HabitableZone

Off Topic » in reply to Re: I noticed the gentle merging of "GOP" and "corporals of industry" again.

Re: I noticed the gentle merging of "GOP" and "corporals of industry" again.

Your view of history may be very realistic, but your expectations for it are adolescent fantasy. Businessmen do not want free markets, politicians do not want reduced power, and lawyers love collecting their 10% off the top.
And they will work together to guarantee your libertarian utopia never happens. Libertarian paradises are as unrealistic and unworkable as Socialist ones, for the same reason: the suits want no part of them.

You cannot have a system based on decentralization that financially rewards consolidation. You cannot expect there to be no political power, only economic power, and realistically expect that economic power will not be used to subvert the smaller, weaker, competitor; even if he is more efficient. Without a counterweight, economic power will concentrate at the top, it always has, it always will. It leads either to monopoly, or an oscillation between boom and bust. Free markets are inherently unstable, like a cone balanced on its point.

Even in a situation like our founders faced, with vast empty stretches of wilderness unclaimed and empty, ready-made for the freeholder, the large plantation or farm dominated for all market driven commodities like tobacco. Only where there was no major cash crop involved because the land was unsuitable could the small, self-contained family farm actually be a money making proposition. Even in Europe, mercantilism ruled, their world was all carved up and the freeholder was no longer in charge. He never was, actually. In agriculture we went directly from feudal baronies and serfs to great family estates with sharecroppers. And when industry came pretty much the same thing happened. Remember, your ideal society has never existed, anywhere, any time.

North America was very lucky, geographically and demographically. In South America it was family corporate power (feudalism) from day one, the latifundias, great plantations, a term borrowed not from Spanish, but from Latin. It was how Ancient Rome ran her agricultural economy. If slavery had been profitable in 1600s New England we would all live in Brazil.

We don't live in a rural eighteenth century environment any more, as you love to point out to our enginneering Luddites here. But neither do we live in an economic pastoral garden either. The world is different, it is complex, and if we really want to enjoy the benefits of capitalism, we can't afford to be social and economic Luddites either.

The world of Jefferson and Heinlein no longer exists, it can't exist. In fact, it never really existed, as I have pointed out to you before. Even our post-colonial democratic entrepreneurial community was based on slavery, low populations, vast lands stolen from the aborigines, and a local, self-contained economy based primarily on muscle, wind and water power. The railroad and the telegraph made that impossible, right about the time the frontier closed forever.

Capitalism works, we need it. But we can't let it run wild. As soon as the power starts to titrate, to precipitate out of solution into isolated crytals of domination, the small firms will get swallowed up and the big ones will consolidate. If we want the benefits of a free market we must make sure it can't be taken over by the monopolies and the oligarchs.

This won't be easy, and it may not even be fully possible. But you are going to have to get used to the idea that even those who agree with you in principle may not share your ideas on how its going to work out in practice.

For starters, you're going to have to understand that the opposite of Libertarianism is not Statism, the opposite of Capitalism is not Socialism, and the opposite of slavery is not the free market. These are only three dimensions in a multidimensional manifold, and navigating it to a point (or line, or surface, or volume) that is best for as many of us as possible is not going to an easy, or a perfect process. And you will be faced by many who are just as smart and just as conscientious and patriotic as you are who simply will not agree with how you have decided we should go about it.

That's politics. You can't tell me how it should be, your're going to have to persuade me, or you're just going to have to meet me half way.

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