Note: As a number of critiques on the work of Kevin Carson have appeared recently on this blog, I thought I’d finally get round to publishing this short piece. This is a response to some of Carson’s comments on poverty and child labour, which I wrote in the summer of last year before promptly forgetting to post it. The remarks remain current.

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Kevin Carson recently offered a fresh critique of libertarian historical analysis, a theme running throughout much of his work.

The gist of Carson’s stance is as follows:

We live in a heavily hampered market, not a free one.

When looking at the surface, certain “bad”, real life outcomes (poverty, low wages, child labour, sweatshops, etc.) may appear as though they are the products of pure, voluntary relations.

In other words, as regrettable as they are, they are the “best available option” given the harsh circumstances of nature.

Dig a little deeper, however, and you often find state repression of viable alternatives.

For instance, large businesses today may be able to get away with paying low wages if state regulation has served to kill off any genuine competition in the labour market.

But for the restriction, wage rates may be higher.

Looking farther back into history, it is true that the regime of private property and capital accumulation unleashed during the Industrial Revolution resulted in enormous strides in improving the average standard of living.

But one could also argue that the owners of the means of production had the greatest ability to tap into the strong arm of the government. Thus, they could restrict the social mobility of the working class into the capitalist class.

As such, while the general level of progress was decidedly upwards, we cannot conclude that the precise property relations that emerged during that time were optimal.

(This complexity is the reason why the theories of both free marketers and socialists can sound at least plausible when pointing at the historical record.)

More recently, one could apply Carson’s insights to “Big Tech” censorship on their platforms.

“Oh, but these are private companies who can do what they like!” is the cry of the (to use Carson’s terminology) “vulgar libertarian.”

I beg to differ.

Similarly, I would differ with any libertarian who upholds big bank foreclosure of people’s homes as an example of “the freedom of contract”.

There is no “freedom of contract” when one side has the legal privilege of creating the consideration for that contract out of thin air.

Any defence of such circumstances ends up as little more than an unwitting prop of the status quo.

So, in the abstract, and – when applied correctly – I agree with Carson entirely. We cannot analyse real life as if it were a textbook example of the free market in operation.

Indeed, I have referenced his work in my own discussions on the matter (see here).

Unfortunately, I cannot offer much agreement with the article of Carson’s published on this blog.

Here, Carson applies his argument to the work of two scholars, each of whom discusses certain “bad” outcomes:

Benjamin Seevers, who talks about child labour in foreign countries that supply Western goods.

And Ludwig von Mises’ discussion of the conditions of the poorest workers during the Industrial Revolution.

Each author, claims Carson, is guilty of “historical illiteracy” when it comes to the context of hampered market conditions in which child labour or poor working conditions emerged as the “best available option”.

In each instance, however, it is Carson who winds up as the illiterate party.

The purpose of Seevers’ article is to address one, very specific issue: whether banning child labour (or its products) would have the effect of improving child welfare.

His conclusion is no.

In discussing this matter, there is no “vulgar libertarian” assumption on Seevers’ part that all child labour is the product of purely “voluntary” relations.

In fact, he goes to the further length of analysing the effect of banning commodities produced by child labour even in the case of child enslavement:

If you prohibit one form of labor, then the slave owner will direct his or her slaves out of that kind of labor and into others. Prohibiting all forms of child labor will cause the slave owners to direct child slaves into illegal industries so as to avoid detection by the authorities. Given the prevalence of violence in black markets, these slaves will likely be exposed to more violence than they were before.

After accounting for these facts, Seevers’ conclusion concerning the effectiveness of bans remains the same:

[W]hen regulating these actions, the [choice is not] between enslaved children and freed children, but between enslaved children in legal industries (e.g., cocoa fields) and enslaved children in illegal industries (e.g., prostitution). Maybe your conscience will be dirtied if you buy the products made from slavery or child labor, but passing a universal ban on the importation of these products will only spell disaster for the children involved.

So while Seevers might well have been clearer about the precise context of imbalanced power relations, they are beside the point. Whatever the existing level of injustice, heaping more interference on top of it will simply create a worse outcome.

Carson ends up conceding this at the end of his essay – thus rendering everything he has said without much relevance.

So he then has to pivot to the more nebulous question of Seevers’ motivation: that the latter “wanted” to make his point in the “context of a political agenda of defending corporate globalization”.

In other words, Seevers (or his editor) is a nefarious, or, at best, unwitting proponent of the statist-quo.

Now, that might be true; but such a remark is reminiscent of a climate alarmist shooing away disagreement on the grounds that it must be “in the pay of big oil.”

One expects such tactics from low-wattage juveniles inhabiting outfits like Just Stop Oil.

But if Carson professes to be a serious thinker, a lot more is required than the mere observation that Seevers’ kind of article is promulgated by “right-libertarian websites” (itself hardly a pejorative).

Had Carson bothered to read Seevers’ conclusion more carefully, he may have realised a pressing aspect of the contemporary, rather than historical, context that was likely weighing upon the author’s mind:

That everyone expects the state and state regulation to cure all economic ills.

Indeed, there is one, glaring omission in Carson’s stance as I described it earlier:

That if certain “bad outcomes” are, in fact, the result of state interference, then further government interference cannot be the solution.

On this, Carson is silent, but it is the form of both theoretical and historical illiteracy that is far more prevalent and influential in determining policy.

Turning now to his little potshot at Mises, I have to wonder whether Carson even remembered to put on his spectacles.

The words of Mises, from Human Action, with which Carson takes issue, are these:

The factory owners did not have the power to compel anybody to take a factory job. They could only hire people who were ready to work for the wages offered to them. Low as these wage rates were, they were nonetheless much more than these paupers could earn in any other field open to them. [1]

Carson responds by quoting some of his own previous work:

See, laborers just happen to be stuck with this crappy set of options – the employing classes have absolutely nothing to do with it. And the owning classes just happen to have all these means of production on their hands, and the laboring classes just happen to be propertyless proletarians who are forced to sell their labor on the owners’ terms. The possibility that the employing classes might be directly implicated in state policies that reduced the available options of laborers is too ludicrous even to consider. [emphasis in the original]

The problem here is that Carson has lifted a tiny quotation out of a chapter in which Mises provides a detailed explanation as to why people were so eager to flee the countryside to factory work.

Had Carson bothered to read the whole chapter, he would have seen that Mises’ had a very thorough understanding of the unjust circumstances endured by the agricultural labourers that contributed to that exodus:

Economic conditions were highly unsatisfactory on the eve of the Industrial Revolution. The traditional social system was not elastic enough to provide for the needs of a rapidly increasing population. Neither farming nor the guilds had any use for the additional hands. Business was imbued with the inherited spirit of privilege and exclusive monopoly; its institutional foundations were licenses and the grant of a patent of monopoly; its philosophy was restriction and the prohibition of competition both domestic and foreign. The number of people for whom there was no room left in the rigid system of paternalism and government tutelage of business grew rapidly. They were virtually outcasts. The apathetic majority of these wretched people lived from the crumbs that fell from the tables of the established castes. In the harvest season they earned a trifle by occasional help on farms; for the rest they depended upon private charity and communal poor relief. Thousands of the most vigorous youths of these strata were pressed into the service of the Royal Army and Navy; many of them were killed or maimed in action; many more perished ingloriously from the hardships of the barbarous discipline, from tropical diseases, or from syphilis. Other thousands, the boldest and most ruthless of their class, infested the country as vagabonds, beggars, tramps, robbers, and prostitutes. The authorities did not know of any means to cope with these individuals other than the poorhouse and the workhouse. The support the government gave to the popular resentment against the introduction of new inventions and labor-saving devices made things quite hopeless.[2]

Mises even identifies in black and white the enclosure movement – the very circumstance cited by Carson as the impetus for the rush to the factories – as the cause of the “dire wretchedness” of the lowest orders.[3]

So where, in all of this, is the “right-libertarian tendency to avoid any consideration of structural power differentials or background violence?” Where is Mises’ failure to “look even one micron beneath the immediate situation” when explaining why the factories were havens to the masses?

There is another point of Mises’ discussion ignored by Carson – one to which the Austrian would later devote an entire treatise:

That economics and history are separate realms, and that one cannot deduce economic laws from examining historical circumstances.

The mainstream profession – that which has the ear of governments and central banks – is yet to absorb this lesson. As such, I would suggest to Carson that this failure too is a more pressing form of illiteracy.

In discussing these matters, I have made no comment on whether Carson’s own, substantive understanding of history is accurate, nor have I mentioned his own economic theory. Some Libertarian Alliance readers may find each of these wanting.

Rather, my focus has been on the accusation that either of the two authors discussed is guilty of ignoring underlying conditions and/or whether such conditions are relevant to the points they are trying to make.

In this regard, it is one thing for Carson to superimpose his personal preoccupation with history onto the work of a newbie like Seevers.

But when it comes to Mises, I’m reminded of David Gordon’s echo of Ralph Waldo Emerson in response to a similar misfire at both Mises and Rothbard:

If you strike at a king, you must kill him.

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Notes

[1] Ludwig von Mises, Human Action: A Treatise on Economics, The Scholars’ Edition, Ludwig von Mises Institute (1998). 615.

[2] Ibid., 614.

[3] Ibid., 615-6.