Comment by thegrimmest | Hacker News Reader

Comment by thegrimmest | Hacker News Reader

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Funny that your optimum free market strategy is murder. A market where murder is a legitimate strategy is anything but free. In fact a good litmus test as to the freedom of a market (or any social structure) is the legitimacy of murder.

Comparing murder to antitrust therefore seems to be a pretty weak argument. Deontological libertarians would view the use of force required to enforce antitrust as authoritarian overreach. They would see no moral justification in the enforcement of arbitrary limitations on the voluntary transactions of consenting parties. They would see these as tyrannical.

This stems from a core disagreement about the nature of society. Some people see it a as a collective project for the good of all participants (the sticky points being the definition of "good", and the non-optionality of "collective"). Others see it as simply an agreement to coexist peacefully and cooperate only voluntarily, while embracing the Darwinian nature of said coexistence.

Each side is well meaning I'm sure, but I find it hard to reconcile these two worldviews.

Coexistence - peaceful - darwinian. A circle that's hard to square.

I don't see why. It's basically what happens in any free society - we (as individuals, organizations, social orders) compete over finite resources. Disputes are resolved via due process. Winners win and losers lose. The difference between civilized and uncivilized is only in which actions are available to the players, not in the nature of the game.

The problem is that competition for resources is taken as the essence of markets, which it is not. Competition exists in markets, sure, but it's not the point of the market per se. That's psychotic. This is the problem when decontextualized practicalities become enshrined as abstracted ideological and moral tenets of the highest order. According to your view, if I were starving, and you had a warehouse full of food, then I would be stealing if I were to break in and take some food to survive. Theft is always wrong by definition (you cannot say it is sometimes justified in ad hoc sense while remaining coherent; if the law just is competition for resources, full stop, then the starving man is just a loser, full stop), so I, the starving man, am morally obligated to accept my death outside the walls of that warehouse.

But as I said, this would be an incorrect view of markets, which occur within societies, to enable the good. Human beings are social animals, and so our good depends on society. The common good is also prior to private property. A scenario where people are starving, but where there are warehouses full of food, is one that demonstrates some degree of dysfunction.

> Competition exists in markets, sure, but it's not the point of the market per se. That's psychotic.

Competition is the point of every ecosystem, insofar as there is a point. The properties of an ecosystem are fundamentally emergent wherever living organisms interact, in markets or otherwise.

> so I, the starving man, am morally obligated to accept my death outside the walls of that warehouse

Why is this view so foreign? I don't expect you to adopt it per se, but surely you can see that yours is not the only perspective. There are many people who would prefer to commit suicide in dignity rather than live to seem themselves become a burden on others. There are even those who would rather die screaming in agony rather than pry greedily into the pockets of strangers.

> enable the good

Ah yes but then the you have to define "the good" which is notoriously challenging, and also be sufficiently comfortable in your definition to impose it by force on others who may disagree. I'm just not sufficiently comfortable with anyone's definition of "the good", my own included, to make that leap.

> A scenario where people are starving, but where there are warehouses full of food, is one that demonstrates some degree of dysfunction

I disagree, this scenario exists all over the natural world, and is fundamental to all ecosystems. In a competitive environment (which again, is inevitable), it's optimal to ruthlessly defend the maximum you are capable of, rather than the minimum you need to survive.

Your nickname seems appropriate to me.

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