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You seem to be describing our current corrupt democracy that produces crony capitalism that gives favors to big businesses and enables the business owners to be

by krupan 1mo ago

You 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 1mo ago
What 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 1mo 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 1mo ago
    Doubt. 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 1mo ago
      [deleted]
    - krupan 1mo ago
      The 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 1mo ago
        Did the US stand with the USSR?
    - WalterBright 1mo 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 1mo ago
        No 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.
        WalterBright 1mo ago
        Both happened at the time it became uneconomic to employ children, and productivity was sufficient that people didn't have to work that many hours. Why do you suppose there was an exemption for farm work? It's because children were needed to bring in the harvest. Children are lousy workers. What jobs in your workplace do you think they could do? None in any place I've worked.
        tombert 1mo ago
        > None in any place I've worked. Oh, well, if you don't think that children would be good at making compilers then child labor must not have been a problem. I guess you have a point.
        WalterBright 1mo ago
        Have a look at what children were doing at work, and then come back. In once case I know of, the children in a textile factory worked all day at replacing spent spools of thread on the weaving machines. They were replaced by a machine that did the same thing, at much lower cost. Are there any jobs at your work place that would be productively performed by children? Have you ever gotten your kids to clean their rooms or do their homework?
  - anigbrowl 1mo ago
    The US would have thrived on any system because it started the game with a continent whose indigenous population was small, pluralistic, nomadic and technologically backward, and whose natural resources were abundant or completely untouched. The colonists had access to the technology of the leading power in the world at the time, and had imported slaves in bulk from another technologically backward continent to jump-start their economy by the time the US was established.
    - WalterBright 1mo ago
      Why did Mexico and S America fail to thrive?
      - anigbrowl 1mo ago
        They did not 'fail to thrive', they had different starting conditions and developed along different paths. They were not as thinly populated when colonized and indigenous cultures were farther advanced, eg Aztec civilization had already made the transition to large cities of hundreds of thousands, whereas the largest indigenous settlements in the continental US were just a few thousand people. The geography of South America is vastly different, so were the patterns of colonialism and settlement, with far higher rates of intermarriage and takeover of existing feudal instititions. Geography is far more deterimiantive than ideology.
        WalterBright 1mo ago
        > Geography is far more deterimiantive than ideology. Then why are Hong Kong and Taiwan so successful with free markets? Anyhow, Spain installed a feudal system in South and Central America, with a focus on looting it and extracting gold and silver. That was certainly not a path to prosperity. In stark contrast, America was settled with the principle of allowing settlers to own land, and farm it as they saw fit. This created a large and very productive middle class. Ideology was totally the dominant force.
        anigbrowl 1mo ago
  - deleted 1mo ago
    [deleted]
  - tombert 1mo ago
    That seems a bit reductive; I don't even know that you're "wrong", but there are a lot of factors that might have led to the United States' success. We have a lot of natural resources and a lot of our land is readily habitable. Yes, the US also has relatively liberal economics [1], and maybe that's why the US has done well, but I think there are too many confounding variables to conclude it's purely because of economic liberalism. [1] I mean liberal in the academic sense, not as a synonym for Democrat.
    - WalterBright 1mo ago
      Russia is chock full of natural resources. But Russia was never prosperous. Ditto for Mexico and S America.
      - tombert 1mo ago
        "Prosperous" is a relative term; Russia, even during the USSR days, was still significantly more prosperous than Uganda, for example. You can say "yes but they weren't as rich as the United States", but if "being as successful as the United States" is your bar then most countries fall short. There are plenty of countries that you would consider economically liberal that aren't as prosperous as the United States. I'm not going to claim I know "why" some countries do well and some don't, and that's my point. There are oodles of variables that end up being relevant and I think it's intellectually dishonest to pick one and thank/blame it for everything.
        WalterBright 1mo ago
        The US had to ship wheat to Russia to keep them from starving. There was a billboard put up in Kansas at the time: "Welcome to the Breadbasket of the Soviet Union". It would be worth your while to read a history of the USSR. > pick one The correlation between prosperity and free markets is a very strong one. P.S. In WW2, the US supplied all its allies (including the USSR) with massive amounts of food and military aid. And the US fought WW2 in two hemispheres. That's what free markets delivered. The evidence is everywhere you look and is overwhelming.
  - preg_match 1mo ago
    The US arguably would’ve thrived regardless, we had 50% of the world GDP post-WWII. That percentage pie has only declined, as other nations developed. Nations with disparate economic systems, some being top-down centrally controlled communist states. In fact, said states are the only ones who threatened the US economically. And, the US is not the most libertarian country, it’s not even close. The US is developed, so it’s automatically more centrally controlled than most nations. There are plenty of underdeveloped nations that are, effectively, much more libertarian. Because their governments don’t have the capital to enforce much of anything. Those nations are doing quite poorly, hence why they are underdeveloped. You will notice a pattern in the development of nations: as nations develop, the government has more stake in the macro economics of said nation. Because of course they do: they want the economics to go well, and they have the economics to enforce that, or try to. The US government does not “sit out” when things are going poorly, the opposite is true.
    - WalterBright 1mo ago
      When I wrote "has been" I meant the 19th century. > the US is not the most libertarian country, it’s not even close. Please give an example.
      - stopping 1mo ago
        Switzerland perhaps? https://freedomandprosperity.org/2021/blog/according-to-the-human-freedom-index-switzerland-is-the-most-libertarian-oriented-nation/ https://freedomandprosperity.org/2021/blog/according-to-the-...
        WalterBright 1mo ago
        Note I wrote "has been". The economic freedom in the US has steadily declined over the years.
        stopping 1mo ago
        You were responding to a comment which was written using the present tense.
  - nrr 1mo ago
    Is this true? I ask because the metric for determining the distance from the US's construction at any point in time to the libertarian ideal is unclear. Like, given an assertion of closest, it should be quantifiable[0]. It should also be falsifiable and admit a counterfactual. 1. The US was within some epsilon of being libertarian; 2. The US became rich; 3. Therefore, the prosperity of the US was a direct consequence of libertarianism. It's 2. here that I scratch my head at because, uh, the US has through its entire history, even pre-1776, been rich. It wasn't liquid wealth in the financial sense, but the US has had oodles of arable land, navigable waterways[1], natural resources, and favorable geography. It's only within the last 250 years that we've realized wealth in the form of bonkers huge internal markets and (at least, before recently) high levels of immigration. In fact, going back to 1., if we consider the laissez-faire dimension alone and compare it against the rate of wealth growth the US has sustained at least over my lifetime, the relationship is inverted[2]: we've somehow managed to accumulate more wealth as we've become less laissez-faire. This is a confounding variable that needs to be controlled for before we can draw a causal inference either way. I'd also argue that broader land policy, education, formal banking institutions, infrastructure, immigration policy, patents and other forms of economic protectionism, and research and development all belong in that causal model since they also tend to be things I look at when analyzing risk and uncertainty. -- 0: I'm still unsure if this quantification is even appropriate. Libertarian-ness admits a whole-ass vector space of institutional characteristics, and it isn't obvious to me how the norm would fall down to aggregate all of them as a single scalar for the purposes of making this argument. 1: The fact that pre-Columbian civilizations didn't have the wheel was often a justification for how backwards they were. As it turns out, when you have as many rivers as North America has, getting around without the wheel is no big deal. It's just pre-Columbian YAGNI. 2: Well, kinda. Both "wealth" and "laissez-faire-ness" minimally need operational definitions and some kind of partial order to be comparable like this.
    - WalterBright 1mo ago
      > It wasn't liquid wealth in the financial sense, but the US has had oodles of arable land, navigable waterways[1], natural resources, and favorable geography. It's only within the last 250 years that we've realized wealth in the form of bonkers huge internal markets and (at least, before recently) high levels of immigration. So has Russia, South America, Africa, Asia, etc. The high levels of immigration came from poor people in un-free countries coming to the US to make their fortunes. Free markets is what has distinguished the US from other countries. And every country that has tried free markets since has prospered accordingly, regardless of their natural resources, waterways, etc. Like, what natural resources does Taiwan have?
  - throwway120385 1mo ago
    I would argue that the 1950's and 1960's, which I've heard called a "golden age," was an age where we kept corporations in their place with a 90% corporate tax rate and we broke any corporation up who had an oversized market share. How is this "close to libertarianism?" If anything that suggests to me that the US was better off when corporations were weak and local, state and the federal government maintained lots of in-house expertise for their functions instead of outsourcing everything to consultants and contractors.
    - WalterBright 1mo ago
      I wrote "has been". Everybody seems to have missed that.
throwway120385 1mo ago
Does 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.
- krupan 1mo ago
  We 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.
- WalterBright 1mo 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.
bcrosby95 1mo 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? 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 1mo ago
  David 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 1mo 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 1mo ago
    Such 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 1mo ago
How 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 1mo ago
  It 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 1mo ago
    So 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 1mo ago
      Ok, 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 1mo ago
In 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 1mo 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?
  - WalterBright 1mo ago
    You might want to read "Titan" by Chernow before telling me I am wrong.
  - 1mo ago
pocksuppet 1mo ago
A 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 1mo ago
  OP’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 1mo ago
    How did Apple kiss Obama's ass?
    - krupan 1mo ago
      How 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.

by krupan 1mo ago

FireBeyond 1mo ago

What 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 1mo 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 1mo ago
  Doubt. 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 1mo ago
    [deleted]
  - krupan 1mo ago
    The 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 1mo ago
      Did the US stand with the USSR?
  - WalterBright 1mo 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 1mo ago
      No 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.
      - WalterBright 1mo ago
        Both happened at the time it became uneconomic to employ children, and productivity was sufficient that people didn't have to work that many hours. Why do you suppose there was an exemption for farm work? It's because children were needed to bring in the harvest. Children are lousy workers. What jobs in your workplace do you think they could do? None in any place I've worked.
        tombert 1mo ago
        > None in any place I've worked. Oh, well, if you don't think that children would be good at making compilers then child labor must not have been a problem. I guess you have a point.
        WalterBright 1mo ago
        Have a look at what children were doing at work, and then come back. In once case I know of, the children in a textile factory worked all day at replacing spent spools of thread on the weaving machines. They were replaced by a machine that did the same thing, at much lower cost. Are there any jobs at your work place that would be productively performed by children? Have you ever gotten your kids to clean their rooms or do their homework?
- anigbrowl 1mo ago
  The US would have thrived on any system because it started the game with a continent whose indigenous population was small, pluralistic, nomadic and technologically backward, and whose natural resources were abundant or completely untouched. The colonists had access to the technology of the leading power in the world at the time, and had imported slaves in bulk from another technologically backward continent to jump-start their economy by the time the US was established.
  - WalterBright 1mo ago
    Why did Mexico and S America fail to thrive?
    - anigbrowl 1mo ago
      They did not 'fail to thrive', they had different starting conditions and developed along different paths. They were not as thinly populated when colonized and indigenous cultures were farther advanced, eg Aztec civilization had already made the transition to large cities of hundreds of thousands, whereas the largest indigenous settlements in the continental US were just a few thousand people. The geography of South America is vastly different, so were the patterns of colonialism and settlement, with far higher rates of intermarriage and takeover of existing feudal instititions. Geography is far more deterimiantive than ideology.
      - WalterBright 1mo ago
        > Geography is far more deterimiantive than ideology. Then why are Hong Kong and Taiwan so successful with free markets? Anyhow, Spain installed a feudal system in South and Central America, with a focus on looting it and extracting gold and silver. That was certainly not a path to prosperity. In stark contrast, America was settled with the principle of allowing settlers to own land, and farm it as they saw fit. This created a large and very productive middle class. Ideology was totally the dominant force.
        anigbrowl 1mo ago
- deleted 1mo ago
  [deleted]
- tombert 1mo ago
  That seems a bit reductive; I don't even know that you're "wrong", but there are a lot of factors that might have led to the United States' success. We have a lot of natural resources and a lot of our land is readily habitable. Yes, the US also has relatively liberal economics [1], and maybe that's why the US has done well, but I think there are too many confounding variables to conclude it's purely because of economic liberalism. [1] I mean liberal in the academic sense, not as a synonym for Democrat.
  - WalterBright 1mo ago
    Russia is chock full of natural resources. But Russia was never prosperous. Ditto for Mexico and S America.
    - tombert 1mo ago
      "Prosperous" is a relative term; Russia, even during the USSR days, was still significantly more prosperous than Uganda, for example. You can say "yes but they weren't as rich as the United States", but if "being as successful as the United States" is your bar then most countries fall short. There are plenty of countries that you would consider economically liberal that aren't as prosperous as the United States. I'm not going to claim I know "why" some countries do well and some don't, and that's my point. There are oodles of variables that end up being relevant and I think it's intellectually dishonest to pick one and thank/blame it for everything.
      - WalterBright 1mo ago
        The US had to ship wheat to Russia to keep them from starving. There was a billboard put up in Kansas at the time: "Welcome to the Breadbasket of the Soviet Union". It would be worth your while to read a history of the USSR. > pick one The correlation between prosperity and free markets is a very strong one. P.S. In WW2, the US supplied all its allies (including the USSR) with massive amounts of food and military aid. And the US fought WW2 in two hemispheres. That's what free markets delivered. The evidence is everywhere you look and is overwhelming.
- preg_match 1mo ago
  The US arguably would’ve thrived regardless, we had 50% of the world GDP post-WWII. That percentage pie has only declined, as other nations developed. Nations with disparate economic systems, some being top-down centrally controlled communist states. In fact, said states are the only ones who threatened the US economically. And, the US is not the most libertarian country, it’s not even close. The US is developed, so it’s automatically more centrally controlled than most nations. There are plenty of underdeveloped nations that are, effectively, much more libertarian. Because their governments don’t have the capital to enforce much of anything. Those nations are doing quite poorly, hence why they are underdeveloped. You will notice a pattern in the development of nations: as nations develop, the government has more stake in the macro economics of said nation. Because of course they do: they want the economics to go well, and they have the economics to enforce that, or try to. The US government does not “sit out” when things are going poorly, the opposite is true.
  - WalterBright 1mo ago
    When I wrote "has been" I meant the 19th century. > the US is not the most libertarian country, it’s not even close. Please give an example.
    - stopping 1mo ago
      Switzerland perhaps? https://freedomandprosperity.org/2021/blog/according-to-the-human-freedom-index-switzerland-is-the-most-libertarian-oriented-nation/ https://freedomandprosperity.org/2021/blog/according-to-the-...
      - WalterBright 1mo ago
        Note I wrote "has been". The economic freedom in the US has steadily declined over the years.
        stopping 1mo ago
        You were responding to a comment which was written using the present tense.
- nrr 1mo ago
  Is this true? I ask because the metric for determining the distance from the US's construction at any point in time to the libertarian ideal is unclear. Like, given an assertion of closest, it should be quantifiable[0]. It should also be falsifiable and admit a counterfactual. 1. The US was within some epsilon of being libertarian; 2. The US became rich; 3. Therefore, the prosperity of the US was a direct consequence of libertarianism. It's 2. here that I scratch my head at because, uh, the US has through its entire history, even pre-1776, been rich. It wasn't liquid wealth in the financial sense, but the US has had oodles of arable land, navigable waterways[1], natural resources, and favorable geography. It's only within the last 250 years that we've realized wealth in the form of bonkers huge internal markets and (at least, before recently) high levels of immigration. In fact, going back to 1., if we consider the laissez-faire dimension alone and compare it against the rate of wealth growth the US has sustained at least over my lifetime, the relationship is inverted[2]: we've somehow managed to accumulate more wealth as we've become less laissez-faire. This is a confounding variable that needs to be controlled for before we can draw a causal inference either way. I'd also argue that broader land policy, education, formal banking institutions, infrastructure, immigration policy, patents and other forms of economic protectionism, and research and development all belong in that causal model since they also tend to be things I look at when analyzing risk and uncertainty. -- 0: I'm still unsure if this quantification is even appropriate. Libertarian-ness admits a whole-ass vector space of institutional characteristics, and it isn't obvious to me how the norm would fall down to aggregate all of them as a single scalar for the purposes of making this argument. 1: The fact that pre-Columbian civilizations didn't have the wheel was often a justification for how backwards they were. As it turns out, when you have as many rivers as North America has, getting around without the wheel is no big deal. It's just pre-Columbian YAGNI. 2: Well, kinda. Both "wealth" and "laissez-faire-ness" minimally need operational definitions and some kind of partial order to be comparable like this.
  - WalterBright 1mo ago
    > It wasn't liquid wealth in the financial sense, but the US has had oodles of arable land, navigable waterways[1], natural resources, and favorable geography. It's only within the last 250 years that we've realized wealth in the form of bonkers huge internal markets and (at least, before recently) high levels of immigration. So has Russia, South America, Africa, Asia, etc. The high levels of immigration came from poor people in un-free countries coming to the US to make their fortunes. Free markets is what has distinguished the US from other countries. And every country that has tried free markets since has prospered accordingly, regardless of their natural resources, waterways, etc. Like, what natural resources does Taiwan have?
- throwway120385 1mo ago
  I would argue that the 1950's and 1960's, which I've heard called a "golden age," was an age where we kept corporations in their place with a 90% corporate tax rate and we broke any corporation up who had an oversized market share. How is this "close to libertarianism?" If anything that suggests to me that the US was better off when corporations were weak and local, state and the federal government maintained lots of in-house expertise for their functions instead of outsourcing everything to consultants and contractors.
  - WalterBright 1mo ago
    I wrote "has been". Everybody seems to have missed that.

throwway120385 1mo ago

Does 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.

krupan 1mo ago
We 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.
WalterBright 1mo 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.

bcrosby95 1mo 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? 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 1mo ago
David 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 1mo 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 1mo ago
  Such 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 1mo ago

How 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 1mo ago
It 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 1mo ago
  So 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 1mo ago
    Ok, 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 1mo ago

In 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 1mo 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?
- WalterBright 1mo ago
  You might want to read "Titan" by Chernow before telling me I am wrong.
- 1mo ago

pocksuppet 1mo ago

A 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 1mo ago
OP’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 1mo ago
  How did Apple kiss Obama's ass?
  - krupan 1mo ago
    How 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.