Google has shown time and again they do not care. I don't even know if they employ human support reps, I've never actually spoken to anyone who represents google other than recruiters.
Google has shown time and again they do not care. I don't even know if they employ human support reps, I've never actually spoken to anyone who represents google other than recruiters.
At what point in relative size is a company too large for the government to handle and the government has to go to war with it in order to keep power?
I.e. Is there a theoretical size in which the corporation (or effectively any other organisation) can just say "no" to the government?
I don't think there is a set number though. It probably depends a lot more on what the business does and how central it is to the health of the economy. It's the "too big to fail" debate, and at various times in the recent past, we have determined several automakers and financial institutions to fall into that category. I think if you are too big for the government to let you fail, you are too big for the government to try to shut you down.
If you wait until the gov't get involved, it's going to be a much more painful, slow, bureaucratic process and you'll probably end up in a far worse position than if you just self-corrected in the first place.
A good example are drug prices. If drug companies were smart, they'd find a compromise. If they wait for Washington to do, they're really not going to like the solution.
The reason why the government is so 'big and bloated' is that your cut-off point for state intervention is >> than someone else who is less fortunate in the lottery of life. Think about that for a minute or two: would you be just as libertarian if you were say a single mom with three kids?
I'm a big empathy fan but defending the growth of state power on grounds of being shorted in the lottery of life pretty much always leads to more abuse and only temporary mitigation of suffering. Not to mention the fans of big government tend to be like alleged anti-violence people. They always seem to be fine with big government and using violence as long as it serves what they think is right. Then those same people either freak out on dirty cops and prosecutors or look the other way if those dirty cops and prosecutors are targeting people they hate.
We are so far from a free market state that any invocation of libertarian bent rings kind of hollow. The game is rigged and the safety net exists in one form or another in most places that would allow one the opportunity to post on a website instead looking after their basic survival. The issue now is not the lottery the issue now is trying to fix all the broken things that were allegedly created to help alleviate the effects of the lottery.
So, feel free to invoke 'principles' while banging on those more inclined to want liberty than safety but as someone who worked their way up from a worse start than just having a single mom the last thing I trust are people inclined to social engineering "looking out for me".
The arguments against libertarians are almost always some absolutist interpretation of some anarchist movie is world or worse Somalia which has tons of tribal systems, failed states (which includes a fair judicial system and enforcement of the law which markets absolutely depend on) and very little developed capitalist industries.
In reality most libertarians want a smaller government than is currently in place, they don’t want zero government. They most certainly don’t want an unstable state without centralize state run courts or law enforcement (outside of a very tiny extremist minority, a far smaller minority in the world than those who want actual vanguard communism again).
I’m a pragmatic libertarian leaning person which means that being realistic means compromise that some industry just simply makes more sense (as the amount of trouble it would cause to be market based via uncontrollable externalities). You could even factor in the amount of natural political meddling like we see in the US healthcare markets, which creates fake pseudo markets that provide few of the benefits of a real market where a single centralized public insurance option may actually be the least evil option, since the alternative has long ago become unrealistic. But that said I’d go as far as up to 50%+ up industry intervention and pro-social projects (ie helping the poor) are actually making things worse off overall had they not existed at all.
Thomas Sowell has written some great books documenting hundreds of cases of gov intervention coming with good intentions that have backfired (ie. rent control in Toronto and NYC in the 70s and 80s which dramatically reduced the supply of new low income development because no one wanted to build with rent control when they could build somewhere else).
I recommend “Wealth, Poverty, and Politics” by Sowell as a starter.
For other examples of failures of gov run central industry making them worse off than before I highly recommend reading the Venezuela economy Wikipedia about all the stuff they did after declaring capitalism is old and dead, creating mass starvation and unnecessary poverty in what could have been the most successful country in South America. Meanwhile countries like South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, and Hong Kong adopted markets after having large state run industry and dramatically increased the wealth of their entire country in a short few decades.
But I believe markets are just one tool that a wise society employs to create a prosperous world where everyone has the basic necessities and access to resources to allow them to flourish.
Honestly, it sounds like you and I aren't too far apart.
But, in any case, many libertarians are in favor of UBI, for example - the whole point of which is to solve the "lottery" problem without creating a bureaucratic monstrosity that is means-tested welfare.
If you could strip this away, there would be no corporate veil, and you could sue the person who failed to act (or whom acted wrongly) and did you wrong. Think of bankers at Wells Fargo creating false accounts in customer names...hire investigator or do your own, sue, discover, repeat...there would be MUCH MORE downside to bad behavior, even if the upside is there.
I think personally that organizations like GORE would exist, and who knows what else might emerge...more co-ops?
Of course this does require 3rd-party alternate court systems (maybe like cert issuers, but held to the same liability standard above?)...our current system cannot handle this, so it may be largely academic thoughts.
If suits only happened when businesses actually did something that truly did damage to society, then I'd agree. But reality is far from this.
a natural state would not have technology.
I would also tend to be libertarian if technology didn't exist. Technology changes the game:
- you can process millions of transactions a minute without a bottle neck from humans
- you can produce plastic, and lots of it
- you can migrate hundreds of thousand of human around the world, which would normally be an invasion
- you can destroy the environment (not so easy without technology)
- you can addict an entire generation of humans to a device (video games, porn, social media)
Without technology there is only so much a person or organization can do.