Under what regulatory regime is a corporation able to rape the environment and siphon off the money? Who says that corporations as they exist today should exist in libertarian-land? Perhaps you'd have only LLCs where the limitation of liability is actually rather small and as such management would take an active role in ensuring that they weren't personally liable for the rapacious behavior that some corporations exhibit today.
Up until Glass-Steagall was repealed Goldman-Sachs was a relatively well run bank that was entirely privately owned and all the partners there made sure people weren't doing crazy subprime stuff because it would negatively impact the bottom line over the next decade or more.
Nassim Taleb talks about "skin in the game" as a requisite for moral decision making. Perhaps libertarians would say that you can't perform in a managerial role at a company without having some meaningful skin in the game. Would people find a way to dodge that? Sure. But companies who did dodge it would tend to be short-term greedy, not long-term greedy and as a result they would tend to go bankrupt faster thus ridding us of the unpleasantness of their existence.
Perhaps you'd have only LLCs where the limitation of liability is actually rather small and as such management would take an active role in ensuring that they weren't personally liable for the rapacious behavior that some corporations exhibit today.
This highlights the bizarre statist-libertarian cognitive dissonance where they hate on government but then argue that lawyers and lawsuits are the solution to everything.
You need to understand that libertarians are not against mediation or even courts. If someone commits fraud, or pillages the environment, there are plenty of ways of punishing them without government. Appreciate the value of reputation.
Front-loaded prevention (ie regulation) serves as a damping mechanism against short-term maximization with irreversible consequences. A lawsuit and ruined reputation do nothing to stop the next guy.
From my understanding libertarians aren't 100% anti-government but rather "anti-government-solving-everything" because of the lack of highly attuned feedback loops.
I'm against government taking over too much because I think it's generally a sub-optimal solution. It takes such a huge public outcry to get anything done it's incredible. Egregious problems can get solved eventually but smaller ones are perpetuated in the law, probably indefinitely. Or at least until the next revolution.
When businesses fail all their policy and code and whatever is wiped out. Companies that don't generate profits fail, which causes their policy to disappear and people aren't subjected to failing policy forever.
The self-correcting nature of business (even if it's still sub-optimal) to me seems somewhat preferable to the nature of government which is to grind on -- successful or not -- until people are so fed up with them that something has to change.
Further I'm not a huge fan of financially supporting people flailing about in misguided and asinine programs. The drug war is actively costing me (and everyone else) money when it should have been clear 15-20 years ago that the policy wasn't working and couldn't work. I'm not saying that businesses don't make stupid short-term decisions but they tend to fail faster. Enron did massively stupid stuff but it was founded in 1985 and had died by 2004. It's lifetime was less than the drug war is today, and the drug war might go on another 10 years if we're unlucky.
At it's peak Enron's market cap was $60b. In 2013 we've budgeted $25 billion at the Federal level.
The self-correcting nature of business (even if it's still sub-optimal) to me seems somewhat preferable to the nature of government which is to grind on -- successful or not -- until people are so fed up with them that something has to change.
Er, but the self-correcting nature of business is simply the result of the fact that the nature of business is to grind on -- successful or not -- until people are so fed up with it that it is forced to change.
It is no different than government in that respect.
Yes, that's true. But there are automatic shutdown provisions inherent in business like bankruptcy. The government that controls the money supply can never really go bankrupt, and even one which doesn't (like those in Europe) still tend not to go bankrupt as they can levy higher taxes, at least up until the point at which there is a revolution.
Businesses start and fail all the time and none of it requires guns or marches or any of that. Which is to say that it's largely peaceful. Something that I'm ardently in favor of.
Who says that corporations as they exist today should exist in libertarian-land?
Since the corporate form is a government intervention into the free market to protect select players for notional public benefit, presumably, it wouldn't exist at all in libertarian-land, assuming, of course, there is even a small dose of consistency with libertarian rhetoric.
On the other hand, you could just dispense with any kind of consistency and...
Perhaps you'd have only LLCs where the limitation of liability is actually rather small
How is supporting government intervention to protect select players (even if it is "just LLCs") from liability to the unconsented harms they do others "libertarian"?
Up until Glass-Steagall was repealed Goldman-Sachs was a relatively well run bank
Glass-Steagall wasn't exactly libertarian, either, so I'm not sure what the point here is.
Comments
Under what regulatory regime is a corporation able to rape the environment and siphon off the money? Who says that corporations as they exist today should exist in libertarian-land? Perhaps you'd have only LLCs where the limitation of liability is actually rather small and as such management would take an active role in ensuring that they weren't personally liable for the rapacious behavior that some corporations exhibit today.
Up until Glass-Steagall was repealed Goldman-Sachs was a relatively well run bank that was entirely privately owned and all the partners there made sure people weren't doing crazy subprime stuff because it would negatively impact the bottom line over the next decade or more.
Nassim Taleb talks about "skin in the game" as a requisite for moral decision making. Perhaps libertarians would say that you can't perform in a managerial role at a company without having some meaningful skin in the game. Would people find a way to dodge that? Sure. But companies who did dodge it would tend to be short-term greedy, not long-term greedy and as a result they would tend to go bankrupt faster thus ridding us of the unpleasantness of their existence.
This highlights the bizarre statist-libertarian cognitive dissonance where they hate on government but then argue that lawyers and lawsuits are the solution to everything.
Mediating disputes =/= Government
You need to understand that libertarians are not against mediation or even courts. If someone commits fraud, or pillages the environment, there are plenty of ways of punishing them without government. Appreciate the value of reputation.
Front-loaded prevention (ie regulation) serves as a damping mechanism against short-term maximization with irreversible consequences. A lawsuit and ruined reputation do nothing to stop the next guy.
From my understanding libertarians aren't 100% anti-government but rather "anti-government-solving-everything" because of the lack of highly attuned feedback loops.
I'm against government taking over too much because I think it's generally a sub-optimal solution. It takes such a huge public outcry to get anything done it's incredible. Egregious problems can get solved eventually but smaller ones are perpetuated in the law, probably indefinitely. Or at least until the next revolution.
When businesses fail all their policy and code and whatever is wiped out. Companies that don't generate profits fail, which causes their policy to disappear and people aren't subjected to failing policy forever.
The self-correcting nature of business (even if it's still sub-optimal) to me seems somewhat preferable to the nature of government which is to grind on -- successful or not -- until people are so fed up with them that something has to change.
Further I'm not a huge fan of financially supporting people flailing about in misguided and asinine programs. The drug war is actively costing me (and everyone else) money when it should have been clear 15-20 years ago that the policy wasn't working and couldn't work. I'm not saying that businesses don't make stupid short-term decisions but they tend to fail faster. Enron did massively stupid stuff but it was founded in 1985 and had died by 2004. It's lifetime was less than the drug war is today, and the drug war might go on another 10 years if we're unlucky.
At it's peak Enron's market cap was $60b. In 2013 we've budgeted $25 billion at the Federal level.
Er, but the self-correcting nature of business is simply the result of the fact that the nature of business is to grind on -- successful or not -- until people are so fed up with it that it is forced to change.
It is no different than government in that respect.
Yes, that's true. But there are automatic shutdown provisions inherent in business like bankruptcy. The government that controls the money supply can never really go bankrupt, and even one which doesn't (like those in Europe) still tend not to go bankrupt as they can levy higher taxes, at least up until the point at which there is a revolution.
Businesses start and fail all the time and none of it requires guns or marches or any of that. Which is to say that it's largely peaceful. Something that I'm ardently in favor of.
Since the corporate form is a government intervention into the free market to protect select players for notional public benefit, presumably, it wouldn't exist at all in libertarian-land, assuming, of course, there is even a small dose of consistency with libertarian rhetoric.
On the other hand, you could just dispense with any kind of consistency and...
How is supporting government intervention to protect select players (even if it is "just LLCs") from liability to the unconsented harms they do others "libertarian"?
Glass-Steagall wasn't exactly libertarian, either, so I'm not sure what the point here is.
You wrote a lot of words but none of them made any sense to me, let alone address the question.