Refuting libertarianism
Refuting libertarianism
- Property is theft
- -
Property rights contradict self-ownership
- -
Advertising
- - Land
ownership in libertarianism
- - Regulations
- - Why
mandatory GM food labeling is great
- - Other
regulations - -
Child labor - widespread in libertarianism
- - No worker
protections = mass exploitation and suffering
- - Would
private rating services solve the problems?
- - What even is
the point of libertarianism?
- - If not
libertarianism, then what?
-
Introduction
Wars, propaganda, surveillance, taxes, draconian laws...the ways the governments
are exploiting the people are numerous and the situation is only getting worse.
This has increased the popularity of an ideology - libertarianism - that
aims to answer these problems by either limiting the scope of - or outright
eliminating - the government. How well does it succeed at its stated goal? Let's
start with defining this belief system:
What is libertarianism?
Historically, libertarianism has meant different things, but we will consider
the definition currently used by its proponents, since that is the ideology I
want to tackle. From <https://www.theadvocates.org/libertarianism-101/> (archi
ve)
Libertarianism is, as the name implies, the belief in liberty. Libertarians
strive for the best of all worlds – a free, peaceful, abundant world where
each individual has the maximum opportunity to pursue his or her dreams and
to realize his full potential.
Okay, sounds great. Let us confirm with another website -
https://www.libertarianism.org/> (archive)
Many people believe that liberty is the core political value of modern
civilization itself, the one that gives substance and form to all the other
values of social life. They're called libertarians.
So, libertarians think freedom is really important and essential for human
fulfillment. But what does "freedom" actually mean to them? How do they intend
to attain this freedom?
Pillars of libertarianism
Libertarian understanding of "freedom" is dependent upon certain hard principles
- which they sometimes call "axioms"
(MozArchive). So
confident they are in those, that they will take back your libertarian badge if
you question them - If one is going to call themselves a libertarian, they must
put those two philosophies first or, in all honesty, they aren’t libertarians.
Anyway, let's see just how hard those axioms are and if they have anything to do
with freedom:
Self-ownership
It seems that the entirety of libertarian ethics / belief system rests on this
"axiom". Murray Rothbard's (prominent libertarian) book For a New Liberty: The
Libertarian Manifesto, describes it (archiv
e)
(MozArchive) as
such:
The right to self-ownership asserts the absolute right of Property and
Exchange each man, by virtue of his (or her) being a human being, to “own”
his or her own body; that is, to control that body free of coercive
interference.
And the justification is this:
To put it with undue brevity, the activity of each inorganic and organic
entity is determined by its own nature and by the nature of the other
entities with which it comes in contact.
Copper has a distinct nature and behaves in a [p. 28] certain way, and so do
iron, salt, etc.
So everything that exists has an in-built "nature" - us humans, too. And ours is
supposedly so unique that it gives us this "self-ownership" ability - in
contrast to all the other entities:
Specifically, while the behavior of plants and at least the lower animals is
determined by their biological nature or perhaps by their “instincts,” the
nature of man is such that each individual person must, in order to act,
choose his own ends and employ his own means in order to attain them.
Sounds self-serving. We have the exact nature that is required for us to become
"self-owned", but nothing else does? It gets even funnier:
Possessing no automatic instincts, each man must learn about himself and the
world, use his mind to select values, learn about cause and effect, and act
purposively to maintain himself and advance his life. Since men can think,
feel, evaluate, and act only as individuals, it becomes vitally necessary
for each man’s survival and prosperity that he be free to learn, choose,
develop his faculties, and act upon his knowledge and values.
We have no automatic instincts? Really? What is hunger, sexual desire, pulling
your hand away from the hot stove, vomiting after ingesting a contaminated meal,
etc? Unless you think you are controlling all of that 100% consciously. And
sure, we can think, feel, evaluate, and act - but it's just a part of what we
do. If you - for example - slip, will you be "thinking and evaluating" then, or
responding automatically? The libertarians' world is so dreamy; everything they
do is "learning, choosing, developing, acting" and nothing external ever affects
them...except - somehow - "violence", of course. Because that's totally
"natural law", and not something the libertarians came up with to prop up their
ideology. To spoil things a little, the entirety of libertarianism is
dependent on the idea that all our decisions are self-determined - except the
ones directly inhibited by someone else's self-determined actions (even this has
irresolvable problems that we will explore in the following section). This
might seem valuable as an ideal to strive for, but it collapses when it hits
reality. In particular because...
...We are already influenced by outside forces way before we even gain
consciousness. Such as inside the womb, a period which determines a lot of
things about you (archive)
(MozArchive) - The
perinatal period therefore represents a critical stage of development, rendering
the brain particularly vulnerable to organizing (and disorganizing)
environmental influences. Indeed, when stress is experienced during this
critical early-life period, its impact on brain function can be long-lasting or
even permanent, compared with the typically transient effects of stress on the
adult brain. One of the relevant factors is maternal iodine
intake
(MozArchive) which
if low - results in the kid being significantly more likely to have low scores
(lower quartile) of verbal IQ, reading accuracy, and reading comprehension.
Another is obviously breastfeeding (and the healthiest population on Earth - the
Hunza - breastfeeds their kids for two years). Is it possible to "self-own"
your way out of those problems as an adult? Maybe. Yet - even as adults - the
environment can limit or expand possibilities. You can only pick from what is
available; some - due to issues such as poverty or disease - will be less free
than others. Therefore, we should focus on improving the conditions that affect
everyone out there. Libertarian ideas are inhibiting this, because they blame
everything that happens on individual choices, ignoring the environment.
And if we accept the effects of "pre-conscious" external factors, it naturally
brings us to another problem - when does the self-ownership actually start?
This is a common issue dividing libertarians. Some believe that it begins at
conception, others - at birth (fetus is a
parasite (archive)
(MozArchive)); and
the most extreme ones say that you don't own yourself until you can support yo
urself (archive)
(MozArchive). You
don't have inborn freedom then - you have to either earn it or it has to be
graciously granted by your parents. How is that different from freedom being
granted by governments - a situation which libertarians hate? Already we can see
that the alleged logic of libertarianism is based on shaky ground.
Non-aggression principle
Supposedly deriving from the above, the NAP states
that (archive)
individuals have the right to make their own choices in life so long as those
choices do not involve the initiation of force or fraud against others. Simple
and clear, right? Well, it is anything but. Let's say you are physically
attacked, and you manage to defend yourself without being hurt - in this case,
how much has your freedom really been impacted? Not at all - in fact, you might
have even gained confidence from the encounter. Therefore, violating the NAP is
not necessarily freedom decreasing.
On the other hand - even if no one initiates force against you, that doesn't
necessarily mean you are free, since there are a thousand ways to constrain
someone without force. Just being born poor heavily limits your possibilities
(and you can bet certain people had a hand in you being poor). How about
advertising - no force used, yet it does control us very effectively (archive)
otherwise corporations wouldn't spend so much money
(archive)
(MozArchive) on it.
In the end, it is clear that ways to decrease someone's freedom without force
exist, and are not necessarily less effective than the opposite. And if so, why
is it force that is the focus, instead of actual harm?
You can ruin someone's freedom by less direct means even more effectively than
by force in some cases - if you spread a rumor that someone is a rapist, people
might not want to associate with him anymore - which would be way worse than
being beaten up once (How False Rape Allegations Destroyed My Family (archive)
Under libertarian ethics, the woman who hurt him did nothing wrong - they were
just words, after all. And thus, he could not have retaliated at all, or he'd be
violating the NAP. Then comes the abortion issue again - what prevails, the
self-ownership of the woman or the non-aggression against the fetus?
Libertarians claim to have solved freedom (just obey the principles!) but
instead keep digging more holes for themselves. Note: in this paragraph I took
the commonsensical usage of the word force, but since libertarianism pretends to
be this super logical ideology, they can't settle for common sense and need
some hard rules. So let's see if they have them:
There is - actually - no definition of force that will allow you to reliably
decide which behaviors to include under that label, and which not to. I mean, in
Yet, libertarians have arbitrarily decided that only some of those forces
qualify for their definition of force. When someone feels your breath or even
reads your words on the screen, there are also forces affecting him, then - yet
no libertarian agrees that someone calling someone else bad words is violating
the NAP (even though physics provides no distinction). Hell, even just
seeing someone creates molecular changes in your brain, which from the
physics point of view are also (the results of) forces. So why not make walking
near someone that hates you a crime in libertarianism? Though libertarians will
never want this, they can't deny it because there is no non-arbitrary way to
divide behaviors into force and non-force boxes (affecting someone in any
way is a force in physics). There is also no reason to attempt such a feat,
when there are clearly different situations that require different responses.
Everyone accepts that intuitively, and yet libertarianism requires you to give
up all your human experience in favor of the binary force / non-force system.
NAP is a rule for midwits. Some libertarians have figured that
out (archive)
(MozArchive) - but
still somehow remain libertarians. If you do accept that the chaos of the usual
human experience cannot fit into the binary force system, what even makes your
belief system unique? You're just another person, looking to figure out what are
the bad and good behaviors and what are the proper responses against them,
instead of pretending that all human situations fit neatly into the force or
non-force boxes. Why even call yourself libertarian at that point?
Summarizing: if you use the physics definition of force, then anything can
be a crime if it affects someone somewhere. If you use the libertarian
definition of force, then it's arbitrary in terms of whether some behavior fits
into the force box or the non-force box. And because the binary distinction
leaves no nuance in responding to situations, it creates a big problem whenever
someone thinks they can kill you because you used force against them by throwing
a leaf at them. Or whenever someone has hurt you without using force, which
leaves you unable to defend yourself. This very unintuitive ideology creates way
more problems than it solves, if it does indeed solve any at all. Moving along:
Property rights
From <https://libertyandanarchy.wordpress.com/2017/03/04/pillars-of-libertariani
sm-private-property-rights/> (archive)
Firmly grounded in natural law, property rights begins with self-ownership
and extends to all justly acquired property. Self-ownership simply means
that you own the exclusive rights to your own body. Property can be justly
acquired in two ways: original appropriation via the homesteading principle
or through voluntary exchange.
So, libertarians consider property an extension of the body - so if you own your
body, and it can't be aggressed against - then the same applies to your
property. There are many problems with this, starting with fact that nature
provides land, water, food, air, etc. for free. How much, and under what
conditions, can I actually claim as mine? This is actually hotly debated among
libertarians and there are many contradictory
theories (archive)
(MozArchive). The
most extreme ones are completely fine with private ownership of the seas or
forests - and since property rights are ultimate, their pollution would be a
right of the businesses that own them. Of course, it's not possible to limit the
pollution to exactly the space that you own - it will spread (best seen with
GMOs (archive)
Since the first GM crop was commercialized in 1996, there have been escape
events in Canada with GM canola, GM flax, GM wheat and GM pigs) elsewhere,
causing "aggression" against other people and their properties. Even if the
polluter would then be punished, the damage has already been done - there might
be a GMO growing on your property now, and you will not be able to get rid of
it, EVER. And even if a property owner was somehow able to keep the pollution
contained, it doesn't really matter. 500 years later, after the owner is gone
and the business goes down, the next generations that would want to use that
sea, or forest, or whatever - will still be affected by the poisons that were
put in there, harming their freedom. So, the libertarian solution to pollution
is completely useless, as we can see.
The most extreme kinds of libertarians claim that you can kill someone
entering your property. Well, since it is his, and you violated it - off you
go. But what harm has he caused you by entering it? None whatsoever (unless he
destroyed something), therefore - property rights do not follow from the
NAP. This is even easier to see in case of something like using, say, a
flashlight someone left lying around. As long as you return it, no harm has been
done - in fact, the owner might not even notice. We live in a world where
businesses charge for just the usage of stuff (the chief one being land -
just daring to exist somewhere is a violation, even though no one is hurt)
and that is completely contrary to freedom - but it's the world libertarians
want.
How free is a person born into a landlord's property? Remember, in
libertarianism - property rights are absolute (archive)
Essentially, libertarians view private property owners as the sovereign rulers
over their property. Thus, if Doolittle were the property owner and developer of
a vast swath of land (acquired via homesteading or voluntary/contractual
transfer) then he could implement whatever form of government he desired over
it. How is that different from what the governments are doing? And yet
libertarians claim to hate that, even though the only difference is the scale
(but actually, there is no limit to the amount of land you can own in
libertarianism - as long as it has been justly acquired according to them). The
libertarian position on property rights is contradictory and not conductive to
real freedom.
Okay, these are the 3 foundational beliefs of libertarianism (that I've now
exposed as vague, contradictory, and anti-freedom) from which other, more
specific ones get derived. Let's tackle those now:
Specific issues
Is taxation theft?
From <https://www.libertarianism.org/columns/is-taxation-theft> (archive)
When the government “taxes” citizens, what this means is that the government
demands money from each citizen, under a threat of force: if you do not
pay, armed agents hired by the government will take you away and lock you in
a cage. This looks like about as clear a case as any of taking people’s
property without consent. So the government is a thief.
It is crystal clear that "taxation" is "theft." The "prima facie" case is
inescapable. The logic is air-tight. But there are all kinds of evasions and
high-sounding rationalizations.
Lots of other libertarian sites make this claim. But is the logic really
air-tight? Spoiler: no. In fact, this is the argument where libertarians shoot
themselves in the foot the most! How so?
As you recall, property rights are absolute under libertarianism, so its
owners can apply whatever laws they want there. If that includes taking all your
earnings to allow you to live there - well, it's my fucking property. Get out
if you don't like it! In other words, property rights are the factor that
enable taxation. We could, therefore, modify the original libertarian case
against taxation like this:
When the ~~government~~ property owner “taxes” citizens, what this means
is that the ~~government~~ property owner demands money from each
citizen, under a threat of force: if you do not pay, armed agents hired by
the ~~government~~ property owner will take you away and lock you in a
cage. This looks like about as clear a case as any of taking people’s
property without consent. So the ~~government~~ property owner is a
thief.
As we can see, if the libertarians want to claim that the government is a thief,
they have to apply that label to any other property owner, as well. However,
this makes no sense when you consider that the property owner owns everything on
the property, including what its inhabitants create. Taxation - in that case -
would just be the owner coming to take what's already his, guaranteed by the
unlimited property rights. And could not be called "theft" at all. If you treat
the government as just another property owner, they are well within their rights
to extract any kind of payment for living on their property (according to
libertarian ideas). And so, the libertarian has nothing to complain about, then.
The only way out of this conundrum for the libertarians is to say that
government's taxation is uniquely unjustified because their land has not been
acquired justly. However, you can't actually
prove that to be true
for anyone else either - so again, either both the government and any arbitrary
property owner are "thieves", or none of them are.
Now that we've established that the government can't be shown to be doing
anything uniquely bad (that any libertarian property owner couldn't also do),
let's talk about some practical aspects. Even if we assume that someone has
acquired a piece of land justly, it doesn't help much the person who's been born
there, and is forced to shell out the money just for existing, right? Similarly
- if someone was raping you - him having the title of a "justified rapist"
wouldn't actually remove the harm done. And again - since libertarian property
rights are unlimited - the owner could just require you to work for him and give
up your entire earnings in exchange for the right to live. This type of
taxation would be much worse (for the plebeian) than what the current
governments are doing, as they are only taking a small percentage of your
money and you are at least getting something for it (such as the animal control,
sewage system, and police that failed to materialize in the libertarian city).
The government limits itself, and there is at least a supposed ethical basis for
the money transfer. The libertarian property owner would have no such
limitations, and could just take it all and not provide anything in return. As
usual, libertarians want a return to the ethical and functional stone age.
Yet, libertarians still get really angry about taxation, which can be seen in
the way they speak about armed agents coming in to lock you in a cage. But why?
What is the real reason taxation bothers them so much? It can't be that it's
theft, because they are fine with business theft called "profit margins" or
Pfizer has not challenged the estimate, which would imply that the 2023 price
represents a 10,000% markup over the manufacturing cost, unlike government
taxation; and the profits do not have to be returned to the people in any way at
all. So it's clearly not for any noble ethical reason that libertarians hate
taxation. So why?
Assuming that the tax was percentage based, the rich would pay more than the
poor (in absolute amounts). Meaning wealth transfer downwards. This is exactly
(MozArchive) - For
the government to imply that the affluent should pay even higher taxes under the
guise of promoting the common good is beyond brazen, because they want to
accumulate more and more riches at the expense of the plebeians, without any of
those damned ethics or institutions getting in the way. Or they are simply
fanboying for the current rich, so that they too can sniff the feeling of a
higher position even so slightly; same reason some attach to a school bully or a
high level sports player (only to disown him the second he stops performing
well). Regardless of whether you yourself would benefit from the lack of
taxation, or you simply worship the real benefactors, you end up supporting the
current system of the jungle, in which you're supposed to fight for survival,
and climb up the ladder by
abusing or
others. Except with all governmental brakes (even if crude and inadequate)
disabled, the "game" would become even more brutal.
Property is theft
What would happen if all the properties around had a law which required the
occupants to pay 100% of their earnings for their right to be there? In that
case - unless you were a part of the privileged class that owned property -
you'd be doomed to a life of slavery, in which all your stuff belonged to the
capitalist, or "property owner". This argument is related to an old idea known
as Property is Theft, popularized by anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. Quoting
from his book, "What is Property?":
The proprietor, producing neither by his own labor nor by his implement, and
receiving products in exchange for nothing, is either a parasite or a
thief.
AXIOM. —Property is the Right of Increase claimed by the Proprietor over any
thing which he has stamped as his own.
The idea is actually older though, appearing in a 1797 novel:
Tracing the right of property back to its source, one infallibly arrives at
usurpation. However, theft is only punished because it violates the right of
property; but this right is itself nothing in origin but theft"
So, the libertarians have got it partially right with the taxation is theft idea
- but they didn't go far enough. The power to tax comes from owning property
(land), making THAT the real theft. A common criticism of this idea is that it
can't be theft, because there was no one to steal it from. But this is just
wordplay, so common to cornered ideologues. The point is, anyone claiming a
piece of land as his own can now decide what you can or can't do there,
including to take your stuff. But by what right did he take the land in the
first place? The Earth certainly did not assign it to him. Why should we respect
the claim, then? The claimant would now be preventing other people's usage of
the property, reducing their freedom. And that is the spirit of the claim
that Property is Theft - but maybe a better word would be usurpation.
This is also the basis of (the criticism of) the whole work system of a
libertarian society. The capitalist arbitrarily controls the means of
production, and you cannot take the results even if you did the labor. Instead,
the capitalist will sell the products for profit while paying you a chunk of it
(even though he himself had no part in the making of the product aside from
owning the property). That is another meaning to Property is Theft, greatly
summarized in Proudhon's two quotes above. Of course, libertarians would
consider this situation voluntary, since you decided to sign up for the job.
However - since money is required for life (in the current society at least),
and most people cannot hope to earn it in any other way than the corpo grind -
it is no more voluntary than gun to head. You could say that taxation is
voluntary by the same kind of logic, since the libertarians have decided to live
in a certain country, agreeing to the tax laws. Of course both of those claims
are unjustified, and both can only exist if we accept absolute property rights.
Property rights contradict self-ownership
This turns into the bigger issue of property rights and self-ownership being
in contradiction. Imagine I was born onto someone's property (not my choice,
obviously, so the standard libertarian blame game cannot be played here). Would
I then have the right to not be raped by the owner? After all, my body would be
occupying his property. Logically, either my bodily control would prevail -
which means I couldn't be raped; or the owner's property rights would - which
means that I, too, would be his property that he could do anything he wanted
with. So, despite the libertarians claiming that these two principles support
each other - they, actually, cannot co-exist. One of them has to be given up
or limited, taking libertarianism down with it.
The reality is that I would still have control over my body in that situation
and could perhaps fend off the rapist if capable enough. Things still happen in
the physical world regardless of what the humans think or write about it. We
have to adapt our beliefs to the physical reality, instead of expecting reality
itself to follow our writings. If the simple act of being born somewhere is
enough to ruin the explanatory power of the libertarian principles, just how
useful are they, really? To resolve the contradiction between property rights
and self-ownership, libertarianism has to submit to reality and temporarily
restrict property rights (which ruins their whole narrative of being perfectly
logically derived) to let the violator (the person who doesn't want to pay the
100% tax, or be raped) leave. This brings us to another issue:
Advertising
One good way to show the flaws of the libertarian pillars is the advertisement
issue. If you've ever been on an internet forum, I'm sure you've seen those
waves of posts advertising viagra, etc. on a board that is totally unrelated. If
the forum is still functioning, then these are always swiftly deleted, and no
one bats an eye. They are rightly considered as trash, thrown away and that is
that. Then you go outside and see the same kind of spam on billboards, that
suddenly cannot be deleted or adblocked away. And yet, the libertarian that's
surely deleting ads from his own forums and / or using an adblocker, will
A woman, like any individual, can choose whether or not to pay attention to
advertisements.
Imagine if you were told to do that on a forum that's just been viagra-spammed,
because the advertiser had "property rights" in there, so you couldn't just
delete the spam. No one would use forums at that point, since they'd have to
wade through a hundred viagra ads to see one "real" post. Yet that is basically
Yankelovich, a market research firm, estimates that a person living in a
city 30 years ago saw up to 2,000 ad messages a day, compared with up to
5,000 today.
It is difficult to move a few meters in Cairo without being exposed to some
sorts of advertising.
Visual examples (that I do not want to put here directly so that I don't add to
the ad-spam load) are inside the report. The notion that you can just choose not
to pay attention to advertisements becomes even more laughable when you realize
(MozArchive). It
is insane to recommend looking away as a strategy when there is nowhere to look
away to. And when the ad-photons hit your eyeballs, you have already been
affected, so it's too late to look away anyway. Unless you want to be constantly
watching out for billboards in the corners of your eyes, and just not be
looking in those directions. That has to be extremely draining and again, the
spots to look away to are getting lesser and lesser, what with the grass and sky
disappearing.
Even if just looking away was viable, why should we need to do it? Ads
provide nothing good to us, only to the corporations that throw them around.
Yet, in a world functioning in accordance with libertarian ideas, being buried
in ad-photons every waking minute you're outside is acceptable, as you have not
been "aggressed" against. This is despite the fact that aggression isn't
reliably defined and
it is easier to defend yourself from a beating than from ads up in the sky -
about which you can do literally nothing. Now, to justify the prevalence of
(MozArchive) that
it doesn't work (well enough):
The claim that ads can easily manipulate consumers is refuted by history and
everyday events. If it were true, no business that advertised would fail.
But businesses fail every day.
No one says that advertising guarantees a businesses' survival; the libertarians
have set up a strawman so fragile, the weakest wind blows it away. Many factors
determine whether someone buys a product or not - among them being price, need,
availability, and (again) the various types of advertising. And even when
people buy, it might not be enough to offset the costs of the advertising
campaign, or they finally figure out the product is really bad, or the business
might die for any number of unrelated reasons such as lockdowns, robberies,
bombings, bad press, etc. But the fact that ads can easily manipulate consumers
is shown clearly in scientific studies such as this
one
Seventy-one percent of travelers often look at the messages on roadside
billboards and more than one-third (37%) report looking at an outdoor ad
each or most of the time they pass one.
Nearly one-quarter of billboard viewers say they were motivated to visit a
particular store that day because of an outdoor ad message and nearly
one-third visited a retailer they saw on a billboard later that week. Half
of viewers reported receiving directional information from a billboard and
one-quarter said they immediately visited a business because of an outdoor
ad message.
25% of people who see an ad immediately visit the relevant business. Absolutely
insane effectiveness. Another example (archive)
Of the 88 percent of consumers who notice OOH ads, 78% have recently engaged
in some way. Over three-quarters (76%) used a mobile device to learn more
about a product featured in an OOH ad, just over half (51%) used their
mobile device to search for more information about an advertiser, and 43
percent made an online purchase.
78% of people who see ads engage with them, and 43% buy products advertised in
them. But to the libertarian, that's just not enough effectiveness, because
well, some businesses end up failing. Amazing. I guess the only way a
libertarian would think of advertisements as manipulative and bad would be in
case of a 100% effectiveness. As in, get exposed to an ad = buy product without
fail. Nowhere else is this kind of accuracy expected, no computer model or
scientific theory has perfect predictive value. No human endeavor gives the
expected results 100% of the time. The world's best sports players perform
historic chokes. Even math - the
hardest of hard sciences - has its unsolvable problems, numbers that never end,
etc. And yet we don't claim that nothing we do that's based on math works. But
that's basically what libertarians are trying to do, by coming up with an
unfalsifiable theory of independent rational agents to protect their love of
ads.
Businesses - however - do not believe that theory and are aiming to get as close
to the 100% ad effectiveness as possible. That is why they have invented
(MozArchive). I'll just
show you the same quotes as I did in my article critiquing the profit
motive, as they
fit here just as well:
What combination of marketing inputs (positioning, messages, media
advertising expenditures, distribution channels, new products, sales
organization, etc.) will maximize long-term sales revenue or profitability?
What combination of positioning, themes, imagery, music, and colors creates
the most effective advertising for a company or brand?
How can these design variables be manipulated to maximize market share or
profitability?
How can the direct marketing to each of these target segments be optimized?
What are the optimal number and type of salespeople to maximize market share
or profitability?
The goal is not to maximize customer satisfaction (no company can afford
that), but to optimize customer satisfaction and/or loyalty.
So, on one side, we have the actual scientists who are analyzing the brain in
terms of the factors that allow it to be manipulated into buying. On the other
side, we have the libertarians who think this is all stupid since an "agent" can
simply "decide" not to look at the ads or not to be affected. The contrast
between the two camps is clearly apparent. Libertarians rely on hopes and
dreams, while businesses rely on science. The science that allows them to
consider the human brain as a system to be hacked and reprogrammed for endless
consumption. And as libertarianism denies it's possible, it is once again
revealed as a cucked ideology, supporting one's own exploitation.
To deny that ads work takes some serious gaslighting on the libertarians' part,
too. If that really was the case, then why has the "free market" not removed all
those extremely wasteful businesses from the competition? After all, they spend
(MozArchive) (Companies
spend $1.79 billion annually to market food to children - and this is just the
food companies) to create and spread ads. Businesses - actually - are rarely
outright stupid at least when earning profit is concerned, and since they have
categorically rejected the libertarians' agent theory, they must have realized
that it is worthless for bringing in the money. Just imagine if they gave up all
the potential profits because they didn't believe people could be pushed to buy
something! It's simply insane to even suggest this. Anyway, in a previously
quoted article, libertarians take the gaslighting even further by suggesting
that the ads are doing you a favor:
After all, advertising is information about products, including products
many people may be unaware of but would be happy to learn about. Sure, ads
try to be attention-grabbing, but so what? People are busy, and information
is all around. So the value of advertising is obvious.
Oh yeah, despite all the aforementioned science that goes into creating them,
the libertarians still pretend that advertisements are just information. And
they help you learn about things you might not be aware of, because you're too
stupid to figure out what you want and find it, so you need it shoved over and
over in front of your face, by any means possible. Just buy, you "customer", and
stop thinking too much! Yes, the value of advertising is obvious indeed - but
for the ad-pusher, not for you. Continuing the gaslighting:
This point is not undercut by the undoubted fact that manufacturers present
their products in the best light possible. Part of growing up is acquiring a
degree of skepticism about the claims made in advertisements.
The entirety of the scientific magic that is applied to producing ads is
downgraded to simply presenting their products in the best light possible. And
if I can't resist this presenting, I'm just not grown up enough.
Anyway - since advertisements work so well - we can expect them to be
As technology continues to advance, the landscape of advertising will
undoubtedly evolve. Emerging technologies like artificial intelligence,
augmented reality, and virtual reality offer exciting possibilities for
creating immersive and interactive ad experiences. Digital marketing
agencies must stay ahead of these trends to remain competitive and
effectively reach their audiences.
The advertising world is - in the end - fighting for the most complete
mind-control of a human (or consumer, which is all that you are for the
business) possible. Meaning, if one company uses only "old-style" advertisements
(that are only superficially able to convince someone to buy something), and
another jumps into the new, high-tech ones that hit some deeper mental buttons -
the caveman company will get outcompeted. Eventually, every company will have
to get with the times and succumb to those more intrusive advertising
strategies, or die. This also means that small businesses will get exterminated
as they won't be able to afford the very
expensive (arc
hive)
high-tech advertising - Hardware investment – $100,000 to $300,000+ for
construction and screens (and this isn't even the most modern tech). And in
libertarianism, there can't be interventions against
ad-spam (archive)
(MozArchive) as
it's all "voluntary", so the ad junkyard is destined to get more and more junky.
The biggest, most evil corporations will take over and fill your mind with
trash 24 / 7.
It seems to me that the advertising issue buries all of self-ownership, NAP and
property rights. How "self-owned" are you really when thousands of ads enter
your brain every day and direct its functioning towards making you into a
perpetual consumer? Why should ads not be considered an aggressive act worse
than the commonsensical view of violence, when (again) they control us very
effectively and we can't avoid them? Why allow unlimited property rights when
they result in an ad-filled junkyard that no one likes except the few people who
benefit from throwing the trash around? In the end, anyone who actually wants
something good from this life and world needs to reject libertarianism. Let's
finish this section with quote from Banksy about advertisements that I really
like:
People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life,
take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall
buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses
that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening
somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They
have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and
they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at
you.
You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property
rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever
they like with total impunity.
Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you
see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can
do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a
rock someone just threw at your head.
You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe
them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put
themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even
start asking for theirs.
People in London standing near an ad that's been taped over with a big red
'X'Doing the above is not
allowed in libertarianism
UPDATE August 2023: a few people over the years have reached out to me with
concerns like "well, ads suck - but how does a business sell its products
without them?". This came up again a few days ago, so let me attempt a reply
right now. First of all, if something is really needed, people will hunt it down
regardless. No one has to advertise potatoes or raw milk; in fact, people will
go to great lengths to grab the latter in a world of shitty processed milks,
even when the legal system, etc. tries to put up hurdles. Continuing this train
of logic, maybe the products that wouldn't be able to get sold anymore, are
those that people don't care about in the first place?
It seems to me that ads are a solution in search of a problem. After all, what
exactly is wrong with people buying only what they actually require? What they
actually had to sit and think about, instead of having it shoved in front of
their faces over and over again? A decade ago - when I was still somewhat
sympathetic to libertarian "free market" ideas - I thought it's weird how none
of their proponents seem to see the problem with ads. I have always thought of
ads as something that breaks the entire "free market" ideology, making inferior
products survive because of reasons totally unrelated to their quality. But no
libertarian I've found has ever agreed with me. And so, I began to think that
maybe the point of the "free market" wasn't to provide anything good to the
consumer, but to give more power to the big businesses, that can afford massive
marketing campaigns.
But, how does all this philosophical analysis help the businesses that want to
sell their shaving razors, wallets, online courses, or mobile games? Again,
maybe they just won't, and will die. In my world, "selling more products" isn't
necessarily something to strive for. However, in an ancap (and maybe even
current) world, it is the highest measure of success. Because, those sold
products mean that the business gets to survive, its employees receive their
salaries, and its owner can afford a comfortable life. But it is all built on a
foundation of sand, that will collapse when the smallest wind blows. And that
wind is the realization that the ancap (or current, to a certain extent) world
relies on buying, selling, and doing useless things - entirely to keep up the
facade of "earning a living". Because, "handouts bad", or whatever - so we have
to keep pretending to do something to justify our right to exist. Anyway, I kind
of went off course; suffice to say that there is no need to focus on selling
products in a world where the life's essentials are guaranteed
unconditionally. And ads become useless, then.
Land ownership in libertarianism
Assume the current system went down and libertarians are now in power. Since
their whole shtick is based upon property rights, they will have to decide who
now gets all the property. The easiest way would be to just leave the current
owners in place - but wait! As explained
earlier, libertarians
believe only in justly acquired property - which means that which happened
without using (their definitions of) coercion / force / fraud. Therefore, to be
consistent with their principles, they'd have to prove that all the current
owners have acquired their property justly. This would entail establishing a
chain of acquisition right from the first homesteading up to the current
ownership and show that libertarian principles have never once been violated. Of
course, you cannot go back in time and no one has recorded this information to
the extent that is required. Therefore, if libertarians want to keep their
property, they have to give up on their principles since they cannot
absolutely prove it has been acquired justly.
What options remain for the libertarians? They could just ignore the above and
stay with the current property owners even though they cannot justify their
right to ownership (which would once again destroy their pretense of being based
on cold, hard logic). Another way would be to admit that - since no one can
show their property has been acquired following the libertarian principles -
that it is all now without owner. Therefore, the first person who mixes her work
with a property (homesteading principle) can now lay a claim to it. So, if I
manage to sneak into (what previously was) your villa while no one is there and
move some furniture, I'm now the rightful owner. If you are a libertarian, you
will surely get a kick out of this while I throw you out for trespassing ^_^. As
you can see, libertarians have no viable solution to this problem.
Regulations
Libertarians claim that regulations help big businesses (archive
)
(MozArchive), and
if the government just kept its hands away, small business could actually comp
ete (archive)
In a free market, firms would be smaller and less hierarchical, more local
and more numerous (and many would probably be employee-owned); prices would
be lower and wages higher; and corporate power would be in shambles
It is true that big business loves some types of regulations - this is
easily seen with GDPR, for example (archive)
According to PwC, 68 percent of US-based companies expect to spend $1
million to $10 million to meet GDPR requirements. Another 9 percent expect
to spend more than $10 million.
There are also fines of up to €20 million for not complying with it, which big
business easily affords
but might be a problem for the small business. However, it is not at all
true that all regulations help the corporations. Let us explore an example of
one that is clearly negative for the corporations but positive for the average
person - GM food labeling laws:
Why mandatory GM food labeling is great
if all regulations were beneficial to big corporations (as the libertarian
narrative states). Since everything a corporation does is to increase profits,
the only reason they'd attack labeling laws is that they know their profits
would be negatively affected with them in place. Hey, we even have studies
proving that (archive)
In Study 1 [...] Labels such as “non-GMO” (absence labeling) and
“contains GMO” (presence labeling) serve as negative signals for GM foods
and tend to shrink their market share. The market share shrinkage effect is
stronger under the mandatory policy (presence labeling) than under voluntary
policy (absence labeling).
The above means that if you tell people there are GM ingredients in a product,
they don't buy it. And that forcing businesses to report the information makes
even less people buy GM than just relying on the companies to graciously let you
know (which they don't want to; why do you think that is, if GM food is so
great?). Let's read further:
In Study 2 [...] The results show that presence-focused labeling
(“contains GMO”) makes consumers (i) more sensitive toward the GMO
attribute, (ii) less sensitive toward price information, and (iii) more
reluctant to make a purchase in a category.
Ha! Less sensitive toward price information means that the price stops
mattering when the GM issue is involved. People really don't want to buy
GM food.
In Study 4 [...] participants exposed to positive GMO labels tend to be
less negative toward GMOs than those exposed to neutral GMO labels.
Reading this carefully, it means that even if you spin the presence of GM in a
product positively, people still won't buy it. Industry tricks do not work here;
people simply do not want GM regardless. And the only way you can prevent
that from materializing (as shown by the studies) is by hiding that information.
Is this the world you want? One in which a business wins because of selling
(MozArchive) after
(MozArchive) shows
that ~90% of people in Europe and USA do not want such a world. Libertarians d
o (archive)
though. They do not think you have a right to know what's in your food. They
think it's on the company to graciously tell you (or not) what their products
contain. Of course, they excuse that by saying people simply won't buy from the
companies that hide information, so that they will be outcompeted and only the
honest ones will survive:
As a libertarian, I am against mandating the labeling of anything. It should
be the choice of the seller, which ultimately is dictated by consumer
demand. Perhaps more consumers will stop buying food products that aren’t
labeled.
You can assume there'd be many people still buying unlabeled products because of
the additional effort required to seek out the labeled ones. So why add that
extra step when it's so easy to just tell people what they are actually
buying? This is just rewarding businesses for lack of transparency, and making
it possible for a product to survive only because it hides information, instead
of because people like it. Exactly the opposite of what we were promised the
free market would do (reward good products and practices). But the libertarians
want to save the business and burden the customer pointlessly at all costs:
If you are concerned about GMO foods, then you will have to do some research
yourself and avoid foods that you know are likely to contain GMOs.
Why? When a simple regulation makes the problem disappear? This is simply
rigging the game so that it is easy for businesses to do evil, but hard for the
consumers to defend themselves from it. We already live in a world where most
people need to work ~40h per week just to survive; some have to additionally
take care of their kids, deal with family drama, housework, disease, legal
bullshit, etc. The last thing they want to do after all that is researching if
the food they are buying actually is what it seems to be, instead of a
laboratory concoction that's going to slowly kill them. Remember - also - that
if you accept no labeling requirements for GM food, then you also have to accept
that for other things, according to libertarian reasoning. Now, you aren't able
to know what the parameters of your computer, phone, anything are - without
having to do yet more pointless "research". The question is what kind of a
society do we want to have? The one that supports the 99.99% of regular people
who want to know what they are buying, or the 0.001% of big businessmen who
benefit from hiding that information? Hell, imagine I restated the research
argument like this:
If you are concerned about cyanide in food, then you will have to do
some research yourself and avoid foods that you know are likely to contain
cyanide.
You can substitute cyanide for any other thing people might want to avoid
such as sugar or seed oil. Either way, it is obvious to see how this argument
that unregulated competition will create the best possible product for
consumers:
Its [the competition's] function is to safeguard the best satisfaction
of the consumers which they can attain under the given state of the economic
data.
Consumers are satisfied when foods are adequately labeled (which can only be
ensured by the state) - as proven over and over by the relevant polls.
Libertarians - then - can shove their competition you-know-where, because the
people have already decided that a regulated market is better. Remember that we
already have labeling laws for things like nutritional information, etc. And
GM food labeling is just an extension of the laws already existing for decades
that are also unquestionably positive. The only entity that benefits from the
lack of labeling laws is the business. That is why they paid so much to kill
this initiative.
What would actually happen in a totally free market is companies telling you
only what they know you want to hear, and hiding everything else. Again, this
still happens today to some extent but libertarians (as usual) want to kill
hundreds of years of progress and have a world of unrestricted business abuse.
Here we have their attempt to maliciously enable companies to hide information
from the small guy with freedom as an excuse (though notice how the freedom
concerns only what the business is allowed to do; the consumer's freedom to
choose what enters his body can go to hell).
Why not put the puritanism away in favor of something that gives better results
across the board aside from hurting the bottom lines of the few giant
corporations (which - even then - it does only because they were not
transparent in the first place) that want to push their concoctions incognito?
Again, they could still sell whatever they want to - they'd just have to tell
us about it. So the only reason to oppose labeling laws is to let businesses get
certain products past the people's lack of demand by selling them based on
false pretenses. Libertarians - then - end up being cucks, supporting the
exact policies that allow the abuse to persist against their own best
interests. They'd rather be forced to spend additional effort to find products
with labels, just because the businesses (their Gods) cannot be inconvenienced
in any way. As my legendary friend once said - Ancapism is cuckism.
Other regulations
As if the above example alone wasn't bad enough, libertarians make it clear that
they want to remove all regulations (archive)
(MozArchive) - not
just the labeling ones:
When a legislature interferes with voluntary employment contracts, it
infringes people’s freedom to bargain with their own labor and possessions
And there’s no principled way to draw a sharp line here: Once it’s okay for
a legislature to interfere with bargaining in this way, there’s no stopping
politicians from setting wages and prices, or requiring or prohibiting the
hiring of particular people.
And this is actually the only consistent libertarian position - since according
to them, all employment is voluntary - any regulation would decrease the
freedom of the parties involved. Of course, this does not concern work
regulations only - but all of them. Therefore, for example, environmental
regulations would not exist (archive)
(MozArchive) in
libertarianism unless they followed from private property:
We advocate repeal of the laws that prevent full ownership of the air and
water above and below land, thus denying individuals protection under the
law against polluters. Private property rights must replace public property.
Under libertarianism, all the air and water in the world is owned by someone,
and if that someone wants to pollute it - so be it. The implications are
staggering: unless you yourself own property, you have no guarantee that your
next breath won't kill you. Since a business could pollute their air on
purpose, and then force people living there to give up all their money in
exchange for clean air - or even just not provide the option, and let them die.
Some libertarians realize the problem (archive)
(MozArchive) and
try to argue for environmental regulations - but that is going outside the
libertarian principles, which cannot prohibit using your property the way you
want to.
Exploitative child labor - widespread in libertarianism
Coming back to employment, there can be no worker protection laws
(MozArchive) in
libertarianism - after all, if someone wants to work in a place without safety
requirements, who's to prevent him? Child labor is also all clear:
As for child labor, there is nothing intrinsically wrong with the idea, so
long as it is not abusive or recklessly dangerous. Why should it be fine for
a 16 year old to work a few hours after school, but employing a 15 year old
will result in stiff fines or prison. Shouldn't this be a decision left to
the teen and his parents? We already have laws that take care of abusive
parents, right?
But you can hear the doubt in the libertarians' words even above - right as they
are justifying child labor. And libertarianism cannot have laws against
abusive parents, since children are their parents' property - they can abuse
them just as they would a teddy bear. Some libertarians disagree with this due
to the implications, but it is consistent with their principles. By the way, we
do have proof that child labor would be very dangerous and exploitative
under libertarianism, since that is what has happened
historically (archive)
(MozArchive) until
the dreaded government got involved:
Another reason that businesses liked to hire children workers was because
they worked for little pay. In many cases, children weren't paid at all, but
worked for their room and board. When they did earn wages, children often
earned 10 to 20 percent of what an adult would earn for the same job.
What a surprise, businesses like their cheap labor, ethics be damned.
In some cases, the businesses treated the children no better than slaves.
They kept them locked up and forced them to work long hours. In other cases,
the businesses felt they were helping the children out by feeding them and
keeping them from starving.
Ha! I was wondering when this was going to come up. This is the standard
capitalist / libertarian mindset: I am the almighty property owner - working for
me and getting a share of MY profits is a great privilege! You'd have to suffer
from a pretty serious case of Stockholm Syndrome to believe in this stuff.
Children often had to work under very dangerous conditions. They lost limbs
or fingers working on high powered machinery with little training. They
worked in mines with bad ventilation and developed lung diseases.
If you give full autonomy to businesses, this is what inevitably happens; since
profit is the ultimate goal, why develop safety measures? Unfortunately, this
is still happening
today to the
extent that it is allowed - but the libertarians want a return to a world
where the situation is ten times worse.
In the United States, a real effort to regulate and put an end to child
labor began in the early 1900s. Many businesses were against it because they
liked the cheap labor. Some families also needed the money their kids
brought home. However, eventually laws were passed. In 1938, the Fair labor
Standards Act was passed that placed some limitations on child labor, set a
minimum wage, and put limits on how many hours an employee should work.
Despite some resistance, we've got the protections and only the businesses ended
up losing out. In the end, the money that the parents allegedly needed from
their children was simply replaced by the minimum wage. It will take some time
but hopefully we soon realize that we don't need the capitalists at all as well
but this topic will be explored in a later section.
No worker protections = mass exploitation and suffering
With the increasing automation, and no employment regulation of any kind,
the workers would simply be ruthlessly exploited. Libertarians - again - admit
all regulations are unwelcome (archive)
including minimum wage law, comparable worth rules, working condition laws,
compulsory union membership, employment protection, employment taxes, payroll
taxes, government unemployment insurance, welfare, regulations, licensing,
anti-peddling laws, child-labor laws. Most workers have very little bargaining
power over the workplaces; if someone doesn't want to work for the pay set up by
the business, or dislikes the working conditions - there are a thousand others
to replace him (unless he has some rare skills). This creates a situation
where the business has free reign to exploit its workers however it wants to -
with the only defense being the dreaded government regulations such as minimum
wage. Without them, you'd quickly end up in a world where only the strongest,
healthiest workers survive; after all - if a business can find people willing to
work 16 hours per day - all the others who can only endure 12 will be left in
the dust. And yet, this is portrayed as a virtue by the libertarians:
In economics there are also people who are relatively weak. The disabled,
the young, minorities, the untrained—all are weak economic actors.
If you can't deal with the increasingly hostile "free job market" - you're just
weak. It's your fault, deal with it. Or work for less (or nothing):
Consider a young, uneducated, unskilled person, whose productivity is $2.50
an hour in the marketplace. What if the legislature passes a law requiring
that he be paid $5 per hour? The employer hiring him would lose $2.50 an
hour.
Hey, why are we making it all about productivity? The productivity of your
grandparents, or the blind, or the legless is probably zero. Do they not matter
anymore? Why is productivity the master measure, instead of something like, I
dunno - human life and dignity? If libertarians are so concerned with the money
"losses", maybe they should start caring about businesses spending exorbitant
amounts on advertising campaigns (archive)
(MozArchive), or wars, or
(MozArchive) (so
much for the "efficient free market"!) or... But they never care about any of
this; rather victim blame the small guy - as a good social darwinist would. By
the way, in a decade the young, uneducated, unskilled person will have trouble
finding a job at all due to the aforementioned
automation. The productivity
of many / most people will then be zero. And since there is also no welfare
under libertarianism, those millions of people would have a real problem. If
there is no more need for so much productivity, why focus on it - just so that a
business is allowed to hoard?! But libertarians really like the idea of
having everyone have to work:
Unemployment Insurance. Government unemployment insurance and welfare cause
unemployment by subsidizing idleness. When a certain behavior is
subsidized—in this case not working—we get more of it.
UPDATE December 2022: I was rereading this quote, and the part about
subsidizing idleness jumped out at me this time. Guess what behaviors would be
rewarded in libertarianism? Abuse of
workers.
including on the grass or in the skies. Environmental
poisoning.
Don't swing the sword so carelessly, libertarians, or you might cut yourself :D.
Is subsidizing idleness so bad compared to those? Especially when you consider
that...
...Unemployment is not necessarily bad anyway - if a job doesn't need to be
done (arc
hive)
(MozArchive), why
do it? In the libertarian world, however, everyone would need a job to pay for
"rent" (in other words, daring to exist) and food - unless they own some
property, again proving that libertarianism provides freedom only if you do so
(even better if you own a business). How do we even reconcile this job
requirement with the upcoming robot revolution? Just let everyone starve and
die? Since - remember - being replaced by a machine makes your productivity zero
- and libertarians really don't think such people deserve to live. Though the
current system is not even close to optimal, at least the unemployed have some
kind of safety net instead of being forced to find work immediately or perish.
There is some pressure put on the businesses that way, which would not exist in
pure libertarianism. And that's something libertarians hate (as admitted in the
above quotes) because they are really social darwinists in disguise. What
could a seriously ill person do under libertarianism? Let's see what
libertarians think
(archive)
(MozArchive). The
question:
On average, disabled people are less productive than able people. Indeed,
many severely disabled people produce nothing at all.
If taxes were abolished and if charitable contributions were inadequate
(which they probably would be), the disabled would be left with no
purchasing power to pay for their own healthcare. Many would suffer and/or
die. This is not 'fair', but life isn't fair.
Is it the role of the State to redress Fate's wrongs? Personally I think
yes. What do the Libertarians think?
And the answers:
No, it is not the 'states' role to committ a wrong against other humans in
order to try to rectify a fact of nature. We humans need our rights
protected, not abused, by the state - that is the purpose.
I do not see why people should be obliged in helping others especially when
they had nothing to do with the state of the person in need. A system based
on the possible occurance of calamities will turn into a calamity itself.
Charity and the good will of people will cater to the needs of the disabled.
Now let me attempt my own answer. First of all, as I explain in another
section, we
don't have to care about how productive someone is or whether they have
purchasing power. And if life isn't fair, then we can make it fair. We have big
brains, and we don't have to carry over the jungle rules into civilization. We
can just give people the resources and treatments they need without
expectations. Also, it's not Fate that makes people sick (in the vast majority
of cases), but our toxic
foods, air
pollution, lack of safety testing,
social isolation, abusive relationships, threat of poverty, etc. Things we could
fix and which would be worse in libertarianism.
(MozArchive), where
a libertarian slips up and tells us what their ideology is really all about:
In a truly Libertarian society, the disabled are either taken care of by
their family, or they are considered weak and simply die. If they cannot
make it on their own and their family will not or cannot take care of them,
then they die and the resources they would be taken up will eventually be
split amongst those who are not as weak. Something along the lines of
natural selection and evolution, and how they are supposed to work.
See? Libertarianism is social darwinism, the purging of the weak while
graciously allowing the not as weak to persist (but who decides the meaning
of those? The "property owners"? Why?). By the way, natural selection and
evolution don't work like this person thinks they do; there are no arbitrary
"property ownership" titles in nature that decide who gets what. Even if they
worked how this person thinks - again, we don't have to recreate the jungle
here. We can structure our society however we want to. And to structure it in a
way that sacrifices human life on the altar of the false productivity god would
be quite insane.
Yet that is exactly what libertarians want. For the disabled to be forced to
rely on the goodwill of family (that they might not even have) and / or randoms.
Imagine how stressful it would be to wake up and realize that whether the next
day even came depended on if someone got moved by your begging. And in a
libertarian world, strangers would surely be even less willing to help than
today, because the ideology teaches people to judge others in terms of how weak
they are. I'm not saying that a charity-based system absolutely couldn't work -
but why be forced to rely on it, when strong protections could simply be baked
in? Yet libertarians don't want them to be baked in because they've
completely absorbed the jungle mindset; the brutal fight for survival and
position, the elimination of the weak.
Of course, the trick here is that the "strong" is simply the "property owner",
or more specifically the businessman. And the entire point of this designation
is so that the business is justified in abusing its workers. And - though the
current government system is not even close to optimal - at least it provides
Libertarianism - as has already been shown - would have basically none. But are
there even better systems possible? Yes - the ones that give up money which
enables the productivity false god to even exist. I mean, it should be obvious
something's wrong with the existence of money when the poor give more to
charity than the
rich (archive
)
(MozArchive) - and
what we found was that the lower-class people, or the relatively lower-class
individuals, were inclined to give away 44 percent more of their points or their
credits. So even "charity" - libertarians' beloved "solution" for the inherent
cruelty of their ideology - works only because the "less successful" people are
nicer than the "more successful"; or in other words, being an asshole makes you
"successful".
Would private rating services solve the problems?
One way libertarians try to squirm out of the problems with an unregulated
market is by claiming that
(MozArchive) private
rating services would develop, to which businesses would have to submit if they
wanted to compete:
So the libertarian perspective on job safety regulation would be to allow
private rating services to develop. Employers who want to attract the best
workers, for the best price, would need to submit themselves to scrutiny of
these rating services.
However, what reason is there to believe that this would actually happen? Say
there is a service which compares businesses in terms of working conditions,
whether they allow child labor, work duration, etc. Does this mean that the
low-rated companies would suddenly stop existing? No, since there would be no
incentive for a business to even care about the ratings. Of course people
would prefer to work in a safe place, but the choice does not belong to
them. The so-called "low-skill worker" does not have much bargaining power
over the businesses that hire him since there is a thousand people to replace
him; if he refuses to work in a dangerous place, others will do it instead.
Contrary to libertarian claims, then, it appears that it is the ethical
companies who would be outcompeted, since they would not be able to save money
by employing children or skipping repairs, etc.
Let us now look at what actually happens in reality instead of libertarian
imagination. In the failed libertarian city (archive)
(MozArchive), the
volunteer fire department collapsed for lack of funds. There was no sewage
system, no animal control and no police - even though we've long been promised
by the libertarians that private businesses could easily take care of those. If
they couldn't, what makes you believe they could provide proper rating services?
TripAdvisor is mentioned as an example of a successful rating service and yet
And in September 2018, a high-profile investigation by The Times of London
found that one in three (33%) of TripAdvisor reviews are fake. TripAdvisor
has denied the results of the independent investigation. However, from our
experience, this seems pretty accurate.
We’ve stayed at a number of hotels where we are absolutely bombarded by the
hotel management to leave positive reviews for them. We had a restaurant
offer to complete the TripAdvisor review for us. On our recent trip to
California, a restaurant offered us a complimentary glass of wine for
completing a TripAdvisor review.
So the rating services can easily be gamed, and of course the big business is
the one that benefits (it can afford to reward customers for positive reviews
more easily). If a rating service gained a monopoly, they could also accept
bribes and then it would become totally unreliable (benefitting big business) -
making you wait for another one to appear that would compete with it, where the
same thing would inevitably happen. The so-called free market has no viable
answer to this problem. This goes deeper than traveling though - let's check
out
(MozArchive) the
libertarian logic in supporting no government enforced standards in anything:
Look at how we deal with choices in areas where the government does not
mandate standards, say how food tastes in restaurants. Does this lack of
regulations mean that restaurants can do whatever they want and get away
with it? Does it mean they can sacrifice taste in favor of maximizing
profit. No, of course not. Instead we have restaurant reviews in newspapers.
We have word of mouth. We have Yelp and Zagat and other rating services. If
a restaurant starts serving poor tasting food, the world will know about it
nearly instantly, certainly faster than the government could respond.
These could be gamed the same way as TripAdvisor - but okay, let's assume that
the private rating services help us discover bad tasting food. It is kind of
funny how libertarians always use banalities as examples to support their
ideology. First it was trading cards, and now food taste... What if the food
contained a toxic chemical (or a few) instead? Clearly, a regular person cannot
detect such things - and in libertarianism, they don't have to be labeled. Would
you like to end up with dementia (archive)
because a business decided to stick aspartame into their drinks and didn't tell
you? Or a bunch of toxic preservatives (archive)
(MozArchive) that
will cause cancer a decade down the road? Do you think private rating services
are capable of detecting those things? They'd have to send their agents to hunt
down every single food available on the market, and send them all to labs for
the analysis of ingredients. And keep doing that over and over, since new foods
would be appearing constantly, or old foods might change their compositions. I
can't imagine that being viable (just think of the costs!). Wouldn't it be more
efficient and more effective to have every newly invented food undergo an
inspection at launch, with actual punishments (like, at least forcing a recall)
for labeling fraud or contamination?
We have some protections today, but not enough. Corporations still get lots of
opportunity to trick the consumers. Check out this Cheetos ingredients
list and see if you can spot the
deceptions (Who knows what's hiding under the labels "Natural and Artificial
Flavors"? And you don't know which oils you get in your Cheetos, nor in what
percentages; though they are all horrible so this information wouldn't help you
that much). What I'd like to have is the requirement to list all product
ingredients, including chemical names (if applicable), latin name of originating
plant / animal species (somehow, this often isn't listed even today, but might
matter for some diseases), pesticides used during production, country of origin,
etc. This is what would ensure the ultimate consumer freedom (at least as much
as possible in a system based on the profit motive). But libertarians - in their
quest to justify business abuse at all costs - want to go back to the stone age
and require people to shoot in the dark while buying anything at all, and risk
poisoning themselves. As we've already learned to
expect, the
libertarian wants to put all the burden on the consumer and zero on the
business. So, the food company can just put anything into their products, not
tell you, and you're supposed to just figure it out, somehow. If you don't, you
might die; hey, maybe then the word of mouth will spread about your death and
people will begin to avoid the offending product...if they are lucky enough to
hear about it in time. Hooray for the free market, where every grocery store is
a minefield! The libertarian considers this freedom for both parties...hahaha.
What even is the point of libertarianism?
Since I've shown that the alleged logical underpinnings of libertarianism are
not so logical (falling over at
hurdle on the
way to the finish
line), there has to
be some reason it's even been invented. If it does not stand up to scrutiny
logically, why does it exist? If you look at all the issues I've covered in this
report, they all fail to logically support libertarianism - but there is
something else that they all have in common. Can you guess what it is? Let's
check it out:
Self-ownership - allows the rich to blame the victim (the poor) for their
plight, instead of conditions.
NAP - of course, prevents the poor from reclaiming their power by
violence.
Property rights - an extension of the above.
Free market - allows the rulers to pretend that it's just your lack of
useful skills or laziness that makes you poor, even though it's provably
impossible to lift yourself out of poverty in this
world by honest ways.
Child labor - more workers for the capitalists to abuse earlier, can
afford to pay less for the adults; eventually all kids are forced to work
since the adult wage isn't enough to live on (same trick used when the
capitalists shoved women into jobs).
Advertisements - keeps the poor in mental chains, teaching them they just
need the newest product to feel content (instead of improving conditions), and
redirects wealth upwards even more.
Regulations - the less of them exist, the more opportunity the rich get to
play around (eg. no need to care about safe disposal of toxic waste).
Taxation - lack of it prevents the redirection of wealth from the rich to
the poor, increasing the power gap.
What connects those issues is that they all try to justify the domination of the
rulers over the plebs. That is the point of libertarianism - to keep power in
the hands of the people that currently have it. To be effective, though, regular
bread eaters had to be convinced that - somehow - this ideology helps them,
too. What the powerful settled on is pretending that it's the big bad government
that oppresses the plebs and if only that went away, their chains could be
broken and they could begin climbing the ladder (assuming they were skilled and
worked hard). What follows from this is that your neighbor is competing against
you in the fight for position (jungle mindset) - instead of both being exploited
by the higher castes. Anything and everything so that you don't look upwards
and maybe question the entire need to "fight for position".
The trick worked pretty well, IMO; when I go to Wykop ("polish reddit") I see
lots of people complaining about rozdawnictwo (handouts) - a common libertarian
talking point, designed to make you believe that sharing is bad. You're supposed
to "earn" everything in your life, including the right to live, and if you
can't for whatever reason (like being injured, depressed, or chronically ill) -
off you go. And you earn it - of course - by doing the bidding of the powerful.
This fuels the jungle mindset and justifies the rulers' hoarding of resources
and the squeezing of workers until their last drops of blood, sweat and tears.
Additionally, libertarianism provides the net that's supposed to catch the
people (rightly) worried about government overreach - and then promptly throw
them into the sea of business sharks that now have no restrictions from biting.
Either way, the boot on the face is still there, even if the material of the
boot has seemingly changed. Funnily enough, at the very top, government and
business become one and the same; yet another time the Deus Ex: Invisible War
portrayal of controlled
opposition proves
relevant. You can tell I just love that game :D. Anyway, is there evidence that
libertarianism is actually connected to the rulers? Yes, there indeed
is (a
rchive)
Ludwig Von Mises, who never held a paid job at any University, was
maintained first by David Rockefeller and then for decades received money
from the Volker Fund and related business men, like Lawrence Fertig.
David Rockefeller said: "Finally, in his most surprising statement, he
revealed he considers himself a follower of the Austrian school of
economics. Friedrich Hayek had been his tutor at the London School of
Economics in the 1930s."
Read the entire article for more evidence. One other thing I want to point out
is how everything in libertarianism relies on the existence of money - the
likely enabler of most problems in the
world. Even if you
question a tenet of libertarianism, you never leave the big mental structure of
money acceptance. Anyway, I guess this section makes a good ending to the
report. There are still a few things to iron out here, I'll get to it soon.
Edit: I'm deleting the section about libertarians lacking feelings; it was just
repeating what this section is saying in a more complex way. The higher-up
libertarians (those that talk with a straight face about weak economic actors)
surely do lack them; the rest has simply been baited with promises of freedom
and assurances that the jungle is the only way to have it. After that, sunk cost
and memes keep people inside the trap. Anyway, if we ever have a revolution, I
really hope the new society isn't built with libertarian ideas in mind.
If not libertarianism, then what?
It's a question I've been asked a few times, and which must surely be on the
radar of most people who've read a report like mine. Well, anything is better
:D. But okay, I'll attempt a real answer. First of all, we need to switch from
a world based on power to the one based on ethics. Meaning - before
implementing something - we need to ask ourselves what kind of effects it will
have and if they are going to be good for us. Instead of "someone on top"
deciding for "ones at the bottom" - which is the reality of both business and
government, and what libertarianism wants to push even further. This requires
cooperation; as in, talking to others and making the decision for the good of
everyone. Rugged individualism is not natural for people and has failed. As for
specifics, one idea is something like Athenian
democracy, where
everyone gets a say in what happens in their local area. If you want practical
comparisons,
ads can
only exist in a world based on power, where a "property owner" decides what to
put and where; in a world based on ethics, no one wants them and boom they're
gone. It seems to me that it's the hierarchy that causes most of our problems,
so tackling that would be priority #1. Sorry I don't have anything more
concrete; again, specifics are something to explore once we give up our current
obsession with power.