Freedom is the ONLY thing that counts. I do acknowledge that Libertarians claim to want to pursue freedom.
However I believe that Libertarianism, will only replace tyrannical government with tyrannical rule by businesses.
The problem with governments no matter their political leaning is that most political ideologies lack any mechanism to deal with corruption and abuses of power. Libertarianism seeks to deal with this by removing government and instead hand the power to private companies.
Companies are usually small dictatorships or even tyrannies. Handing them the power over all of society will only benefit the owners of these companies. The rest of society will basically be reduced to the status of slaves as they have no say over the direction of the society they maintain through their 9to5s.
These companies already control governments around the world through favors, bribes or other means such as regulatory capture or even by influencing the media and thereby manipulating the public’s opinion through the advertisement revenue.
Our problems would only get worse, all the ills of today’s society, lack of freedom, lack of peace, lack of just basic human decency will be vastly aggravated if we hand the entirety of control to people like petur tihel and allen mosque.
Instead the way to go about this is MORE democracy not less of it. The solution is to give average citizens more influence over the fate of society rather than less. However for that to happen we all need to fight ignorance and promote the spread of education. It has to become cool again to read books (or .epub/.mobi’s lol)
The best way to resolve the the corruption issue is to not allow any individual to hold power, instead having a distributed system.
More of a community-driven government. Sort of like these workers owned companies. We should not delegate away our decision-making power. We should ourselves make the decisions.
Although this post is in English it does neither concern the ASU nor KU or any other English speaking countries, in particular. It’s a general post addressing a world wide phenomenon.
;)
Libertarian Police™ Department
I was shooting heroin and reading “The Fountainhead” in the front seat of my privately owned police cruiser when a call came in. I put a quarter in the radio to activate it. It was the chief.
“Bad news, detective. We got a situation.”
“What? Is the mayor trying to ban trans fats again?”
“Worse. Somebody just stole four hundred and forty-seven million dollars’ worth of bitcoins.”
The heroin needle practically fell out of my arm. “What kind of monster would do something like that? Bitcoins are the ultimate currency: virtual, anonymous, stateless. They represent true economic freedom, not subject to arbitrary manipulation by any government. Do we have any leads?”
“Not yet. But mark my words: we’re going to figure out who did this and we’re going to take them down … provided someone pays us a fair market rate to do so.”
“Easy, chief,” I said. “Any rate the market offers is, by definition, fair.”
He laughed. “That’s why you’re the best I got, Lisowski. Now you get out there and find those bitcoins.”
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’m on it.”
I put a quarter in the siren. Ten minutes later, I was on the scene. It was a normal office building, strangled on all sides by public sidewalks. I hopped over them and went inside.
“Home Depot™ Presents the Police!®” I said, flashing my badge and my gun and a small picture of Ron Paul. “Nobody move unless you want to!” They didn’t.
“Now, which one of you punks is going to pay me to investigate this crime?” No one spoke up.
“Come on,” I said. “Don’t you all understand that the protection of private property is the foundation of all personal liberty?”
It didn’t seem like they did.
“Seriously, guys. Without a strong economic motivator, I’m just going to stand here and not solve this case. Cash is fine, but I prefer being paid in gold bullion or autographed Penn Jillette posters.”
Nothing. These people were stonewalling me. It almost seemed like they didn’t care that a fortune in computer money invented to buy drugs was missing.
I figured I could wait them out. I lit several cigarettes indoors. A pregnant lady coughed, and I told her that secondhand smoke is a myth. Just then, a man in glasses made a break for it.
“Subway™ Eat Fresh and Freeze, Scumbag!®” I yelled.
Too late. He was already out the front door. I went after him.
“Stop right there!” I yelled as I ran. He was faster than me because I always try to avoid stepping on public sidewalks. Our country needs a private-sidewalk voucher system, but, thanks to the incestuous interplay between our corrupt federal government and the public-sidewalk lobby, it will never happen.
I was losing him. “Listen, I’ll pay you to stop!” I yelled. “What would you consider an appropriate price point for stopping? I’ll offer you a thirteenth of an ounce of gold and a gently worn ‘Bob Barr ‘08’ extra-large long-sleeved men’s T-shirt!”
He turned. In his hand was a revolver that the Constitution said he had every right to own. He fired at me and missed. I pulled my own gun, put a quarter in it, and fired back. The bullet lodged in a U.S.P.S. mailbox less than a foot from his head. I shot the mailbox again, on purpose.
“All right, all right!” the man yelled, throwing down his weapon. “I give up, cop! I confess: I took the bitcoins.”
“Why’d you do it?” I asked, as I slapped a pair of Oikos™ Greek Yogurt Presents Handcuffs® on the guy.
“Because I was afraid.”
“Afraid?”
“Afraid of an economic future free from the pernicious meddling of central bankers,” he said. “I’m a central banker.”
I wanted to coldcock the guy. Years ago, a central banker killed my partner. Instead, I shook my head.
“Let this be a message to all your central-banker friends out on the street,” I said. “No matter how many bitcoins you steal, you’ll never take away the dream of an open society based on the principles of personal and economic freedom.”
He nodded, because he knew I was right. Then he swiped his credit card to pay me for arresting him.
Unpopular opinion: obvious stuff that 99% of the people here will agree with.
It’s true that it’s not really an unpopular opinion (especially here), but it’s still thoughtful and well articulated. I thought it was more interesting than most posts.
True, I didn’t mean it as an insult to OP, just pointing out the ol’ tradition of posting very popular things on the forum for unpopular opinions
It’s been my experience that libertarians are just conservatives that are too cowardly to commit to the bit.
I’ve encountered three stripes of Big-L Libertarians online (thankfully, they don’t seem to exist in Oz, they’re mostly Americans with too much free time):
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The Libertarian who is just a walking tax grievance. All he cares about is not paying taxes, it was how he got introduced to libertarianism, everything else is rationalising this point.
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The Libertarian who treats it like a model train set in his basement. Everything works perfectly in his head, all the systems snap together, and he doesn’t much care how it relates to an actual railway network in the real world. Libertarianism is more a neat little thought experiment for him than anything else. They have varying levels of commitment to implementing these ideas in the real world.
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Actual fucking psychopaths. Social Darwinists. These guys are the ones who go on about “freedom”, but they’re engaged in sleight of hand. When they say freedom, they mean the freedom of the strong to exploit the weak, and the freedom to starve in the gutter. They all seem to imagine themselves as temporarily-embarrassed millionaires and captains of industry, or ranchers who get to print their own money and turn people living on their land into neo-feudal serfs.
None of them have a satisfying answer for how their utopian power vacuum is supposed to be stable. Some know it isn’t, but can’t give the game away.
And of course any time any of them are presented with evidence of deregulation or privatisation having a negative human cost, they’ll also claim there’s a magical inflection point where things just weren’t deregulated or privatised enough: you have to give them everything they want first, then their theories will start to work, pinky-promise. And sometimes the psychos will say the quiet part out loud and will chide you for daring to bring morality and human suffering into an economic debate.
And yes, a lot of this language is gendered. No, it is not unnecessary. Yes, they are almost always dudes. No, I don’t know why.
I think you may have come up with the least unpopular opinion on Lemmy. There’s more people who are unabashed fans of Stalin and Mao than there are libertarians.
Buuut…I mean, I’m not a libertarian, but I’ve taken libertarian ideas more seriously than you have, so I can play devil’s advocate.
The idea behind libertarianism isn’t to hand power over to corporations; that’s just what detractors claim will happen. What they claim will happen is that corporations will become far less powerful.
The nightmare cyberpunk scenario where companies acquire private militaries and just physically take over doesn’t really apply. The difference between libertarians and anarchists is that the former do see a place for government, usually including military, courts, policing, enforcement of contracts, and a few other things. So companies would continue to have to earn your dollar the old fashion way.
Now, think of industries that suck, where the companies are really shitty causing people to complain about them all the time, but are nonetheless stuck using them for lack of options.
Got some? Okay, now, were you thinking of electronics companies? No? How about bedding, or kitchenware? Hardware & tools? Flooring? Children’s toys? Food & grocery?
Or…were you maybe thinking (depending where you live) of banking, airline, healthcare, insurance, or telecom industries?
Okay, now, change of topic: think of some industries with lots of regulation and government intervention.
Did you by any chance come up with the same list?
Lots of people will claim those industries are heavily regulated because they’re somehow inherently shitty, and need the government to step in to fix them. Libertarians would say that those industries are shitty because regulations and government interventions prevent competition and shelter incumbents. They don’t have to treat customers well anymore, or make particularly good products, because their position is secure whether they do or not. In an actual free market, competition is easier, so it’s harder for a company to establish a monopoly.
An extreme example: Britain famously demanded Hong Kong as compensation from China during the Opium Wars, and used it as a gateway to Asia. They treated it with a sort of benign neglect: as long as the port was functioning, they didn’t pay that much attention to the operation of the territory. It was not heavily regulated, to the point that even (for example) the healthcare industry was basically regulation-free. You could literally stick a sign on the door of your apartment claiming you were doctor, and start treating people, and nobody would stop you.
So, since healthcare is one of those sacred industries that requires heavy government regulation to protect people, the life expectancy and health outcomes of Hong Kongers must have been abysmal, right? Well…no, it actually climbed steadily throughout, and is #1 in the world today (though it should be noted the situation re: regulation changed post-1997). And it was a hell of a lot cheaper than American or European healthcare at every point.
There are industries where monopolies seem to form naturally. In my lifetime, Microsoft, Facebook and Google have all been accused of being monopolistic. There were calls for government intervention. But like…they were monopolies (or got close, anyway) because lots of people chose to use them. Nobody was forced. I couldn’t stand Microsoft or Facebook, so I switched to Linux way back in the 90s and I’ve never really used Facebook at all. I do use some Google products, because they’re pretty good.
And I’m fine. Nobody ever threatened me. My life wasn’t negatively affected AFAICT. I just didn’t use that product. Competitors appeared, like Linux & BSD, Reddit, Lemmy, etc, and I liked those better so I used them instead. That was it. Pretty boring as far as dystopias go.
The situation is a bit different when it comes to government. I can’t opt in or out, I’m just stuck. I mean, I can move (assuming I have enough cash to do it), but fully extricating yourself from your home country is surprisingly hard: the US will chase you around the world to claim taxes from your income. And you immediately have to pick another country, and your options are severely limited.
People talk about corporations in such dire terms. It’s kind of mystifying to me: just don’t fucking use that corporation’s products. Voila! You’re free from their insidious influence.
Ahh, but they corrupt government institutions with their lobbying money! The libertarian answer is: have fewer government institutions, then. They can’t lobby to bend regulations in their favor if there are no regulations in the first place. They would say that heavy regulation means incumbents are protected from competition, and can thus extract more ‘rent’, meaning more profit, which they can then turn towards warping the copious regulations in their favor…meaning still more protection, more profit, and more regulatory capture.
Like I said, I’m not a libertarian, but I understand their perspective, and I think it should be more influential than it is. I can talk about how rent control raises housing costs, or how “worker’s rights” results in lower pay, or how minimum wages are racist and sexist.
Or you can just call me names for taking libertarians seriously! That seems like the more popular approach.
Now, think of industries that suck, where the companies are really shitty causing people to complain about them all the time, but are nonetheless stuck using them for lack of options.
…
Or…were you maybe thinking (depending where you live) of banking, airline, healthcare, insurance, or telecom industries?
Okay, now, change of topic: think of some industries with lots of regulation and government intervention.
Did you by any chance come up with the same list?
Typical libertarian blather.
In each one of these cases the industry predates the regulation. The regulation of banking is a response to the shitty behaviour of pre-regulation banks. Ditto for airlines, health care, insurance, telecom, etc. etc. etc.
The old adage “each regulation is written in blood” applies (albeit the blood being metaphorical in some cases).
The libertarian cinematic universe (coughRandroidscough) has it that businessmen were just chugging along merrily making a profit when suddenly, out of nowhere, the government leaped in to slap regulations on things. The reality is that regulations (which are themselves, naturally, not perfect, often applied long after the need has vanished, and prone to being corrupted) are a response to corporate malfeasance. Very few regulations are made ahead of the fact. (Politicians are constitutionally incapable of thinking ahead, after all.)
So airlines being heavily-regulated? Go look at the history of the airline industry. Look at the accident rates caused by the complete and utter profiteering of early airlines. Then ask yourself if regulation made these industries evil, or if perhaps regulations came in because of the evil of said industries.
Typical libertarian blather.
Typical ad-hominem dismissal.
In each one of these cases the industry predates the regulation.
Yeah, I preempted you and pointed out that’s the argument of the ‘other’ side.
There are some cases where you can argue that regulation was a response to abuses. I’d agree with banking. I gave a counterpoint re: healthcare, where free market healthcare worked really well.
Telecom was largely rolled out by government monopolies, in order to do it quickly. Then (at least in Canada, where I’m from), the government basically passed monopolistic government bodies to private companies, with a little “make sure to allow competition!” clause. Surprise surprise, there’s basically 1-2 telecom companies per province in Canada today, and they’ve captured the fuck out of regulatory bodies. Corporations are corporations, and they’re gonna seek profit. That’s a good thing if they’re competing and struggling, but terrible if you pass them a harness and whip.
I’m skeptical about airlines & insurance. They’d have worked themselves out eventually, if left to market forces, but that’s never been allowed to happen.
Early airlines were a mess, but the last 50 years have been incredibly safe. You’re like 1000x safer in a plane than a car. I’ve seen arguments that such extreme safety regulations are actually causing thousands of deaths per year: the level of regulation significantly raises the price (I’ve seen 2x as a rough estimate, no idea how accurate that is), which causes a lot of people to drive instead of fly–and driving is 1000x less safe, so lots of them die in car accidents. If flying were only a few hundred times safer than driving, and prices dropped by 25%, it might save hundreds of lives due to fewer car accidents.
There’s this problem with regulation: nobody ever lost their bureaucratic job by being too careful. If you’re a government bureaucrat and you eased up regulations on airlines (or food & drug safety, or building codes, etc), and that caused some incident that killed a person or two, you could be offered up as a sacrifice to public rage–even if the same relaxation of regulations saved lives by encouraging (safer) flying over driving, or made drugs available that saves hundreds of lives, or made housing 13% cheaper in some given city. The benefits are diffuse, the harm is acute–and newsworthy. And what’s the upside for you, as a bureaucrat? You don’t get a raise, or a bonus, or even a pat on the back for lower housing prices or exciting new cancer treatments.
So: restrict, limit, contain, regulate. That’s the only sane thing to do. Make a big deal about how safe you’re keeping everybody. Nobody will ever know that thousands of lives could have been saved, or housing could’ve been affordable, or travel could’ve been quicker, etc, if you’d eased up on regulations. You, the bureaucrat, will never face the counterexample–or the costs associated with overregulation.
There are some cases where you can argue that regulation was a response to abuses. I’d agree with banking. I gave a counterpoint re: healthcare, where free market healthcare worked really well.
Yeah but, a basic Google search about the history of the Hong Kong healthcare system makes it obvious that your counterpoint is almost entirely incorrect. Whether that’s a result of your arguing in bad faith or a result of you just ignorantly parroting something you heard an elder libertarian say is up for debate.
Your example was 19th century Hong Kong and you said “the British didn’t regulate healthcare and anyone could put a sign on their door claiming to be a doctor and start treating people” you then yada-yada’d to “and now they have world class hospitals”.
You completely skipped a bunch of history, like how the British government actively subsidized the establishment of a Chinese medicine hospital. You skipped the part about how a combination of British physicians and Chinese physicians who were trained in Western medicine founded the first medical school in Hong Kong.
You were correct when you said it was all done without government regulation, but so was most of the healthcare in America at the time.
And the most glaring issue with your counterpoint is your comparison of late 19th century medicine with modern times. Modern medicine is practically magic compared to those times. And yet we just experienced a worldwide pandemic where millions of people
collectively lost their minds and actively fought against science, logic and common sense. We had the modern day version of “putting a sign on their door claiming to be a doctor” with all the youtube quacks and anti-vac “influencers”.
Free market health care might have worked well enough when populations were smaller, distances were greater and lives were shorter. But we don’t live in that world anymore.
nobody ever lost their bureaucratic job by being too careful. If you’re a government bureaucrat and you eased up regulations on airlines (or food & drug safety, or building codes, etc), and that caused some incident that killed a person or two, you could be offered up as a sacrifice to public rage–even if the same relaxation of regulations saved lives by encouraging (safer) flying over driving, or made drugs available that saves hundreds of lives, or made housing 13% cheaper in some given city.
I love how you’re going with the optimistically naive libertarian schtick.
I WANT my food, pharmaceuticals, automobiles and homes to be made to strict standards of quality and safety. Haven’t you read The Jungle
No amount of “driving safer” will protect you from a car that will crumble/explode in a collision, no amount of “driving safer” will keep a poorly manufactured engine from falling apart or the cabin floor from rusting out. But hey, what’s another couple thousand dollars in repairs or having to buy a new car when I saved so much up front, right?
And why should lower income people be forced to live in shoddy, substandard housing? Just because you’re poor doesn’t mean you deserve to live in constant fear of electrical fires or building collapse.
We need to regulate the development, production and distribution of drugs. ALL drugs. I csn trust that the new diabetes treatment for my aunt has been well tested and is safe because I know how exhaustive the development process is. And on that same token, the ONLY reason there are so many fentanyl overdoses right now is because recreational drugs are produced and distributed by clandestine (i.e. unregulated) facilities.
I gave a counterpoint re: healthcare, where free market healthcare worked really well.
The nation noted for its “free market healthcare” on the world stage has shit health stats. Working real well there, Sparky.
Telecom was largely rolled out by government monopolies, in order to do it quickly.
Time to open up a history book, there, dude. 'Cause you are so fucking far off the mark it’s hilarious.
I’m skeptical about airlines … They’d have worked themselves out eventually, if left to market forces, but that’s never been allowed to happen.
At what cost in bodies? I know to the libertarian mindset death counts are just number, but each increment of those numbers is a human life. The ultimate loss of liberty is death.
Want to see what “market forces” do in airline industries? Look at the 737-MAX fiasco, where government abrogated its oversight of the airline, permitting companies to “self-certify”, a decision that you can draw a direct line from to 346 dead bodies.
Seriously, go visit those 346 people’s families. Tell them that “market forces” would have eventually settled out the issues. Be ready to run. 346 times.
The idea of regulation is to stop the bodies from happening in the first place instead of waiting, while the body count racks up, for “market forces” to fix everything.
This religion of “the market solves all” is why libertarians are fuckwits.
Quick, someone share the reddit copy pasta where the police officer does heroin in his police car.
So, since healthcare is one of those sacred industries that requires heavy government regulation to protect people, the life expectancy and health outcomes of Hong Kongers must have been abysmal, right? Well…no
Wasn’t the state of healthcare at the time somewhere between useless and actively harmful? Not much use in regulating what the experts of the day are completely wrong about.
Anyway my issue with much of the argumentation you’ve presented here, despite there being many reasonable points, is that most libertarians seem to simply not care at all whether their predictions of how well unfettered capitalism will go are realistic or true. It’s just talking points to them, because if they weren’t true, it would still be justified to favor absolute property rights over everything else. That’s what they really care about, the justice of no one getting to touch their stuff, and it outweighs everything else.
Which is frustrating, because despite their rare willingness to drill down into specifics, it’s a clear point of biased disingenuousness. If the only thing a point means to someone is that if it is made one way others might be persuaded of their cause, the incentive is to only understand it that particular way, and never realize or admit if it’s wrong.
My issue with the core ethos is, a person’s ability to opt out of things very often depends on how poor they are, and so if property is liberty, it’s only liberty for those with the property.
The state of healthcare in the 1960s through the 1990s? I mean, it wasn’t that bad. Life expectancy at the time was rising very quickly in developed countries–and in Hong Kong.
Libertarians can drive me crazy too, and I agree that a lot of them are driven by ideology, not practicality. And a lot of them can’t even make these arguments in defense of their own beliefs–they just come at it from a simple moral POV (“taxes are violence!”). But that’s not unique to libertarians: most people hold to ideologies they don’t fully understand, which is why they defend them rabidly with insults and attacks, instead of just explaining why they believe what they do. “I believe we should do this because it’s right, and I’ll get mad if you try to explain why it’s impractical, impossible, or counterproductive!” is an attitude I hear more often, if anything, from the Left.
And, well, in a libertarian world, your ability to opt out of things may depend, to some extent, on your wealth–but (they would say) it’s easier for people to get wealthy in general. And as I pointed out in my original post…well…no, it’s not really true. I opt out of Facebook and Microsoft and other ‘monopolies’, and I’m just fine. Why would that change? But I really, actually can’t opt out of the state, and the bigger the state gets the more restricted we are. So, the solution to “if the libertarians got their way, some people would be more free than others” is “we should significantly restrict freedom overall, for everybody”?
These points seem pretty reasonable, wonder what’s wrong with them since you mentioned you’re not actually a libertarian?
You also mentioned businesses that tend to become monopolies, and more generally, there seem to be types of business that don’t really play well in a free market. One non-monopoly example could be antibiotics, since we’re all worse off the more they’re consumed. Another example is natural resources exploitation: competition won’t stop these resources from running out. I know close to nothing about economics but shouldn’t it be pretty straightforward to figure out which businesses or which business aspects are the ones that benefit from free market? It seems mostly a technical question.
I’m pro-gun control. I like public transit. I think cities should be organized to some extent. Countries that managed large-scale cooperation did much better during the pandemic. Global warming is hard to solve in a pure libertarian system. There are lots of reasons why I’m not a libertarian.
I wish it were nice and simple to identify where regulation helps and where it doesn’t, but it’s the source of endless debates.
It’s impossible to respond to all of your points, but I wanted to respond to one of them: part of the regulation is cartel law, which was needed because in a “free” (as in, no regulation) market, businesses did not in fact compete with each other to beat out their rivals, but they colluded with each other to keep prices high.
Because simple logic is that when perfect competition would be happening, then no one would earn any profit, since they would need to make their services/goods cheaper and cheaper to acquire market share, until no one has any margins or only one business is left that operates most efficiently. Both of these results have actually been happening.
Everyone in a market actually makes more profit if they don’t compete with each other and make prices arbitrarily fixed. (Or only one is left, in which case prices will again be arbitrary). This has been happening so much that regulation was needed. Regulation is what made the actual spirit behind a free market possible, because without it, it’d either be cartels or monopolies.
“free” market (as in, no regulation)
What!? No! That’s not what the free part refers to in the term “free market”.
A free market is one in which the actors are free to engage or not engage in business with others. The presence of a cartel is a step away from a free market because the existence of that cartel removes consumers’ freedom to choose between competing providers.
So how do you stop cartels from forming without regulation? How do you stop monopolies from forming when the only thing you need to create one is more capital than your competitors?
Your first paragraph shows how delusional you are. And the last confirms that you are indeed a liberal or libertarian. So it fits.
Don’t have any counterarguments? Don’t let that stop you! Just throw out some insults and act as though a serious reply is beneath you, given your superior understanding of the world. If confronted, gesture broadly at the comment you’re replying to and say something like “that third point you made is stupid!” Don’t bother elaborating or explaining why. Everybody will probably think you’re a professor of economics who’s just sick of explaining himself or something!
The very first sentence is borderline propaganda. It implies that lemmy is full of hard leftist when, in truth, there are as many liberals here. Why start with this sentence?
Then it follows with something like “I’m not a libertarian” or something along this line, “but”, which means it’ll actually be a long rent or propaganda to promote liberal views or critique the leftist views. And I wasn’t wrong, as the last paragraph showed.
I didn’t comment to talk about the political matter, but about the shape of the discourse. You are a hard liberal, but you pretend not to be. That’s either dishonest or delusional. Or at least that’s what your writing conveys.
OK, I just checked delusional definition, and maybe it’s not what I thought. I mean something like “convinced by an idea that is completely wrong”. If you have a better or less insulting word, I’ll gladly learn it.
Is that an unpopular opinion? I thought that was the whole appeal, hence why most billionaires are libertarians.
That’s also basically the moral of the story of bioshock.
