Very well put! And I agree that our retraining systems are horrendous. I’m probably not anywhere near as reasonable as you, as I can point to the government for every problem - why is college so expensive? Federally backed loans you can’t discharge in bankruptcy. Why do so many jobs need licenses that take years and tens of thousands of dollars to get when, for example, cutting hair is something you can learn on Youtube? Why does starting a billion dollar software company have way less friction and red tape than starting a convenience store? Why is housing so expensive? I can go all day.

Economic freedom leads to personal freedom and increased happiness. The never ending desire to have the government solve all our problems is what got us into this huge mess in the first place. I know that people are hurting, but the solution will emerge.

So, yeah, I'm glad you're a free-market guy because I don't have enough free-market guys to drink beer and argue with. Although I'm not drinking beer (if you are, cheers), and we're not really arguing.

I am curious what the mechanism is from the free-market side to prevent increasing income inequality, and regulatory capture by corporations and the wealthy? If we de-regulate, what stops Bezos and Exxon, EvilCorp, and whoever from doing whatever they want (assume for a second that's not already happening to some extent under the current setup)? I guess that there's a market-based mechanism that is supposed to prevent that, but I don't know enough libertarians to have heard the argument.

I'm not convinced we should legislate our way out of anything either, but I can't get over the idea that deregulation = noone looking over the shoulders of those with absurd amounts of money and the wolf eats the whole damn henhouse.

Yeah, I can’t see how this goes on for much longer without the rise of a new land independent nobility that “employs” everyone else as “contractors” for food, clothing, shelter and very little else. This year amazon has grown enough to “hire” 500 more families in this city. Please put in your family’s application for warehouse attendant now. With the “white collar” jobs becoming like the butlers/valet of yesterday (the privileged servant class).

What are your ideas for how to shift things in a more positive direction?

If I were to write my congressman tomorrow, what do you think I should say? What are the top-5 key actionable bullet points?

Genuinely curious. I like to hear all sorts of ideas for how we can steer the country (hell, the planet) in a more positive direction.

I wish I had actionable ideas.

For a top 5 (or 7) wish list it would be along the line of:

- Outlaw billionaires the same way we’ve outlawed (at least on paper) monopolies. At that scale individuals have the power to sway governments. (A billion is likely not the right number, but it’s a good starting point.)

- Kill the money in politics. Make lobbying illegal.

- Kill the filibuster

- Kill the electoral college

- Decouple healthcare from employment (The only realistic solution I know of is socializing it).

- Provide a robust safety net (but get rid of the checks balances to prevent “abuse”). Just blanket give everyone $2000/month.

- Eliminate exemptions to providing benefits make it proportional to hours worked (worked an average of 10 hours a week for a month? That employer must provide 1 week of benefits to that person.) There is no common good from giving employer a massive expenses break to employ 2 people at 20 hours a week instead of just hiring one full time employee. This is gaming the system plain and simple.

Based on my understanding of their platforms, that seems consistent with a Warren/Sanders ticket?

For billionaire, wish list will have this top item:

1. Kill solarmist (it's good starting point).

I concede we need the state and am therefore not an anarcho-capitalist. My ideal state is as small as possible and no larger. Military and nuclear weapons are my biggest gotchas that I can’t reason my way around.

So you are asking me the wrong premise - if the state has no power, what regulation can a corporation capture?

I like corporations because businesses provide value. They can fail. The organizing principle has a straight-forwards goal of earning money. I don’t see any states failing (except for socialist ones like Venezuela) in a way that can put them out of business - they tend to grow forever in all directions, capturing more wealth and diminishing freedom.

The next question - do I care about inequality as a given? If everyone on earth had a healthy, purpose driven life but one family had 99.99% of all the wealth, would this be a problem? Basically do we dislike inequality because of envy or because most people genuinely have nothing?

You are correct that corporations are already running the show. Our biggest corporations are more powerful than most countries on earth. Because innovation in free societies is emergent and decentralized, the best the government can do is play whack-a-mole every few years as the free market laps them over and over.

I like the chaos, I like the unpredictability, I like weird people, I like having the freedom to do whatever I want. I want maximum freedom in all things and the least amount of coercion.

One area you should look at if you aren’t familiar is cryptocurrency. This is the most powerful innovation in regards to regaining individual freedom - financial freedom - that has come in centuries. The ability of governments to print their way out of debt is coming to an end, and individuals all over the world are going to have an escape valve from corrupt elites.

This was kind of a rambling response, no beer involved. Cheers

The problem with a state with no power is that it has no ability to prevent organizations from externalizing all of the costs of their profits. A simple place to see this is in environmental regulations. I can give plenty of examples, but before the rise of environmental regulation in the late 20th century, wide swathes of our country were regularly and freely polluted. We fixed lots of that through application of government power and imposed costs on polluters, both large and small.

I wonder if there is any sort of a market mechanism proposed from the libertarian side that would account for this?

Ok, so this is kind of interesting because to increase freedom, we would have to actively reduce existing legislation. So both sides, the side that sees government as the problem, and the side that sees government as the solution, have to get legislators on-board to actually do something to implement their plan.

Oh man, things aren't looking good for any of us on either side.

Let's check back in 10 years.

I have a minority view well outside the mainstream. Libertarians do best on individual issues. When analyzed in isolation the libertarian argument wins out for many things.

While libertarians lack official power, the market is so powerful that it drives tons of human activity without people even being aware. Also, the belief that the government is all-powerful and can actually solve problems is 99% fiction. So while people look to the president as someone to blame for problems or praise for solutions, the truth is that very little of consequence is in the president’s (or government’s) control. So being a libertarian is a state of mind - the acknowledgment that the source of happiness and purpose is ultimately your own concern and no one else can do this for you. Not having a seat in government means nothing because libertarians generally don’t want government and it’s usually fairly easy to ignore, legally avoid paying taxes to through a variety of loopholes and structures in our Byzantine tax code, and is so ineffective it’s mind boggling that it ever gets anything done beyond corruption and graft.

So to come full circle, I believe governments are far weaker than most admit or recognize, and power is increasingly in the hands of private people and organizations. And I welcome this shift in power.

Both you and the person you are responding to have held a very interesting and civil discussion on a topic that is often charged. Thank you both for expressing these ideas so sanely. I found both the retraining "valley" from the parent poster and your positioning of libertarian worldviews as a state of mind interesting and crisp. Cheers.

The concept assumes there are replacement jobs being created. That was true for a hundred years, it hasn't been for the last 20+.

At some point automation eliminates jobs wholesale, and there aren't replacements waiting. People always refer to cars replacing horses and point out that all those jobs surrounding horses were replaced with something else - manufacturing plant jobs, car salesman, etc. What they fail to mention is that HORSES were replaced with CARS - and we've got far, far, far fewer horses on the planet today because they're just not needed.

We're the horses...

Would you back a UBI-based approach to this problem?

Any cool moonshot ideas for how to approach it?