Self-described libertarians have been explaining to me on Facebook how my criticism of a Supreme Court ruling that puts the most powerful government official in the world above the law is proof that I'm no longer a libertarian.
I forget who said it (possibly the existential comics guy) but someone said "libertarians are just authoritarians who haven't found a preferred dictator yet"
That’s always been mine: libertarians are just Republicans who like weed. They purport to stand outside of the party system but, when it’s time to put an X in a box, they always seem to find comfort with the Republican candidate.
Or they used to be, anyway. I think more and more those guys are just like “wait a minute, I’m rich and white, why am I trying to pretend sociopathy isn’t more fun for people like me?” and go full scale MAGA
As something of a libertarian, these comments make me angry and depressed. A lot of us libertarians just think "It ain't nobody else's business" is an excellent first approximation guideline for government and society. But I can't stop all those other assholes from calling themselves libertarians.
I think the problem is most of the "just leave us alone" libertarians are trying to do just that, leaving assholes to bray and scream and cede power to authoritarians.
On one hand, the government stays out of my business, but also there needs to be regulations to keep peoples hands out of my food.
There are very few problems that “the market” can correct. As I often point out, it took the government to end child labor, as we can see by the push today to cripple government so it can be brought back.
Disagree that it's "very few," but the market can only solve problems that the market can solve, and there are many problems that the market can't solve or that it will not solve before unacceptable damage has been done.
I can’t think of a problem that’s solved by the market that isn’t more effectively and efficiently solved by regulation, but that may be a paucity of imagination on my part. Got any suggestions?
so I think the problem there, if I put on my "I'm not really a libertarian in any policy sense, but am negatively polarized to defend the market abstractly" hat, is that those are all cases where some kind of huge asymmetry in either information or market structure is being exploited
in my mind the purpose of regulation is to create a socially beneficial level playing field for those kinds of situations
we regulate building codes bc it's not possible for individual consumers to easily choose to live/work in only safe places, given scale, and that should be important
whenever I get into these discussions, people are just like "yeah, ellie, you should just drop it, you're a lib not a libertarian" but like, in terms of like, abstract political points, I think there's a libertarianism that comes to lib goals on regulation based on "the market should be *good*"
Information asymmetries are a part of it, but I pick those 3 because to my mind they emanate from different sources. Building codes is information asymmetry. Airplane safety is an artefact of high costs of entry into the market constituting a barrier to competition.
Kids products is the most abstract: it’s an artefact of the purchaser and the consumer being different people, so their goals aren’t perfectly aligned. Safety raises cost of goods, and not every person buying a product for a kid is incentivized that way.
That seems like an example of a problem that the market would have solutions for - we would all be a lot more careful about buying things for our kids - but the cost, namely lots more dead kids, is far too high to allow that.
This is kind of unfair because we are fighting on a battlefield I know intimately (kids product safety), so I have to drop a heavy dose of: trust me, this is an excellent example of market failure.
In that context, we're probably talking about different things. I'm thinking about this on a level of "will this toy break and choke my toddler." I suspect you're talking about somewhat less concrete dangers.
Related: why are there so many counterfeit toys? Because birthday present givers don’t know how to tell the difference. If it’s on Amazon, that used to be good enough for them (a reputation Amazon has recently ruined with drop-shipped garbage).
I am hardly a great thinker on this. But I see this as a drawback of regulation. If you don't think everything is caveat emptor, you're lulled into a sense of security, and it's very bad if it's a false one.
But that’s the challenge: the purchaser isn’t the consumer. The only way to know that magnet in the toy is properly-attached is destructive testing, and no one is going to do that with every product they buy. For example.
I don't want to be read as if I'm for this, which I'm absolutely not. But when I buy a toy for my kids I don't know that it's safe, and I'm trusting the manufacturer, with some very limited oversight from the CPSC, to have made it safely. It's hardly a perfect guarantee under any circumstances.
Or, like, even if I do assume that every product might kill my kid, what resources do I, a parent, have? I trust CompanyX, so I buy their stuff - but they don't know their supplier has done something shady, or they don't care, so my research didn't do me any good.
Well, CompanyX is - supposedly - doing what it needs to do to ensure that its suppliers are doing what they need to do to make sure that CompanyX's ultimate products are safe.
I remember coming across a parent who had bought their own X-Ray Spectrometer to do chemical testing on the toys their kid touched. I thought that was a bit excessive, not a future state aspiration.
similar issue with the recent lead in turmeric issues. Middleman buys turmeric, knows customers like it really orange and adds lead (also increases weight). But lead isn’t a fast-acting poison so it isn’t going to be noticed.
