How? If businesses are benefiting from corporatism, then they aren't going to support the dissolution of the entity which enables it. And it's going to be pretty hard to dissolve the state for anarcho-capitalism when not even the capitalists are on board.
It's more of an argument for accountable government by the way of public campaign financing and heavy restrictions on private donations to political campaigns. That's a far more achievable and preferable option to abolishing the state outright, which is a non-starter for some reasons that I've already mentioned.
Last edited by lazybones on Jan 19th, 2018 at 11:17 PM
The only difference between anarcho-capitalism and what we have now is that in an AC environment the monopoly of force is owned by corporations instead of the state. Essentially, in an anarcho-capitalist environment corporations ARE the state.
If you want to see what an ancap country would look like, check out Somalia and the parts of Mexico that are run by cartels.
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Well, of course, businesses do not want to lose their subsidies and state-provided monopolies. But as long as an institution exists which has a monopoly on force and has a nigh-infinite supply of money corporatism will live on. Making government accountable is merely a temporary solution, due to power hungry nature of corporations and the money-hungry nature of politicians.
Please research before you start making authoritative statements like that, tbh. Corporations would not "own everything," due to competition. Also, corporations are far more tied to their consumers than government because their actions have a direct effect on their profit-loss margins. Competition and profitability work in tandem to keep corporations in check. Government lacks both of those regulations. Now, let's take a deeper look at Somalia. The best way to analyze the state is to look at its success before and after the state was abolished. This graph shows some successes:
That may be true until a hypothetical ancap Big Software Company comes out with killer robots to subjugate humanity by force, NAP be damned.
Sounds specious but I think it's actually a non-trivial argument to refute (competition doesn't serve as a blanket counter because some fields naturally converge to monopolies anyway, e.g. search engines). You could easily see a single corporation owning, say, a fifth of total GDP through natural market competition and then turning into an irl Trade Federation. There's no fundamental reason why competitive forces would always keep things just in enough equilibrium so that a sufficiently motivated and powerful private entity couldn't break it.
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1. I think it is extraordinarily difficult to garner that much of the market without government intervention and with free trade.
2.In your example, competition would handle the problem pretty easily. If we imagine that Google starts forcing all of their customers to use their service, competitors such as yahoo, bing, ecosia, Baidu, Sogou, QiHoo 360, Chinaso. Not to mention, Google absolutely cares about their reputation and shareholders would not be pleased with such aggressive action.
3. I mean the reason to believe that equilibrium would be kept intact is that companies are beholden to their consumers and shareholders.
Ehhh. Monopoly is not a concept that purely exists in the world of government regulation. Competition on paper keeps anyone from gaining control of everything but there are plenty of irl examples of certain competitors getting an overwhelming amount of control:
- RL empires/nations (monopoly of force isn't the point because the *competition* has that too)
- Lots of tech companies (in that industry in particular) with almost complete market share of certain industries without significant gov't regulation in their favor
- Sports dynasties
- Darth Sidious
You're thinking too small. I'm not worried about Bernard Madoff, I'm worried about Emperor Palpatine. Shareholders don't matter that much to a hypothetical company who has essentially self-awarded a monopoly of force.
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Well the rhetorical trick is that you can just say that anything that ever happens in recent history doesn't happen in a free market and thus doesn't count as evidence regardless of whether there's evidence that the non-free market actually contributed to the monopoly.
I brought up analogies to other competitive fields where monopolies can surface just to illustrate the point that competition isn't magic and isn't impossible to create majority power-holds over. A "Mongol Empire" or "modern US navy" of corporations with respect to monopolizing power over competitors isn't on paper impossible or even especially implausible.
See: Google. Not really a bad monopoly but nonetheless monopolized search simply because they had the best product + the nature of the industry favored monopolies.
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DarthSkywalker0, I'm typing a little sporadically right now so I suppose my rhetoric isn't operating at peak capacity: what I'm trying to say is that you can observe in lots of competitive networks and systems across a wide domain of fields one group getting enough power to either dominate everyone else put together or dominate them given imperfect coordination. E.g. sports, militaries, Star Wars debating, etc. The problem here is that I honestly don't know if there's any safety net in your ancap land for the case when that does happen, whereas say with governments there are active collective efforts to balance power against hegemons, etc.
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It is the nature of the market to stop monopolies. The fields you mentioned aren't monopolies simply high-cost services. The only reason why competition is not more rampant is due to the quality of the service. Well, again that is the myth of the economic myth of Cartels. There have been many attempted cartels throughout history, none of them have proved successful. The first reason as to why this happens is because individual members of the cartel tend to cheat on one another secretly – lowering the cartel price to some customers in order to take business away from other members of the cartel. This tends to become an endemic problem resulting in the death of the cartel. The second thing that transpires is that new competitors are drawn to the industry, eager to fill in the market gap. Everyone always points to the examples of the 1880s as monopolies. Tom Woods addresses this myth,
There is also the problem of diseconomies of scale. When a business gets too big it costs more to make less.
If businesses won't support anarcho-capitalism then it's dead on arrival. Just as socialism would be dead on arrival without the support of workers, or syndicalism without the support of trade unions.
In regards to your other concerns, you are right that corporatism will likely persist on some low frequency even with clean elections and reform. However, that is simply a reality that we must come to terms with. After all, capitalism could not even function if it were not for the state's guarantee of property rights and its crucial role in settling disputes. So the state must exist, and no state can be fully pure. It's just a matter of structuring the state in a way that makes it least prone to corruption.
I disagree. But, I do not want to turn this into a massive debate. Suffice it to say, that I do not buy the notion the state is the guaranteer of property rights. They exist in stateless societies such as Northern Ireland and private organizations have a monetary incentive to protect yours.
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Jan 19th, 2018 11:15 PM
