Introduction

This proposal is designed to be a short-term transitional model towards a form of socialism that focuses on abolishing the concentration of private wealth and aims to implement a socialist iteration of equality of opportunity for welfare and self-realisation.

It is meant to be implemented in advanced financialised capitalist economies with developed regulatory institutions. The model does not preclude further uses of conventional redistributive policies via a universalist welfare state.

Equal Shares: Designing a Socialist Economy

There are four corporate actors in this economy. The first is the adult citizenry. The second is the sector of "public firms" but as we'll see these are not owned directly by the state. All large firms belong to this sector. The third is a set of mutual funds and the fourth is the state treasury.

Every adult citizen would receive from the state treasury an equal endowment of coupons which can be used only to buy shares in mutual funds, not money. Only mutual funds can purchase shares in public firms, using coupons. Prices of corporate shares are hence denominated in coupons. They oscillate depending on the supply and demand of shares.

Citizens are free to sell their mutual fund shares for coupons and to reinvest them in other funds. Finally, firms may exchange coupons with the state treasury for investment funds and may purchase coupons from them with money. This is the only point at which coupons exchange for money. The investment funds play the role of equity in the firm.

A share of the firm entitles the owning mutual fund to a share of the firm's profits, and a share of the mutual funds entitles the owning citizens to a share of the fund's revenues. When a citizen dies, his shares must be sold and the coupons are returned to the treasury.

Firm's investment funds come from two sources: bank loans and the state treasury, through coupon exchange. Citizens deposit savings in banks. The supply and demand for loans determines the interest rate (see note) and the supply of coupons and the demand for state investment determines the rate at which coupons exchange for investment funds. The treasury's funds are raised by corporate and personal taxes.

Banks are the primary monitors of firms and tasked with the disciplining of managers. Banks will also be public firms who's shares will likewise be purchasable by mutual funds. Mutual funds are also engaged in monitoring. As majority shareholders, they have representatives on supervisory boards.

Conclusion

The coupon system is meant to endow each citizen with a stream of capital income during his lifetime, a property right in the economic surplus produced by the nation's productive assets. In this economy, there is no capitalist class, there is one class of worker-shareholders and there is a roughly equal distribution of profits among the citizens.

Because shares can only be purchased with coupons, and coupons cannot be sold by citizens for money, the rich will not own more shares than the poor, except insofar as they are better informed about investment opportunities.

This is mollified by the requirement to purchase shares in mutual funds, which make investment decisions on citizens' behalf. The bequeathing of mutual fund shares as well as of coupons is prohibited.

A Note on Investment Planning

This model proposes the use of investment planning, whereby the state provides incentives for firms to invest in particular sectors of the economy against the signals of the market by offering differential interest-rate loans as well as through state-directed investment. For example, high interest rates would be charged to industries that cause significant negative externalities such as pollution.

This is a form of dirigism that has been extensively and successfully used in the development of the East Asian economies as well as in France.

For example, during much of the postwar period in Taiwan, banks were publicly owned, with private ones only holding around 5% of deposits. Until the 1980s, 80% of gross private capital formation was bank-financed as opposed to equity-financed, with the goal of guiding firms towards socially optimal development plans (Wade, 1990, p. 161).

References

Roemer, J. (1996). Equal Shares: Making Market Socialism Work. Verso Books. 7-39

Wade, R. (1990). Governing the Market: Economic Theory and the Role of Government in East Asian Industrialization. Princeton University Press.

Further Reading

Corneo, G. (2017). Is Capitalism Obsolete: A Journey through Alternative Economic Systems. Harvard University Press. 168-198

Appendix

This model shares similarities with the Rehn-Meidner Plan. This plan was proposed by the Swedish Social Democratic Party and the Swedish Trade Union Confederation, whereby the Swedish government would tax a proportion of company profits and put them into special funds charged to buy shares in listed Swedish companies, with the goal of gradually transferring companies from private to collective employee ownership.

Introduction

This is a proposal about the use of sealed-bid second price auctions in a market socialist economy to preserve the investment incentives for small and medium sized private firms.

The traditional problem for a market socialist economy is that if it allows for a private sector of small firms, then their owners won't have an incentive to invest, knowing that in case of success, their businesses will eventually become socialised once they reach a certain size. Instead of setting arbitrary thresholds, an incentive compatible mechanism of mandatory auctions can be used instead.

Description

Assume that once a year, every private firm would have to name an amount of money it is prepared to pay to the government. This may be thought of as a voluntary contribution that replaces all other taxes on the private firm. This voluntary contribution would be used to calculate the price floor of an auction in which the private firm may be sold to a market socialist one. In this auction, all market socialist firms would be entitled to bid.

The price floor would be a multiple of the voluntary contribution, this multiplier m would be fixed by law and would be democratically determined by each society (It is to be expected that in a multiparty democracy, liberal parties representing the interests of private owners would seek to push this multiplier to be set as high as possible.) Thus, if a private firm announces a voluntary sum of b, then the price floor for the auction would have to be higher than m • b.

After the announcement of the auction, every market socialist firm would be given a period of time (a few weeks perhaps) to evaluate whether they want to bid and if so then how much. Each firm would then inform the corresponding auctioning authority of the offer the are willing to pay. If there are no offers that exceed m • b, then the private firm would pay its announced voluntary contribution b to the state and remain in private ownership.

If however there was a higher bid than the price floor, then the firm that offered the highest bid would be chosen, however it would receive the private firm for the price offered by the second highest bidder, and if there was none, then for the m • b price floor. Notice that in such a second price bid auction, the dominant strategy for each bidder is to offer the highest price they themselves are willing to pay. Thus if the enterprise is sold, it would be efficiently allocated.

The private owner would thus receive a sum of at least m • b, as a compensation for the takeover of the firm. The owner could always chose their voluntary contribution b in such a way that they at least receive a sum corresponding to the value of the enterprise to them, should there be a takeover. This mechanism would preserve an investment incentive for private owners and would ensure that the auctioning off to the market socialist sector would be efficient in terms of timing and selection of the buyer.

Crucially, the investment incentives for the private sector are preserved because a private owner reaps the benefits of their investments even if they are forced to sell. If the owner invested well, there are also good prospects to profits.

References

Corneo, G. (2019). Some Institutional Design for Shareholder Socialism. Review of Social Economy, 77(1), 42-49

Further reading

Vickrey, W. (1961). Counterspeculation, Auctions, and Competitive Sealed Tenders. The Journal of Finance, 16(1), 8-37

Posner, E. A. & Weyl, E. G. (2017). Property is Only Another Name for Monopoly. Journal of Legal Analysis, 9(1), 51-123

So about a year ago I read the Governing The Commons by Elinor Ostrom.

She dealt with rivalrous non-excludable goods (CPRs, common pool resources). The traditional fear in economics is that if you can benefit from something without contributing to its upkeep, why would you contribute to the upkeep? If everyone thinks like this, the common resource will be destroyed because no one contributes to upkeep.

Basically, what she found is that various communities around the world have self-organized and created institutions to solve these sorts of problems.

Basically, the problem with traditional thinking on the "tragedy of the commons" is flawed because it assumes no communication can take place between users. When communication is possible, they can develop institutions with sanctions that change the game theory costs and therefore make not defecting the best option.

From her study, she outlined 8 key principles for building such institutions that can be found her: https://www.onthecommons.org/magazine/elinor-ostroms-8-principles-managing-commmons/index.html

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I've been utterly fascinated by her work, but there's something I've been wrestling with. Rule 1: Define clear group boundaries.

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What concerns me is that not all things can have clear boundaries right? So, take scientific knowledge for example.

Scientists need like food to eat and electricity right? But once scientific knowledge is produced, it's kinda hard to keep hidden (and that's a good thing), and so you can't exactly paywall it. Without money, scientists can't get food or electricity or whatever else they need to live right? And so they'll work somewhere else.

You need to convince community members to contribute labor and resources towards providing for the scientists. But then we have the same free-rider issue: if you can benefit from increased scientific knowledge without contributing to the scientist's livelihood, why would you?

To me, it's not exactly clear what the right "boundaries" would be in this case right? Like, knowledge isn't like a pond right? A pond has clear boundaries, but something like knowledge or digital music doesn't right?

But clearly these sorts of problems have been solved right? So I want to understand how an ostromite approach could be applied to commons without clear boundaries.

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In the case of our scientist, I suppose we could have a collective of people who really want the result of that research (say a drug that cures a specific disease). Sure not everyone who has the disease will contribute, but if enough people want it badly enough they have an incentive to work together to establish an ostromite institution. Then the boundary would just be everyone in that institution?

But still, you need to get enough people willing to join right? And that can lead to the same issue as before.

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I'm not sure, what do you think? Are there ostromite solutions to free-rider problems in public goods?

Some chronic health issues are currently kicking my ass, which means I have a lot of down time and very little brain functionality to do anything with that time. I have bought a couple books on Market Socialism but the highly academic prose is exhausting to me to read for more than a couple pages.

Has anyone come across any resources on the subject that are very easily digestible?

Cheers! Ricky

https://web.archive.org/web/20220102200125/http://www.inlimbo.ie/summaries/long/democracy.pdf

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/pierre-joseph-proudhon-what-is-property-an-inquiry-into-the-principle-of-right-and-of-governmen

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/33310/33310-h/33310-h.htm

https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/economics/hodgskin/labour-defended.htm

http://radgeek.com/gt/2011/10/Markets-Not-Capitalism-2011-Chartier-and-Johnson.pdf

https://oll-resources.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/oll3/store/titles/320/0551_Bk.pdf

https://oll-resources.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/oll3/store/titles/323/0419_Bk.pdf

https://archive.org/details/labourswrongsan01braygoog

https://archive.org/details/effectsofciviliz00hallrich

https://archive.org/details/cu31924030333052/page/332/mode/1up

https://www.academia.edu/23023501/_David_Schweickart_After_Capitalism_New_Critical_Book4You_

https://jacobin.com/2016/04/jonathan-chait-nymag-marxism-democratic-socialists

https://web.archive.org/web/20221108233919/https://acenturyofchange.medium.com/points-of-unity-and-the-three-tenets-bcdd609bae56

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_socialism

https://epdf.tips/queue/market-socialism.html

https://www.laits.utexas.edu/poltheory/jsmill/cos/cos.c01.html

https://eet.pixel-online.org/files/etranslation/original/Mill,%20Principles%20of%20Political%20Economy.pdf

https://zinelibrary.c4ss.org/media/ALLiance%20-Advocates%20of%20Freed%20Markets%20Should.pdf

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/331223694_The_Rise_and_Fall_of_Market_Socialism_in_Yugoslavia/link/5c6d139f92851c1c9deedda4/download?_tp=eyJjb250ZXh0Ijp7ImZpcnN0UGFnZSI6InB1YmxpY2F0aW9uIiwicGFnZSI6InB1YmxpY2F0aW9uIn19

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_Socialist_Federal_Republic_of_Yugoslavia

https://c4ss.org/content/24158

Comment if you think I should add something.

I would like to know more about the form of market socialism that was implemented in Yugoslavia. Who are its most important theoreticians of the system and what are the essential books to read?

Are there any market socialist parties in Europe Or in your country ?

So traditionally cartels are seen as unstable.

This is because of a collective action problem.

Basically, while everyone in the cartel benefits from high prices, each member could benefit a little more by cutting their price a small amount and thereby getting all the customers. The other cartel members have to respond likewise, and this drives down the price. Couple that with artificially high prices attracting new competitors to the market, and the cartel is fundamentally unstable (more or less, there are exceptions).

Anyways, I've gotten into Elinor Ostrom as of late and it occurred to me that her rules and commons management almost sound like a cartel. I mean you're limiting the supply of say, fish, for example. So like, each individual fisherman could benefit more by fishing for more fish, but if he did so he'd destroy the resource because it would drop fish to below healthy levels.

But limiting supply is what cartels do to raise prices right?

So like, could ostrom's rules be used to support cartel formation? Are there ways to counter that? I mean the higher prices would attract competitors still, but maybe they'd be incentivized to join the cartel since it is stable? In fairness there is a limit yo this process because there is a minimum each cartel member needs to produce in order to justify being in the cartel. But in order to keep prices the same supply has to be fixed so more cartel members = less supply per member. I'm not sure though, would love thoughts. Another interesting idea is that if Ostrom's rules can be used to form a cartel, then couldn't it also be used to form a counter cartel? So like, the denial of goods to the cartel by the most interest parties (i.e. a boycott or a refusal to supply a firm).

Could Ostrom's rules be used for cartel formation? If so, how can this be prevented if at all?

The false dichotomy of private/public ownership is usually used when talking about sectors of the economy. Does anyone know where to get data about the quantity of worker ownership in different places?

So earlier today and yesterday I was chatting with a communist over on r/Anarchy101.

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My position is basically that I am against all unjust hierarchies (state, pigs in blue, capitalism, etc). My general alignment is neo-proudhonian pan-anarchist "whatever works for people involved" type deal. I'm not sure how to characterize my ideal economic system (if you're curious I describe it in the post I was chatting with the communist on: https://www.reddit.com/r/Anarchy101/comments/191f3yx/seeking_clarification_what_is_the_actual/).

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This is very much an intra-anarchist debate.

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Anyways the basic topic we were discussing is markets within an anarchist context.

They raised a point I have heard often in leftist circles:

Markets are not efficient because they do not factor in the externalities of production. Basically, goods are cheaper than they should be because markets only account for the costs of the buyer and seller.

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The point I raised is:

This is true within a capitalist private property regime. If there was no state protection of property, what would happen is if you tried to screw me over by polluting the river I drink from, I'd go into the factory and disable the machine doing the polluting. the factory may retaliate and i would so in turn, this process gets more and more expensive for both sides until both of them sit down to talk. And what would end up happening is that both sides would come to an agreement that works for them.

The factory workers polluting the river would likely have to pay to help clean up the river of their pollution or they'd find an alternative method of production. It's cheaper for everyone to sit down and hash out this deal before you start polluting, and that's what most would opt for. You cannot do this within capitalism because the state cracks down on you hard when you try as property is god and any attempts to damage it or prevent its externalization is seen as aggressive and worthy of jail time. In essence, by clearly defining limits of private property and protecting it with violence, but not doing the same for the commons, the state essentially allows for the externalization of costs.

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We had a long back and forth but eventually I was linked to Ch. 7 of Quiet Revolution in Welfare Economics by Robin Hahnel and Michael Albert. It was a fascinating read and gets to the crux of my question.

Specifically I wanted to understand this passage here (cut it down cause this is long already):

In market economies, economic decisions are taken by individual actors who have limited information about the effects their decisions may have on others and certainly no incentive to advance others’ interests at their own expense. When this occurs, an obvious incentive exists for those whose interests are being disregarded in the decision-making process to seek to negotiate with the actor whose activity affects them. .......

If many actors are affected, while they may attempt to band together to express their views jointly, the coalition of affected partners will be plagued by the problem of nonexcludability. The coalition cannot effectively challenge individual members’ deliberate misrepresentations of the degree to which they are affected in efforts to minimize their individual assessments.° For the only way to chailenge the veracity of coalition members’ suspicious estimate of the degree to which they are affected is to exclude them individually from the benefits of the negotiations. And the only way to do this is to break off negotiations with the actor whose decision generates external effects for the coalition.

To summarize (my understanding anyways, feel free to correct):

If there is an externality, there is an incentive for all affected parties to come to the table to negotiate with the producer. However, the issue is that folks misrepresenting the burden of the externality cannot really be excluded from negotiations around the externality cause the benefits of the negotiations are not really exclusionary.

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I'm a bit confused by this point, for a couple reasons.

First, doesn't this also applied to decentralized planned economies? Production has externalities in the sense that the producer may not bear all of its costs. That means different communities may come together to negotiate with the producer. But then we effectively have the same situation as before right? What happens if one community, in a bid to get more resources, tries to overstate their degree of damage?

Second, this I don't totally see how such a thing would work. Within an anarchist context at least, wouldn't the point of the negotiations be to rectify the costs? So like, say a worker owned factory is polluting a commonly owned river. Wouldn't the best solution be for the people living on the river to get a water filter upstream near the pollution source that would be financed by the factory? Or compensate workers for their time and energy cleaning up the river, again paid by the factory? Or to use a less environmentally damaging production method? The point of these negotiations isn't to like pad pockets to make people feel better, but to solve the problem no? So what advantage does lying have here? The factory is looking for the cheapest way to not be sabotaged and the river folks are looking for a way to make sure their water is clean. Advocating a more expensive but equally effective water cleaning method just throws a wrench in things right? Like I don't totally see where profit seeking could fit in here, though that could just be me. Mind you this type of thing isn't unique to a market economy, a planned economy could very easily come to a similar negotiation type deal (i've become increasingly interested in Pat Devine's Negotiated Coordination as an economic model as of late, it seems to match quite closely with what I proposed in my original post).

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Anyways yeah, what are your thoughts?

Do you believe the critique laid out in the book applies to decentralized planned economies as well? Why/Why not?

Do you believe it is a fundamentally unsolvable problem? Or do you think the cost rectification idea i laid out effectively addresses this?

Am I misunderstanding the critique? If so, how?

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Thanks!

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tl;dr:

Does the inability to exclude bad actors within a coalition of people affected by an externality also apply to decentralized planned economies or only market ones?

Is this problem unsolvable?

Am I misunderstanding the critique made?

For some context, mutualization is the transition from traditional business models to mutuals and cooperative businesses. In other words, private businesses being turned into cooperatives.

I think that social media companies, television networks, and other similar businesses would be better off being made into cooperative businesses. They would no longer have any profit incentive to keep producing disinformation, drama, or mediocre content even when it would beneficial to produce higher quality content (This isn’t to say that this kind of stuff would never be made, let’s be real. But cooperative ownership would reduce that chance). This also would decrease the chance of censorship and/or propaganda if these companies were under state ownership (again, there’s still the possibility of it happening anyway, but it would still be relatively small). I think that this should be done in tandem with restricting censorship and reinstating the Fairness Doctrine.

But what do you think?

Not a good idea to take wikipedia at face value so asking around:

Wikipedia Market Socialism

Although sometimes described as "market socialism",[11] the Lange model is a form of market simulated planning where a central planning board allocates investment and capital goods by simulating factor market transactions, while markets allocate labor and consumer goods. The system was devised by socialist economists who believed that a socialist economy could neither function on the basis of calculation in natural units nor through solving a system of simultaneous equations for economic coordination.[12][9]

Wikipedia Lange model

Although Lange and Lerner called it "market socialism", the Lange model is a form of centrally planned economy where a central planning board allocates investment and capital goods, while markets allocate labor and consumer goods. The planning board simulates a market in capital goods by a trial-and-error process first elaborated by Vilfredo Pareto and Léon Walras.[1] The Lange Model is in practice type of centrally planned economy and not type of market socialism.

I feel like Marxists want the Means of Production to be “abstractly” owned by the workers as a class, via a state they supposedly control (not sure how this is any different than a democracy everyone controls, etc). Rather than concretely owned by the worker themself, like the petite burgoise do. I honestly don’t see anything wrong with a petite burgoise society where everyone owns the MoP they work. As Bookchin says

“[Maxists] perspectives are oriented not toward concrete, existential freedom, but toward an abstract freedom—freedom for "Society," for the "Proletariat," for categories rather than for people. Carson's first charge, I might emphasize, should be leveled not only at me but at Marx”

I think we see this time and again when socialists states pop up and then don’t pay their farmers a fair price for food. Those farmers keep society alive, and they work hard, and they deserve to be paid handsomely. That’s not capitalism, that’s just ethics.

This is something I've been thinking about a lot

If you start a new business and become successful you may hire a few more people to help you out, let's say you hire two assistants, it doesn't make sense for them to vote to fire you, you have the most experience, and you have put more work into the business then them

But now let's say a few years go by and now a thousand people work in this company and they agree that someone else would do a better job at being the boss. Well, now these people do have a lot of experience in how this business works, some of them may have been with you from the start, and by this point they too have put a lot of work into this business. For these reasons it does make more sense that you probably shouldn't be the boss anymore

But here's the thing: When does this transition happen? At which point should the business become democratic?

I know some people will argue that the moment there are two people working together it should be democratic, and I agree that can work, but I'm not convinced that's how it should work every time, specially if someone joins a business that is already successful

Also, my background is in physics, so this reminds me of a phase transition, when matter changes state, like between solid, liquid and gas. Maybe companies should have a "phase transition" in which they go from being undemocratic and privately owned from democratic and collectively owned. Maybe there could be some legal mechanism to help the workers buy the company from the owner. It's easy to see giant companies like Amazon have passed this threshold long ago, but for smaller companies it's harder to say

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One reason worker co-ops are difficult to start is because of the economies of scale big corporations hold. This allows for these mega-corporations to effectively destroy any and all business models which threaten their grip on market power. A culprit is the idea of "incorporation" which is limited liability on steroids; meaning shareholders are essentially unaccountable for destructive investments. If these big corporations were broken up or lost many of their legal privleges, would cooperatives have an easier time starting up? Is there any data confirming this?

And slightly off-topic, but many of these mega-corporations (like McDonalds and Amazon) are real estate empires. Would punishing land speculation vis a vis land-value taxation also help the cooperative movement?

Hello!

I also posted this in r/Anarcy101 and r/mutualism but I got one reply on the first which I am still a bit confused about and nothing on the second, so looking to get more eyes on this.

I recently discovered this channel: https://www.youtube.com/@Plutophrenia

It's been super helpful and I have learned a lot from it.

One of the videos on this channel is this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0Xw9OIpB94 and it's all about mutualist value theory (specifically the combination of the subjective theory of value of the marginalists and classical labor theory of value).

The way this channel describes it, utility is the impelling force for labor, and disutility is the limiting force. Where they meet will be the quantity produced by an individual.

The basic assumption behind this logic is that labor has an associated dis-utility. It represents an ABSOLUTE cost. Unlike capital or land usage, whose only real cost is opportunity cost and that's only because whoever controls the assets CAN charge for access, labor is an absolute cost because the laborer is not choosing between two types of labor, but whether to labor or not labor.

Now that makes a lot of sense to me for the vast majority of labor in an economy.

He also goes on to say that "pleasurable labor" still follows this logic, but the basic idea is that the end product is something that the laborer takes pride in or admires, or alternatively from the expected reward of labor of having overcome the toil involved. So the "pleasure" comes from the finished product, not the labor in and of itself. All of this makes a lot of intuitive sense to me and I really like that idea. In order to convince someone to do something unpleasant, you must give them something of equal or greater value to that unpleasantness.

What I wanted to really understand is: what about in cases where the labor, in and of itself, is inherently pleasant?

I enjoy listening to several comedy podcasts, and I also love watching some D&D series on youtube. Cracking jokes with your friends is something that people do for fun, as is playing D&D (because it's a game, it is inherently enjoyable to play right? That's the point of a game).

So where is the dis-utility of labor in this process? Games and jokes are something people actively seek out because they provide utility. Sure, there's an argument to be made that editing the podcast or video and uploading it has associated dis-utility, but if that's the case, then shouldn't the hosts of the podcast or the players in the D&D campaign not need to be paid because they don't have an associated dis-utility?

The best reply I thought of is that their time has an associated opportunity cost. So they have decided to labor for say, 8 hours a day, and because this recording session takes up some of those 8 hours of that day, they need compensation equal to the compensation they would have gotten from doing unpleasant labor during that time (maybe not even that much, cause the utility from podcast/filming would also be factored in).

But now that factors in opportunity cost as well. And sure, that opportunity cost is going to be defined by the utility/dis-utility of what you could be doing with those same hours and so it's still based in dis-utility of labor, but is there more nuance to this than I initially thought?

The only other reply I could think of is that, while playing D&D with friends is fun, it usually isn't recorded and shared with a large audience. That might be a source of dis-utility? But why would that be? Especially if the folks involved are comfortable with that sort of thing?

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So yeah, thank you! I would love to figure out where the source of dis-utility is in these sorts of "fun" labor that people do (like recording games, or cracking jokes with a friend, that sorta thing. What people do normally that is inherently joyful as opposed to admiring a finished work or something along those lines)?

Edit:

I suppose the disutility could arise from the process of being filmed, as most don't normally do that part for fun. So you have to incentive people to film for you as opposed to simply sitting at home on the couch or playing with friends and that's where the compensation comes in.

With that being I said, I don't totally see where the disutility arises from the process of being filmed. Some people are comfortable on camera right?

But I guess there is some disutility cause if there wasn't people would normally film their games and upload to YouTube Irrespective of pay. And most people don't do that.

I just have trouble identifying the source of that disutility.

Another possible is a lack of utility derived from recording. So there may not be a source of dis-utility but a lack of utility (that's what I was told on r/Anarchy101).

If that's the case, how do you predict the necessary wage to produce a given quantity of labor? Cause normally the wage is the dollar value wherein utility of wage = dis-utility of labor. But if there isn't an impelling or limiting force, the wage would be 0, yet we know the people on the podcast are paid. That pay has to compensate for some cost right? So idk....