
No, Classical Liberalism Isn’t a “Fraud” - caramiadare
https://www.libertarianism.org/columns/no-classical-liberalism-isnt-fraud
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smacktoward
This article is a great illustration of the fundamental problem with
libertarianism.

 _> [C]lassical liberals don’t think corporations are any more altruistic, so
we propose to carefully sequester them from the source of special privilege:
government. What Cooper seems not to understand (though he seems close at
times to grasping it) is that corporations would rather not compete; they’d
rather appeal to “the sovereignty of nations,” which, as we have noted, is
their originator, to hobble or outlaw their competitors._

The glaring omission in this analysis is that government, while it is _one
potential_ source of special privileges for corporations, is not _the_ source
of special privilege. Simply keeping government out of the affairs of business
will not prevent corporations from reaching positions from which they no
longer have to compete.

As we've seen countless times over the last few hundred years, corporations
can reach such a position quite effectively without any help from government
whatsoever, by driving their competitors out of business (monopoly), or by
colluding rather than competing (oligopoly), or through other means of
imperfect competition. And when that happens, there is only one actor with
enough power to free up the market again -- government.

Asking (as the article does) for government to "confine itself to the
protection of individual liberty" is, therefore, a call for society to accept
these market failures as effectively un-fixable. (Which is perhaps why
libertarianism is such a popular philosophy among those who run the
corporations that would rather not compete.)

~~~
ewzimm
I think "the protection of individual liberty" in this case includes
regulation of corporations which act against liberty. The request is that the
government not grant special privileges to some corporations refers mostly to
things like subsidies and special contracts. On the other hand, if a
corporation is acting in a way that puts people in danger, for example
excessive pollution or selling defective products, there's no basic ideal of
classical liberalism or libertarianism that would prevent the government from
acting to stop it. The point of this article is that the idea of libertarians
opposing all government regulation is false. They tend to want to restrict but
not abolish it.

That's not to say that it's a flawless philosophy. It's definitely one that's
created out of idealism and faith in humanity, which might not always be
warranted. In a way, it has become self-defeating in its success because it
has empowered individuals to believe they're wiser than they are, leading to
people who are more easily manipulated by well-crafted rhetoric that stokes
the ego and convinces them that they know something that others don't.
Characterizations of different groups as stupid and maybe even a little evil
are particularly effective for this kind of manipulation, like the kind that
the author here argues against.

------
8bitsrule
_Classical liberals, pioneering class theory, have shown that business and
government often partner to serve the interests of the powerful, to create a
favorable environment for well-connected industries and companies...._

Hear hear. But to know that means knowing a little history - about places like
the Caribbean and Hawaii - and law - like when US corporations gained
personhood in the late 1800s. Knowing history, it's self-evident. Which is why
smearing and disappearing history has so important to these folks for soooooo
long.

