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You must know that humans are very fickle creatures. People buy clothes and food from poorly-regulated industries all the time, not because none of them can be
by colanderman 13y ago
You must know that humans are very fickle creatures. People buy clothes and food from poorly-regulated industries all the time, not because none of them can be made to care about the conditions under which these goods are manufactured, but because not all of them can be made to care constantly.
If only a small group of people are ever interested enough to personally fund regulation, how can such free-market "regulation" effectively ensure good working conditions and food safety? Government solves this problem by low-pass-filtering the fickleness, thus ensuring continued funding.
- burntsushi 13y agoMy initial comment was pointing out that we libertarians very explicitly don't underestimate corruption; which factors very strongly in why we view centralized power in the form of legitimized coercion as A Bad Thing. My follow-up to an off-topic but related comment was that accountability exists in freed markets; just not in the way you might be used to in democratic societies. My intention is not to defend freed markets from every possible criticism. There is plenty of literature out there that does that much better than I could already. A nice place to start is David Friedman's "The Machinery of Freedom" for pragmatic details. [1] Just as accountability can come in many different shapes and sizes, so too can regulation. The only requirement is a bit of imagination. [1] - http://daviddfriedman.com/The_Machinery_of_Freedom_.pdf http://daviddfriedman.com/The_Machinery_of_Freedom_.pdf