Libertarianism: How can it truly make us free?

Libertarians such as Libertarian want to slash government to the bone and let corporations and private individuals have free reign. This, they maintain, will make us all more free.

But how can it truly make us more free? With the legislation about minimum wages, and anti-trust laws gone, won’t power simply be transferred from the politicians to large corporations?

Seems to me that all it would be is proprietary despotism. Power will still be consoladated in the hands of the few, since those with the most money will still have the most power.

Blalron wrote:

Liar.

Come now, Blalron. Libertarianism has many legitimate weaknesses. No need to build up strawmen.

Libertarianism certainly does not want to allow corporations to have free reign. IIUC, a libertarian regime would have strict anti-fraud and anti-coercion laws and would in theory provide the funds to whatever government agency was in charge to adequately enforce those laws.

So in fact, Libertarians do not want to slash government to the bare essentials and let individuals and corporations have free reign?

More laws do not make one free.

While I am not a libertarian, I would much rather live in a Libertatian America then a Green party America. One side sees more laws as the be-all end-all to our problems, the other side has common sense.

What would prevent Disney, Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Microsoft, General Electric, WalMart, RJR Nabisco, McDonalds, CBS, NBC, and AOL-Time Warner from merging together into one big OmniCorp that pays its workers $1 an hour, forcing them into wage slavery?

That’s a great argument!!! I’ll remember to use it a lot from now on…
“some people disagre with me, others have common sense”

People making $1/hr could not buy their products. They could do so, but it wouldn’t last long.

That’s a pretty simple question Blalron, if that happened, how would these companies be supported since the majority of society would be working for them, getting paid minimally and not able to purchase items, thus not keeping Omnicorp in business. Omnicorp could work overseas in “2nd and 3rd world” countries, but even with deregulations, I can’t see it reverting the US into slavery.
As long as I can remember RC Cola has been around. I don’t know anyone that drinks it, but damn if that product is still on shelves. Competition in a free market will be around in one form another.

Competition on a free market is protected by many laws. For instance anti-trust laws, laws preventing corporations from pressuring retailers into not selling concurent’s products, laws forbidding to sell at a loss in order to evict a little concurrent from the market, etc…

What if their products are the only ones out there because they’ve forced all competitors out of business? For example, OmniCorp starts a store in town, with cut throat prices. They sell their products at a loss (since they have hundreds of billions at their disposal) until all other companies are driven out of business.

What if there is nowhere else to work, since OmniCorp and its subsidiaries has a stranglehold on everything by using the aforementioned “free market” tactics?

Watch it Lib. With comments like that you sound disturbingly like Chumpsky.

God, I hate this weak argument. It’s a straw man. To see why, let’s turn it around on government:

“What’s to stop the government from outlawing all elections, forming a dictatorship, and enslaving the people?”

In fact, governments do this, all the time. Government is dangerous. However, it’s a weak argument to use when someone advocates, say, an increase in the minimum wage. We live in the land of the real world, and in the real world there is no chance that the American government of today could morph into an evil despotic dictatorship. Maybe in 100 years, but then anything is possible in 100 years.

In the world I live in, what stops OmniCorp from charging $1 per hour is that no one will work for them for that amount of money. The U.S. only has 6% unemployment right now. There is heavy competition for labor.

Ask yourself this: If minimum wage laws are the only thing that prevent wages from dropping to $1/hr, how come the vast majority of workers make more than the minimum wage?

And you’re next argument is going to be that Omnicorp will just grow until it owns everything, and then people will have no choice, right? The problem is, it’s never happened, and it’s not because of anti-trust laws. The fact is, in a free economy it is incredibly difficult for companies to hold on to monopolies. In fact, I can’t think of one. And there are damned few that ever got big enough to have to worry about anti-trust laws.

If an Omni-corp started getting big enough that people were worried about its size, its very bigness would become a competitive disadvantage. All things being equal, people would start buying from others just to keep the company from becoming bigger. Look at the Open-Source software movement, which is a legitimate threat to Microsoft and sprung up spontaneously as people began to react against the size of MS.

The example I always use against the notion that monopolies would spring up all over the place without government intervention is IBM. IBM has, at several moments in the past, been the overwhelming giant in its industry (once as an adding machine and cash register maker, once as a mainframe computer maker during the System/360 era, and once as a microcomputer manufacturer in the early 80’s). The /360 era is especially instructive, because IBM had an immense technological lead over its competitors. The System/360 project cost billions of dollars, and took years and years to develop.

In each case, IBM wound up losing their market share big time, due to small errors and the natural rise of competitors into markets that began to be non-competitive.

The free marketplace is not anarchy and chaos. Properly regulated to prevent fraud and coercion, the market is a powerful regulating force.

Libertarian will definately be able to give a better answer than I can. But I can say that Libertarianism has a lot more to it than the actions of OmniCorp.

Here’s an example relating to the environment. In economics some time ago a guy named Coase proved a theorem, the Coase Theorem. What it said, is that if people have clearly defined property rights to some object, that object will be used in a socially efficient manner. For example: African elephants. It has been that nobody “owned” elephants in Africa. Then someone had the bright idea to apply a little economic theory, and said, “let’s put the ‘ownership’ of elephants into the hands of people who live in the elephants’ home range.” In Zimbabwe a program called CAMPFIRE was instituted (in a number of states, or provinces, or whatever they have???–it wasn’t throughout the whole country).

Turns out that when the local people were given the property rights over the elephants, and allowed to set prices and cull rates (with help from economists & biologists who already studied price setting and animal pop. dynamics), the elephant populations in the affected areas rose and the local populations made alot of money.

I think that might qualify as a Libertarian sort of scheme. The government didn’t manage the problem; rather, the locals–through exercising property rights–used an effective market solution to benefit themselves, safari hunter, and the elephant herds.

I’ll defer to Lib. on this one. I can, however, point you to a good web site for further reading: David Friedman. This guy is pretty well respected, from what I’ve heard.

OOC, Libby, why has your one response in this thread been to call the OP a liar?

I don’t want to presume to speak for Libertarian, but let me point something out that might be a point of contention with your presentation.

First off, it is a mistake to say that slashing government will have the effect of letting corporations have free reign. In fact, quite the opposite is true. Corporations depend on the state, and the state becomes little more than the tool of corporations. Indeed, the corporate elite and the managers of the state traverse back and forth from one to the other.

One should note that libertarianism has traditionally been associated with the left. It is only in the U.S. that the term has been sort of co-opted by the extreme right. Traditionally, libertarianism, in particular libertarian socialism has been used as a more descriptive term for anarchism. The following is a good intro to anarchism:
http://flag.blackened.net/intanark/faq/index.html

I think that many libertarians have some good ideas, but go wrong on several points regarding what would make a free society. I don’t really want to get into it here, as it would take too long, and has already been done at length in the FAQ I linked to above. In particular, you might want to check out the sections on “What are the myths of capitalist economics?” and “Anarchism and anarcho-capitalism”

So why is it, then, that people in Guatemala will work for $0.19 an hour, but people in Denmark won’t? Is it because there is heavy competition for labor in Denmark and not in Guatemala? Hardly. Corporations love Guatemala, and are anxious to move in to exploit the labor force. This is generally true. In the capitalist Third World, you have very low wages, and extreme poverty.

No, the only reason why OmniCorp is not paying $1 an hour is because of decades of bitter popular struggle. It is because people fought–literally fought in many cases–for the right to organize and press for their rights. In fact, it is exactly the working class struggle against the capitalists that brought about the 8 hour day, brought the minimum wage, the right to organize, and so on. Wherever you don’t have a strong labor movement, you have low wages and heavy exploitation. It has nothing to with competition for labor.

I think it was Jacques Barzun* who called it “The Big Switch”, when Liberal became Conservative and vice versa in America. IIRC it was the New Deal that was the catalyst.

*Excellent book, by the way.

No, the reason people in Guatemala make .10 per hour is because that’s all anyone is willing to pay for them. This is not rocket science, you know. If no one wants to hire you at a given wage, it might be a clue that you’re not worth that much.

So why aren’t Guatemalans worth more? Because they don’t have the same level of education, the same governmental structure that gives them stability, and the technological infrastructure to make them efficient. It’s a fault of government, not markets. Many of these areas are unstable, and people are unwilling to invest capital in them. They go through continual wars and uprisings. The government confiscates property or nationalizes industries and runs them into the ground.

Americans make a lot because they are worth a lot. They are highly technically trained, and a group of them and some capital can produce more goods and services than almost any other group with the same amount of capital.

A union worker isn’t worth $35/hr just because he’s in a union. More fundamentally, he’s worth $35/hr because he can leverage hundreds of millions of dollars in equipment and infrastructure as he does his job.

In poor countries where the market is allowed to work, wages naturally rise as the economy grows, the population becomes more educated, and the infrastructure improves. Eventually, you wind up with South Korea, or Taiwan, or Hong Kong - countries that lifted themselves up from 3rd world status into major economic powers, with wages for the citizenry to match.

Exactly wrong.

In fact, workers in Guatemala are harder working, in general, than those in the U.S. The reason they don’t get paid a living wage has nothing to do with what the company is “willing” to pay them, but the fact that companies can get away with it. Companies would love to pay American workers the same, but they can’t get away with it because here workers are able to organize.

I mean, we don’t have to speculate about this. We can just look at the situation in the U.S. before workers won the right to organize. In the 19th century working conditions in the U.S. were abysmal. You had extravagent wealth, incredible wealth. The country was already by far the wealthiest country in the world. Yet, workers were paid shit, had to work tremendously long hours, had no benefits, etc. Basically, a capitalist paradise.

It was only when workers began to organize and press for their rights that things got better. The struggle continues to this day.