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JulianMorrison comments on Our House, My Rules - Less Wrong
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Comments (229)
First, find me a socialist country without unequal power. Or heck, without economic inequality. Even Soviet Russia had the "nomenklatura" and the dollar black market.
Are you assuming I'm reversing stupidity? I think there might be pain inherent in libertarianism but that doesn't mean I'll go running to whatever defines itself as an opposite.
What I'm trying to say is that corporate abuse of power doesn't automatically go away because you give power to the government. The end result may just be even more power sloshing around in the system. But now we're degenerating into mere politics...
Nope, a degeneration into politics would be marked by one or the other of us switching to "arguments are soldiers". I don't think we have.
I'll put my cards on the table here. I have a lot of respect for libertarian abstract pure capitalism. Its particular advantages that I don't think are equaled elsewhere are: a local update rule (making it embarrassingly parallel), by agents who are self-motivated (without external force) by monotonically increasing expected utility, producing coordinated activity without coordinated preferences, and typically producing compounding reinvestment that grows the technological and wealth base for everyone. I think capitalism is the fixed-point an economy will fall into if you have scarcity, enforce property, and don't do much else. It's the only system that can operate in the presence of scarcity without needing coercion.
I just don't necessarily think those advantages mean it's nice.
Sane libertarians don't say it is nice. They just say that the problems are not automagically fixed by saying, "Let's have the government pass a law against..."
For one thing, politics is basically the rules governing conduct between people who are treating each other as members of different tribes. In this environment "nice" isn't really a likely outcome, given human moral sentiments.
Politics is primarily a within tribe tool.
The definition of "tribe" is very flexible, at least as how it applies to human moral sentiments. I'm talking about psychological tribes, not literal ones (hence the slightly awkward phrasing in the passage of mine you quoted)
The law is principally about how you deal with people you don't really care about. You generally don't look to the law to work out how to treat your family or friends (and when one does, its generally considered a bad thing). The law's primary purpose is to control how you treat people you have no strong affiliation with. Humanity does not have a happy history when it comes to dealing equitably with strangers or near-strangers.
I'm talking about psychological tribes too. That is where politics finds it's primary home. To the extent that families and friendship groups act like tribes, they too have politics. As do offices.
As for laws, well, that's slightly more complex, made more so when our inter-tribe and within-tribe moral systems get somewhat blurred by circumstances.
I agree with Julian completely but I would add the observation that there are no countries today with anything remotely resembling pure capitalism. Europe, the US, and the remainder of the traditional "west" are particularly far away from such an ideal.
Agreed. Really free markets were regulated away in the early 20th century, it what has always felt to me like a case of trying to trade stability for growth by preventing whatever caused massive volatility in the past from happening again.