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Because under a fully deregulated scheme, corporations will raise a private Navy + private Army and then conquer India... effectively becoming a government on t

Because under a fully deregulated scheme, corporations will raise a private Navy + private Army and then conquer India... effectively becoming a government on their own. Governments, in general, are constantly "less bad" schemes compared to their predecessors. The Roman Republic is pretty bad by today's standards, but it was far superior to other forms of government in the timeframe it existed in. The discussion of "Government" is innately about "Good Government", not bad ones. A good government will split responsibilities in a way that proves to everybody that its trustworthy. That's the lesson on modern civics (ie: anything from the Magna Carta or more recent). ----------- In any case, I'm not convinced that the fully privatized scheme discussed in this blogpost is to anyone's benefit. The current scheme of free-market banks that collapse on their own (and then the US Government stepping in afterwards) has numerous benefits in practice.

racketcon2089 4y ago
I appreciate you clarifying your points where they were proscriptive rather than descriptive, it is certainly a common civc intention of government and a persistent ideal of governance. In a previous era from 1890-1910, the purpose of "trust busting" and regulating industry was specifically to limit the threat of any single private entity from creating enough systemic risk to be considered "too big to fail." There's nothing particularly pro-market about saying that habitual drunk drivers who no entity will sell accident insurance to must be retroactively insured for free by the government to contain the systemic risk they inflict on sober people. The legitimate benefits of the technological innovations that've come from no-downside financial speculation appear to be increasingly portable, available to other societies either through reverse-engineering or commodities-for-technology-transfer or outright espionage. So regardless of how much the top 5-20% of Americans and their cultural institutions have a moral or predictive-utilitarian argument for the societal and technological benefits of concentrated capital and financial policy that sees the wealthiest capture a larger percentage of GDP decade-over-decade, it appears to be internally destabilizing and internationally weakening by nearly any metric one could name. To steelman the other side of this, one could argue the decline is overstated and temporary or attribute it to other factors. But it's no longer the case that a majority domestically or internationally is confident that this is the least bad system to emulate out of all the really existing systems. Powers in decline and relative elites within them tend to spend a lot of time creating theories for why the majority is wrong to feel the way they do, but historically that strategy has failed, regardless of if what replaces the existing system eventually turns out to be even worse.

racketcon2089 4y ago

I appreciate you clarifying your points where they were proscriptive rather than descriptive, it is certainly a common civc intention of government and a persistent ideal of governance. In a previous era from 1890-1910, the purpose of "trust busting" and regulating industry was specifically to limit the threat of any single private entity from creating enough systemic risk to be considered "too big to fail." There's nothing particularly pro-market about saying that habitual drunk drivers who no entity will sell accident insurance to must be retroactively insured for free by the government to contain the systemic risk they inflict on sober people. The legitimate benefits of the technological innovations that've come from no-downside financial speculation appear to be increasingly portable, available to other societies either through reverse-engineering or commodities-for-technology-transfer or outright espionage. So regardless of how much the top 5-20% of Americans and their cultural institutions have a moral or predictive-utilitarian argument for the societal and technological benefits of concentrated capital and financial policy that sees the wealthiest capture a larger percentage of GDP decade-over-decade, it appears to be internally destabilizing and internationally weakening by nearly any metric one could name. To steelman the other side of this, one could argue the decline is overstated and temporary or attribute it to other factors. But it's no longer the case that a majority domestically or internationally is confident that this is the least bad system to emulate out of all the really existing systems. Powers in decline and relative elites within them tend to spend a lot of time creating theories for why the majority is wrong to feel the way they do, but historically that strategy has failed, regardless of if what replaces the existing system eventually turns out to be even worse.