anti-trust law, laws against false advertising, corruption laws.
I'll give you the false advertising. Anti-trust laws do not seem like an obvious win in the case of natural monopolies; for example, destroying Google and giving an equal share of their resources and employees to Bing, Yahoo, and Ask.com does not seem obviously likely to improve the quality of search for consumers. As for anti-corruption laws, I'd need to see a much clearer definition before I gave you an opinion.
Your mention of wanting to "preclude blackmail, theft, and slavery" implies that you would like to see cooperative production between genuine equals, not relations of dominance or exploitation.
That's true, but I suspect you're using those words in a substantially different sense than I would intend. Let's clarify: I believe that it is undesirable for someone's freedom (in a Libertarian theoretical sense of free use of their own body, autonomy, and property) to be dependent on the amount of violent physical force that other economic players are able to muster. This does not imply most of the other things you suggest.
As it happens, I'm on the fence about public education. It seems like a good idea in principle, but having been through the process myself, I cannot endorse it with good conscience. Furthermore, I am uneasy granting the government a monopoly on indoctrination of youth, which is a major component of any education.
As for inheritance tax, I don't think that's either enforceable or desirable. If people want to care for their children after they are dead, that doesn't harm me at all, and I wish them well. As for information campaigns, government propaganda, however much I may agree with this generation of ideals, is not something I particularly want to fund. Governments do not generally give power back once it's been given to them, and, when you give a government a power, you must trust not only the current administration, but every future one for the lifespan of the country. On the whole, it seems wiser to allow private organizations to blanket the world in propaganda as they see fit.
Oh dear. We seem to have strayed quite far from libertarianism.
You certainly seem to. I think I'm comfortable where I am, thank you. This specifically is actually my complaint about much political discussion. Whenever anyone expresses any doubt about the details of their political beliefs, people from other camps flock like carrion-birds to try to convert them to the righteous path. This leads to people not discussing doubts for fear of appearing weak to the damn, dirty greens, and forces people into unnecessarily extreme positions.
On my last two sentences - I intended them as somewhat of a cheeky wink, but maybe they're a bit snotty. I'm certainly not trying to convert anyone; and I'm all for being aware of doubts, inconsistencies and hard choices. Political discussion is just great fun.
On the particular examples:
Anti-trust law hasn't (yet!) destroyed Google - however splitting up monopolists like Standard Oil or various cartels seems a clear win.
I guess anti-corruption laws can be taken as an extension of anti-trust (no bribing the supply manager to get the contract) or as sol
Politics ahead! Read at your own risk, mind killers, etc. Let all caveats be well and thoroughly emptored.
It seems reasonably clear to me that, from a computational perspective, functional central planning is not practically possible. Resource allocation among many agents looks an awful lot like an exponential time problem, and the world market is quite an efficient approximation. In the real world, markets, regulated to preclude blackmail, theft, and slavery, will tend to provide a better approximation of "correct" resource allocation between free agents than a central resource allocation algorithm could plausibly achieve without a tremendous, invasive amount of information about the desires of every market participant, and quite a lot of computing power (within a few orders of magnitude of the combined computational budget of the human species).
It would be naive to say that we'd need exactly the computational power of the human species in order to achieve it: we can imagine how we might optimize the resource allocation scheme by quite a lot. Populations are (at least somewhat) compressible, in that there are a number of groups of individual people who optimize for similar things, allowing you to save on simulating all of them. Additionally, a decent chunk of human neurological and intellectual activity is not dedicated to economic optimization of any kind, which saves you some computing time there as well. And, of course, humans are not rational, and the homunculi representing them in the optimized market simulation could be, giving them substantially more bang for their cognitive buck - we can imagine, for instance, that this market simulation would not sink billions of dollars into lotteries each year! It may also be that the behavior of the market itself, on some level, is lawful, and a sufficiently intelligent agent could find general-case solutions that are less expensive than market simulation.
Still, though, the amount of information and raw processing power needed to pull off central planning competitive with the market approximation seems to be out of our reach for the time being. As a result of this, and a few other factors, my own politics tend to lean Libertarian / minarchist, and I'm aware that there is some of this sentiment in circulation on this site, though generally not explicitly. I'm trying to refine my beliefs surrounding some of the sticky issues in Libertarian philosophy (mostly related to children and extreme policy cases), and I thought I'd ask LW what they thought about one issue in particular.
I have been wondering whether or not there are any interventions in the economy that can have a positive expected benefit. I honestly don't know if this is the case: put another way, the question is really asking if there are any characteristic behaviors of markets that are undesirable in some sense, and can be corrected by the application of an external law. Furthermore, such things cannot be profitable to correct for any participant or plausibly-sized collection of participants in the market, but must be good for the market as a whole, or must be something that requires regulatory power to fix.
An obvious example of this sort of thing is the tragedy of the commons and negative externalities. The most pressing case study would be climate change: the science suggests, fairly firmly, that human CO2 emissions are causing long-term shifts in global climate. How disastrous these shifts will actually be is less well settled, but there is at least a reasonable probability that it will be fairly unpleasant, in the long term. Personally, I feel that we are likely to run into much bigger problems much sooner than the 50-200 year timescales these disasters seem to expected on. However, were this not the case, I find that I'm not quite sure how my ideal government, run by a few thousand much smarter and better informed copies of me, ought to respond to the issue. I don't know what I think the ideal policy for dealing with these sorts of externalities is, and I thought I'd ask for LessWrong's thoughts on the matter.
In my own mind, I think that as light a touch as possible is probably desirable. Law is a very blunt instrument, and crude legislation like a carbon tax could easily have its own serious negative implications (driving industry to countries that simply don't care about CO2 emissions, for example). However, actions like subsidizing and partially deregulating nuclear power plants could help a lot by making coal-fired power plants noncompetitive. We could also declare a policy of slowly withdrawing any government involvement in overseas oil acquisition, which would drive up the price of petroleum products and make electric cars a more appealing alternative. However, I don't know if there would be horrifying consequences to any of these actions: this is the underlying problem - I am not as smart as the market, and guessing its moods is not something that I, or any human is going to be very good at. However, it seems clear that some intervention is necessary in this sort of case. Rock, hard place, you are here.
Thoughts?