It's very rare that both parties engaged in any transaction are equally informed. But often the government is even less informed so they are utterly useless in terms of intervention.

The best the government can do and should do is reduce power imbalances and market monopolies which give rise to information asymetry. Reducing wealth inequality should be the government's priority.

Money can buy trust. People are too focused on presentation instead of substance. People these days are incapable of seeing substance where it exists and they are easy to fool into seeing it where there is none.

"Equally informed" isn't actually required. All you need is to be informed enough to make a reasonable decision. If you know one of the products is less secure but $10 cheaper, you know essentially what you need to know even if the manufacturers have a ton of information about specific algorithms used and electrical impedance that you don't know or understand but that don't change the high level conclusions anyway.

It's only when the customer doesn't even have the information that the product which is $10 cheaper is also less secure that you run into a problem.

Now name any transaction more complicated "I agree to pay you $3 for this bunch of asparagus" where the buying side has as much information as the selling side.

It seems to me the government should be involved in almost every transaction.

Real quick after this becomes normal, somebody is making an extra few cents by buying 10 bunches of asparagus from a farmer, redividing them and selling 11 bunches to customers.

What gets done about that? Weights and Measures. I agree to pay you $3 for a spigglywig of asparagus.

Then I worry your spigglywig is deliberately under-size. The market town gets an officer to check you're selling asparagus in correct spigglywigs, and next thing you know you've got a multi-billion dollar metrology (the science of measuring things) research lab and they're defining the fundamental constants of nature so as to be right certain exactly how much a spigglywig is every time.

So yes, "free market" is at best a model that can only be approximated and at worst it's a filthy lie.

Is that asparagus bio though? I can't tell by just looking at it. And I definitely can't tell if it tastes any good.

> It seems to me the government should be involved in almost every transaction.

Yuck. I'm not a hard free-market-only libertarian (I believe in single payer healthcare for example) but economic transactions between two private parties should never have government involvement. Hell, I dislike the banks and credit card companies having involvement, we tolerate them because we have no choice.

> It seems to me the government should be involved in almost every transaction.

Depending on your definition of "involved", every libertarian I know would agree with you.

Most people's conception of libertarianism is a massive straw man. I promise we are not as insane as you've been lead to believe ;)

Actually you are, because your pronoun "we" includes all the people whose conception of libertarianism is a massive straw man, but claim to be libertarians themselves. Which is now most self-described "libertarians", and a large swath of the Republican party. Now days it's just a meaningless euphemism people use when they don't want to admit they voted Republican.

And the few libertarians who actually know what it means are usually quite cruel and heartless, fighting tooth and nail against universal heath care even today, because their ideological principles outweigh their empathy and humanity.

But as a result of your ideological evangelism, you own all the self-described "libertarians" who your philosophy appeals to simply because they want to hurt and punish poor people, but don't understand what it "really means".

Sorry if this annoying inconvenient health crisis has knocked the blocks out from under your religious philosophy (and that the invisible hand of the market saw it necessary to bitch slap Rand Paul into quarantine after he downplayed the severity Coronavirus, got it himself, tested positive, and continued to selfishly spread it while awaiting the predictably positive results), but we NEED government intervention and universal health care right now to save people's lives, so please spare us the "no true Scotsman" lecture.

You are proving my point for me. You read the word "Libertarian" and immediately start rambling about Republicans and how cruel I am for my "religious philosophy".

> Sorry if this annoying inconvenient health crisis has knocked the blocks out from under your religious philosophy, but we NEED government intervention right now to save people's lives

This is a strawman, and there's no reason for you to be so offensive. I absolutely agree that government action is proper and necessary to protect the population, especially right now. "Provide for the general defense" is one of the government's jobs.

I think you should take a minute to examine your assumptions about what libertarianism is instead of reacting emotionally whenever you hear the word.

I think you should save your breath for defending libertarianism from the mindless hoards of people who actually claim to be libertarian themselves, but don't know what it means. Because I know very well what it means, and don't claim to be one myself.

I've done nothing anywhere near as offensive and self-centered as what Rand Paul has done, first parroting Trump by downplaying the risk of Coronavirus, then knowingly spreading the highly contagious disease after he was exposed to it, by following Trump's idiotic advice to go about your normal daily life, instead of following sound medical advice to quarantine until he got his test results, which were positive. On top of his medical training and long career of opposing universal health care.

He's a physician: he should have known (and does know) better than to do that, and that makes his policies and behavior perfectly aligned with the stereotype of the heartless libertarian who doesn't care about anyone but himself. He can't fall back to Trump's ignorant "I'm not a doctor, but take this pill from a company I've invested in" defense.

We needed universal healthcare BEFORE the pandemic struck. Why have you and your ideological colleagues fought tooth and nail against it for so long, to the point of lying about and sabotaging Obamacare? Are you finally changing your tune, when it's way too late?

https://www.businessinsider.nl/rand-paul-introduced-obamacar...

So what was your position on universal health care before, and what is it now, and does that align with the "true libertarian" philosophy, or are you "no true Scotsman" yourself? I'd love to hear your defense of Rand Paul's actions. Is he a true libertarian like you? And how about Eric S Raymond: do you think he knows what he's talking about?

Your focus on universal healthcare is understandable, but misguided.

America has more doctors and more hospital beds per capita than Europe does. This is one of the reasons that Europe has seen more coronavirus cases and more deaths per capita than America - their healthcare system is starved for resources.

I am in no way claiming that the American healthcare system is perfect, but I don't see universal healthcare as a panacea, because we are seeing in real time that it is not.

As far as what my stance on healthcare is: I think healthcare is a unique market where there is rarely the ability for you as the patient to make an informed decision about your medical care. In other words, a free market approach is not entirely feasible. I think a system similar to our school system would be ideal: publicly operated hospitals available for little to no charge, with the freedom to start a private hospital that has to compete with the public ones. This would mean high quality care at reasonable prices all around.

This has always been my stance. I've met libertarians who agree and disagree with me, but I can defend my stance using libertarian "first principles". So I think it's fair to call it "true libertarian" philosophy.

A libertarian is not a republican, and a libertarian is not an anarchist. A libertarian simply believes that individual rights should be protected. That should not be such a controversial statement.

> America has more doctors and more hospital beds per capita than Europe does. This is one of the reasons that Europe has seen more coronavirus cases and more deaths per capita than America - their healthcare system is starved for resources.

Judging from https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_hospita... your assertion is false.

Yes, that's exactly what I meant by "Gish Gallop"!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop

More telling is how reluctant he is to defend Rand Paul's indefensible and stereotypically libertarian antics, how not once has he mentioned his name, and how he pretends he didn't read anything about him I wrote.

Genuinely curious to see a source for that claim.

I think the implication is that, to quote Eric Weinstein from that Kayfabe article, "economic theory ... currently uses as it's central construct a market model based on assumptions of perfect information."

Does he say that? Because it's very wrong -- economics of imperfect information has been a dominant theme of microeconomics for the last 50 years. They gave Akerlof, Stiglitz, and Spence the Nobel back in 2001. They gave a second Nobel in 2007 for mechanism design, which is on when and how you can design institutions so that imperfect information doesn't wreck everything.

Here is an excerpt from Milton Friedman:

Fundamentally there are only two ways in which the activities of a large number of people can be co-ordinated: by central direction, which is the technique of the army and of the totalitarian state and involves some people telling other people what to do; or by voluntary co-operation, whch is the technique of the market place and of arrangements involving voluntary exchange. The possibility of voluntary co-operation in its turn rests fundamentally on the proposition that both parties to an exchange can benefit from it. If it is voluntary and reasonably well informed, the exchange will not take place unless both parties do benefit from it.[1]

You will see a similar disclaimer in any bit of free-market libertarian thought, because you can't have voluntary exchange without informed consent.

If transactions without informed consent are taking place, it is easy to argue that someone's property rights are being violated. Any libertarian since John Locke will tell you that protecting your rights is the first and foremost job of government[2].

[1] https://oll.libertyfund.org/pages/friedman-on-capitalism-and... [2] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/locke-political/

>Any free market purist will tell you that all transactions must be both mutually consenting and informed. If these conditions are not met, it is the governments job to step in.

I don't think such a person exists outside of some libertarian fantasies.

In practice, the right side of the political spectrum is about preserving the free market insofar as it protects incumbent wealth.