this post was submitted on 02 Jun 2024
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Nobody forces you to buy from a private business. But from another business if you like. But there's only one DMV in each state, it has a monopoly on licences.
Wonderful. Instead of a monopoly, I have the illusion of choice.
You have real choice. Don't want Windows? Use Linux. Don't want Reddit? Post on Lemmy.
Capitalism lets you use free software and contribute it to the people. Compare it to governments who are captured by corporations and just default to Windows in 90% of cases. The remaining 10% is Mac or Chromebook, which isn't better
The biggest companies in the world used their influence to get installed in public schools and government jobs. Now most of us can't use free software at work or for school
You're most definitely forced to buy from private businesses, even if not generally from a specific one, because you're born in a World were all Land has an owner (and "they ain't making any more of it" ) and unless you're gifted Land by your parents, you will have to pay somebody for Food since you can't even grow your own food or build your own place to live without paying for somebody else's Land.
Further, since Free Market Theory only works for Markets with low barriers to entry and hence high competition (so mainly for unimportant stuff like soap or teddy bears) for many if not for most things you will most definitely be constrained to buy from a single business or a handful of businesses operating as a cartel, especially in anything directly or indirectly affected by Land ownership, such as Food Retail.
Not all forms of coercion involve direct and hence obvious use of force - most of coercion in the Modern World is based on rules which indirectly limit your choices and if anybody tries to step out of those rules (which can be you trying to grow your own food in land you do not own or somebody else trying to sell you cheaper music whose copyright they do not have) THEN the use of force happens - you're not directly forced to buy from a private business or one of a small group of private businesses, you're indirectly forced to by rules making sure that in practice you don't really have other viable choices.
Whilst I mostly mentioned Land because amongst the rules limiting individual and trade freedom Land Ownership is one of the oldest (all the way back to when Monarchs confiscated all the Land which before had common ownership) and with the widest impact (everything which requires something physical to be somewhere or to move, is dependent on access to Land), there are other rules such as Copyright or those rules regulating access to limited resources such as the radio spectrum (for example, mobile phone operator licenses) that similarly put access control in the hands of a few private entities and thus in practice force everybody else to go pay those private entities to get or access those things or anything that indirectly needs to have or access those things (this is how Food Retail market concentration relates to Land Ownership)
In practice there are a lot of what I call "taxes paid directly to the private sector", caused by how the rules that limit access to scarce resources (or, even worse, resources made artificially scarce by certain rules, such as done by Copyright) place the access control or limited the access to only specific private entities, so most people's "freedom" when it comes to those and related things is entirely "you can have if by paying these guys or you can not have it" which when it comes to life's essentials (food, water, shelter, health) is not actually a choice.
Even before capitalism you had to pay for food. If not with money, it's with time. That's not a problem capitalism invented, it's a problem it's invented to solve.
My point is having choice in what you eat is good, the government should not be in charge in handing us a standard meal. My school cafeteria meals were very unhealthy, pizza, burger, tater tots, etc. I don't know why they feed kids something more healthy
As I pointed out in my post, you can't use your own work to get your own food if you don't either own or rent Land.
So anybody not born to landed or wealthy parents (who give him the land or the means to get it) cannot directly trade their time for food, and has to trade time for doing something for somebody else (i.e. work) who does own Land and the means of production and gives him "trade tokens" (aka money) in return, which can be used to buy food.
At every one of those steps due to power imbalances and the rules themselves that person loses something for somebody else (their time and work produces way more value than the pay they get, their food is much more expensive to buy than the cost of growing it).
This person has no real freedom, only an artificiality limited set of choices.
All of this predates Capitalism (it goes way back to Feudalism) - Capitalism just entrenched it, making Money (specifically those who have lots of it) the top power instead of Kings and adjusting the Law so that it would be the tool of coercion for money as it was before for kings (see the two examples I gave in my previous post).
Capitalism was never meant to solve any problem other than how do you move power from kings to landowners and the trading bourgeoisie without the latter two's infighting destroying the system - in Capitalism they seldom fight with violence.
If the powers of the state directly force you to give the money (I.e. taxes), the powers of the Moneyed force you go through a complex circuit to fullfill your basic needs, were at each step they take a slice of the product of your efforts, a disproportionately large one whenever they can sufficiently constrain your choices (for example, when a Market is dominated by a monopoly or cartel). Ultimatelly for you the result is the same: either way you have spent more of your time than you would otherwise have needed either to make up for paying taxes or to make up for all that was taken from the product of your work along the way and none of the two is your choice.
PS: I'm not saying the state should control food production, I'm just pointing out that you're not Free in Capitalism and you have no choice but to lose part (often most) of the product of your work in ways other than tax and which, unlike taxes, will never be returned to you in another form (taxes get you things like schools, roads and security whilst giving a slice of the wealth you produce to a private party doesn't return anything to you).
I happen to think that we need some Capitalism (though with lots of regulation, probably some minimum provision of human needs in the form of something like UBI and mostly subservient to the Democratic power of the vote) but let's not hold wild delusions about it being a form of Freedom for anybody but the very wealthy or that being forced to unnecessarily lose part of your work at each step of the circuit you're forced to run through to merely get food under Capitalism is any better than paying taxes to the state.
I agree that you're not completely free in capitalism, but you're not free in nature either. If a bear lives in the woods, you're not free to go there. If you need to go to the woods to eat, you might be eaten by the bear.
But you do have to work more in capitalism than necessary to survive. But there's no system that's a lot more efficient that I know of
You're less free in Capitalism than in nature: that's my point.
But yeah, that system is a lot more efficient at producing wealth (in a broad sense of the word, rather than merelly money) than Anarchy or centraly controlled systems - Capitalism excels at short and mid-term resource allocation and production compared with the rest (though, long term that's more dubious since by itself and left to its own devices it eventually collapse the whole system due to totally ignoring negative externalities such as Polution and having no broader strategical capability, so for example pure Capitalism will never invest in Education to raise all worker's capabilities for using higher efficiency production methods and instead expects people to pay for their own education or learn on the job, which is far less efficient and even impossible at times).
Further, Capitalism is pretty bad at distributing the wealth produced, hence for the median individual it might actually be worse than centralised systems - just because a country's GDP is going up doesn't mean most people will benefit from it or even that most people aren't seing their personal situation getting worse rather than better.
IMHO, Capitalism works as a Trade and Production resource allocation system but not as a Political system (which is how Neoliberals have tries to use it) and needs to be wrapped by and controlled by something else for the political decisions at a strategical society-wide levels. A metaphor is that of Capitalism as a car-engine: it's a much better way of getting to places fast than a Fred Flinstone "feets running on the ground" method, but it makes no sense to have you car with a great engine run around without a driver - sure, the engine makes sure the car moves much faster than by other means, but without a drive it will just go fast in some random direction until it crashes.
In practice what we see is various mixes of Capitalism with something else (even bloody China has Capitalism nowadays) and hence different results for the median person depending on the mix. What we also see in many countries is, thanks to the dominance of Neoliberalism in the last 3 decades, a "Capitalism by itself" trend that is yielding worse results for the median person that the Capitalism + Something Else that predates that move to Capitalism used as a General Politicial (rather than merely Trade and Production) Decision Tool.
That's why libertarians think the role of government is to prevent people from using aggression on others: polluting my air is aggression against my person. The government has a role in regulating environmental regulations, as follows from the NAP. We're not anarchists
"Your Freedom ends were my Freedom starts"
The thing is that in the real World with all its complexity, in most cases somebody has to judge on were each person's Freedom actually starts and the judgement has to be made based on rules which apply to all (lest people can just "buy" more Freedom). This is especially bad on situations of "big gain for me, small loss for lots of people" - i.e. Negative Externalities (such as Polution) - and "if one does this it's fine, if many do it we're all fucked" ones - i.e. Tragedy of The Commons.
You can seldom follow the "polution" around to figure out all who get impacted and by how much and add it all up to determine if it exceeds people's Freedom boundary or not. Further, the Tragedy of the Commons problem (which also applies to some cases of Polution) means that just one or two poluters are fine but many poluters is too much, by which point you get to the whole "should the first poluters be allowed to polute but not later ones?".
(For example: how exactly would one make sure the total of CO2 emissions does not exceed what the Earth can take without forcefully limiting each individual's emissions of CO2 using rules?)
This is how in practice you end up with general impositions from Society on all Economic agents, a.k.a. Regulations - they're the only efficient way to deal with problems whose impact is distributed (Negative Externalities) or practices which only become a problem if multiple people engage in them (i.e. Tragedy Of The Commons).
(PS: I suggest you actually go read all about "Negative Externalities" and "Tragedy Of The Commons" in Wikipedia: it's quite the eye openner, IMHO)
As with everything (even the seemingly great idea of "Everybody should have the same" of Communism) the problem is in the details, the further away from "just two people" the situation the worse the problem and the more unlikelly it can be arbitred in a feasible way with simple principles.
Like Communism, Libertarianism is a pure principled position that doesn't actually work in the real world and quickly crumbles and gets subverted once the complexity needed to work in it get added.
This is how the whole focus on "Tax" came to be: it's a subversion of Libertarianist thinking for political benefit of those who have unassailable first mover advantages in things like Wealth and Asset Ownership (and who would be the most taxed of all) which is even a mainly inherited advantage rather than the product of their personal merit (for example, Musk, Gates and Bezos were all born to wealthy families): it's only by denying the requirement for general - i.e. by an society-wide organisation with power, a.k.a. the state - rule-making and rule-enforcing to deal with things like Negative Externalities and Tragedy Of The Commons and denying the higher efficiency and broad productivity gains of Society-wide investment in some things (but not all) such as Education, that you can justify a state that collects very little or no taxes since it has little or no machinery (if it does nothing, it needs no funds), and denying those needs is a wonderful recipe for societal or environmental collapse, or simply for that society to end up so far behind other societies it eventually gets conquered.
You are totally correct, which is why libertarians define the function of government to be everything the market can't solve. It's the government's responsibility to provide for defense (nobody would voluntarily provide for everyone's defense) and to limit pollution (nobody would voluntarily decrease their own emissions)
Being 100% ideologically pure doesn't work in the real world. I would support something closer to the Fair Tax, because my own tax preparation wastes around 12 hours every year. If I got married, I'd pay a much much higher tax as well (maybe double!) I think there should be no marriage penalty for taxation. I almost don't hear people talk about this, but it's probably hurting birth rates in the US, which is already before replacement
Well, as I pointed out, Market can't solve things like Negative Externalities and Tragedy Of The Commons, nor can it do broad Strategy (for example, investing in Education to have a population which in aggregate is more productive) and those things are a lot more than merelly Defense and Polution (for example, Road Safety is a Negative Externality subject and reliable Product Information is a Tragedy Of The Commons one if you consider "trust in sellers" a form of Commons that if exhausted by too much abuse leads every buyer to make their purchase decisions from distrust-as-default, which is reduces trade).
As for lower birth rates, from my own country (Portugal) and having lived all over Europe, I would say the greatest present day problem is not at all taxes (as long as they're actually used to pay for Public Services such as Universal Healthcare, they tend to help the most those who earn the least, such as young adults beginning their careers) but rather house price inflation: people are living their parents' home later, marrying later, getting children later, getting fewer children (because they can't afford a bigger house or the cost of multiple children whilst paying for a bigger mortgage) and even in the case of some countries (like Portugal) leaving the country for places were houses are cheaper as a proportion of Income.
Taxes need to be used better (more in ways that benefit people in general, less as pork and to pay the jobs for "the boys" from the mainstream political parties) and the time-waste burdern of taxation needs to be minimized, but that's a completelly different position from a generic "taxes are bad" - I don't think it's taxes that are bad, I think it's the well entrenched politicians from certain political parties that are bad and hence when in power use taxes badly.
Well, the market providing higher salaries to educated people does encourage parents to invest into education for their children. But the other two points we are in agreement about.
Road safety is also something the local government should take care of. I was specifically talking about federal government, of course local governments have a role as well. For example, making sure to persecute criminals. Providing courts for civil suits, etc. It is not clear that the market would provide solutions for these services.
What is not clear is that the postal service should be national since the market already has several private services. The government can contact you via the internet for official notifications and send your driver's license by UPS or Fedex.
So the libertarian position is that things that have good private solutions should not be duplicated by the government at the taxpayer's expense. The increased costs of things like sending mail will be offset by lower taxes. This is more fair as the people who send more mail will pay more.
That's why libertarians think the role of government is to prevent people from using aggression on others: polluting my air is aggression against my person. The government has a role in regulating environmental regulations, as follows from the NAP. We're not anarchists
That's why libertarians think the role of government is to prevent people from using aggression on others: polluting my air is aggression against my person. The government has a role in regulating environmental regulations, as follows from the NAP. We're not anarchists
There are a few privately run dmvs in some states. But also a fun as it is to gripe about, I don't want a profit motive at the DMV. I don't want a profit motive just about everywhere.
Profit motive creates competition, which is healthy for markets. One entity in charge of something has no reason to improve since it has a monopoly on that service
Yes profit motive has done wonders for the health care industry, we spend more tax payer money than any other developed nation for much worse results. But hay, the 200 insurance companies competing for tax payer money and not consumer heathcare access is so good!!!
It's not, I'm being sarcastic, privatization of public services and goods is fascism, and like all fascist ideas or It's really only good at speed running the collapse of your economy, military, and govenment.
I didn't buy healthcare because I live abroad. If I ever get seriously sick I can move to the States and the insurance can't refuse my pre-existing condition. Thank you, government regulation for letting me skip insurance payments and only have travel insurance for accidents