True, and good point.
>just reflects the biases of the people making the decisions...The market's only real "failure" is that it's too democratic
This is a failure if you can agree that people are less than optimal at making decisions, i.e. that humans have biases that work against their own rational self-interest at times. Meaning the market can exacerbate faulty decision heuristics. Behavioral economics is full of examples of this that classical economics simply labels as "anomalies". I tend to think the socialization aspect is an admonition that markets don't always work best when humans are at their most emotional/least rational.
Most people excluding the most ardent anarcho-capitalists recognize there are times when a completely free market doesn't serve the best interest of society (e.g., healthcare, monopolies). Sometimes I think people get it inverted and think society serves the market and not the other way around.
In my opinion the best interests of society are best served by letting people make their own decisions regarding themselves and their own property, and not by aggression or deliberate attempts at social engineering. I tend to be pro-market on average but really it's not the market I'm interested in so much as liberty. I also take a very expansive view of what the market entails; not just materialistic concerns but the full spectrum of human preferences. Does it always lead to a perfect outcome? Of course not. No system comprised of fallible and incompletely-informed human beings could possibly do that. It's just better than all the alternatives.
All the human failings which prevent markets from achieving optimal results are also problems for the various political schemes that aim to regulate them, magnified by the introduction of force as a "legitimate" means of achieving the desired end state. (It's ironic, for example, that people turn to governments to save them from monopolies—mostly government-created monopolies—when the government itself is the biggest monopoly of them all.)
In the end the real goal isn't to make people "happy"—we could do that much more easily with drugs. Rather, it's to ensure that people can live their lives the way that they choose, so that they can seek happiness, or purpose, or whatever else means the most to them. The fact that people make choices that (in someone else's opinion) probably won't make them happier is not sufficient justification for taking away their freedom to choose for themselves. I happen to think the moral, principled position also happens in this case to be the one that leads to the best outcomes for the most people from a purely materialistic point of view, but this is merely a happy coincidence; it would still be the right thing to do even if it resulted in abject poverty.
In the end getting back to the OG topic - it ends up being forced social engineering, instead of freedom and social fluidity. People who can only et paid 6 figures by virtue of geography are going to shout and scream about COL being awesome. People who are awesome get shafted. And humanity's progress is limited, because we get sub-optimal use of resources.
PS: Hi fellow libetarian.
I think this is the cynical view that paints it in an arrogant light. The alternate is there is an acknowledgement that the system is less than ideal and could be improved.
>People who are awesome get shafted
I mean, isn't this par for the course in any group environment? If you're healthy, you get shafted by paying more into insurance than you use. If you're wealthy and subjected to a progressive tax structure, you get shafted by paying a disproportionate amount of taxes. Sometimes I wonder if getting shafted is part of the cost of living in a stable society. You agree to carry a load so that in the event you need it, somebody can carry the load for you. Game theory shows that this leads to more optimal solutions as long as you can keep free-loading within certain bounds.
I used to be a staunch libertarian but came to realize society doesn't work so well when it's structured to only let the top percentile be successful. At a certain threshold, the top percent will always be successful. The utilitarian in me is concerned with finding a way to may the most people successful, which means gearing some policies to the mean rather than the high performers. To that utilitarian perspective, I think it's a more optimal use of resources if you consider human capital one of the more useful resources.
I've noticed libertarians tend to be those high performers who would tend to benefit (or perceive themselves to benefit) from not being held back. I personally moved away from it because most of the discussions seemed to lack nuance. Even Ayn Rand collected social security when her health started failing...
Because it is arrogant to say that vegans must subsidize milk production(which they do), it is arrogant to say that an atheist must pay compensate for Church tax exemptions... and the farther away the taxing authority, the more arrogant it is. The biggest issue that I have with my taxes here in US - subsidies for military to fight a war on behalf of the Saudis in Yemen.
If you're willing to pay for or contribute to something bigger/better - then why use tax for it?
> I mean, isn't this par for the course in any group environment
When you voluntarily join said environment - sure.
Funny... Being gay, growing up in Lithuania and living on $10 per week(between me and my mother) - I got to be libertarian well before I got to earn those 6 figures.
PS: I also detest Ayn Rand.
I think everybody has policies that their tax dollars support that they don't agree with. That is part of the compromise of living in a society. I don't think the solution is to have individuals decide on each line item they are personally willing to support unless we want to be a yeoman farmer society. Modern society is too complex and I think the ship has sailed on that point.
I do think there is room for middle ground. I think it would be useful for people to see, say, on their tax returns how much of their individual tax money goes to each high-level government agency. This would bring it out of the abstract and connect them more closely to those policies so they can adjust them to their particular values by voting at the polls while reducing the overall information budget they have to digest.
You stance optimizes for liberty as you rightly point out. People, however, generally want a society that balances liberty and stability. Laws and policies are enacted to try and find that right balance. It's similar to the centralized banking model vs. a completely laissez-faire economy; it's enacted to provide stability, perhaps at the expense of some liberty. I don't think people inherently have an issue with the government having a monopoly as long as they have a say in how that government functions. In a well-functioning democracy, the people are the government so the idea of a governmental monopoly is diluted somewhat.
Stability is certainly a worthwhile goal, to a point—in the end nothing alive can be completely stable—but there is no reason why it must come at the expense of liberty. The main issue is negative externalities, which are already addressed by the Non-Aggression Principle; i.e. your liberty applies to yourself and your own property, not other people or their property, unless they consent. Libertarian society is not a free-for-all. What little scope for petty conflict remains can be addressed adequately through social means rather than force.
> In a well-functioning democracy, the people are the government so the idea of a governmental monopoly is diluted somewhat.
Even in the ideal model, "the people are the government" in approximately the same way that individuals cells are a human being. Part of a vast collective, in other words, with no individual influence or control, retained only to serve the collective, and ultimately disposable. That's fine for cells in the body but a horrible way to think about sentient beings.
I do think there are times when they are juxtaposed. "The Constitution is not a suicide pact" is the cliché. Ideally they can coexist, but for the libertarian ideal to work, humans have to be rationale. I think we are anything but rational although we like to pretend we are most times.
>unless they consent.
That consent, to a certain extent, is implicit on being a willing participant in a free democratic society. It's part of the social contract.
>"the people are the government" in approximately the same way that individuals cells are a human being
I don't think I agree with this analogy. A collection of human cells cannot volitionally decide for the human being to become something wholly different. A government, by the people, can change it's entire makeup to serve it's changing values. When I say the people are the government, I mean the people in a functioning democracy have the power to make the government reflect their value system. I feel like you are misinterpreting my statement by reading it through a individualist/collectivist lens.
It's interesting to see this sort of rhetoric re-emerge after it took a long break after the '08 recession. Of course, the idea that the market is "too democratic" is absurd. At least, I haven't seen a democratic system where 1% of the population gets 40% of the vote.
As long as "willingness to pay" is the market proxy for the utility a consumer gets from a good, the market is not "democratic".
In a pure voluntaryist market system everyone gets 100% of the vote (i.e. veto power) when it comes to how they use their own labor and resources. If one has acquired more wealth then one has more options available and more decisions to make, but still doesn't get any direct say in how other people use their property, no matter how rich or poor they may be. This is far more egalitarian and in keeping with the ideals espoused by most democracies than the idea that every person's freedoms and property are subject to a glorified opinion poll.
Yeah, so uh... not democracy.
I'm not going to relitigate the entirety of Anarchy, State & Utopia in the HN comments section, but suffice to say that these ideals are far from objectively "egalitarian" and the idea that other's negative, non-inferential side-constraints must be sometimes violated in the context of social cooperation is actually foundational to republican (as in the political philosophy) thought.
That isn't a market failure. It's just a recognition that the economy is global, not national. The market doesn't optimize for the benefit of one nation against others. As for "short-term bias", the market just reflects the biases of the people making the decisions—the same as any other system. If people are inclined to stockpile medical supplies or materiel for self-defense, the market will support that too.
The market's only real "failure" is that it's too democratic for the liking of certain individuals who feel they have a better idea of how a society should be organized than the poor, ignorant, gullible masses that actually comprise that society.