What's so bad about laissez-faire capitalism? It's why the West became so wealthy and powerful

What's so bad about laissez-faire capitalism? It's why the West became so wealthy and powerful.

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Because it inevitably paves the way for the formation of monopolies and predatory corporations.

Legal rules provide the foundation for markets where the gains of market participants are correlated with overall social gain.

It's a fancy way of arguing in favor of oligarchy, or rule by a moneyed elite.

It is the enemy ideology of capitalism as we know it, as the core concept of capitalism is that competition spurs innovation, but if it is not properly regulated then there is nothing from stopping industry heavyweights from colluding together in order to manipulate the market and drive out competitors, because that is a more cost-effective way of staying in business than investing in product innovation or taking on risky new ventures

But those can only come about due to government collusion. How do you expect a monopoly to come about without said collusion?

Dude, monopolies arise naturally. There was little to none regulation during the Gilded Age, yet it was the golden age of monopolies.

All the major airlines get together and decide to set a minimum rate. Planes and airport rents are extraordinarily expensive so no one is able to enter as a competitor in the near term and if competition does arise they can shut it out by just lowering prices again.

Governments have been a staple of human life since 4000 BCE. Complex economies can not arise unless there is a force monopoly which regulates contract enforcement and acts as an impartial arbitrator for conflict resolution.

take the government out of the equation and you get raiding culture, such as what the Celts had before the Romans took over, or how mafia kingpins used violence to protect their investments in industries not under the direct supervision of any government (and confiscated product was simply considered a cost of doing business)

Maybe they're the monopoly because they simply produce the best product.

Can you think of any monopolies that came about void of any government interference?

And Unions exist so workers can do the exact same thing on their end. Are you advocating a free for all, or suggesting the government should get involved to break up monopolies?

Laissez-Faire =/= Ancap mad max autism. Don't straw man.

regulation and collusion are not the same, I would also assume there are more monopolies now such as cable and utility companies

That might be how they BECOME a monopoly. But there's no incentive for them to maintain those standards once they are one.

Yes there is. If they don't maintain those standards, people won't buy as much of their product. They may be able to get by making only, say, 70% of what they did with the high quality product, but that choice is up to them. Can they continue production at 70%? Pay their workers? Pay their debts? Rent? Upkeep? Etc?

>Laissez-Faire =/= Ancap mad max autism. Don't straw man.
Thanks for not going full retard.

but it's not attacking a straw man when your instinct is to blame the government for behavior that has existed before, and after, governments began existing, it ignores the different kinds of government that have existed (such as when the government was literally the personal property of a ruling family) and the implication of your statement is that making the government less involved with the economy is a panacea that solves every problem facing a complex world.

The US became wealthy and powerful thanks to protectionism.

>Yes there is. If they don't maintain those standards, people won't buy as much of their product.
When an industry reaches a point where a single institution or collection of institutions control most of the capital, sclerosis sets in because it becomes more cost effective for them to manipulate the market to drive out newcomers than it does for them to continue investing in risky product innovation

Again, stop straw manning. This is the second time you've put words in my mouth and argued against them.

It also doesn't take into account that people don't have to buy the monopoly's products. If GreedCo owns a monopoly on vacuum cleaners, I can simply not buy their vacuum cleaners; I'm under no obligation to purchase a vacuum in the first place after all.

Are you 15 or what? That's not how monopolies arise. Most arise due to M&A or unfair competition.

If you're, say, the only internet provider in an area, people will buy your product pretty much regardless of price or quality. It's not like they can buy competitors products instead. Luxury products are the only ones that might see reduction in volume, but even then the quality people are willing to pay for is MUCH lower than the quality needed to drive competitors bankrupt.

ryanair and easyjet appeared after margaret thatcher deregulated everything

>Again, stop straw manning. This is the second time you've put words in my mouth and argued against them.
And again, it's not straw manning when you suggest that monopolies can ONLY come about due to government collusion when 99% of human societies were some form of conspiratorial oligarchy regardless of how strong or weak their central public bureaucracy was (if they even had one)

raikoth.net/libertarian.html

It's mostly about lolbertarians and I assume you might be pinochetboo or something but "economy" part applies very well.

>ryanair and easyjet

are not monopolies...

>When an industry reaches a point where a single institution or collection of institutions control most of the capital, sclerosis sets in because it becomes more cost effective for them to manipulate the market to drive out newcomers than it does for them to continue investing in risky product innovation

And 95% of the time, "manipulating the market" means buying politicians to write favorable legislation.

Everything is a monopoly to an extent. If there are 2 local shops and you go to one because it is closer, that shop has a "monopoly" on that location. The shop has leverage to raise prices a little because some customers will still use it rather than walk an extra 20 minutes. If the shop owner was willing to pay more to get a good location they deserve the returns on that extra investment.

This also applies to regular monopolies. Rockefeller had the foresight to see that oil was the next big thing. If your great great great great grandfather had the foresight too he could have gotten in on it and the dividends from your Standard Oil shares would offset the high prices of the Standard Oil monopoly.

Capitalism is inherently unstable and prone to crises.

laissez-faire thinkers assumed that the economy existed in a state of static equilibrium. Any crises was due to an "exogenous shock" to the system. Monopolies and Trade Unions interfere with equilibrium. Unfortunately for them the economy is an evolving complex system, cyclical, non-linear, and prone to inevitable crises.

The second problem is about money creation. There are two choices - either the government creates money, or the banks create money. If the government decides to allow the banks to create money, the banks will loan money and write the value of the loan in their assets/liabilities. This is how they profit, by loaning money. If banks are allowed to create money they will balloon private debt.

>And 95% of the time, "manipulating the market" means buying politicians to write favorable legislation.
Which is a problem to be fixed by holding governments more accountable than peoples in the past did, not by pretending that people would play nice if the government simply went away, which is impossible.

Make the government "smaller" and all you've done is created a power vacuum, and the kind of people good at filling power vacuums are not the kind of people you want running your government.

>any libertarians have made excellent arguments for why certain libertarian policies are the best options, and I agree with many of them. I think this kind of libertarianism is a valuable strain of political thought that deserves more attention, and I have no quarrel whatsoever with it and find myself leaning more and more in that direction myself.

>However, there's a certain more aggressive, very American strain of libertarianism with which I do have a quarrel. This is the strain which, rather than analyzing specific policies and often deciding a more laissez-faire approach is best, starts with the tenet that government can do no right and private industry can do no wrong and uses this faith in place of more careful analysis.

So its an anti stawman faq

Seriously while I know fee market solves everything people exist its not really libertarianism persay.

No libertarian would say you can farm wasps if those wasps get lose and sting your neighbors, to take an argument from the faq

That picture triggers me.

Adam Smith was not a laissez-faire fanboy, he specifically stated the state needs to prevent monopolies.

>the economy is an evolving complex system, cyclical, non-linear, and prone to inevitable crises
and? it is prone to crises in every system

>If banks are allowed to create money they will balloon private debt.
wildcat banks were a rarity and plenty of central banks in other countries act like wildcat banks

He also believed in progressive taxation and strong trade unions and believed that when left to their own devices merchants collude in order to profit at the expense of the public.

>holding governments more accountable
And how do you propose to do that? Short of holding congress at gunpoint.

>And how do you propose to do that? Short of holding congress at gunpoint.
There's not an easy answer to that question, otherwise we'd have already done it.

But we won't need guns. Ballots are the rightful and peaceful successor to bullets. An active, involved, and educated citizenry is our greatest insurance against tyranny, either in its oligarchic form or in its authoritarian form.

Ballots, and laws are just pieces of paper. The government has no obligation to follow them, or have any real regard for public opinion.

I mean, look at the US. It was founded as the smallest, most limited government in history, with a whole bunch of checks and balances, and it's become a monster.

Regulations against the market are fine, but who's going to regulate the government?

>Ballots, and laws are just pieces of paper. The government has no obligation to follow them, or have any real regard for public opinion.
But by the same token neither does anyone else. Societies form as a trust among a large group of people. A dollar bill is just a green piece of paper and gold is just a shiny yellow rock until you live in a society where these things are held in common value.

>I mean, look at the US. It was founded as the smallest, most limited government in history, with a whole bunch of checks and balances, and it's become a monster.
The U.S government was founded specifically as a public system, in essence nationalizing the property previously held by the sovereign king (and telling his creditors to take a hike), with checks and balances in place to prevent any one person from monopolizing political power.

By the standards of the day it was quite powerful, and the most prescient of the founding fathers were those who understood the capacity of the government to work for the common man, as exemplified by people like Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, and even Thomas Jefferson begrudgingly (for all his talk of limited government, he was a remarkably powerful president)
And while we're on the subject of Jefferson, pic related.

>Regulations against the market are fine, but who's going to regulate the government?
a conglomerate of multinational corporations who use tax inversion and predatory lending strategies to coerce public systems into passing legislation favorable to them.

Or we the people, whichever you think would do a better job.

This.

>monopolies are bad
>protectionism is good

>I want to be slave to corporate whims
>I want to be exploited

>Can you think of any monopolies that came about void of any government interference?
The pet food one, Luxoptica, Quanta, De Beers, etc.
But pleace enlighten me how some guy buying starch and other ingredients of dubious origin from China is the gov's fault.
Oh, and just so you don't pull the "durr they won't be able to sustain that monopoly without the gubment", in 2010 they had a massive crisis, because that shit they put in the food was causing kidney failure in animals.
Did they implode, and leave way for smaller, healthier newcomers to fill the void with small prices and healthy competition?
Fuck no, they got bought by Simmons Pet Food and grabbed an even bigger humongous chunk of the market.

>inb4 those aren't monopolies because they have token competitors.

Union monopolies are just another type of corporate monopoly that extracts rents from everyone else.