them on nice grounds, taking into account their needs, merit, and so on.

4. The master allows his slaves four days on their own and requires them to work only three days a week on his land. The rest of the time is their own.

5. The master allows his slaves to go off and work in the city (or anywhere they wish) for wages. He requires only that they send back to him three-sevenths of their wages. He also retains the power to recall them to the plantation if some emergency threatens his land; and to raise or lower the three-sevenths amount required to be turned over to him. He further retains the right to restrict the slaves from participating in certain dangerous activities that threaten his financial return, for example, mountain climbing, cigarette smoking.

6. The master allows all of his 10,000 slaves, except you, to vote, and the joint decision is made by all of them. There is open discussion, and so forth, among them, and they have the power to determine to what uses to put whatever percentage of your (and their) earnings they decide to take; what activities legitimately may be forbidden to you, and so on.

Let us pause in this sequence of cases to take stock. If the master contracts this transfer of power so that he cannot withdraw it, you have a change of master. You now have 10,000 masters instead of just one; rather you have one 10,000-headed master. Perhaps the 10,000 even will be kindlier than the benevolent master in case 2. Still, they are your master. However, still more can be done. A kindly single master (as in case 2) might allow his slave(s) to speak up and try to persuade him to make a certain decision. The 10,000-headed monster can do this also.

7. Though still not having the vote, you are at liberty (and are given the right) to enter into the discussions of the 10,000, to try to persuade them to adopt various policies and to treat you and themselves in a certain way. They then go off to vote to decide upon policies covering the vast range of their powers.

8. In appreciation of your useful contributions to discussion, the 10,000 allow you to vote if they are deadlocked; they commit themselves to this procedure. After the discussion you mark your vote on a slip of paper, and they go off and vote. In the eventuality that they divide evenly on some issue, 5,000 for and 5,000 against, they look at your ballot and count it in. This has never yet happened; they have never yet had occasion to open your ballot. (A single master also might commit himself to letting his slave decide any issue concerning him about which he, the master, was absolutely indifferent.)

9. They throw your vote in with theirs. If they are exactly tied your vote carries the issue. Otherwise it makes no difference to the electoral outcome.

The question is: which transition from case 1 to case 9 made it no longer the tale of a slave.

The requirement that an object have utility is a necessary component of the labor theory of value, if it is to avoid certain objections. Suppose a person works on something absolutely useless that no one wants. For example, he spends his hours efficiently making a big knot; no one else can do it more quickly. Will this object be that many hours valuable? A theory should not have this consequence. Marx avoids it as follows: “Nothing can have value without being an object of utility. If a thing is useless so is the labor contained in it; the labor does not count as labor, and therefore creates no value.” Isn’t this an ad hoc restriction? Given the rest of the theory, why does it apply? Why doesn’t all efficiently done labor create value? If one has to bring in the fact that it’s of use to people and actually wanted (suppose it were of use, but no one wanted it), then perhaps by looking only at wants, which have to be brought in anyway, one can get a complete theory of value.

Even with the ad hoc constraint that the object must be of some use, there remain problems. For, suppose someone works for 563 hours on something of some very slight utility. This satisfies the necessary condition for value that the object have some utility. Is its value now determined by the amount of labor, yielding the consequence that it is incredibly valuable? No. “For the labor spent on them (commodities) counts effectively only insofar as it is spent in a form that is useful to others.” Marx goes on to say: “Whether that labor is useful for others, and its product consequently capable of satisfying the wants of others, can be proved only by the act of exchange.” If we interpret Marx as saying, not that utility is a necessary condition and that (once satisfied) the amount of labor determines value, but rather that the degree of utility will determine how much (useful) labor has been expended on the object, then we have a theory very different from a labor theory of value.

We can approach this issue from another direction. Suppose that useful things are produced as efficiently as they can be, but that too many of them are produced to sell at a certain price. The price that clears the market is lower than the apparent labor values of the objects; a greater number of efficient hours went into producing them than people are willing to pay for (at a certain price per hour). Does this show that the number of average hours devoted to making an object of significant utility doesn’t determine its value? Marx’s reply is that if there is such overproduction so that the market doesn’t clear at a particular price, then the labor was inefficiently used (less of the thing should have been made), even thought the labor itself wasn’t inefficient. Hence not all of those labor hours constituted socially necessary labor time. The object does not have a value less than the socially necessary number of labor hours expended upon it, for there were fewer socially necessary labor hours expended upon it than meet the eye.

“Suppose that every piece of linen in the market contains no more labor-time than is socially necessary. In spite of this, all the pieces taken as a whole may have had superfluous labor time spent upon them. If the market cannot stomach the whole quantity at the normal price of 2 shillings a yard, this proves that too great a portion of the total labor of the community has been expended in the form of weaving. The effect is the same as if each weaver had expended more labor-time upon his particular product than is socially necessary. (Marx, Capital, p. 120)

Thus Marx holds that this labor isn’t all socially necessary. What is socially necessary, and how much of it is, will be determined by what happens on the market! There is no longer any labor theory of value; the central notion of socially necessary labor time is itself defined in terms of the processes and exchange ratios of a competitive market!

– Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia

To say I am not optimistic about the future of Central Asia is an understatement of oceanic proportions. The entire region is unstable, with ethnic disputes and conflicts over borders, water, oil, and pipelines disrupting every political discussion. It is debatable whether these countries are in fact countries. Turkemenistan, for example, was shoved together by Stalin out of a vast stretch of desert, incorporating five nomadic tribes. There is no logic at all to Kazakhstan. And Uzbekistan as an identifiable country does not exist. Ethnic and tribal distinctions will drive the region’s politics for the foreseeable future. Their current “leaders” are opportunists who seized the moment as communism fell but who have little support. Groups in all the Stans will start to agitate to establish their independence, just as happened in Eastern Europe with the former Yugoslavia and has been occurring regularly over the years in Africa.

The Soviet Union has already broken into fifteen states. People speak eighteen different languages in the five Central Asian republics. There are more than a hundred linguistic, ethnic, religious, and national groups in the region, none of which joined the Soviet Union willingly. …

Sooner or later, all these “countries” will be bankrupt. The currencies of Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan are declining in value rapidly, and both economies are moribund. … Big trouble is in the offing: violent strikes, assassination attempts, bombs exploding, and the eventual outbreak of more than one civil war.

What does this mean for the United States? Very little, probably, for these people will be paying little attention to us and blowing one another up for a very long time to come. Their nuclear weapons have, in large part, been stripped and cannibalized. Those weapons that are intact have not been maintained. Unless U.S. politicians, in their mindless posturing, make the mistake of replaying the “Great Game” all over again, and dragging us into this mess, as their European counterparts did in the nineteenth century, we in the United States should be largely unaffected. Or so it seemed a few years ago. Now the United States, rattling sabers over Iraq, has established bases in Central Asia, making additional enemies in the region. It constantly grieves me to see our politicians dragging us into terrible situations about which no one has done the homework, in places where no one understands the situation on the ground.

– Jim Rogers, Adventure Capitalist: The Ultimate Road Trip

Turkmenistan’s president, Saparmurat Niyazov, former party chairman under the Soviets – the same party continues to dominate Turkmenistan’s politics today – has changed his name to Akbar Turkmenbashy, which means “Great Father of all Turkmen.” And his megalomania is not limited to his renaming the town of Krasnovodsk after himself. His portrait appears on the country’s currency, on bottles of vodka, on packets of tea. Everywhere we went, driving across Turkmenistan, Niyazov stared down on us from statues and from posters that read: ONE PEOPLE, ONE NATION, ONE TURKMENBASHY. …

Niyazov’s cult of personality was in evidence everywhere we looked. On Turkmen television, from the upper-right-hand corner of the screen, his face stared out at the viewer around the clock. It was only by way of significant pressure exerted by the international community that he was prevented from placing his face on his country’s flag. …

Entering Ashkhabad, one passes a line of twenty hotels, all of them brand new, all of them financed by money borrowed from the West, all of them empty. The country is bankrupt, the currency is collapsing, and Turkmenbashy is building monuments to the nation’s various bureaucracies, the Oil Ministry Hotel, the Agriculture Ministry Hotel…

The one good highway in the country – perfectly flat, asphalt, beautiful – is the road Turkmenbashy takes to work from one of the two palaces in which he lives. The country has a spectacular airport but little air traffic in or out, just twenty-five airplanes sitting there empty. Driving into town from the airport, one drives down a well-maintained road lined with fountains on either sided. The houses built along this route have no water when dignitaries drive by – which is when the fountains are turned on. And two blocks behind those houses, behind the faced they represent, the neighborhood is a slum, a Soviet-style disaster. …

In the middle of town, the visitir to Ashkabad comes upon a huge monument, a 246-foot arch, on top of which stands a solid gold statue of Turkmenbashy. The statue rotates, so that the great father of all Turkmen can maintain a perpetual vigil, surveying his entire domain, his arms always pointing to the sun.

Every member of the Turkmen legislature and of the Council of Ministers owns a Mercedes that was given to him by Turkmenbashy. None, however, has a Mercedes S600, which in Central Asia represents the top of the line. Only one such model has been allowed into the country: the car given by Mercedes=Benz of Germany to Turkmenbashy himself, as a kind of thank-you for all the foreign aid money the Turkmen president has funneled the company’s way. You and I provide Turkmenbashy (and by extension Mercedes) this money by way of our various taxes – all in the name of promoting democracy and in actual support of the politics of petrochemicals. This nation of five million people, under the thumb of an absolute dictator, is rich with deposits of natural gas. And we keep feeding this megalomaniac money in the hope that someday he will let us extract it.

– Adventure Capitalist by Jim Rogers