I'm not seeing good responses from libertarians regarding the inbalance in how law is practiced; would appreciate pointers to write ups of more effective libertarian-style remedies. That is, corporations with concentrations of power are treated by libertarians as possessing equal standing with individuals in a court of law. In practice, that is absolutely not how it works out. Yet, many a libertarian response to various problem spaces is "the courts will work it out!", in a deus ex machina style conclusion. Spend any appreciable time (>= 10 years) running a business, and you'll probably observe the same: I've yet to meet a business owner who subscribes to the "equal under law" libertarian ideal, everyone I've spoken with agrees that larger concentrations of wealth and power commensurately enjoy greater access and privileges in the court systems around the world that are unobtanium for smaller entities. I've heard the libertarian response of "we're just not capitalist enough" applied to this problem domain; look to US-style private arbitration to see how that's turning out. I've never been a fan of the "no true Scotsman" approach, anyways. Any libertarian-oriented remedies that realistically acknowledge how humans practice acquiring and deploying power of various forms would be appreciated.

From what I gather, there are really two facets of libertarianism. The social libertarianism, meaning let people do what they want, stop banning everything, drug war is futile, etc. Then there is the economic libertarianism, which means keep the government out of most, if not all business dealings. Deregulate, etc.

I highly suspect people are much more interested in the first, but not really the second. Interests who stand to benefit from the second are selling them as a package deal and we will end up only getting the second. In other words, the arrest machine will keep running, but businesses will be free to fleece customers, government and employees with impunity.

Surprising though, regulation is intended to save capitalism, not hurt it, at least in the long term. If capitalism runs down a path where it no longer benefits the vast majority of citizens in any given country, there will be hell to pay resulting in the end of capitalism. That would be a shame too, properly regulated capitalism is a really great system.

Maybe if the laws were closer to what libertarians would like, this equality in front of it would be achievable. The basic libertarian philosophy regarding law says the only enforcing laws should concern the non aggression principle.

Libertarianism doesn't provide a good methodology for prioritizing the well-being of disinenfranchized person's, so If your ethics tell you that preserving property relations are less important than elevating the condition of all humans, then perhaps it is time to evaluate alternative economic stances that prioritize property less than people.

One such alternative would seem to be Proudhon's anarchism (mutualism) or even Marx's (or his predecessor's) Communism, though I know this is generally an unpopular response, I see no reason why it has no merit.

Economic libertarianism is the XXI century version of Leibnitz optimism of the XVIII century, which was so eloquently critiqued by Voltaire in Candide -- with Capitalism replacing God. They just believe that capitalism is the best of all possible systems and if we just blindly follow its rules everything will be fine and well, it doesn't matter how many people suffer in the meantime.

Would it kill you to join everyone else in the 21st century and use numbers instead of romance numerals

FYI, many countries/languages write centuries this way (e.g la langue de Voltaire)

English-speaking countries? Because as a native English speaker, I have no problem reading their words but I have no idea what kind of numbers they're trying to express.

Try this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_numerals

Yeah I know they're roman numerals but I can't read roman numerals without significant effort. It's bad form to include large roman numerals in English text. The majority of English speakers aren't going to know roman numerals beyond 10.

In the 1800s and early 1900s at least some people could emigrate to countries like the US where there was still a lot of open space. Even that's not an option this time.

We are not running low on "open space" at all. The habitable area of the planet is vast.

Many of the emigrants of the 1800s ended up settling "new" land in the US. But there's vast territories around the world that are extremely inexpensive. Since the 1800s we have grown more dependent on the services provided by the state in urban areas.

In the 1800s you could go somewhere, kick out the natives and declare yourself the owner of the land. I don't think that's possible anymore. At least not in most habitable zones. Where in particular do you recommend people should go?

They left much of the areas they slaughtered the natives for, the midwest is still incredibly empty. Five states with eleven people per square mile or less, including Alaska. Plenty of space.

The "empty" midwest is all owned, though. $4000/acre, maybe? That's not much if you are trying to buy land to build a house. It's a lot if you're trying to acquire 1000 acres for a farm, though.

Alaska is largely government owned. It's empty, but that doesn't mean that you can take a chunk of land there.

Can you go the Midwest somewhere and live off the land? I doubt it.

You can, but you'll be dirt poor. Back when "dirt poor" was normal, and luxuries like "bathing every day" or "carpet" were uncommon, being dirt poor seemed acceptable. Now most people won't accept that as a lifestyle.

To all the empty land in central Iceland; Sweden is also not very dense.

Although those places are not very conductive to farming...

You are legally prohibited from building anything above 500m in Iceland, which is most of the central interior.

The problem isn't the abundance or lack of open space, it's the fact that the primary income sources from open spaces now requires massive amounts of capital to be competitive.

This. There's a reason that communist revolutions were fueled by a desire for bread, peace, and land. In the start of the 20th century, you could make a decent living if you owned nothing but the land you lived on.

Nowadays, you really can't.

I wonder what happens if we get robots that can provide a complete living off some plot of land. Like agriculture, energy and whatever you need. So in theory you could live autonomously then.

Somehow I think the owning class will come up with ways to make this illegal or impossible.

Why would robots make a difference? Currently, you can't really live off of a plot of land alone, but you'll be living quite well if you also own a bunch of high tech machinery to farm it efficiently. For a well-off Ferrari-owning farmer, the Ferrari is likely not among the most expensive vehicles he owns, the tractors/combines/whatever cost the big bucks.

That's what the poster above meant by "the primary income sources from open spaces now requires massive amounts of capital to be competitive", and owning these robots would be the massive amount of capital; you'd be able to sustain yourself because (and if) you'd have a lot of very expensive robots, not because you just had some land; and you'd also be able to sustain yourself by just investing the value of these robots.

I think that it was not so much about open space, as an opportunity to establish an economic independence. The likes of which the equivalents only exist in different forms today - much akin to dreams of startups today.

The idea that there was open space in the Americas before the Europeans came is a myth. It neglects the inconvenient fact that the native Americans were already here.

The indigenous population of the Americas was absolutely destroyed by Old World diseases. This happened mostly by accident (although sometimes done intentionally) but was probably near inevitable once first contact was made. (In many places it out-paced the actual extent of direct European contact as indigenous people traveled.)

So there WAS vast expanses available by that time, even without intentional genocide (which also happened).

Disease killed a lot of the native population, maybe even decimated, but it did not leave the USA a vast open space. Otherwise the US Army would not have had almost continuous warfare from the conclusion of the Revolution War to the surrender of Geronimo (minus the Civil War) to displace the natives to make room for American settlers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_military_casualt...

A large percentage of the land battles of the War of 1812 were fought between the US and natives because the US wanted the land of the natives to become open space so the natives allied themselves with Britain.

Lewis and Clark would not have survived or even made it to the coast if they had not had help from most of the tribes they met along the way. Of course we displaced all of the natives they met eventually.

I just read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lies_My_Teacher_Told_Me so that may bias my opinion.

So why settlers spent so many bullets to kill people who were already dying by nobody else's fault? And if there was so much open space in America, why Europeans happened to locate exactly in the "very few" places where natives lived? Strange, indeed.

1. Because the vast majority of them already died from smallpox well before Manifest Destiny.

2. There is still a huge amount of open space in America. In 1800, there were only 5 million citizens, compared to 323 million today.

3. Natives lived all over the continent. Europeans landed where the ocean ended.

In the specific year you state was four years before Lewis and Clark started their expedition. They would not have survived if they did not have help from most of the natives they met along the way, one of the main objectives was to document all the natives that lived there. That would have been kind of weird goal if it was all open space.

Sorry, by open space, I meant sparsely populated, not pasture land.

re point one the __lowest__ plausible percentage of North America and South Americans that died of disease before ever hearing a rumor of it source is 90% and has a fair chance of being higher, the disease front traveled as quickly as the natives, refuges from one dying village to the next, or people coming to investigate why no body has visited from the next community over in a while. The deliberate atrocities later were just a mop up action in the larger picture.

I've read estimates of smallpox outbreak at 20-50% mortality across the continent. Some areas in New England are estimated to have a 96% mortality rate. Pretty crazy.

The libertarian would say that if the general public gets access to advanced robotics then there will be enormous prosperity. For example, imagine if you could buy a robot that would survey your backyard, order equipment from amazon, start planting food, set up irrigation, harvest and deliver it to a neighbors automatically? Free locally grown food for everyone. Now, isn't that awesome? You could also rent a robot that would find water, dig wells, trench, put in pipes, etc. The possibilities are endless to take PRODUCTION of goods out of the hands of specialized highly capitalized organizations and into the hands of anybody who can rent a robot.

The problem is is that a robot this advanced could also be used for very sophisticated bad purposes, so you're going to have lots of regulation and big corporations will only be able to use these robots and you'll have to buy things they produce with whatever meager wages they let you have.

How do you pay for the robot if you're not working?

Just take out a loan. The food cost savings and excess production will pay for the loan and they can repo the robot if you don't pay. The robot will even be able to tell you if it's likely to be cash flow positive.

Only people working would qualify for a loan. Those people would have more prosperity until the robots cratered all wages and prices, being free labor and flooding the market with excess.

When the prices crash a large number of people with robots will be unable to pay back the loan. Their robots will be repossessed. They will now be out of a job and with no robot.

The poor would get left over food from the kindness of people with robots? They'll certainly never work again.

The robot will properly buy futures contracts so that the borrower will be insulated from any food price fluctuations. If the numbers don't add up the lender will not make the loan. There will not be any "overproduction". The robots will instead recommend another line of business where the robots production will be profitable given the price of market futures for those products.

I have an American friend who lives in Argentina who works online. The cost of living is such that he can work two months and pay his living expenses for two years. Those horribly low prices in Argentina are totally killing him. Not!

So what you are saying is the disaster is there will be so much food that people won't be able to eat it all and the prices will crash? Imagine if everybody had unlimited amounts of everything they wanted! How would we support prices?

This kind of thinking reminds me of the great depression where they would destroy food to keep up prices even as people were starving.

BTW, The novella "Manna" by Marshall Brain is kind of a good take on the future with robots and everything, though I don't really like his "happy" future.

BTW, thanks for giving me a hard time on this. I am getting to the point where this is going to be a bit of a manifesto and you're helping me flesh things out.

I'll be interested to see if any manifesto can plot a path through societies looming issues. I don't see a scenario where we can maintain our current style of capitalism without things breaking down in one way or another.

You're friend in Argentina:

* has the ability to get a job from home, which means it's probably a tech/outsourcing job in a first world country. That doesn't take care of 95% of the population. That doesn't fix the issues.

* In the robot scenario where robots are smart enough to understand markets/futures and can decide a completely different line of work, and then do that work, those remote jobs are gone. Your friend is out of work. He doesn't get a robot.

* the company that hires him has to compete for resources in their country of origin. Their local pay requirements determine what they think a "good deal" on labor is. That country would have robots as well and their wages would crater. Again your friend's cush life would disappear, unless he could buy a robot.

>what you are saying is the disaster is there will be so much food that people won't be able to eat it all and the prices will crash? Imagine if everybody had unlimited amounts of everything they wanted! How would we support prices?

Now you are getting to the root of the issue.

We produce enough food in the US that nobody should go hungry, yet we have swaths of kids that don't know where their next meal is coming from.

We have enough abandoned houses that nobody should be homeless, but people still live on the streets.

In capitalism, a private person/entity produces and someone else has to PAY to use what's produced. The issue isn't that there won't be enough to go around. The issue is that our current system will allow lots of people to starve and do without even when there is excess.

You used the term libertarian. That might be why you're getting all the push back. Maybe I'm misinformed on the topic. Libertarians believe an unregulated market and human morality will make everything better. Those two things combined gave us the triangle trade, raw goods (America) --> manufactured goods (Europe) --> slaves (Africe). We also got child labor, poisonous food being sold, no education, life threatening work conditions, etc.

>This kind of thinking reminds me of the great depression where they would destroy food to keep up prices even as people were starving

Being against this strategy is the antithesis of capitalism. If I give away food, prices drop. If I reduce the supply then prices will go up.

During the great depression, prices dropped so low that all farmers were going to go bankrupt. Farmers themselves were dumping crops and rioting to keep crops off the market to try and increase prices. Farmers were marching on courts because they were demanding that foreclosures stop.

If you let farmers flood the market with goods (lowering prices), while allowing them to refuse to pay their debts, then what kind of economy do you have? It's not capitalism.

My concern is that the coming wave of automation will recreate the great depression x10. The population at large doesn't see it coming, and maybe I'm a chicken little. 30% of the US population think poor people are just lazy, and that if they just worked harder they'd be better off.

When automation comes full force, then our economic and political system will change. The question is what will it change to, and what will the transition look like. There's a happy path and a bloody path.

>When automation comes full force, then our economic and political system will change. The question is what will it change to, and what will the transition look like. There's a happy path and a bloody path.

This is what I keep harping on with folks. I think automation will hit and hit hard and our current economic/political structures are not ready for it or won't be able to adapt fast enough (hence your depressionx10 or just a massive inequality gap).

We already have 'more productive' economies but we have stagnant wage growth, increasing rental/housing costs due to people leaving for cities since there are little/no economic prospects in rural areas now, and, as you said, logistical problems in fulfilling basic necessities. Not to mention mental models that say that these 'unemployed' folks are bad and should just retrain/go to bootcamp/move elsewhere.

Consumption-wise, we can buy whatever we want. Shitty food is cheap, electronics, etc, all cheap. But some of the base foundations in Maslow's hierarchy don't come very cheap anymore and it's harder and harder to get to the higher reaches.

To address your points:

* My friend is not a rockstar programmer. He's about average, and in San Francisco he was living in Bayview and getting his house and his car regularly broken into and barely scraping by. Now he lives like he makes 5x the money he did in SF and his taxes are vastly lower since he's making less money, but living better. This is one of the largest mysteries of modern capitalism. Why are the prices for things so vastly different in different countries?

* If the robots can run the futures market and do general purpose programming then we probably won't even need money because we will have perfected central planning. Instead the robots will be playing a game called "The Humans" which is like when we play "The Sims" with the goal of trying to make the Humans happy. This will go on at a superhuman level of intellect and we won't even be able to analyze what the heck is going on, much like we can't really know why Alpha Go makes the moves it makes. We just won't turn it off because we can't live without it. This is the good or bad future depending on the ultimate fitness function, which in the good future is make everybody happy and not where the fitness future is based on deep ecology (DE) [1] which would prefer a 95% population reduction.

* My friend might not be a web developer, but he could probably get a job working on designing some guy's Burning Man float who owned a robot for enough to live well since it would require an absolutely trivial amount of effort to live since there would be so much supply.

* As far as Libertarianism goes, your formulation seems to be that that means no rules. No not really. I don't think ANY libertarian that is respected by the libertarian community would think slavery or poisoning people should be legal so you really have got a strawman there. Besides if we had no rules at all the wealthy Deep Ecology people could get together and decide they wanted to exterminate everybody they don't need to maintain things with killer robots who unlike in the movies have perfect aim and tactical strategy.

* The foreclosures during the great depression were due to collapse of bank reserves due to fractional reserve banking. You had short panics in the 19th century before the fed and fractional reserve banking, but not depression like scenarios of rapid credit contraction as the money multiplier work in reverse. This is unfortunately a very very deep rabbit hole side issue that requires a 30 page essay to get through. In China, which is probably more capitalist than the U.S, they have a different system. They have tons of companies that have bad debts and the government prints money out of thin air to selectively bail them out without austerity forced on the taxpayer, which is why they haven't had a credit crunch that has predicted every year for the last 30 years.

* The happy path of the future AI automation is normal people get access to these robots and use them to produce unlimited prosperity. The bloody path is only the elite get access and they decide to wipe out everyone else with killer robots because they find them to be irritating useless eaters.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_ecology#Development

But I don't need a robot to order from Amazon or survey the back yard. In fact I insist on a robot that doesn't order from Amazon. I just need one to do the digging and stooping and weed pulling.

I just had to make the example so ridiculously automated that a 400lb opioid addicted alcoholic high school dropout illiterate person on the bottom end of every bell-curve with a criminal record and bad credit that can barely operate Netflix using a voice interface and saying "I wanna see dat funny show dat given me da gigglez" will be able to use and benefit from this technology so the basic income crowd would be satisfied that no one would be left out.

Oh, HN has its own Ken M