Atlas Shrugged

Vivisectus wrote: »

Yes, that is what you said the last time. It is still neither here nor there: many libertarians believe in spontaneous order and propose free-market systems of law enforcement and even opt-in law courts. They favor dismantling the government apparati for both and letting the free market sort it out. They believe it would result in fairer and more efficient law enforcement.

It is a lovely idea, but the problem is that it would only take a handful of unethical people to turn the whole system into a loose confederacy of robber-barons... such as we see in Somalia.

Of course there are also plenty of libertarians who are not in favor of doing this at all. They have never been able to explain to me how people can be trusted to always be rational in a marketplace environment and therefor need to be bound by no regulation at all... but still need to be forced to obey laws. At least the spontaneous order crowd are consistent in their ideas.

Yea the crux of this is that regulations are laws, so the entire ideology is inherently self-contradicting, and the laws that are considered 'good' and those that are considered 'bad', are entirely arbitrary/subjective - based on rhetoric alone.

When it's a law that a free-market supporter doesn't like - typically anything that creates a legal definition of and successfully stops fraud - it's arbitrarily labelled 'interference' with or a 'distortion' of 'the markets'.
When it's a law that a free-market supporter does like - easily subverted loophole-filled legal definitions of fraud, anything protecting property rights and concentration of wealth for the powerful, from the masses whose property rights will be exploited and wealth diminished - then it's necessary/desirable as part of a 'minimal government'.

It's nothing to do with minimizing the states role though, just about co-opting the state into ceding economic power out of democratic hands and into private hands, and upholding rights for the powerful, while promising to but failing to uphold the rights of those who are not powerful - so that the powerful can keep their power secure and expand it.

We can already see today how legal systems around the world are two-tiered, with those with a lot of money/power gaining favorable treatment - it'd be an incredibly extreme version of this, rather than the utopia that's promised.

That's why they promise a utopia where everyone gets along, but never address the massive practical problems that would fail to let that work: The utopia that's promised isn't the end-goal, that's just the sales pitch, for achieving the above.