It doesn't make any sense to compare the GDP of a city to that of a country, especially a largely rural country. LA's GDP benefits from many large corporations which choose to headquarter there, not to mention one of the largest ports in the world. Why not compare to a US state with similar population, like Georgia, which has a GDP somewhere around 80% of Sweden's.

The US has a higher gdp per capita than Sweden anyway.

And it is a much worse place to live.

You mean like IKEA, Volvo, Ericsson, H&M, Electrolux, or Spotify?

LA has a comparable population to Sweden, which is why I chose it for a reference point. Georgia also has a comparable population, but I was comparing cities to Sweden, not states.

The difference is that those Swedish companies could be said to be a result of Swedish policies and cultures, while companies headquartered in LA could just as easily be headquartered anywhere else in California with zero changes to anything, and anywhere else in the US with very, very few changes to anything.

Yes, you compared a city to Sweden, but Sweden is not a city. Sweden is more akin to a state, so it seems more appropriate to compare it to a state. That was the point.

Um what? Somalia has the worst private property protections.

https://www.globalpropertyguide.com/Africa/property-rights-i...

Could it be that LA actually has or at least had more natural resources?

>In the 1890s, the small town of Los Angeles (population 50,000) began a transformation driven by the discovery and drilling of some of the most productive oil fields in history. By 1930, California was producing nearly one quarter of the world's oil output, and its population had grown to 1.2 million. In the decades that followed, many wells closed, but even more opened, surrounded by urban and suburban growth. Machinery was camouflaged, loud noises were abated, methane pockets were vented, as residents learned to live side-by-side with oil production facilities. To this day, oil fields in the Los Angeles Basin remain very productive, and modern techniques have centralized operations into smaller areas or moved offshore.

https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2014/08/the-urban-oil-fiel...

The government of Somalia provides private property protection?

The de facto government of Somalia (i.e., the warlords) do.

No they don't, that's what being a warlord means. Private property protection is not 'whoever I like or pays me gets to keep their goats', private property protection means protection under the rule of law.

Everything is backwards in your argument.

NY, LA, Chicago, SF, and LA are both heavily regulated in terms of what 'socialist' land use laws they can implement by the fact they must follow the constitution of the United States of America, which by and large guarantees the right to private property.

> If they were, then Somalia would be a capitalist's paradise instead of a warlord's paradise.

Capitalism and 'classical liberalism' explicitly call for a government strong enough to enforce individual rights from abuse by other individuals. Somalia does not have that and is thus missing a key component of Capitalism. Nice strawman though!

Funny how libertarians and conservatives are all in favor of big government when it defends their particular private interests. Socialism for the rich, capitalism for everyone else as the common meme goes.

I dunno, the libertarians at places like reason.com seem to be pretty opposed to any government at all. There is no major libertarian party or even representative at the national level, so it's hard to say what they are in favor of.

Actually many of them are working on proposals to get rid of a state entirely. I think that will probably not work out at all, but that's hardly wanting "big government."

Oddly enough, I found this video to be a better debate on the subject of libertarianism vs. Marxism than most of what can be found online because it doesn't seem to strawman either side:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwqnRYPcrl0