This is only a contradiction if you view the government as some sort of impartial referee in the game of capitalism. If instead you rightly view them as the biggest player on the field that bullies everyone else and picks favourites then there is no contradiction.
Look at the FED.
Don't be under the illusion that our system is built upon trust and volunteer acceptance. It's built upon overwhelming brute force.
>he military isn't going to take over a dealership with armed service personnel to keep Tesla from selling their cars.
Who do you think the car dealerships will call when Telsa refuses to shut his stores down? The police. They will confiscate the property, arrest the managers/owners and shut down the business.
That is overwhelming brute force whether you call it the military or the police.
I'm going with the court system.
Businesses for the most part don't comply with the law because they are worried about a gun being pointed to their head, they are worried about being sued and being put out of business, or being sent to jail for something criminal.
Those are essentially the same thing. What do you think happens if a court rules that you cannot continue your business, but you do anyway? Or what happens if you are given a jail sentence and you physically resist being moved to jail?
Not completely, but society still heavily relies on it. The majority of people obey (most) laws because they believe it's the right thing to do, not because they're afraid of punishment. And if they didn't, we'd very quickly find that the existing police forces are completely inadequate to keep control of a herd of psychopaths.
Companies are a little different, since their decision making is often disconnected enough that the individual morality of their employees isn't necessarily reflected in their overall behaviour.
http://reason.com/archives/2010/12/13/the-swat-team-would-li...
That's right. Floridian police raided several barber shops, with a warrant to ensure the barbers were licensed practitioners, and while they were at it they handcuffed people, held them at gunpoint, and even arrested several for unrelated crimes (coincidence?!).
And if only such an event were an outlier ... sadly, it's become common, around the country.
That's bs post-hoc justification. There is no contract and few people agreed to it. Government is accepted because it works better than no government. We haven't found the perfect way to organize society (and it may not exist), so we stick around in the local optima.
>It's an organized, representative extension of the population of the country.
This is true in theory. In practice it's a big mess. Voters don't actually have that much control. Just a single bit of input "which party do you like more right now?" And maybe they shouldn't they because direct democracy isn't that great either. The real advantage of democracy is that if the rulers really screw up, if they make the population really angry, they will eventually lose their power when the next year divisible by 4 comes around. It also encourages the politicians to make an effort to be popular (which isn't necessarily what's best, but it's better than nothing.)
Good luck building your startup if your larger competition can get away with Mafia-like tactics.
Depending upon whether people choose to actively participate in their government, it can either protect or harm us. I meet far too many laissez-faire "free market" know-it-alls who have a strong wish for the latter.
Actually that's the very definition of a truly free market.
Good luck building your startup if your larger competition can get away with Mafia-like tactics.
Right, so, the argument there is that a true free market is not a good idea. So we put up rules and regulations that we think will be beneficial to society, but we don't change the definition of "free market" to "the market structure that we find sensible."
In other words, governmental control is a direct limitation to the amount of freedom in the market, but we think that's a good thing. It's to everyone's benefit to restrict one's freedom to sell rotting rat meat labeled as beef.
Not if the social structures necessary to enable society to restrict that freedom inevitably lead to other inefficient/undesirable restrictions, and the bad restrictions end up outweighing the good restrictions.
In both situations, freedom is best defined as that which the weakest member of the group has. A society where the weak can be bullied by the strong, coerced and cajoled by threats of force, is not a society where those people can be considered free. Unless you think that slaves are also free people, provided that there are no laws concerning slavery.
Similarly, I don't see how a market can possibly be considered free if strong incumbent players are able to exert extra-market pressure on the weak players, to bully them in ways "outside" of normal market forces. Rather, a free market is one where all players are free to act on an equal footing, competing on price, quality, service, reputation, and other "market-based" differentiators, rather than through bribes, collusion, artificial barriers to entry, and the like - because the playing field is forced level by regulations which apply to all participants equally.
None of the great free market economists responsible for laying down the very definition of what "free market" means - from Smith to Friedman to Mises and so on - have argued that to have a free market you must be able to destroy someone else's life or property. They've argued the exact opposite, that among the most important things in a free market is property rights and the defense of said property rights.
A free market does not mean a market free of protected individual rights, it means a market free of the government initiating force against individuals to arbitrarily restrain free association among people, and a market in which the government performs its proper duties, including the protection of property rights.
No it isn't, the free market is a very defined thing, based on the number of actors in the system, perfect information, rational actors. It has absolutely nothing to do with the presence or lack of regulation (though obviously regulation can play a role in these factors)
Government obviously performs several functions which are necessary or extremely helpful for a free market, but it's not so simple to prove that these functions couldn't be performed without a government.
Given that that's not anything remotely like the common use of the term (which is about functions), maybe you should use a more appropriate term to avoid confusion.
On the contrary. I think my definition describes what most people think of as a government. If I show up at your door with 5 tough guys, explain to you that your neighborhood has voted to instigate a 25% income tax in order to maintain the roads of the neighborhood, would you consider me to be government? Would you comply? According to what you just claimed, since I would be performing a function generally associated with government, acquiring funds the same way as government, and using a similar justification (the vote) as government, it sounds like you would consider me to be government. And yet, I do not think most people would agree.
Or just as well see them as a parent that keeps the children from bullying each other.
EDIT: Also, the children work and the parent collects an allowance.
Yes, because that image is false.
The government is mostly the sock puppet of whoever has most money - biggest corporations and richest individuals, who essentially buy whatever politics suits them best.
Rest assured they derive great satisfaction from your misdirected anger against the "government".