>>There are multiple disciplines within economics that are divided along ideological lines - the discipline is generally more concerned with constructing models that reflect specific perspectives than trying to accurately predict market behaviour, and this is not surprising given the general unpredictability of markets.
But there is a mainstraem consensus, and Marxism is entirely outside of it. It is quack economics. For example, Marx believed that automation would reduce the demand for labor, and with it, wages:
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/wage-labour...
>>But even if we assume that all who are directly forced out of employment by machinery, as well as all of the rising generation who were waiting for a chance of employment in the same branch of industry, do actually find some new employment – are we to believe that this new employment will pay as high wages as did the one they have lost? If it did, it would be in contradiction to the laws of political economy. We have seen how modern industry always tends to the substitution of the simpler and more subordinate employments for the higher and more complex ones. How, then, could a mass of workers thrown out of one branch of industry by machinery find refuge in another branch, unless they were to be paid more poorly?
and
>>To sum up: the more productive capital grows, the more it extends the division of labour and the application of machinery; the more the division of labour and the application of machinery extend, the more does competition extend among the workers, the more do their wages shrink together.
This was proven wrong in his own lifetime as factory worker wages rapidly grew in industrializing Britain.
He was an economically illiterate quack promoting basic fallacies like Ludditism that are popular with laymen.
>>Bureaucracies are gonna create more rules over time, that's what they do, but I'm not making novel claims when I suggest that Reagan's economic policy was one of deregulation, lowering taxation, and shrinking the federal government. His deregulation was of a market form. Here, cited from Investopedia, a pro-capitalist site (that is broadly considered well-reasoned and unbiased): https://www.investopedia.com/terms/r/reaganomics.asp
This is just the mainstream narrative. The real powers in society, which revolve around the state, have for 50 years, spun a narrative of an ascendant libertarianism (e.g. "neoliberalism"), when all broad-based measures of the centralization of society shows rapid transition to a more controlled and restricted market with more power in the hand of state bodies and industries tightly intertwined with them.
>>I honestly don't see how you can believe this. Unions are the weakest they've ever been, having shrunk alongside the middle class (no coincidence there):
The reason union membership rates declined is that unions bankrupted nearly every industry that was amenable to unionization. The union movement completely captured US industry and extracted exorbitant benefits that crippled the golden geese of the US economy.
The labor laws passed in the 1930s and 50s guarantee that any industry that does start to become a significant contributor to national output, whether it's the Big Three Auto Makers and the big steel manufacturers in the 1950s, or Tesla, Amazon and Google today, becomes the target of rent-seeking unions who are impossible to effectively resist thanks to the free-market undermining labor laws in place.
The decline in productivity growth, particularly in globally competitive markets like manufacturing, is a predictable consequence of that.
Beyond labor regulations, is the growth of government social welfare spending, at the behest of public sector unions who increasingly control the political system:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/social-spending-oecd-long...
A couple anecdotes illuminates the kind of power these unions wield:
New York has nearly 300,000 unionized public sector employees receiving over $100,000 a year:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2020/05/26/why...
In California, emergency workers can retire at 55 with 90% of their pension, that averages $108,000 per year, and the average government worker in California now makes over $140,000 a year:
https://www.hoover.org/research/140000-year-why-are-governme...
California now has $1 trillion in pension obligations for its unionized public sector workers.
>>Not a very convincing response in the face of literal historical revisionism. Child labour had to be outlawed.
The historical revisionism + ideologically-motivated naivety is in thinking that child labor could be eliminated without the economic development that free market capitalism fostered.
Child labor laws only became practical when per capita GDP reached a level where prohibiting child labor wouldn't lead to an increase in people dying from privation. If you prohibited child labor in the poorest countries in the world today, you would cause an increase in malnutrition and extreme poverty, because productivity in those societies is so low that children working is often the only way every one in the family can afford to eat.
Child labor is also very different than most types of labor, in involving parties who cannot in many cases provide informed consent, so laws relating to it can be justified in a society based on voluntary interaction.
Focusing on child labor is another case of you focusing on an outlier scenario where libertarianism doesn't apply as a matter of principle, as you attempt to rationalize your anti-libertarian principles.
>>Cooperatives have a greater survival rate than corporations, but are rarely founded because generally speaking people who found companies want to get rich while actively avoiding giving their employees a share in the profits.
And you're completely ignoring/depreciating the significance of creating and expanding productive enterprises, which is what the market right to own a company as a founder and investor incentivizes and sustains. You will see dramatically less new business creation if you abolish these rights, for the sake of forcing society to use coops.
>>I feel that my hypothesis that libertarians experience cognitive bias towards their ideology rather than taking an objective view of the arguments holds up,
I spent many many years completely discounting what libertarians online had to say. I only feigned debate with them, when in reality I dismissed them as simplistic ideologues, blindly parroting a narrative concocted by corporate-owned think tanks and media (e.g. Fox News) to trick the masses into fighting against their own interests, and never actually evaluated their arguments with an open mind.
Libertarianism is actually just a basic understanding of economics, devoid of ideological narratives alleging exploitation in certain types of voluntary interaction, that are advanced to rationalize restrictions and special privileges imposed and bestowed by the state, respectively, to allegedly combat these invisible chains of oppression.
>>because you have continually shifted the goalposts and carved out exceptions where it's "not capitalism" due to emergency circumstances, despite the fact that capitalism is the economic system we operate within in every country on earth.
Arguing that market rights cease to apply in extreme circumstances for which market rights were not designed is entirely reasonable, and for you to critique capitalism, and argue for the social democratic anti-libertarian order, which in most countries of the world, gives the state control over at least 40 percent of the productive output via taxation and regulatory gatekeeping, based solely on appeals to these fantastical outlier scenarios, shows bad faith debating.