On Tue, Jun 4, 2019 at 12:47 PM Lawrence Crowell < goldenfieldquaterni...@gmail.com> wrote:
> *> I suppose the distinction between a capitalist system is the > corporations own the government, while in a socialist or communist system > the government own the corporations.* There will always be concentrations of power in any society, the more there are the less likely one will be able to become totalitarian. There are lots of corporations but only one government, so given the choice i would much rather have the corporations own the government than the government own the corporations. *> I could go further, including why I am not a libertarian. I pondered > that nonsense years ago. The problem is that market systems are just not > stable.* Not stable compared to what? I agree the free market is inferior to a government staffed entirely by genius saints, but unfortunately such people are are rather difficult to find; I like the free market because it is self correcting even if nobody involved is a genius or a saint: I manufacture 99% of the worlds widgets, you make 1%. I want to drive you out of business, so I figure I'll lower my price until you go broke and then I can jack them up to anything I want. So now you lose money on each widget you sell, the trouble is I do too. I have 99 times as much money as you do, but I'm losing it 99 times faster. Even worse, because the price is very low the demand for widgets is huge, and if prices are to remain low I must build more factories (or oil wells) and increase production. I'm losing money faster and faster, meanwhile you just temporally halt production in your small factory and wait for me to go broke. It won't be a long wait. > > *They can collapse, and do so rather spontaneously. These can drag > lots of people into misery and death. Even if you had a libertarian system > without government,* > If we were starting from scratch I would suggest Anarcho-Capitalism, I think it would be far superior to democracy, but unfortunately we are not starting from scratch and so it would be very difficult to get there from here; but don't let the word "anarchy" scare you, it just means lack of government. Chaos necessarily implies anarchy but anarchy does not necessarily imply chaos. Good laws are no different from anything else, if you want to maximize something then make it a commodity and sell it on the free market. But nobody does that for laws, that's why there are far more good cars than good laws. In a world with minimal or no government Privately Produced Law (PPL) would have Private Protection Agencies (PPA's) to back them up. Disputes among PPA's would be settled by an independent arbitrator agreed to by both parties BEFORE the disagreement happened. Something like that can exist today. When companies sign complicated contracts they sometimes also agree on who will arbitrate it if differences in interpretation happen. Nobody wants to get caught up in the slow, expensive court system run by governments. The arbitrator is paid by the case, and because he is picked by both sides, it's in his interest to be as just as possible. If he favored one side over another or made brutal or stupid decisions he would not be picked again and would need to look for a new line of work. Unlike present day judges and juries, justice would have a positive survival value for the arbitrator. All parties would have a reason to avoid violence if possible. The disputing parties would not want to turn their front yard into a war zone, and violence is expensive. The successful protection agencies would be more interested in making money than saving face. Most of the time this would work so I expect the total level of violence to be less than in the nation state system we have now, but I'm not such a utopian as to suggest it will drop to zero. Even when force is not used the implicit threat is always there, another good reason to be civilized. Please note that I'm not talking about justice only for the rich. If a rich man's PPA makes unreasonable demands (beatings, sidewalk justice, I insist on my mother being the judge if I get into trouble,etc) it's going to need one hell of a lot of firepower to back it up. That kind of army is expensive because of the hardware needed and because of the very high wages it will need to pay its employees for an extremely dangerous job. To pay for all this they will need to charge their clients enormous fees severely limiting their customer base and that means even higher charges. They could never get the upper hand, because the common man's PPA would be able to outspend a PPA that had outrageous demands and was just for the super rich. A yacht cost much more than a car, yet the Ford motor Company is far richer than all the yacht builders on the planet combined. No system can guarantee justice to everybody all the time but you'd have the greatest chance of finding it in Anarcho-Capitalism. In a dictatorship one man's whim can lead to hell on earth, I don't see how 40 million Germans could have murdered 6 million Jews in a Anarcho-Capitalistic world. Things aren't much better in a Democracy, 51% can decide to kill the other 49%, nothing even close to that is possible in Anarchy, even theoretically. In general, the desire not to be killed is much stronger than the desire to kill a stranger, even a Jewish stranger. Jews would be willing to pay as much as necessary, up to and including their entire net worth not to be killed. I doubt if even the most rabid anti Semite would go much beyond 2%. As a result the PPA protecting Jews would be much stronger than the one that wants to kill them. In Anarchy, for things that are REALLY important to you (like not getting killed) you have much more influence than just one man one vote. I can't give you a iron clad guarantee that some Private Protection Agency won't switch from being a protector to being an oppressor, but I can't give you an iron clad guarantee that the US Army will not overthrow the government and set up a military dictatorship either. They certainly have the means to do so if they wished to. I don't think that's very likely to happen, but it's far more likely than the sort of organization I'm talking about doing it. The instant a PPA starts acting in a totalitarian way customers would abandon it, shut off its money supply and stop its cancerous growth in the bud. That is a powerful tool that we don't have today, with the US Army you are forced to keep sending it money through taxes even if you hate what it's doing. But this is all theoretical, as I say we are such a enormously long way from Anarcho-Capitalism that it may be too late and it's just not practical to get to there from here. > *> I can also say that I am not a lot of things that end in "ism" "ian" > "anity" and so forth. These ideological scripts are to me largely nonsense.* It's easy to say that, but the fact is unless you decide to move to a desert island and never to interact with another human being again like it or not you're going to be involved in some sort of ism. > *> I do vote in most elections, even the minor ones,* Me too. > *> but I largely do not so much vote for certain candidates, but against > certain candidates.* Me too. John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. 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