Re:Show HN: Compare news from the political left and right
by kingsuper20 on Saturday April 17, 2021 @12:58PM
(#26845707)
It's always the edge conditions that are the interesting ones.
How does an anarcho-capitalist deal with issues like village commons, natural monopolies, winner-take-all business models, national borders, etc?
Re:Show HN: Compare news from the political left and right
by pdonis on Saturday April 17, 2021 @04:05PM
(#26847025)
> How does an anarcho-capitalist deal with issues like village commons, natural monopolies, winner-take-all business models, national borders, etc?
The general answer is, by mutual agreement among the affected persons, and by refusing to interact at all with people who cannot be trusted to abide by mutual agreements.
For a more detailed treatment, see, for example, David Friedman's The Machinery of Freedom.
Of course there is no simple, short path from where we are now to any feasible anarcho-capitalist society; the idea that we need governments to solve problems is becoming more and more firmly entrenched, even in the face of the terrible track record of governments at actually solving problems.
There is nothing libertarian about censoring someone.
Sure, you have the right to do that, given they're on your private property (on Facebook) but that screams authoritarianism: it's like Facebook is his own little country ruling on his citizens and limiting their freedom.
Now, the act of advocating for Facebook to be able to do what it is currently able to do is libertarian. An authoritarian measure would be, as you mention, regulating Facebook to force them to publish anything or giving exactly the same space / visibility to people of opposing viewpoints.
As an another aside, as an anarcho-capitalist (right libertarian), I've a lot of respect for your political viewpoint - that would be ideal but I think it's unachievable. Egalitarianism - or equality of outcomes - can't happen unless you force it with an authoritarian government or you have perfect people that share voluntarily everything. On top of this, as soon as you have an authoritarian government you'll start having corruption (we don't have perfect people) which will favour government officials over normal people, throwing in the bin your egalitarianism.
Instead of focusing on equality of outcomes, I think we should focus on reaching equality of opportunity; given we have imperfect people we need a system of incentives to keep people broadly aligned with what society wants. Therefore there should be no government (which is outside the market and corruptible) and all services (including protection, healthcare, lawmaking) should be provided by the market. I think this will bring us as close to egalitarianism as we can possibly get.