Flame — HabitableZone

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It isn't about the money.
Tom Brosz — (archived)

If the libertarian wins, he will have to pay for the same services in other ways, and he will have to pay for many, many more security devices.

Maybe so, but the libertarian isn't going to use a gun to make the progressive pay for what the libertarian needs.

Try and get the point: it isn't about money. It's about force.

(I wonder what private food inspectors' fees would be?) Some of those will be cheaper and more efficient. Some of them will be frauds, some of them will be overpriced. All of the costs will be passed on to the customer, and since there would be no government oversight, the possibility of monopolies, price-fixing and collusion would replicate as it did in the late 1800s.

You want to know how it would work in a free society? You bring up a good example. Let's take a look at food inspectors:

I don't know what the fees would be. As you say, they would be added to the price of food in the better grocery stores. No law would force a store to use such inspection services, but a store that didn't might have a lot of trouble finding customers. Would you shop in one? Even to save a few cents? Naturally, those that did use such a service would prominently display the fact on their products, and also display the brand name of the inspector.

Oh, yeah, there would be more than one. Not a government monopoly. Would every last one of them be scrupulous or honest? Of course not. But in a competitive situation, each inspection company would have a huge incentive to do two things: maintain its own reputation (how many mistakes or downright illicit events would it take to put an inspection company out of business? Maybe one?) and watch the other companies like a hawk for slipups. Imagine the gain in business if you could prove that your competitor wasn't very good at his job.

A free society would be replete with many competing outfits like Underwriters' Labs, and Consumer Reports. Such outfits are totally dependent on their reputation for honesty and reliability. It's their only product. It would be difficult to create collusion or a "trust" between all of them, since the price of entry into an informational market is not that high, and the gains to be made by exposing the collaborators would be immense.*

There would be inspection and consumer advocacy outfits for everything. It would be a much larger industry than it is now. A consumer would look for their marks on products. Maybe a store might have its stuff inspected by more than one outfit, putting its product one step above the others.

A lot of this was already going on in our nation's early history, before the government decided that only they were incorruptible and effective enough to do the job--without competition. Such a system was beginning to be created for drugs before the FDA was founded.

One problem is that a lot of the history of our nation's businesses is written by the very bureaucracies and organizations that insist that we would all surely die without that bureaucracy. Even now, most liberals believe that only the iron restraint of the State keeps businessemen from ripping the throats out of their customers and employees. After all, if you were running a business, wouldn't screwing the customers and employees be the first thing you'd do?

*Trusts and such become more of a problem when it requires enormous capitalization to enter a business, although in our modern era, when one can import most products from all over the planet, it has become a lot harder to create a bulletproof collaboration to monopolize a market. Even OPEC doesn't do that well.

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