Topic: Need some opinions on unregulated business - page 2. (Read 2827 times)

Government is bad because it's a monopoly more than for any other reason. You can think of the world as a free market anarchy where all the land is legitimately owned by 193 landowners that allow you to live on the land under certain conditions. A few are genuinely criminal, but with most once you hit the age of majority if you don't like it you can leave, and if you don't like all of them you can go live on a raft in international waters where no law affects you at all (well, if you start attacking cruise ships, you'll get arrested quickly, but that's legitimate self-defense not any kind of coercion). So why do we see all these harmful effects from oversized government? Because government is non-competitive, and in practice most of us don't have the choice of going to another country over disagreements about the level of taxes, public services, personal freedom, etc. A corporation or cartel that has a monopoly on food and shelter will have the exact same negative consequences as a government monopoly on land. Secondly, both megacorps and governments suffer from the same economic calculation problem with regard to internal affairs, which makes both inefficient once they cross a certain size threshold.

All this brings me to my second point - why we are here (the Bitcoin forums). For most of us, it's not just getting fedgov out of our money, or creating a new, better gold standard, it's also about getting rid of the need for banks, credit cards and Paypal - it's about getting big business as well as big government out of where it doesn't belong. With the internet, there is an unprecedented opportunity to decentralize the economy and massively reduce worldwide power and wealth inequality. Self-employment will go up, and small businesses will become more and more powerful. The world will become less hierarchical and based more on peer-to-peer mechanisms: the free market, crowdsourcing, democracy, etc, and we will all benefit.

"Long-term" lol


For most businesses, long-term considerations include anything not on this quarter's report.

Environmental exploitation and other externalities: insurance.
You buy insurance against bad things like someone poisoning the water supply. These insurance companies then offer to buy their own insurance for this event on the open market, but below your price so they will make a profit at very low risk. Someone takes them up on their offer and stands guard at the water supply to tilt the scales in his favor. The more insurance companies and more guards competing, the more cost-effective your purchase. If for some reason I benefit by poisoning the water supply (say I own a polluting factory), I can sell insurance to the middlemen at a loss to control the price and thus ward off vigilantes. If my loss on insurance is less than my benefit from polluting, I am basically paying off everyone who buys insurance.

This works a LOT better in theory because of real-life transaction costs and a limited number of participating firms. I'm currently exploring ways to use Bitcoin to reduce this problem.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coase_theorem
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/decentralizing-prediction-markets-47122

For labor, it's a prisoner's dilemma for the Walmarts of the world to all collaborate. I suspect this collaboration happens in practice partly because those companies have a lot of influence in government. But that's kinda the standard libertarian excuse for everything.

Prohibit is perhaps a strong word. Can I just ignore your "monopoly" and just do what I want with my stuff? If so, you don't have monopoly privilege. If however, you can constrain me thru government licensing, regulation and other agencies that can manipulate what I can do with my things on my property, then monopoly exists. So no monopoly on force either.

Prohibit monopolies through a monopoly on force?

Just prohibit monopoly privilege. By evening the playing field, it's probable that the likes of Walmart couldn't manipulate pricing for long. Of course, if everybody conspired to financially hamstring their neighbor, not even the best of governments could stop it. A society is only as good as as the individuals it comprises.

Laws make for good suggestions, they don't stop crime, they don't make people more charitable, more meek, benevolent, friendly, caring or otherwise. However, making laws that give special privileges or authority to one class of individuals over another only exacerbates the problem.

Sure it can.  And as you sip a pina colada in your Caribbean yacht, you will no doubt find ways to ignore those long term impacts.

Of course it does. A damaged environment can have a long-term impact on expenses and profit.

I think you misunderstand the purpose of a free market.  Its to get the best return on capital.  The environment doesn't appear on a balance sheet.

I've been a libertarian for a number of years and I consider myself a staunch anarcho-capitialist. But one thing that I've never been able to resolve is how to stop exploitation (environment, people, etc) in a true free market. I'd like some of your opinions on how this might be addressed. Let me give you some examples:

Currently, we have several companies that are basically destroying the environment in several African countries and decimating the regional or local economies. If they were unregulated, would this behavior not increase?

What about labor exploitation? While I don't agree with the assessment most people have about Walmart being a slave labor company, let's use it for our example. So Walmart pays its workers slave wages and they toil away long hours working for little money. Right now, we can say that they choose to do so because, if they didn't like it, they could go elsewhere and earn a higher wage or upgrade their skills to get a better job. But what happens in an unregulated market where Walmart gets together with every other retail giant and price fixes labor costs? At that point, the laborers only option is to upgrade their skill but then they aren't making enough to pay for the education required to do that.

I truly believe a free market capitalist society is the only way we'll ever be profitable. But issues like this are ones that have kept me puzzled for a while. Can anyone offer some insight?

Thanks!
TMA