S’wonderful, S’marvelous!
Posted on December 2, 2011 at 12.23 pm
Q. How can you be a minarchist/libertarian and be against corporatism? Corporations did not even exist until our government started acting minarchist in the economic realm. — David, from the internet.
A. Hardly. As I’ve written in the past, the absolute last thing we have is economic minarchism. Here is a short and incomplete list of things which exist in our current system which would not exist in a minarchist society:
- Corporate welfare and subsidies
- Bailouts to a stagnant and backward American auto industry
- Bailouts to Wall Street banks
- Bailouts to foreign banks
- Other, hidden bank bailouts
- Fiat money creation to fund those bailouts to the detriment of the lower and middle classes
- The government lending tax dollars to banks for basically free and then borrowing the same money back and paying interest on it
- A devastating housing bubble funding by artificially low interest rates dictated without regard for market signals by the Federal Reserve
- Regulations, a convoluted tax structure, and labyrinthine legalities benefiting (and basically written by) large companies with the legal resources to find loopholes at the expense of their smaller competitors
- Foreign policy significantly influenced by war profiteers and oil companies
After the last few years of rampant, bipartisan corporate favoritism we’ve repeatedly seen out of Washington, I find it marvelous indeed that anyone could think that we have economic minarchy. After all, I assume you realize that, by definition, economic minarchy would look like the government being uninvolved in the economy except for providing a court system for the prosecution of fraud/other bad business practices and criminality, right?
And Libertarians wonder is there is a conspiracy of the banks and government. Just giving more reason to be apologetic to the so called “big government” Libertarians hate.
…is that something that libertarians wonder? I’ve always observed them operating as if bank-government corruption was a foregone conclusion.
The state was created with the sole purpose of perpetuating capitalism. It has subsequently become its own entity which depends on capitalism to exist as well as perpetuating it. In a minarchist economy, the state is supposed to still exist to protect private property but otherwise does not necessarily operate in support or opposition to capitalism. However, the function of protecting private property insures that capitalism will exist. Without the necessary state functions to allow workers to control the means of production, the capitalists still control the means of production. Because of that ability, capital (and therefor power) accumulates into the hands of the few. A minarchist economy simply transfers social power from the hands of elected representatives into the hands of capitalists who can only profit off exploitation. For example, if a minarchist government does not have the necessary regulations in place from preventing the influence of a corporation from controlling the flow of government money, then how will they do so? The bailouts happened because there were no regulations in place to prevent banks from controlling tax payer money.
[...] have freedom from this exploitation. For whatever reason you side with the corporate opinion. Do we really have to go through this again? I am not advocating special benefits for corporations. I am not transferring trillions from the [...]