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.
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.
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 ad-hominem dismissal.
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.
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.
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.
Re: Hong Kong, I’m not talking about their system circa 1870, I’m talking all the way through to the Chinese takeover in 1997 and beyond. Very recent. Throughout, life expectancy and health outcomes rose steadily.
The fact that Western & Chinese doctors trained at Western medicine isn’t incompatible with libertarian values, at all–quite the opposite. Yes, there was some government funding during the century of British rule, but that’s not the sole source of progress, and it’s debatable whether it was necessary.
I think the pandemic is a good counterargument against libertarianism, because it required cooperative action (or at least, cooperative action dramatically improved outcomes). Interestingly, though, Hong Kong, which is still relatively light on regulations, did very well compared to Western nation. It was more of a cultural issue.
Global warming is another sticky point. Any place where externalities cause problems is a good point for argumentation. Again: I’m not a libertarian.
Pharmaceuticals, automobiles, and homes all get safer over time because that’s what people want. People buy cars that are rated as safe by independent bodies, so cars are often much safer than is strictly required by regulation–and getting safer every year. That’s because people want safe cars, and are willing to pay more for them, and because unsafe cars cause lots of bad press. There were very few restrictions on what could be sold as medicine in Hong Kong for a century, and yet people didn’t all die of toxins in their medication. Developers follow professional standards, most of which are not enforced by government. The government hasn’t been adding newer and stricter regulations year-on-year in these industries–and yet they get safer year-on-year. If regulations are the sole driver of safety, why is that the case?
You were scolding me for referring back to the 19th century in reference to HK healthcare (though I wasn’t doing that), and yet you suggest that the only thing keeping us from living in dirty hovels is government regulation. That’s silly. If libertarians (and incidentally, most economists) are right, fewer regulations would mean much cheaper, better-quality housing for low-income people. Shit, let me point you at the YIMBY movement: Fuck single-family zoning! Fuck building restrictions, and parking requirements, and set-back regulations, and dozens of other petty and arbitrary regulations–all put in place by well-meaning but naive bureaucrats. Getting rid of all that shit would drastically reduce housing prices, meaning better housing for everybody! And incidentally, the YIMBY movement is not only fully compatible with libertarian views–it’s basically torn straight out of the libertarian playbook!
Tell that to people with chronic conditions waiting impatiently for the FDA to approve experimental medications which might well help them with their sicknesses, which will kill them soon. Why shouldn’t they be free to try something that might save their life?
Fentanyl was developed and distributed right in the open, approved by the FDA, and distributed to doctors and pharmacists, and everybody happily prescribed it and took it believing that it wouldn’t be FDA-approved if it was dangerous. It’s only recently that it’s gone underground. Meanwhile…lots of less-regulated countries have no such opioid epidemic. A strict and overbearing regulatory regime (the FDA is relatively strict even compared to similar nations) did nothing to prevent it, and arguably exacerbated it.
You LITERALLY did. You began your premise by explaining how the British didn’t care about Hong Kong so the people there didn’t face any regulations.
Yada yada yada, they now have great hospitals. As I said, you skipped ALL the other stuff that led to today, including how most of the civilized world followed the same general trajectory.
I wasn’t suggesting that Chinese and western doctors working together was incompatible with libertarianism, I was suggesting it was an example of how your “the British didn’t care” bit is incompatible with facts.
you sure about that?
From another article: “Containing the virus in Hong Kong has depended on cutting off transmission chains as soon as they appeared. Any person with a confirmed infection, even if asymptomatic, was required to be hospitalized, while close contacts were sent to a government quarantine facility for up to three weeks.”
Externalities? You mean the kind of stuff that governmental regulations on private businesses are intended to prevent/mitigate?
You’re debating like all the libertarians I know. Poorly.
Which brings us to your next point…
They got safer over time because what people want is to not die and the government put rules on how those things can be manufactured and operated.
Sounds to me like the regulation on the automobile manufacturers pushed them towards innovation.
No, the bad press happens when the press leaks an internal memo proving that the car maker knew full well that they’re car had a flaw that could cause death or dismemberment but they decided not to do anything about it because it would hurt their bottom line.
Because they weren’t selling toxins. Traditional Chinese medicine is generally derived from natural ingredients. They still knew to avoid the dangerous mushrooms or berries.
What are you talking about? You sound like your just guessing about things. The FDA has a tremendous amount of regulatory oversight. They have an army of inspectors, investigators, and policy makers keeping bad shit off the market every day. I don’t know where you get the idea that they don’t enforce their guidelines, or that they aren’t constantly revising or writing new guidelines when they have new information.
I never suggested that, and I don’t believe anyone debating against a libertarian in good faith ever would.
Again, NOT what I was suggesting. I’m saying that if you don’t enforce a minimum level of safety, there WILL BE people who will sell dangerous things.
Cite your sources.
I agree with you to a point, but it you want to build lots of low cost multi family housing in the suburbs, you better have building and parking and set back requirements. My first house was a condo on a busy 4 lane street. The front door was maybe 50ft from the road. I spent years in that house dealing with the never ending noise of the traffic and the foundation shaking any time a semi drove by.
Again, I agree that there are some zoning laws that are due to be revised or repealed, but suggesting that they are all pointless and detrimental to society demonstrates a profound misunderstanding of basic civic planning.
No, the libertarian playbook says my neighbor should be allowed to open a gun range in his backyard if he wants to. The libertarian playbook says that a local businessman can buy and bulldoze the houses on the other side of me so he can build a new branch for his industrial widget factory, and that he’s allowed to dump contaminated waste water into the creek that runs through my backyard.
You know that’s actually a thing, don’t you? There have been plenty of people with a terminal condition who have volunteered in clinical trials knowing full well it may kill them.
It IS safe in clinical doses. It’s administered in ways that prevent accidental overdose like patches. And people don’t so much trust the FDA as much as they trust their prescribing physician.
Again, your just making things up. Opioids are a problem all around the world. Some countries are way worse than others, but it’s not at all unique to America.
So the FDA is strict and overbearing… but did nothing to prevent it?
You could argue that, but you’d be wrong. If anything, it was exacerbated by the obscene amounts of money it made for the makers of the drug, money that they used to lobby government officials.
Isn’t that the free market in action?
I LITERALLY was talking about Hong Kong from it’s establishment in the 1840s through to the Chinese takeover in 1997 (and beyond, really, because they were mostly left to their own devices for most of 2 decades after Chinese rule).
Hong Kong should have been the exception to that rule if heavy regulation is actually a requirement in the healthcare industry, but in fact it’s top of the heap. If you can achieve the same results without regulation, what’s the point of regulation?
I was speaking informally. I meant that the British didn’t govern with a heavy hand. They weren’t entirely disinterested, but they were a lot less paternalistic than they were back home in Britain.
Yes, exactly that kind. You do realize I’m arguing your side here, right? Are you having trouble keeping up?
Yeah well ur stupid. Zing!
So explain why things continued to get safer even when the government was not actively adding extra regulations? Why did life expectancy go up through the Reagan years, when the government was actively deregulating?
Regulation must have helped somehow, right? It served an an inspiration! There’s no way customers would’ve simply showed a preference for safer cars over time…
This is the status quo. Car companies sell cars, and car accidents are one of the leading causes of death in the US. I’m about to shock you to your core, here: car companies know about car accidents, and yet the continue to sell cars! Even weirder? People also know about car accidents, and continue to buy cars!
Every car on the market has known flaws that cause accidents. For example: they have rubber tires, and those tires have a tendency to wear and eventually blow out, a known cause of accidents which leads to a known and quantifiable number of deaths every year. Shocking!
It’s all shades of gray, man. Car companies can’t make perfect cars that never cause accidents, and even approaching that ideal would make for ridiculously expensive cars. So, they find themselves (like every producer of a product ever) in a situation of balancing costs & risks. Emails talking explicitly about that look bad out of context, but even the NHTSA has thresholds and compromises in their regulations.
What, without the government itemizing the dangerous mushrooms & berries in law? What stopped self-proclaimed Hong Kong doctors from passing off poison berries as medicine, if they didn’t have some FDA-equivalent telling them what to do?
I mean, the YIMBY movement has all kinds of pages and YouTube videos making my case for me.
An example: housing prices in Tokyo were going wild in the 80s, and they responded with massive deregulation. Now housing is Tokyo is much cheaper than comparable cities (I mean, to the extent that other cites can even be compared to Tokyo, with a metro population roughly equal to the population of Canada). I saw a graph a few years ago where there was an obvious elbow in Tokyo housing prices when the deregulation occurred, putting it on a totally different trajectory from New York, London, Paris, etc.
And notably lacking since then: stories of high rises collapsing or massive fires burning down whole neighbourhoods. Tokyo is incredibly safe, even though you can build a 5-story house on an area only large enough for 2 parking spaces and open a restaurant on the first floor.
Like Hong Kong: it only takes one counterexample to demonstrate that heavy regulation isn’t required. You can argue that it can be beneficial, or at the very least isn’t too harmful, but it’s hard to argue that it’s necessary when Tokyo does fine without.
But you did have a place to live. You weren’t homeless. You didn’t have to stay with your parents. You didn’t have a 2-hour commute to work & back. You made the choice to live there, and to stay there for years, in spite of the fact that there was road noise.
There simply isn’t enough land in and around major & desirable cities for everybody to have a nice, quiet, private 2-bedroom house with a yard. So the choice is: do you regulate as if it were possible, and fuck anybody who can’t afford the resulting $8M homes (see: the Bay Area)? Or do you allow lots of housing development so that people can at least find affordable places to live, even if they have to experience road noise?
Even most libertarians agree that some regulation is a good idea, they just think it should be minimal.
But also…that’s an easy assertion to make, and you could make it everywhere. “You just don’t understand X well enough to know you’re wrong”. That’s not convincing. I’ve faced similar dismissals in cases where I’m convinced the counterpoint was wrong, and I could make my argument at length (eg: rent control is great!). I reckon I could imagine approaches to civil planning that would be compatible with libertarian principals, but would avoid situations where industrial plants were stuck in the middle of residential areas. I’m sure there are think tanks that have worked on the problem.
Not all Communists are Stalinists, and not all Libertarians are this extreme either. Even the extreme ones tend to support courts & policing, and have an explanation for how this sort of situation would work itself out. I dunno, I don’t understand their perspective enough to defend it in this case.
Yes. But it’s also a thing that some chronically ill patients have to travel abroad for experimental treatments, because the FDA hasn’t got around to allowing trials yet.
It’s not unique, but it’s uniquely bad, in spite of the fact that healthcare is one place where the US leads the world in heavy regulation.
(cont)
Yes, exactly. They control what drugs are allowed in the country in the name of safety, and yet some of the most damaging drugs in history slipped right past them. So what’s the point, then? Much less regulated markets do just as well when it comes to drug safety, drugs are cheaper, and terminal patients can make decisions about their own health. So what’s the benefit of the FDA?
I listened to a podcast years ago talking about the FDA. Wish I could find it. It wasn’t some right-wing think tank or anything, in fact a lot of the issues it raised trended left-wing. For example, I remember one of the issues being that the FDA banned human trials on women of childbearing age–that is, 18 to 50. Of course, testing on children is verboten anyway, and over-50 is a whole different category because hormones change dramatically post-menopause. So, effectively: the FDA banned human trials on women.
This resulted in some ridiculous consequences: pregnancy or birth control medications being tested on men, for example. But more generally, all drugs are tested on men only, and men are substantially different from women. This meant that women tended to face much more severe side effects from drugs, since drugs that had gender-specific side-effects on men were filtered out by the trials process, but not those affecting women. There were examples in the podcast where these side-effects were fatal. This has been going on for decades, ever since the 1970s, and it’s only started to change recently.
That’s one example of overregulation having very concrete consequences. And yet, the FDA hasn’t faced any consequences, and in fact the consequences are largely hidden because they’re diffuse and aggregate: hundreds of thousands of women feeling sick or dizzy or tired.
I would say that counts as the FDA being “strict and overbearing” and yet failing to prevent harm to the public. And again, even as they protected a handful of women from the potential consequences of human trials, they let fentanyl out the front door (along with many medications that had adverse effects on women, discovered in the wild rather than in trials).
Are we sure this is all important and necessary?
Absolutely not! That’s regulatory capture in action. High levels of regulations result in high profits for drug companies by strictly controlling IP, excluding generic drugs, and making it nearly impossible to start up new drug companies. In turn, the existing companies use those high profits to influence further regulation, streamlining the approval process for their own (sometimes dangerous) drugs, giving them a veneer of safety, and blocking out competition. This is exactly the kind of thing that libertarians rail against.
The libertarian ideal would be more like: dozens and dozens of drug companies offering low-price, high-quality drugs, making a reasonable but profit in the process, with independent consumer- and hospital-funded organizations checking them for safety and effectiveness. People are less trusting, and more careful about the drugs they take, but in extreme cases, where a person is terminally ill, they’re free to try whatever treatments they want. A single drug with terrible side effects would be enough to put a drug company out of business (because they’re smaller and less wildly profitable) and severely damage the reputation of any rating organization that stamped their approval on it, so both are much more careful about putting out and approving new drugs.
But again, I’m not a libertarian. I’ve got views that would blasphemous to a libertarian. Hell, I’m pro gun control. I just get sick of the endless ridiculing of strawman libertarian caricatures on Lemmy and Reddit. They have valid points, they just tend to carry it way too far (from my perspective). I’m done defending them for now, I think I’ve managed to flesh out the strawman a bit for people who are open-minded enough to consider their POV, instead of just saying “LOL libertarians just wanna fuck teenagers and shoot guns” or whatever.
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The nation noted for its “free market healthcare” on the world stage has shit health stats. Working real well there, Sparky.
Time to open up a history book, there, dude. 'Cause you are so fucking far off the mark it’s hilarious.
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.
You mean the nation where the government spends more per-capita on healthcare per citizen than almost anywhere else, while also claiming to be “free market”? The US healthcare industry is a fucking disaster.
Well, don’t trip over yourself correcting me or anything. Silly me, I thought SaskTel, BCTel, Manitoba Telecom Services, and Alberta Government Telephones were Crown Corporations (i.e. public). I’m not as familiar with the history of telecom in the US–but also, the modern-day telecom industry is a hell of a lot healthier in the US.
Did you skip the rest of my comment? Over-regulation of airlines is almost certainly costing bodies today. That doesn’t bother you, though, right?
Dereliction of self-assigned duty. The government claimed responsibility for airline safety, then quietly dropped it. If they’d never taken responsibility in the first place, there’d be independent bodies doing it–the same way Consumer Reports gives safety ratings for cars without government funding.
And even so, even with aalllll those 737-MAX deaths, airlines are still 1000x safer than driving your car. Per 100k flights, you can expect roughly 1 accident, of which fewer than half result in any fatalities at all. Keep the ‘fiasco’ in perspective.
Okay, how 'bout I do that, and you go console all the victims of car accidents in the US. Hell, restrict yourself to the ones where one involved party said something like “You know, we could fly…nah, it’s too expensive!” Hard to quantify, but given the car accident stats, I think you’ve got your work cut out for you.
Just ground all planes, and flight accidents would fall to zero! Brilliant! And incidentally, that is analogous to the situation today: we severely restrict airlines in the name of safety, resulting in more deaths elsewhere (but that’s not on us, the airline regulators!)
But the market solves a hell of a lot more than people give it credit for.
And there’s the name-calling! Boy, you sure showed them libertarians!
“almost certainly”? How have people died as a direct result of over regulation of airlines. Cite your sources.
Here you go. That’s some examples where economists have considered the effects of regulation on cost, and thus mode of travel, and thus fatal accidents.
It’s hard to put specific numbers on a counterexample. Here’s an article with a table estimating the impart of increasing the cost of air travel.
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Read up. It amazes me that we live in an age where information is at our fingertips in seconds and people still “debate” while saying things like “I don’t actually know …”. Read. The fuck. Up.
The reason the American telecom industry is “healthy” (FSVO “healthy”) right now is because the government stepped in. It was literally government intervention that caused telecoms to blossom.
(Hint: this happened in my lifetime, and not that long before your lifetime, likely.)
After government enforced safety regulations set the baseline standards, yes. Again, just as with the telecoms industry (and the airline industry, for that matter) Read. The fuck. Up. This is not esoteric information that’s concealed and known only to a select few. This is the motherfucking public record.
You. You libertarians. (It’s utterly adorable that you’re pretending not to be one and are just “giving their side”. You’re transparent as all fucking Hell, with about the subtlety of a riot.)
Man, fuck off. You claim to know everything? You sure don’t do much exposition if that’s the case. Content to just bitch, huh?
I know about Bell and the breakup. I don’t know as much about the original evolution of the telecon market in the US. I bet if I did some research I’d find regulatory capture, government protectionism, and at the very least abuse of IP law. Not sure how much explicit government funding I’d find, but I bet it’s a lot more than zero.
I know the government loves to set baselines. I’m very skeptical, in many cases, that they’re necessary. Just asserting that they are and telling me to “Read. Up.” is not persuasive.
I’ve listed some of the many reasons I’m not a libertarian elsewhere in this thread. See, I’m of the opinion that any intelligent person should be able to explain an argument, even if they don’t fully agree, because if you don’t understand an argument you don’t actually know if you agree or not.
But you wouldn’t know about that. If I were you, I’d stick to your forte: scanning pages of arguments and examples, ignoring almost everything while looking for cases where you suspect a person might have made a mistake or admitted they didn’t know everything, then jump out and yell “HA! You don’t know a specific thing, therefore everything you said is invalid! Do your own research to see if you’re wrong or not, because I’m like too important to spend time explaining my own beliefs! PUBLIC. RECORD.”
Explain to me: if I were a libertarian, why the fuck would I try to hide it, anyway?
No, on second thought…don’t bother.
Quick, someone share the reddit copy pasta where the police officer does heroin in his police car.
Somebody already did.
But yeah, sorry, I couldn’t fit the worldview in a tweet.
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”?
I was thinking of the 1800s, overlooked that you also were referring to more recently
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.
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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.
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?
You stop cartels from forming by keeping the market free, as in when the price fixing cartel pushes the prices way up, that creates incentive for new investors to enter the market.
Basically, as long as you don’t prevent entry into the market for new players, you prevent any permanent cartel formation. Any price fixing cartel creates an incentive structure that destroys their cartel.
In terms of preventing the cartel formation in the first place, really you just need a large and complex enough market that the communication/coordination problem is too big to solve. Like a price fixing cartel of two suppliers is way easier to form and maintain than a price fixing cartel of ten suppliers.
In our case, the reduction of the number of players in the market is the result of all the forcible shutting down of companies we did during 2020 and 2021. Whatever you say about lockdowns and their necessity, one side effect was the failure of small businesses all over the country.
It was like a mass extinction for business entities. As a result, our ecosystem is less healthy and resilient, more prone to shocks and deviations from the norm.
Over time, it will get better. Basically, slowly, new small businesses will be started and introduce competition for the big guys. But it’s a hard a long uphill climb to carve out a niche in an existing market. It takes a long time for all these relationships to form and calibrate themselves.
We lost of a lot of value — in the form of functioning enterprises that were the result of decades of work by dedicated people — when we tried to put the economy into medically-induced coma. Basically, by analogy, we underestimated our ability to keep it alive, and it suffered necrosis and atrophy, and now our economy is like a person struggling to rebuild their body after a severe period of suspended animation.
Sorry I missed your last question. I’m not sure that I agree that one can form a monopoly just by having to most capital of any player in the market.
How do you figure that?
That’s why the free is in quotation marks.
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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.
Even most liberals love to dunk on libertarians.
I’m not a libertarian, because I don’t take my liberal views to the extremes that cross the line into libertarianism. But I find many of their arguments persuasive. And yes, I explicitly said I was going to play devil’s advocate, because it annoys me the way people dismiss a ridiculous parody of libertarianism and then act like they’ve made a real point.
I’m definitely a liberal, and I don’t deny it at all. I fit right in on /r/neoliberal on Reddit. That doesn’t make me a libertarian: I’m pro-gun control, pro-public transit, etc. I have lots of views that libertarians would absolutely hate.
You mean my devil’s advocacy? I think any intelligent person should be flexible enough to explain ideas they don’t fully agree with. If you can’t even explain an opinion you disagree with, you don’t actually disagree with it: you’ve just dismissed it in caricature.