this post was submitted on 02 Jun 2024
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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