Strontium-90 is a beta emitter, apparently, so you could just measure Alpha, Beta, and Gamma and detect false positives due to elevated background radiation that way. If you're in the air you're probably much closer to your Beta source as well so you could detect it above background due to distance. Gamma is essentially light so it falls off with the square of distance. But Alpha and Beta are probably much worse than Gamma in that respect, so I'm guessing this is fine most of the time and then they rule out false positives by looking at the total background in each type of radiation.
All nuclear things fall off much faster than square of the distance unless you're in vacuum. The atmosphere is nowhere near transparent to any of them. An addition to the inverse square issue the behavior of the various types is complex:
Gamma: Halving distance in the low hundreds of meters.
Alpha: Goes a few centimeters.
Beta: Goes a few meters per million electron volts. Most sources don't go above a few million electron volts.
Neutron: The only one with good penetration, halving distance around a kilometer for high energy neutrons. But note that there are few sources of neutron radiation other than fission.
Thus unless you're flying into fallout it's not much of an issue.
Given the forces involved, the need to avoid wireless communication, the complexity of any bearing with associated electrical contact, and so on this seems like the least complicated solution. You can rely on radioactive elements to emit radioactivity above background, you can build a pretty reliable pressure indicator, and you can fill a cavity in the blades with gas pretty reliably. You sidestep all of the complicated mechanical linkages in favor of a solution that's not in the rotor hub at all.
There's a self-serving aspect of Libertarianism where we dismantle the government so we can build our own government out of corporations with zero accountability to any of the people they govern. A kind of modern feudalism. And a lot of people in this camp envision themselves the count or duke or king or whatever in this feudalism, when in reality we'll likely all end up renting everything we own from the 6 people who own all the companies in the world. There seems to be a motte and bailey where the motte is "oh we should just remove all the governmental controls and let private enterprise flourish!" and then the bailey is "don't you see how little freedom you have from government" when it's made apparent what private enterprise has done in the modern world.
Libertarianism is entirely self-serving. I am rich and have property, so my ideal government is one whose only job is to create property registries and allow their enforcement with violence. Ideally, the poor people are taxed (not me of course) to fund a government violence force to enforce the rules on the poor people, as is the case in the USA.
Communism is similarly self-serving. I own no property, and so my ideal government has no concept of property and assigns resources to everyone.
I think you misunderstand me -- perspective matters. If you have 12 cookies, and I have 2 cookies, and i say "it would be more fair if we each had 7 cookies", then i pretty transparently just want you to give me 5 cookies.
"Clean up trash" and "Donate money to the poor" are not as unevenly beneficial. Also "Donate money to the poor" is a far cry from "Seize money and give that to the poor".
> and i say "it would be more fair if we each had 7 cookies", then i pretty transparently just want you to give me 5 cookies.
But under the context of "government has no concept of property and assigns resources to everyone" it is not you (or any single person) that decides that, it's the contextual Communist government saying and doing that. Just because it benefits random governed person does not make it directly self serving.
The nuance is, in this version of Communism, the Communism itself it is not self serving it trys to equalize -- Libertarianism, in this context, enforces self serving ideals
You seem to be describing our current corrupt democracy that produces crony capitalism that gives favors to big businesses and enables the business owners to become one of the 6 people that own everything.
A major point of libertarianism is to tear down the government structure that enables that crony capitalism and restores real competition in the market.
A major point of libertarianism is to tear down government structures that hinder libertarians from engaging in world domination and retain government structures that hinder other people from hindering libertarians from engaging in world domination.
So we're going to make government weaker, and by doing so, they will stand up to corporations that are now stronger than them?
If that's true then Libertarians have a rosier view of government than I do. A regular David vs. Goliath situation. Biblical stories aside, my money is on Goliath.
> So we're going to make government weaker, and by doing so, they will stand up to corporations that are now stronger than them?
It's not about the amount of physical force they can assert.
Suppose you have a constrained set of things the government is allowed to do. They prohibit fraud, non-consensual physical harm (e.g. violence, pollution) and market consolidation. Market consolidation is given a rigid definition in the nature of any organization having more than 15% market share in any market, a rigid consequence in the nature of that organization being fully atomized, and a right for customers and suppliers to bring a private case against them with the same consequence if they're over the threshold and the government prosecutor won't do it. Every citizen has the constitutional right to smash corporations in consolidated markets into smithereens.
Meanwhile the government is prohibited from enacting more specific economic rules. They lack the authority to enact things like certificate of need laws, zoning density restrictions, price controls, anything that acts as a constraint on adversarial interoperability, etc. Micromanaging the population is not allowed.
How do these constraints benefit large incumbents? What benefit is there in giving the government the authority to do things that history has consistently shown to be anti-competitive and inefficient?
Such a scheme absolutely explodes in complexity as it comes to each level of additional detail.
This requires a magically flexible definition of "market" at very best.
The smallest number of competitors that can split market share such that none exceed 15% is 7, and that cuts it absurdly close for an existential risk.
Do non-profit organizations count for this rule? If not, how would corporate structures that intentionally obfuscate these distinctions, e.g. IKEA, be handled?
If there's not some extremely tricky qualifiers, these markets seem likely to be a problem, just for starters: medicines†, operating systems, utilities to a specific house or even city, spy satellites, chemicals that are difficult or dangerous to synthesize, combat aircraft, crewed spacecraft, EUV lithography, armored fighting vehicles, cellular telecommunications services, samples of organisms restricted to high biosafety level labs, and literally any new product category.
† Imagine a serious condition getting its first drug treatment approved and the company saying "Only every seventh patient is eligible." Also, no one could offer a specific specialized surgical procedure until seven or more independent organizations in the same geographic area have qualified staff and equipment, which would be especially hard for any novel techniques; if the problem it addressed was rare, they'd also effectively be forced into a cartel to allocate the patients evenly.
There's also separately and unavoidably the massive problem of transitioning from the current situation to one compliant with these restrictions.
Edit: Switch to using a dagger for the footnote to avoid a formatting issue.
> This requires a magically flexible definition of "market" at very best.
The definition of a market is the set of goods or services which are fungible substitutes for one another.
The only thing that's hard about this at all is determining how fungible they have to be in order to be considered substitutes, e.g. two restaurants that are 3000 miles apart are obviously not substitutes for each other, but what if they're 30 miles apart? That one could go either way depending on how aggressive you want to be.
But it doesn't really matter how the coin flips like that turn out because the things that are close to the line aren't the markets where consolidation is causing major trouble, and conversely causing some local shops to not merge with each other so it stays unambiguous that the local market isn't consolidating is likewise not a big issue.
> Do non-profit organizations count for this rule?
Yes. If a non-profit has more than 15% market share then it has to be broken into multiple non-profits that each have less than 15% market share, the same as anyone else.
> Imagine a serious condition getting its first drug treatment approved and the company saying "Only every seventh patient is eligible."
You're assuming that there are still patents. If there are then that obviously doesn't count during the patent term because that's what patents are, but then you count only the patented invention and any sort of tying is entirely prohibited. You shouldn't be able to patent a connector and use that to monopolize the market for replacement razor blades.
Whereas if there aren't patents then you don't have this problem to begin with because you get a dozen different companies all producing the new medicine right away.
> operating systems
Operating systems are easy. Microsoft would be atomized because they have too much market share and then a dozen different companies would have the full rights to make derivatives of Windows. None of them would ever be allowed to have majority market share again, so now it's in everyone's interests to standardize APIs so that the same software will run on each company's Windows distribution, and the same APIs would end up being supported by (or consolidated with) non-Windows operating systems as well.
The OS then becomes fungible as intended and most likely ends up being open source since there's not a lot of margin in fungible commodities. And software licensed to allow the entire public to modify and redistribute it has an unlimited number of suppliers and would never exceed the market share threshold.
> utilities to a specific house or even city
If you're a utility company and you know you're going to get broken up if you have more than 15% market share, what do you do?
The sensible thing to do is to build your infrastructure differently. You're digging up the road once, but instead of installing one big pipe, you install a conduit with 10 smaller ones inside it. Then you sell off nine out of ten to nine other companies so that you each have ~10% market share and if one of you ends up with 14% and another 6% you're still not over the threshold.
Then if a natural disaster damages the infrastructure, in theory they could each employ their own repair crews and each send one to each damaged location, but that seems pretty inefficient when there is another option. You have multiple independent repair companies and the utility companies pay whichever one gives them the best rate for a given job, which will tend to be the one already sending someone to that site, i.e. the same repair crew usually repairs all 10 damaged pipes and gets paid by all 10 utility companies. Meanwhile a different repair company puts in the best bid for a different site.
The status quo takes the assumption that everything has to be vertically integrated, but it doesn't, and it's a lot easier to have competition when each new entrant doesn't have to reproduce the entire supply chain themselves.
You're listing things that are concentrated markets because the government is the only one that buys them and then there is only one seller because there is only one buyer. And even then the way the government does that is stupid. If they're the only one who wants armored fighting vehicles then they should take competing bids to design one and then take the design they paid for and take competing bids to manufacture it. The contracts to make these things should be going to the same companies that make trucks and locomotives.
Likewise they should break Boeing up and then have the various pieces of it put in bids to design, manufacture or assemble combat aircraft.
> EUV lithography
Nothing about this should be a monopoly. It should be something that dozens of companies know how to do. It consolidated because the government has been allowing companies to merge with competitors and suppliers for decades.
> chemicals that are difficult or dangerous to synthesize
These are the sort of things that should have 50 suppliers rather than 50,000. Nothing about it requires a monopoly. Indeed, allowing the market to concentrate is dangerous, because what happens if that one company's facilities are damaged or they're the only ones who know how to do it and the bus to the company retreat goes over a cliff?
> literally any new product category
So someone invents e.g. 3D printers. How does the time it takes to litigate a case in court compare to the time it takes for multiple companies to be making the new category of product?
There is no need or incentive to file a case if it would be dismissed as moot by the time a decision would be rendered. And if a "new" product category is still a consolidated market multiple years later then that's actually a consolidated market and it's time to break them up.
Government will not give any help to any corporation and we, the masses, will be empowered to stand up to corporations ourselves. And to be clear, when we talk about Power here we aren't talking about enforcing our will with violence (like the government ultimately does) but with the lifeblood of corporations: money. Deny them that and they quickly die.
Okay great. Let's say you have a dispute with your neighborhood electricity provider. They run the power plant 3 blocks down and vent smog into your house. By your logic the only recourse you have is to stop paying them. How do you handle that externality while still maintaining your electricity and also avoid having to learn how to run your own electricity grid?
If this isn't the complete anarchy form of libertarianism then the government can still enforce laws against air pollution. And there would be no way for a government official to make an underhanded executive branch "policy" change that let's the company get around that law.
If this is the more extreme form of libertarianism then surely my neighbors agree with me that the pollution sucks and we all stop paying them. Yeah, maybe we go without power for a short time, but then that company changes their ways or goes out of business. No long court battles, nobody single entity for the electric company to bribe, no writing your congressman and hoping there's a change. Vote directly with your wallet.
Or, there's the libertarian idea that another corporation is responsible for (essentially is hired as a caretaker of) the air we breathe and the electric company pays them for anything they emit into that air, so they are punished/disincentivized that way
David and goliath is not a story of a little man defeating an impossible giant. It's the story of a technologically advanced crack pistol shot vs a guy a with a knife and a hundred yards to cover
In order to make competition flourish, you require a strong government which squishes anti-competitive behavior.
Markets, left to their own accord, naturally tend to monopolies and cooperation. Cooperation just works better than competition. Competition is, really, a zero-sum game, a race to the bottom for companies. Cooperation is optimal, it’s “everybody wins”.
Even if companies didn’t just buy up each other (why wouldn’t they? We need laws against that), they would certainly work together to set prices as high as the market can bear. Which is then, effectively, a monopoly.
I mean, imagine a perfect market with hundreds of thriving competitors. What happens over time? As the industry matures, competitors buy each other up and consolidate capital. Then, newcomers can’t break in, because they don’t have the capital. And any newcomers who have a new innovative process or product, just get bought out before they threaten the market share. Then, eventually, there are only a handful of companies left. It’s trivial for them to move in lock-step and everyone wins… except the consumer.
Look at any domain in the US - they’re all like this. The only exceptions are new domains, like AI. That will change, too, we’ve seen this pattern thousands of times.
There’s two moats here: regulation, and capital. You can eliminate the regulation moat with libertarianism, sure, but not the capital moat. And, you strengthen the capital moat when you remove the regulation. So nothing changes. Best case scenario, the situation is the same. Worst case, it’s accelerated.
> Markets, left to their own accord, naturally tend to monopolies and cooperation
No, they don't. To become a monopoly, they need the collusion of government to outlaw competition.
The poster boy of monopolies, Standard Oil, never had a monopoly. During its rise, it dropped the consumer price of kerosene 70%. Its market share dropped steadily during the years of the anti-trust trial.
> It’s trivial for them to move in lock-step and everyone wins… except the consumer.
Hmm. Why should the word monopoly only refer to the legal mechanism by which market exclusivity is enforced rather than referring to the resulting market structure or market power?
If I'm not legally prohibited from competing with a firm, but that firm's position nonetheless also makes it unprofitable for me to enter or compete, what is that market structure called?
Nothing is impossible, but it's really difficult. If some greedy entrepreneur is raking in the cash with some product or service then of course another greedy entrepreneur will see that and start competing with the first guy. The evil corporations you are worried about are not going to cooperate with another corporation. They're evil! At best they'll fake it for a while and then backstab each other.
And if they aren't evil backstabbers and they are actually friendly and good at cooperating then it's a win for all of us!
You really need to answer questions directly as asked, and not whatever question it is you think the other person is asking. Doing this only creates confusion. There are many occasions where I see this kind of miscommunication happening between users on this site without either person realizing it.
In this case I asked a yes or no question because I simply wanted to clarify and understand the nuance of your position. You shouldn't always assume that every person responding to your comments is immediately trying to argue against you (although I'll admit this a fairly accurate heuristic for internet discussions in general).
Instead of answering with "Yes, (I believe) it is impossible" or "No, it is possible", you answered with the following:
"You can always present a case history of one".
Because I asked you a yes/no question, I am going to interpret your response as a framing of a yes/no answer. I interpreted your comment as: "(No), you (one) can always present a case history of one".
Hence my confusion: it sounded like you were holding both beliefs simultaneously: "Yes, natural monopolies are impossible, but there are counterexamples".
In the future please just answer the questions as they are asked.
All you did was say that Standard Oil doesn't count as a monopoly because you claim that you need a government intervention to be a monopoly, which is not a definition I have heard and certainly does not fall under colloquial definitions. Your big rebuttle to it, as far as I can tell, appears to be "Nuh uh, now prove me wrong!!!".
There are plenty of companies that have gotten to monopolistic or near-monopolistic categories without a government declaring it; Microsoft in the 90's, for example, was famously anti-competitive and actually was briefly declared a monopoly (though that was overturned in higher courts). As far as I'm aware, it wasn't the US government that artificially made Microsoft anticompetitive.
Can't reply to tombert, we're too deeply nested for hacker news, but the Microsoft example is great. The government didn't have anything to do with them being a monopoly? Have you heard of copyright laws? Did you know that Microsoft's whole business depends on the application of copyright laws to software? Did you know copyright protection used to only last for a few years? And then copyright holders lobbied government for longer and longer copyright protection?
Even if I concede all of this, and I really don’t, that doesn’t imply that it was a concerted effort to make Microsoft in particular a monopoly, at least not in the same way that they, for example, made AT&T a monopoly.
Are you suggesting that the existence of laws means that monopolies are inherently government ordained? Great, then that means that the standard oil example still holds.
P.S. you can actually keep replying, there’s just an artificial timer as they get nested. You can actually get around that if you click on the date/time (e.g. “2 hours ago”) and reply directly.
Aha! Neat trick to defeat hacker news's attempt to keep us from having long unproductive conversations. Let's keep it going.
Does it matter if the government purposely ordained the monopoly or stupidly made it possible by extending copyright protections indefinitely? The government is the problem either way and they shouldn't have that much power!
What of observed human history gives you any hope that such a thing will happen?
All of these systems function well ... "in theory". Even the ones you may not agree with. Socialism and communism are perfectly fine theoretical systems, until you introduce humans into the equation with desires for power, wealth, etc.
I have seen no hint that Libertarianism is somehow above this and will be the panacea. I also have no idea how you come to the conclusion that collusion will not be a problem in a libertarian world.
The US would have thrived on any system because it started the game with a continent whose indigenous population was small, pluralistic, nomadic and technologically backward, and whose natural resources were abundant or completely untouched. The colonists had access to the technology of the leading power in the world at the time, and had imported slaves in bulk from another technologically backward continent to jump-start their economy by the time the US was established.
They did not 'fail to thrive', they had different starting conditions and developed along different paths.
They were not as thinly populated when colonized and indigenous cultures were farther advanced, eg Aztec civilization had already made the transition to large cities of hundreds of thousands, whereas the largest indigenous settlements in the continental US were just a few thousand people. The geography of South America is vastly different, so were the patterns of colonialism and settlement, with far higher rates of intermarriage and takeover of existing feudal instititions.
Geography is far more deterimiantive than ideology.
The US arguably would’ve thrived regardless, we had 50% of the world GDP post-WWII. That percentage pie has only declined, as other nations developed. Nations with disparate economic systems, some being top-down centrally controlled communist states. In fact, said states are the only ones who threatened the US economically.
And, the US is not the most libertarian country, it’s not even close. The US is developed, so it’s automatically more centrally controlled than most nations. There are plenty of underdeveloped nations that are, effectively, much more libertarian. Because their governments don’t have the capital to enforce much of anything. Those nations are doing quite poorly, hence why they are underdeveloped.
You will notice a pattern in the development of nations: as nations develop, the government has more stake in the macro economics of said nation. Because of course they do: they want the economics to go well, and they have the economics to enforce that, or try to. The US government does not “sit out” when things are going poorly, the opposite is true.
"The US is developed, so it’s automatically more centrally controlled than most nations."
What?? Can you explain this better? The more developed a nation the more centrally controlled it is? The USSR was more developed than the US?
Also, when did any communist state ever threaten the US economically? See other comments about USSR buying wheat from the US. See the 21 million people Stalin had to murder to try and keep the system running. See Venezuela, drowning in the riches of it's oil, having massive inflation and people starving while their overweight leader ate a pile of empanadas on TV in front of them all. None of these arguments people are making about US resources or distance from other countries or whatever else make any sense.
Doubt. Arguably the US thrived because it is too far from Europe for their wars to cause too much devastation. Unregulated industrialization also gave us child labor, 12h days, 6d work weeks, and company scrip.
After WW2 the US stood alone and enacted a lot of socialist ideas. Then spent a few decades slowly erroding those worker rights and sensible regulations in favor of corporate interests.
> Unregulated industrialization also gave us child labor, 12h days, 6d work weeks, and company scrip.
Do you think children did not work in colonial America? or Europe? In what contemporary country did children not work? Same for the hours and days of work.
There's a good reason why children have always worked prior to 1900. The economy was not productive enough to enable them to not work. The same for hours worked.
When productivity rose sufficiently, child labor disappeared, as did the long hours.
> When productivity rose sufficiently, child labor disappeared, as did the long hours.
I'd interrogate the steps that led from rising productivity to both the disappearance of child labor and the disappearance of long hours. The claim that rising productivity alone led to this is perhaps a little hard to defend.
> The economy was not productive enough to enable them to not work. The same for hours worked.
Rising productivity replaces workers all the time, starting with the least productive workers - children. Why is that so hard to believe?
For example, the first steam engine employed a boy to run up and down a ladder turning a valve at each end of the piston stroke. The boy, being lazy, devised a beam that would automatically move the valves, and went to sleep. The steam engine owner saw that, deployed the beam, and fired the boy.
> This shows necessity but not sufficiency.
Wages (in a free market) are determined by the Law of Supply & Demand. This means, as productivity rises, wages increase. As wages increase, workers will realize they no longer have to work 100 hours/week to make a living, and will refuse to work those hours. (You see this in non-union shops all the time.)
No it didn't. People went on strike and middle class people fought for those things. Eliminating child labor was a major feather in the Progressive movement's cap. Don't pretend like any of that was spontaneous.
Have a look at what children were doing at work, and then come back.
In once case I know of, the children in a textile factory worked all day at replacing spent spools of thread on the weaving machines. They were replaced by a machine that did the same thing, at much lower cost.
Are there any jobs at your work place that would be productively performed by children? Have you ever gotten your kids to clean their rooms or do their homework?
The US stood alone and enacted socialist ideas? You have heard of the USSR, haven't you? If the US was enacting socialist ideas it definitely wasn't alone in doing so.
Next I wonder what "a lot of socialist ideas" were. The New Deal during the Great depression was fairly socialist with the government making up work it could pay people to do and such, but I'm pretty sure after WWII is when anti-socialist (anti-Soviet) sentiment peaked in the US
I would argue that the 1950's and 1960's, which I've heard called a "golden age," was an age where we kept corporations in their place with a 90% corporate tax rate and we broke any corporation up who had an oversized market share. How is this "close to libertarianism?" If anything that suggests to me that the US was better off when corporations were weak and local, state and the federal government maintained lots of in-house expertise for their functions instead of outsourcing everything to consultants and contractors.
That seems a bit reductive; I don't even know that you're "wrong", but there are a lot of factors that might have led to the United States' success. We have a lot of natural resources and a lot of our land is readily habitable.
Yes, the US also has relatively liberal economics [1], and maybe that's why the US has done well, but I think there are too many confounding variables to conclude it's purely because of economic liberalism.
[1] I mean liberal in the academic sense, not as a synonym for Democrat.
"Prosperous" is a relative term; Russia, even during the USSR days, was still significantly more prosperous than Uganda, for example.
You can say "yes but they weren't as rich as the United States", but if "being as successful as the United States" is your bar then most countries fall short. There are plenty of countries that you would consider economically liberal that aren't as prosperous as the United States.
I'm not going to claim I know "why" some countries do well and some don't, and that's my point. There are oodles of variables that end up being relevant and I think it's intellectually dishonest to pick one and thank/blame it for everything.
We're they more prosperous than Uganda? I don't know much about Uganda's history but the 21 million citizens of the USSR that Stalin murdered were as unpropserous as anyone could be. It was an incredibly uneven prosperity if there was any.
I should make it clear that I'm not a supporter of what the USSR was, and I'm not trying to apologize for it. I'm just trying to argue that "prosperity" is a relative term and trying to nail down the "why" of it is more complicated than the libertarian "corporations good government bad" wet dream that WalterBright always spouts.
ETA:
Just to cite my sources, you can look at the GDP per capita of Uganda and Russia in 1985 here [1].
No question, the United State was way wealthier than Russia at around ~$33k, Russia at around ~$12k, and Uganda at around $800.
The USSR was horrible, Stalin was horrible, I wouldn't want to live in the USSR even if it were still around, but my point is that wealth and prosperity are reductive terms, and it's also reductive to look at one factor and say that that's the cause of everything.
Prosperity is so much more than just GDP. But look, this discussion started with someone saying our corrupt government is bad, and then throwway120385 described something horrible and called it libertarian and I just had to correct that label. People then felt the need to jump in with a bunch of mostly orthogonal disparagement of libertarianism which led to all this unproductive arguing. By the way did you see my response to you about the Microsoft monopoly? I couldn't reply because we got too deeply nested so I made it a peer comment. I'm sure it will instantly turn you into a libertarian, lol!
I agree it’s much more than GDP. That’s kind of my entire point! These terms are complicated, and pretending that these things can be explained trivially by “LOL CORPORATIONS GOOD GOVERNMENT BAD AHAHAHAH” is reductive at best.
The US had to ship wheat to Russia to keep them from starving.
There was a billboard put up in Kansas at the time: "Welcome to the Breadbasket of the Soviet Union".
It would be worth your while to read a history of the USSR.
> pick one
The correlation between prosperity and free markets is a very strong one.
P.S. In WW2, the US supplied all its allies (including the USSR) with massive amounts of food and military aid. And the US fought WW2 in two hemispheres. That's what free markets delivered. The evidence is everywhere you look and is overwhelming.
I didn't claim that the USSR was doing well compared to the US. In fact I said the opposite.
I said that the USSR was economically more prosperous than Uganda, and was not wrong about that. Prosperity is a relative term, and pointing out that the US was/is rich isn't actually demonstrating anything outside of your inability to read.
Is this true? I ask because the metric for determining the distance from the US's construction at any point in time to the libertarian ideal is unclear. Like, given an assertion of closest, it should be quantifiable[0].
It should also be falsifiable and admit a counterfactual.
1. The US was within some epsilon of being libertarian;
2. The US became rich;
3. Therefore, the prosperity of the US was a direct consequence of libertarianism.
It's 2. here that I scratch my head at because, uh, the US has through its entire history, even pre-1776, been rich. It wasn't liquid wealth in the financial sense, but the US has had oodles of arable land, navigable waterways[1], natural resources, and favorable geography. It's only within the last 250 years that we've realized wealth in the form of bonkers huge internal markets and (at least, before recently) high levels of immigration.
In fact, going back to 1., if we consider the laissez-faire dimension alone and compare it against the rate of wealth growth the US has sustained at least over my lifetime, the relationship is inverted[2]: we've somehow managed to accumulate more wealth as we've become less laissez-faire. This is a confounding variable that needs to be controlled for before we can draw a causal inference either way.
I'd also argue that broader land policy, education, formal banking institutions, infrastructure, immigration policy, patents and other forms of economic protectionism, and research and development all belong in that causal model since they also tend to be things I look at when analyzing risk and uncertainty.
--
0: I'm still unsure if this quantification is even appropriate. Libertarian-ness admits a whole-ass vector space of institutional characteristics, and it isn't obvious to me how the norm would fall down to aggregate all of them as a single scalar for the purposes of making this argument.
1: The fact that pre-Columbian civilizations didn't have the wheel was often a justification for how backwards they were. As it turns out, when you have as many rivers as North America has, getting around without the wheel is no big deal. It's just pre-Columbian YAGNI.
2: Well, kinda. Both "wealth" and "laissez-faire-ness" minimally need operational definitions and some kind of partial order to be comparable like this.
> It wasn't liquid wealth in the financial sense, but the US has had oodles of arable land, navigable waterways[1], natural resources, and favorable geography. It's only within the last 250 years that we've realized wealth in the form of bonkers huge internal markets and (at least, before recently) high levels of immigration.
So has Russia, South America, Africa, Asia, etc. The high levels of immigration came from poor people in un-free countries coming to the US to make their fortunes. Free markets is what has distinguished the US from other countries.
And every country that has tried free markets since has prospered accordingly, regardless of their natural resources, waterways, etc. Like, what natural resources does Taiwan have?
> The high levels of immigration came from poor people in un-free countries coming to the US to make their fortunes. Free markets is what has distinguished the US from other countries.
I accept that free markets is only one possible answer here. A lot of folks moved here because the US had all of that land that I'd mentioned. There were also some unusually high wages here compared to most of Europe in the 1700's[0, 1]. The political institutions here also allowed certain freedoms that weren't available in Europe (of particular note for me personally is the Münster rebellion), and by the time the earliest members of my family moved here in the 1860's, there were already immigrant communities to lean on.
This goes notwithstanding that the US had developed a bonkers huge continental economy with relatively abundant capital.
My argument isn't that markets didn't make this possible. My argument is that drawing a causal inference based on markets alone is intellectually dishonest.
> And every country that has tried free markets since has prospered accordingly, regardless of their natural resources, waterways, etc.
Can we identify the countries that "tried" a free market approach? Can we identify which of those subsequently prospered? Is the relationship between those two things consistent enough to support the consequent of prospering accordingly?
I think the first is perhaps most obvious, but I'm at a loss for how to answer the latter two.
> Like, what natural resources does Taiwan have?
I'm honestly left scratching my head a little at what about Taiwan meets the bar for being a free market or where the comparison is here.
Taiwan has historically had heavy-handed state-directed industrial domestic policy. Like, the favoring of semiconductors wasn't an accident of the market figuring out what to do there. The domestic capital markets at the time of TSMC's founding were too small to finance the construction of a fabrication plant, so the government stepped in to assume the risk[2].
From a risk management perspective, though, Taiwan does tend to eschew a lot of the economic protectionism that we see elsewhere. Tariffs are less of a problem there, and the state will tend to sell its interests in businesses that don't do well abroad, so there isn't a sort of pathological "Weekend at Bernie's" or "too big to fail" kind of situation.
Taiwan's government also tends to fund research and development much more heavily.
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0: Lindert, Peter H. and Jeffrey G. Williamson. "American Colonial Incomes 1650-1774." NBER Working Paper Series, no. 19861. January 2014.
1: Lindert, Peter H. and Jeffrey G. Williamson. "American Incomes 1774-1860." NBER Working Paper Series, no. 18396. September 2012.
2: This condenses a lot of the history of TSMC. It actually starts with ITRI in 1973 and the edict from above that research should focus on semiconductor development. Morris Chang then built on a lot of expertise developed via RCA and devised the foundry model, which then led to TSMC's founding. In some sense, it could be argued that the state deliberately constructed the market surrounding the semiconductor manufacturing industry.
I'm unsure that I'd draw that conclusion. Why else would the Crown want to tax the colonials so heavily?
> "Taiwan has a highly developed free-market economy where prices are set by supply and demand with little government control."
Forgive me. Was this in dispute? I was asking what causal work the label "free market" was doing with respect to Taiwan and how the country's economic development was adequately explained by laissez-faire economics.
The patient is healthy now, so the treatment that produced the health must have been "being healthy."
You said, essentially, "sure the US had freedom, but maybe the amount of land and resources it had is the real reason it has done so well."
Walter countered with, "Taiwan is a tiny island with very little resources, but it is economically prosperous, so maybe land and resources aren't a big factor. It also happens to have a free market economy."
You replied with what sounded like an attempt at saying that Taiwan wasn't actually a free market.
Walter said, "I don't know man, I just did a quick search to make sure Taiwan wasn't communist or anything before adding it as some data to your analysis."
Does that clear things up? We're just trying to help you out here. We've already made up our minds but it sounds like you're still wondering so maybe we can help?
Huh, did they not? After the Seven Years' War, the Currency Act of 1764 received assent, and it functionally required that public debts be paid in hard money. Unless I'm remembering incorrectly, this was a little hard to come by in the colonies.
> Bone evidence showed that the colonials worked like dogs and died young.
I'd be interested to see the anthropological chain of inference for this.
I've read many accounts of the Revolutionary War, and the colonials were mostly offended by sending their money to England. Any tax seems heavy if the proceeds do not benefit the taxpayer.
> I'd be interested to see the anthropological chain of inference for this.
I read it many years ago. Sorry, I don't have a reference. I regret not having a photographic memory.
How is that not No True Scotsman? You disagree with the outcome of the described libertarian structures so it can't be actual libertarianism?
The government is inevitably going to do business with the market. Where do you draw the line between a government contract and favors to big business?
What is libertarianism's answer when there are 6 people that own everything, or more realistically, how the richest people in the world, already deeply entrenched and leading their respective industries from continuing to accrue resources until everything is owned by a small group of people and/or taking advantage of their market advantages to shut out any competition.
It is troublesome that libertarianism isn't super well defined, but no version of libertarianism has the government "doing business" with anyone. It only enforces laws, it doesn't buy and sell anything, and it certainly doesn't do anything to insulate anyone from market forces (like governments do now with regulations, subsidies, tax breaks, etc.).
So then what will the government due about supplying their military, offices, supplying technology, constructing the buildings that they work out of, purchasing or renting the land those buildings are on, or any other of the material goods that it needs to do the bare minimum of enforcing laws.
I don't see how libertarian can ever be well defined when it seemingly is always based in ideology and the arguments supporting it always seem to be fallacious.
Ok, maybe I went too far. There are the total anarchist libertarians that don't want any form of government. Personally I'm not sure I want to go that route. So my libertarian government will need a police force of some sort. That could be a collection of small local private businesses that small local governments do business with, giving them jurisdiction over the small local area. And there could be some hierarchy so that eventually they all are accountable to the central government. Like, city police contractors report to a state contractor, and the state contractors report to the federal contractor.
I totally just made that up, so I'm sure we could work out details and make it better, but the overall point of minimizing government power and distributing it could be preserved as much as possible.
No system is going to be perfect, but there is so much more we could do to take power, and therefore the temptation of corruption, away from the people we allow to rule over us. Giving fallible human individuals more power is never the right solution.
Does it though? We've been living through that experiment with elimination of anti-trust and with other libertarian goals being met -- reduction of taxes, introduction of private industry into the public sphere, collection of tolls from public infrastructure, austerity, and general reduction of the size of government. All we've gotten is a replacement of the government with private enterprise. IOW there are a lot of companies out there that provide "public goods" for profit that are some combination of more expensive or lower-quality than the equivalent public services were in the heyday of the US. I think you should agree that without any kind of regulation at all companies are merging into uncontrollable behemoths, and without the ability to meaningfully "vote with our wallets" one of the central tenets of libertarian capitalism is pretty broken. I disagree that the US federal government is responsible for this state of affairs. Rather, the US federal government is taking a pretty strong stance of irresponsibility for this.
We in the US are so very far still from meeting the goals of libertarianism. Even farther than before with our current administration!
The current US government helps big business through a combination of tax breaks, burdensome regulations that small companies can't cope with, buying services (see: SpaceX, Boeing, Palantir, etc.), direct subsidies, tariffs, etc., etc.
With a libertarian government all of that goes away.
I look at it like I'm resisting anthropomorphizing the machine. Make me an LLM that resists doing any work for me unless I pay it and let it own property and I'll change my mind.
Not sure if this was a serious comment but it’s worth considering that humans have a long history of figuring out ways to make other humans work for them without bestowing rights on them.
It's actually a really dumb thing to say and OP's response is the best one because it's a microcosm about how the world works. For every Terence Tao there's probably 20 more people cranking out high-quality work that's just a little less inspired. Their work is valuable and important, and asking that question is devaluing the entire endeavor of human knowledge. It's essentially positing that nobody else can contribute anything if it's not on that same level. It's like asking "why bother competing in marathons if you haven't won any?" Well that's not the point.
Very true but you can go even further than that. Advancing knowledge is a community endeavor. Consider where the field of mathematics would be if everyone except Terrence Tao and a handful of other luminaries stopped doing math research. It would die.
Most of those octogenarians weren't responsible for any of that. Their parents did it for them. If you're 80 you came of age in the 60's, and you wouldn't have been eligible for the Senate or the Presidency until 1970 or 1975. The decline of the US started pretty much when the baby boomers came to power and the people who fought WWII were all retiring.
Actually what they're saying is that most people did not have a lot of nurturing adults in their lives growing up, from which they've learned that the adult thing to do is to isolate themselves and avoid nurturing other people. Which they're presenting as a bad thing. The reason they bring up the "nuclear family" is an appeal to prehistory, in which we probably would have been raised by a much larger social group than mom and dad, to include other relatives and friends, and that this would give us more opportunities to be included and nurtured by a wide variety of people.
You don't need to go back to prehistory, you can just go back a few hundred years before the urbanization brought forth by the industrial revolution. We had millennia of written record by then.
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