How Bad Antitrust Enforcers Kill People

Re:How Bad Antitrust Enforcers Kill People by psadauskas on Wednesday April 01, 2020 @06:39PM (#22754233)

I've gone through a similar sort of journey recently myself. I was pretty strongly libertarian, but I've discovered I'm actually vehemently anti-authoritarian, which is why libertarian as the foil to the authoritarian Republicans and Democrats appeals to me.

What I've come to realize, though, is that if the Libertarians got their way, we would just be ceding the authority to corporations instead of government. The problem we're facing now is that corporations and the wealthy are already so powerful, our government can't force the corporations to do anything they don't want to, and our vote is manipulated so we can't elect a government that can.

My ideal, would be a strong government that represents the interests of the People and defends them from the Elite and powerful. Related to this, its job would be to defend the Free Market from the Capitalists. (Where the "Free Market" is an unobtainable ideal where everybody has perfect information and nobody is coerced, while the "Capitalists" do everything in their power to hide information and coerce the players to their own unequal benefit.) I have no idea how we get there, though, since the more power given to the government to regulate the market makes it a better target to be subverted by the powerful players. Nevermind the fact that the current government is completely bought and paid for by the same corporations, and the People are manipulated by them into arguing over small tribal differences instead of focusing attention on their real enemy.

So, I'll continue voting Libertarian, or any other alternative, and die a little inside each time at how little my choice actually matters.

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Re:How Bad Antitrust Enforcers Kill People by secabeen on Wednesday April 01, 2020 @06:46PM (#22754283)

> My ideal, would be a strong government that represents the interests of the People and defends them from the Elite and powerful. Related to this, its job would be to defend the Free Market from the Capitalists. (Where the "Free Market" is an unobtainable ideal where everybody has perfect information and nobody is coerced, while the "Capitalists" do everything in their power to hide information and coerce the players to their own unequal benefit.)

This is largely the position of the Classical Liberal, which used to be a big part of the Republican party, but that has been discarded in favor of big business and religious conservatism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_liberalism

_The Economist_ magazine in the UK is probably the most widely-known promulgator of the classical liberal position today.

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Re:How Bad Antitrust Enforcers Kill People by psadauskas on Wednesday April 01, 2020 @07:28PM (#22754637)

I think where I differ from the Classical Liberal is that I would support a "welfare state", but in the form of a Basic Income or Reverse Income Tax rather than anything being subsidized. I believe that by providing a living wage by default would eliminate a lot of the authority that corporations would have over the lowest-paid employees. The wait staff and fry cooks and janitors would be much less tolerant of abusive working conditions if they didn't fear for missing that income. Additionally, I suspect it would allow the many middle managers and aggressive marketers to pursue other interests, like music or art, and leave the rest of us alone to do our jobs. I don't care if they stay home and smoke pot and play video games all day, as long as they stay out of the way.

I'm just not sure how to avoid the feedback loop, since now labor will cost so much more, so everything will cost more, so the cost of living goes up, so we have to increase the amount of basic income to compensate. I also don't know how to prevent things like, for example, slumlords setting the cost of rent to exactly 40% of the BI amount, or whatever the maximum allowed would be. It seems to me that BI can't merely be a supplement, or even set to "Poverty Level", it has to be something larger, and basically put all businesses that target the poor out of business.

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