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There's a self-serving aspect of Libertarianism where we dismantle the government so we can build our own government out of corporations with zero accountabilit
by throwway120385 8d ago
There's a self-serving aspect of Libertarianism where we dismantle the government so we can build our own government out of corporations with zero accountability to any of the people they govern. A kind of modern feudalism. And a lot of people in this camp envision themselves the count or duke or king or whatever in this feudalism, when in reality we'll likely all end up renting everything we own from the 6 people who own all the companies in the world. There seems to be a motte and bailey where the motte is "oh we should just remove all the governmental controls and let private enterprise flourish!" and then the bailey is "don't you see how little freedom you have from government" when it's made apparent what private enterprise has done in the modern world.
- krupan 8d agoYou seem to be describing our current corrupt democracy that produces crony capitalism that gives favors to big businesses and enables the business owners to become one of the 6 people that own everything. A major point of libertarianism is to tear down the government structure that enables that crony capitalism and restores real competition in the market.
- FireBeyond 8d agoWhat of observed human history gives you any hope that such a thing will happen? All of these systems function well ... "in theory". Even the ones you may not agree with. Socialism and communism are perfectly fine theoretical systems, until you introduce humans into the equation with desires for power, wealth, etc. I have seen no hint that Libertarianism is somehow above this and will be the panacea. I also have no idea how you come to the conclusion that collusion will not be a problem in a libertarian world.
- WalterBright 8d ago> I have seen no hint that Libertarianism is somehow above this and will be the panacea. The US has been the closest any country has come to libertarianism. And the US thrived on it.
- paulryanrogers 8d agoDoubt. Arguably the US thrived because it is too far from Europe for their wars to cause too much devastation. Unregulated industrialization also gave us child labor, 12h days, 6d work weeks, and company scrip. After WW2 the US stood alone and enacted a lot of socialist ideas. Then spent a few decades slowly erroding those worker rights and sensible regulations in favor of corporate interests.
- deleted 8d ago[deleted]
- krupan 8d agoThe US stood alone and enacted socialist ideas? You have heard of the USSR, haven't you? If the US was enacting socialist ideas it definitely wasn't alone in doing so. Next I wonder what "a lot of socialist ideas" were. The New Deal during the Great depression was fairly socialist with the government making up work it could pay people to do and such, but I'm pretty sure after WWII is when anti-socialist (anti-Soviet) sentiment peaked in the US
- pocksuppet 7d agoDid the US stand with the USSR?
- WalterBright 8d ago> Unregulated industrialization also gave us child labor, 12h days, 6d work weeks, and company scrip. Do you think children did not work in colonial America? or Europe? In what contemporary country did children not work? Same for the hours and days of work. There's a good reason why children have always worked prior to 1900. The economy was not productive enough to enable them to not work. The same for hours worked. When productivity rose sufficiently, child labor disappeared, as did the long hours.
- throwway120385 8d agoNo it didn't. People went on strike and middle class people fought for those things. Eliminating child labor was a major feather in the Progressive movement's cap. Don't pretend like any of that was spontaneous.
- throwway120385 8d agoDoes it though? We've been living through that experiment with elimination of anti-trust and with other libertarian goals being met -- reduction of taxes, introduction of private industry into the public sphere, collection of tolls from public infrastructure, austerity, and general reduction of the size of government. All we've gotten is a replacement of the government with private enterprise. IOW there are a lot of companies out there that provide "public goods" for profit that are some combination of more expensive or lower-quality than the equivalent public services were in the heyday of the US. I think you should agree that without any kind of regulation at all companies are merging into uncontrollable behemoths, and without the ability to meaningfully "vote with our wallets" one of the central tenets of libertarian capitalism is pretty broken. I disagree that the US federal government is responsible for this state of affairs. Rather, the US federal government is taking a pretty strong stance of irresponsibility for this.
- WalterBright 8d ago> and general reduction of the size of government What? Seriously? The size of city government, state government, and federal government grows every year in scope, regulations, and spending.
- krupan 8d agoWe in the US are so very far still from meeting the goals of libertarianism. Even farther than before with our current administration! The current US government helps big business through a combination of tax breaks, burdensome regulations that small companies can't cope with, buying services (see: SpaceX, Boeing, Palantir, etc.), direct subsidies, tariffs, etc., etc. With a libertarian government all of that goes away.
- bcrosby95 8d agoSo we're going to make government weaker, and by doing so, they will stand up to corporations that are now stronger than them? If that's true then Libertarians have a rosier view of government than I do. A regular David vs. Goliath situation. Biblical stories aside, my money is on Goliath.
- sylos 8d agoDavid and goliath is not a story of a little man defeating an impossible giant. It's the story of a technologically advanced crack pistol shot vs a guy a with a knife and a hundred yards to cover
- AnthonyMouse 8d ago> So we're going to make government weaker, and by doing so, they will stand up to corporations that are now stronger than them? It's not about the amount of physical force they can assert. Suppose you have a constrained set of things the government is allowed to do. They prohibit fraud, non-consensual physical harm (e.g. violence, pollution) and market consolidation. Market consolidation is given a rigid definition in the nature of any organization having more than 15% market share in any market, a rigid consequence in the nature of that organization being fully atomized, and a right for customers and suppliers to bring a private case against them with the same consequence if they're over the threshold and the government prosecutor won't do it. Every citizen has the constitutional right to smash corporations in consolidated markets into smithereens. Meanwhile the government is prohibited from enacting more specific economic rules. They lack the authority to enact things like certificate of need laws, zoning density restrictions, price controls, anything that acts as a constraint on adversarial interoperability, etc. Micromanaging the population is not allowed. How do these constraints benefit large incumbents? What benefit is there in giving the government the authority to do things that history has consistently shown to be anti-competitive and inefficient?
- judemelancon 8d agoSuch a scheme absolutely explodes in complexity as it comes to each level of additional detail. This requires a magically flexible definition of "market" at very best. The smallest number of competitors that can split market share such that none exceed 15% is 7, and that cuts it absurdly close for an existential risk. Do non-profit organizations count for this rule? If not, how would corporate structures that intentionally obfuscate these distinctions, e.g. IKEA, be handled? If there's not some extremely tricky qualifiers, these markets seem likely to be a problem, just for starters: medicines†, operating systems, utilities to a specific house or even city, spy satellites, chemicals that are difficult or dangerous to synthesize, combat aircraft, crewed spacecraft, EUV lithography, armored fighting vehicles, cellular telecommunications services, samples of organisms restricted to high biosafety level labs, and literally any new product category. † Imagine a serious condition getting its first drug treatment approved and the company saying "Only every seventh patient is eligible." Also, no one could offer a specific specialized surgical procedure until seven or more independent organizations in the same geographic area have qualified staff and equipment, which would be especially hard for any novel techniques; if the problem it addressed was rare, they'd also effectively be forced into a cartel to allocate the patients evenly. There's also separately and unavoidably the massive problem of transitioning from the current situation to one compliant with these restrictions. Edit: Switch to using a dagger for the footnote to avoid a formatting issue.
- wyre 8d agoHow is that not No True Scotsman? You disagree with the outcome of the described libertarian structures so it can't be actual libertarianism? The government is inevitably going to do business with the market. Where do you draw the line between a government contract and favors to big business? What is libertarianism's answer when there are 6 people that own everything, or more realistically, how the richest people in the world, already deeply entrenched and leading their respective industries from continuing to accrue resources until everything is owned by a small group of people and/or taking advantage of their market advantages to shut out any competition.
- krupan 8d agoIt is troublesome that libertarianism isn't super well defined, but no version of libertarianism has the government "doing business" with anyone. It only enforces laws, it doesn't buy and sell anything, and it certainly doesn't do anything to insulate anyone from market forces (like governments do now with regulations, subsidies, tax breaks, etc.).
- wyre 8d agoSo then what will the government due about supplying their military, offices, supplying technology, constructing the buildings that they work out of, purchasing or renting the land those buildings are on, or any other of the material goods that it needs to do the bare minimum of enforcing laws. I don't see how libertarian can ever be well defined when it seemingly is always based in ideology and the arguments supporting it always seem to be fallacious.
- krupan 8d agoOk, maybe I went too far. There are the total anarchist libertarians that don't want any form of government. Personally I'm not sure I want to go that route. So my libertarian government will need a police force of some sort. That could be a collection of small local private businesses that small local governments do business with, giving them jurisdiction over the small local area. And there could be some hierarchy so that eventually they all are accountable to the central government. Like, city police contractors report to a state contractor, and the state contractors report to the federal contractor. I totally just made that up, so I'm sure we could work out details and make it better, but the overall point of minimizing government power and distributing it could be preserved as much as possible. No system is going to be perfect, but there is so much more we could do to take power, and therefore the temptation of corruption, away from the people we allow to rule over us. Giving fallible human individuals more power is never the right solution.
- preg_match 8d agoIn order to make competition flourish, you require a strong government which squishes anti-competitive behavior. Markets, left to their own accord, naturally tend to monopolies and cooperation. Cooperation just works better than competition. Competition is, really, a zero-sum game, a race to the bottom for companies. Cooperation is optimal, it’s “everybody wins”. Even if companies didn’t just buy up each other (why wouldn’t they? We need laws against that), they would certainly work together to set prices as high as the market can bear. Which is then, effectively, a monopoly. I mean, imagine a perfect market with hundreds of thriving competitors. What happens over time? As the industry matures, competitors buy each other up and consolidate capital. Then, newcomers can’t break in, because they don’t have the capital. And any newcomers who have a new innovative process or product, just get bought out before they threaten the market share. Then, eventually, there are only a handful of companies left. It’s trivial for them to move in lock-step and everyone wins… except the consumer. Look at any domain in the US - they’re all like this. The only exceptions are new domains, like AI. That will change, too, we’ve seen this pattern thousands of times. There’s two moats here: regulation, and capital. You can eliminate the regulation moat with libertarianism, sure, but not the capital moat. And, you strengthen the capital moat when you remove the regulation. So nothing changes. Best case scenario, the situation is the same. Worst case, it’s accelerated.
- WalterBright 8d ago> Markets, left to their own accord, naturally tend to monopolies and cooperation No, they don't. To become a monopoly, they need the collusion of government to outlaw competition. The poster boy of monopolies, Standard Oil, never had a monopoly. During its rise, it dropped the consumer price of kerosene 70%. Its market share dropped steadily during the years of the anti-trust trial. > It’s trivial for them to move in lock-step and everyone wins… except the consumer. Ever wonder what happened to IBM?
- stopping 8d agoAre you saying that it's impossible for a company to become a monopoly purely under its own power?
- pocksuppet 8d agoA major point of libertarianism is to tear down government structures that hinder libertarians from engaging in world domination and retain government structures that hinder other people from hindering libertarians from engaging in world domination.
- sph 8d agoOP’s point is that world domination is possible only in collusion with the State. You can’t have trillion dollar companies without going to dinner with the President of the banana republic to kiss his ass and line his pockets.
- pocksuppet 8d agoHow did Apple kiss Obama's ass?
- krupan 7d agoHow hard would it be for you to look up whether Apple does any government lobbying, or if there are any laws, regulations, or tax codes that (whether intentionally or not) give Apple an advantage over a start up that wants to compete with them. Don't ignore things like copyright laws, patent protections, international trade agreements, corporate tax structures, insider trading by politicians, etc., etc.
- WalterBright 8d agoThat isn't remotely what libertarianism is.
- coldtea 8d agoDoesn't matter what it is in principle.
- WalterBright 8d agoIt certainly is not feudalism.
- coldtea 8d agoYeah, it's corporate-feudalism instead.
- ethbr1 8d agoTo expand, I believe the idea here is that what libertarianism is in principal matters less than what it collapses to in practice, similar to the difference in communism. And there's a central tension that libertarianism, as far as I'm aware of, doesn't resolve in how to promote individual freedom across a highly economically unequal society. Trusting those with all the capital to act in anything other than their own best interest doesn't seem a solid foundation.
- pocksuppet 7d agoIn a true libertarian society, since it's small government, the government wouldn't help rich people stay rich. You could just declare yourself owner of Tesla, and nobody would stop you except the former owner of Tesla, if he can afford to stop you. Nobody believes in true libertarianism.
- ethbr1 7d ago> You could just declare yourself owner of Tesla, and nobody would stop you except the former owner of Tesla, if he can afford to stop you. Which they always could, given the vastly different economic starting positions.
- lowbloodsugar 8d agoLibertarianism is entirely self-serving. I am rich and have property, so my ideal government is one whose only job is to create property registries and allow their enforcement with violence. Ideally, the poor people are taxed (not me of course) to fund a government violence force to enforce the rules on the poor people, as is the case in the USA. Communism is similarly self-serving. I own no property, and so my ideal government has no concept of property and assigns resources to everyone.
- iamnothere 7d agoAll politics is self-serving in one way or another. If you disagree you are likely lying to yourself about your motivations. The important thing is not to ignore your self-serving motivations, but to understand them and think long term rather than short term. Things quickly fall apart when everyone pushes for short term gain.
- wyre 8d agoHow is communism self-serving when, you said it yourself, the main concept is assigning resources to everyone?
- bigfishrunning 8d agoIf "assigning resources to everyone" is a net gain (IE the voter doesn't have resources), then yes it is self serving.
- jst1fthsdys 8d agoPretty much everything is self serving using that definition. Clean up trash in a park? Self serving. Donate money to the poor? Self serving.
- bigfishrunning 8d agoI think you misunderstand me -- perspective matters. If you have 12 cookies, and I have 2 cookies, and i say "it would be more fair if we each had 7 cookies", then i pretty transparently just want you to give me 5 cookies. "Clean up trash" and "Donate money to the poor" are not as unevenly beneficial. Also "Donate money to the poor" is a far cry from "Seize money and give that to the poor".
- ethbr1 8d ago> There's a self-serving aspect of Libertarianism where we dismantle the government so we can build our own government out of corporations with zero accountability to any of the people they govern. A kind of modern feudalism. And a lot of people in this camp envision themselves the count or duke or king or whatever in this feudalism So much this. People forget that for all its fault, democratic government is democratic to some degree. Corporations are democratic to zero degree. (And before someone brings up shareholders: institutional investors and dual-class shares)