Against 'Free Market Authoritarianism' | Hacker News Reader

Against 'Free Market Authoritarianism'

isonomiaquarterly.com

15 pointsbrandonlc10 comments

Authoritarianism inevitably results in state controlling the business. Or in different words, the state becomes the business. There is nothing free about that.

i think much of the concern we have learned over the past few years is that it isn’t only the scary bogeyman of “states” that is terrifying.

the authoritarian power just a few people can have from their riches can be even more terrifying and even more abusive.

again, i’m not arguing for state abuse, but state abuse is absolutely and incredibly not the only power which abuses.

All power of any sort leads to abuse, power is basically the potential someone has to abuse and a disturbing chunk of humanity enjoy being terrible and will misuse any power they have.

But the problem with governmental/military/policing power is that people see abuse and their solution is often to try and create an even more powerful entity to fight it. Which should seem really stupid to anyone who has identified that the concentrated power was the problem in the first place. There are also less obvious problems with choosing conflict as a strategy; we should all be on fundamentally the same side.

Competition of power is how power is kept in check.

That's how you concentrate even more power. So is it just an eternal rat race? Except nuclear weapons are the top so is the race over and no one can keep the power in check since no one can get more power than those with nukes?

Welcome to reality. If you want to tear down power you have to have power. If you tear down power some other group will go about concentrating power to you must keep power to monitor and stop them.

Why not the reverse? Lobbying leads to the state becoming the business' muscle.

Please tell me you don't have an army of chainsaw cat-bots at the ready to serve the cause!

Alas, I am but one. But us childless cat ladies are legion, and soon, we will all have chainsaws..!!

The problem with this sort of thing is that people can make good-sounding arguments on either side. I'd have interested to see more links to, like, correlational studies or something. Admittedly it's difficult to get anything out of these with high confidence, but I feel like you have to try.

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