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No, the libertarian political philosophy is that incentives matter, so that if companies can make easy money by getting the government to play favorites (primar
by jbellis 13y ago
No, the libertarian political philosophy is that incentives matter, so that if companies can make easy money by getting the government to play favorites (primarily by regulating smaller competitors out of the market, as well as straightforward politically connected loans), they will. The solution is therefore to make it so the government can't play favorites.
- api 13y agoWhat you describe is another problem: a high degree of naiveté among libertarians when it comes to the connection between economic power and political power. Large concentrations of economic power almost always proceed to purchase political influence and subvert the free market. It's usually far more profitable to do that than to play by free market rules.
- jbellis 13y agoLibertarians would say that it's the traditional liberal response (try to make it hard to purchase influence) that is naive: you've only been trying for a hundred years, and it hasn't worked yet.
- scarmig 13y agoClassical liberals, Rawlsian liberals, and libertarians all face the same public choice issues: they're not something any side can simply wave a wand at and make go away. The annoying part comes when either side pretends like the other side faces them as a unique challenge and the other isn't subject to it. (Traditional Burkean conservatism, on the other hand, doesn't face that issue in the same way: it accepts that government is inherently corruptible as part of the human condition and rejects the idea of a rationalist State.)
- jbooth 13y agoMaking it hardER is certainly possible. Get rid of the Citizens' United decision, enforce some rules on lobbying and campaign finance, re-institute the split between savings banks and investment banks, as a matter of fact break up a few of them so that the influence is less concentrated. We had things working that way a few short decades ago and while it wasn't a golden age, it wasn't as much of a gilded age as today either. Life is shades of gray. You're never going to have a government small enough or an economy small enough that it's not worth it to play dirty, outside of complete anarchy which it turns out is significantly dirtier. What you can do is limit the damage.
- nickff 13y agoPlease read the Citizens United majority opinion, and listen to both oral arguments; I think you will find that CU had a much better argument than you might think. Although you may dislike the consequences of the case, the government's argument was horrifically bad. In short, the government argued that the FEC could ban books and magazines, if they felt the publisher should not be granted a "media exemption", and that this ban would comply with the first amendment ("Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech").
- jbooth 13y agoThat might be so, but the court still had the option of narrowly allowing the items you point out without opening the floodgates. They went for floodgates.
- nickff 13y agoIn some circumstances, courts can narrowly decide cases, but where laws violate constitutional provisions by over-breadth, the Supreme Court strikes down the laws in their entirety.
- jbooth 13y agoSo your issue wasn't with potential FEC overreach as you argued above, your issue is that you agree with the Citizen's United decision in whole, and are all about the floodgates being opened. We'll just have to disagree on that.
- nickff 13y agoI think the two issues are inseparable (for better or for worse). The government required a great deal of power (in violation of the first amendment) to regulate and prevent express advocacy. The court had to strike down the laws as unconstitutional, to avoid allowing the government to put "prior restraints" on the freedom of speech. The only way to avoid this would have been to reach a narrower decision, based on an entirely different basis, but this could not be done once the 'prior restraint' issue had been raised. I suppose that I simply do not understand why the ruling was so controversial; it does not make sense to me that General Motors could be restrained from publishing certain things, and that General Electric (which owned NBC at the time of CU v. FEC) would be allowed to publish whatever it wanted, because of its media exemption (as was the government's argument).
- jerf 13y agoI am not sure this is actually a true statement about libertarians, rather than a standard polemic. Libertarians often come to that belief by being skeptical about any concentration of power... it just so happens that the US Federal government is today the biggest concentration of power, so you hear about that one the most. Thanks to crony capitalism, the line between "government" and "big business" can be a hard one to find. The general solution proposed by the supposedly-non-naive non-libertarians is to... give the government more power. Why it is supposedly so obvious that this is the correct solution to the problem of that we can openly mock anyone who disagrees is, frankly, unclear to me; the evidence that more government power has decreased large corporation's power anytime in the recent past seems pretty lacking, if you ask me. It seems to have just made the purchasing of favors that much easier.
- jbooth 13y agoSo, just to bring the abstracts down to earth for a bit here, you're defending things like the Citizen's United decision here? Let's get rid of the laws against outright bribery of congressmen while we're at it. That's just giving the government more power, with more laws, right?
- zanny 13y agoTrying to make illegal the paying off of politicians only skates the root problem that you have a society where enough wealth is concentrated to enable the buying of legislation from supposedly democratically elected representatives. Even if you managed it, you still have an absurd over concentration of power and wealth you aren't doing anything about, that just continues to corrupt at all levels of society.
- jerf 13y agoIf the purpose of your message is to convince me to stop being libertarian, trying to explain how I'm actually in favor of bigger, more powerful government as your last paragraph does is a very ineffective way to do it. I'm in favor of breaking down big power structures, where ever they are. As for the liberal's bete noir the CU decision, I'm pretty ambivalent. It would be far better to break up the big power pool the Federal government represents and thereby make capturing it less useful, then to try to make one big pool of power then insist that people try not to acquire it. The whole thing is the wrong question.
- angersock 13y agoThe problem is that companies will do anything for easy money, full stop. Governments, private individuals, other companies--whoever can be exploited, will. Libertarians don't always have a good counter to this fact of life.
- jbellis 13y agoI don't understand how that undermines the Libertarian point that if a government has no power to make the playing field uneven, it doesn't matter if it's corrupt.
- MereInterest 13y agoA government that does not have the power to make an even field uneven will also not have the power to make an uneven field even.
- mindslight 13y agoIn the Libertarian framework, the government still has a monopoly on force and justice, and so therefore always has the power to make the playing field uneven. Dropping that assertion, we arrive at anarcho-capitalism. And while a very useful framework for understanding the world, if we try using the nominal tenets of ancap as a foundation and hope to welcome their implications, it quickly becomes useless. There is no distinction between the present situation and USG being a corporation that owns all land and that our parents assented to. Stop infighting. This article is dead-on in describing a major modern problem. Only by holding the conflicting thoughts of multiple philosophical decompositions in your head can you ever hope to see a solution.