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.
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?
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?
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.
That’s why the free is in quotation marks.