Libertarianism Is Dumb and Wrong
“The problem with government is not violence. The problem is that you are not the customer”
I am very curious and I like to learn about everything. Whenever I engage with any profession, I like to ask lots of questions about how it works and draw from its knowledge. Pretty much every profession I’ve ever talked with, some large portion of them light up about sharing their knowledge—excited to “talk shop”, to educate, to “play”.
Except doctors. Universally doctors not only don’t open up at this but actually seem to shut down, annoyed.
Part of it is certainly that their business model incentivizes them to churn through as many patients as possible. And my questions are just extending our appointment unnecessarily, preventing them from seeing more patients or getting a longer break before they must see the next one.
This situation of misaligned incentives is not unique to doctors or even healthcare though. This natural inclination occurs in all markets. It’s just that something about certain sectors make them less capable of “correcting” this natural inclination than others.
The Left: Right About Capitalism, Wrong About Reality
The left is correct that the profit motive—“capitalism”—undermines many prosocial and communal incentives. And they do a phenomenal job critiquing every single way it causes negative externalities as a result, doctors and healthcare just one of several dozen examples.
These bad incentives lead to selling symptom management rather than cure. Or selling very expensive cures that make pharma companies a lot of money while suppressing cheaper or generic ones that would most benefit consumers. And they do this because they not only suffer no cost for consumers being perpetually poor and sick, but actually profit from it, able to externalize the “cost” to other parts of society.
The problem in this critique is that the left, just like doctors, are experts at their preferred rabbit hole and retards at most other ones. If they would only quit their job and ditch all their friends, family, and hobbies to spend eight hours every day for a decade diving down every rabbit hole they could find, they too would realize that singling out financial profit is dumb and gay.
“Profit” has nothing to do with money. “Profit” is just what happens when you spend power efficiently. Every day you gained more power than you spent, you “profited”. And every day, every person—regardless of race, sex, class, country, or political affiliation—is trying to profit in some way. This is literally the objective of living beings. Whether it’s a dating market, an influence market, a status market, a strength market, a spiritual market, a money market, or any other market; we are all making tradeoffs in one to maximize profit in another, based on our preferences or values or temperament.
“Money” is just a subset of power (which itself is just a subset of energy). It is distilled power. Fungible power. Divisible power. Verifiable power. But it is still power none the less.
And arbitrarily singling out economic power for criticism is not just “a little oopsie”. It’s like the biggest oopsie you could possibly make. Because economic markets are actually the most self-correcting markets in all of markets. And when you infect them with the incentives of far less “clean” alternative (ex government power) you make them worse. Which is why government influence over the economy is so highly correlated with negative outcomes. And further why 20th century communism, despite being more explicitly knowledgeable (as opposed to implicitly wise) than all its competitors, turned into hell and killed 100 million people.
So why then are economic markets uniquely criticized in a way that other markets are not? Well one, most lefties just use the criticism of financial markets as a way of profiting in other markets—namely, status markets. But why scapegoat financial profit specifically? My guess is that it’s at least in part the same situation as with Bitcoin’s energy usage. A. it is the only one that is easily measurable and B. the immeasurability of its alternatives make a true cost benefit analysis impossible, so people just fill in the ambiguity with their bias.
In the same way that the right shits on leftist utopianism mostly because they hate change and the unknown and the left shits on rightist utopianism mostly because they hate authority and are easily bored, all their so-called “facts” cherry picked ex post facto to justify their preexisting temperamental disposition: the left hates unfairness and thinks in terms of good and evil. So whenever there is ambiguity from a measurement standpoint they have free reign to just spiral off into the platonic world of forms.
But isolating this is not critical to my point. We can poke at it further another time. Back to power markets:
What is clear is that all the other power markets—despite being far more influential in why human civilization has issues—hardly ever get explored or communicated outside of weird micro communities of autists on the internet.
And while it may not be an especially contagious belief, the empirical evidence overwhelmingly supports that: Government power markets create an order of magnitude more antisocial incentives than economic ones do. And a predominant reason for this is due it being subject to an order of magnitude less competition.
Competition and the Lie of Non-Violence
Everyone accepts that monopolies are bad. Everyone even knows why they are bad. But for some reason we think having a monopoly on all the guns and institutions and schools and laws will somehow magically have the opposite effect as it does in every single other monopolistic arrangement.
However, even this framing is wrong. The libertarians rightly see how a “monopoly on force” corrupts. But they incorrectly frame it as “force vs peace”, “aggression vs non-aggression”, “violence vs markets”. And this error is why they, despite being the least wrong, not only always lose to the libs but even to the Republicans (yikes!).
The truth is that markets are everywhere. They are the natural base arrangement between living organisms. Natural selection is always selecting. Power projection is always projecting. Life is a game of organisms finding new, novel, and innovative ways to project power more effectively over their competitors toward their objective of expanding their own genes (or memes) across time and space. And these games make little distinction in kind between “violence” and “nonviolence”.
Violence is a power projection strategy. One of many that exists in all living beings’ power projection tool kit. It is however generally a last resort strategy—at least for the last few million years—because it is high risk to both parties. Replacing it with status games or economic games or other non-lethal tests of violent capacity (ex fighting, wrestling, or even just being swole af) is a far more efficient methodology most of the time.
But in the same way that when you say “no”, you are implicitly saying “respect my boundary, ‘or else’”: nonviolent power projection is just a “layer two” solution (a la Lightning Network). As long as everything is going well on layer two, you never need to settle on layer one. But without the threat of layer one, layer two will never work.
In modern humans, technological advance or various technological “hacks” (ex Bitcoin) can make having to settle on layer one (violence) less frequent. But if you remove layer one from the game entirely, the game stops working.
Think enough about it, read enough Neo-reaction, or watch enough Jason Lowery, and you will eventually agree that “violent” power projection and “nonviolent” power projection are different only in degree not kind. And that thinking otherwise—as both libs and libertarians do—creates confusion which prevents a true solution from emerging.
All that to set up the point I actually want to make:
Libertarians are right that states are not subject to (much) competition between states regarding the whole “customers will leave if they provide poor service” angle (because the state has the “right to initiate force” and because moving countries is not as easy as switching toothpastes) but they are completely ignoring all the competition and “market forces” that occur within state power structures.
In reality, a “free market” is operating within and around governments and government power all the time. In fact, intra-government power markets are the freest markets of all. They are more meritocratic than any other; elevating the most efficient power projectors and eliminating the inefficient better than anywhere else. Because states have all the guns; because states are sovereign; because no one is or even can watch the watchers. There is no law when you are the law. Only pure, cold, rational economic calculation. And this is especially true if you are the sovereign of sovereigns ie global hegemon ie the USA.
We will return to more on the case for this and why it matters in a moment. First, I need to make a second detour.
Free Markets Are Only Good When You’re the Customer
“Free markets are always more efficient than restricted markets. And more efficient markets are always better for the customer”. Yes. True. But the problem arises in the question: what if you aren’t the customer?
Cows don’t like free markets. Bacteria don’t like free markets. Rocks don’t like free markets. Cockroaches don’t like free markets. Plants don’t like free markets. Because free markets screw them to benefit the humans. They would much prefer humans to be less efficient, less productive, less successful at advancing their memes and genes through time and across space. Because it would mean more competitive advantage for them instead.
With this new framing, we unlock a new obviously-correct-but-rarely-if-ever-examined truth: All markets are zero sum. Because the universe is zero sum. There is a fixed amount of energy in the universe. Matter cannot be created nor destroyed. All so called “positive sum” games are just zero sum ones where the loser doesn’t matter.
Bugs getting genocided by pesticides don’t matter. Bacteria getting genocided by antibiotics don’t matter. Mountains getting blown into bits and turned into highways don’t matter. Iron getting ripped from its home and melted alive into steel doesn’t matter. The dirt that would have been heated by the sun that is now freezing because you placed a solar panel above it doesn’t matter. Because these things aren’t sentient beings who “deserve rights” or whatever. We see no “cost” because we are not impacted by it.
But there is a cost, just not to “us”. Newton’s Third Law: “every action has an equal and opposite reaction”. You cannot delete the reaction. You can only try to make that reaction occur as far away and to the least “important” possible matter as you can.
This is what economic externalities are. Trying to push that “cost” off to someone or something else. It’s not a problem when you build solar panels and steal photons from the dirt that wasn’t “using” it anyway. But the whole bug genocide thing is not so clear cut. We thought the costs went elsewhere but they did not (the bee crisis and endocrine disruption just two well-known ways in which this “costless” benefit is costing us). Same with the bacteria. And obviously there are the popular ones like CO2, pollution, or plastic filling the oceans (which are also endocrine disrupting), and plenty of others.
“Market failures” occur when the “reaction” isn’t far away enough; when the external costs aren’t external enough. Far enough to not be impacting the producer, but not so far they don’t eventually come around and bite us in the ass later.
With this in mind, we can now come back to the problem with intra-government markets.
Politics Is Fake. Incentives Are Real.
In our classical understanding of economic markets, you have to build a product that consumers want if you wish to gain money (which, again, is just distilled, fungible, verifiable power). Intra-government markets are supposed to be similar: You get elected by representing “consumers”, you get replaced if you do a bad job. But sadly, this is more libcuck platonic-world-of-forms fantasy cope.
In the real world, regardless of what your job description says, the populace is not your customer. They are your product. Or rather, your COGS. Your product is their power (their tax dollars, their consumer spending, their faith, their trust, their admiration, etc) and your customers are big corporations, lobbyists, activists, and big institutions.
Just like in any other market: politicians who are efficient and effective at extracting power from the populace and giving it to the big boys—politicians who create a good product for their customers at a good price—survive. And those who don’t, “die”.
And despite any and all highfalutin ideals or neat-o “checks and balances” (“regulations”) you put in your constitution, your so-called democracy will devolve within only a few generations into this disgusting game of persuasion and influence and two-faced deals to swindle the populace out of their power and give it to the corps, institutions, and activists.
You can go against the market’s incentive if you want. You can be an idealist and try to truly “stand up for the people” (rather than just say you will so you can pick their pocket). But it will go as well for you as screwing your consumers would in any other market. ie you’ll “go out of business” very quickly.
And these misaligned incentives are an inherent and immutable flaw in Democratic governance. It’s not that no one thought about this before. It’s not that we need “Democracy 2.0”. The US was Democracy 2.0. The founding fathers knew all this stuff. This is why they made it a republic. This is why they made the three branches, the Constitution, and all the rest. They thought that if only they could “temper” these poor incentives, they could make a government that works. And I mean, it kind of does. But it also doesn’t. And worse, it has become an competition-resistant super bug.
Back in the days of monarchy: if your king got too corrupt, you just killed him. This threat of violence kept kings in check. And if the threat ever stopped working—if the king ever got too elitist and believed himself able to extract from the peasants without cost—the threat would eventually be acted on. A democracy (or, less euphemistically, an oligarchy) however is a one million headed hydra, who only gets stronger every time you attack it. And so of course it's elite become pompous and spiral off into these psychotic delusions about how they are Gods and do shit like satanic rituals and sex traffic underage girls. Give any entity unlimited power with no countervailing threat to keep it grounded in reality and it too will suffer this same fate!
The only way to thwart an antifragile oligarchy is to—like The Flood—kill its food. Obviously the food—just like mister chief and his blue titty AI waifu—will not agree to this. But eventually it just grows so large and extracts so much from the populace, it eventually kills them and itself in the process.
But remember: markets are everywhere. Natural selection is always selecting. Thus, it was only a matter of time before the meme of government found a way to make itself unkillable (or at least much harder to kill). The accountability that made monarchies work also destroyed them. Leading inevitably to the creation of an unaccountable, antifragile alternative. And until you stop being a dumbass utopian thinking in the platonic world of “solutions”, and start being an engineer thinking in the real world of incentives: you, and I, and everyone else remains its host.
Tying It All Together
So—coming back to the poor incentives in healthcare—sure, the doctor will sell you blood pressure pills that you wouldn’t need if he had “done his job” of keeping you healthy in the first place. What you are misunderstanding, because you think like a libcuck, is that his job isn’t actually to keep you healthy. His job is to appease the pharma companies, the medical boards, the lawyers, and the activists. Keeping you healthy is his cover. He obviously doesn’t know this. He believes the delusion just like you do. But that doesn’t change what his results actually are.
Similarly, governments will sell you subsidies and tax break programs and welfare to “cure“ a problem that it would have prevented in the first place if it had done its job of having a healthy society. But, as I’ve made the case above, this is not it’s job. Which is why all its so-called support programs ultimately harm you and me and the rest of the populace. And this is not because it is violent. It is because we are not the customer. We are the product. And these are all just little kickbacks, a tiny fraction of what was extracted in the first place, to keep us being good little tax cattle.
But I’m preaching to the choir here. All the libertarians understand this. Or most of it anyway. The problem is that their solution sucks. It seems great on the surface, and maybe it really is the “lesser of two evils”. But disregarding the huge problem that it isn’t contagious (which is a huge problem), I can assure you: libertarians arrived at it by accident, not because they actually steelmanned all the alternatives.
As someone who was an ancap for years I can say with 100% confidence that most of them, like all utopians, have never even heard of Chesterton’s Fence. Let alone heed it.
On this blog however, Chesterton’s Fence is as foundational as the Bayesian Formula is to SSC/ACT.
And so we must ask:
“If it’s so fucking terrible and shitty, why then do we do it? Why has it ruled for so long?”
Answering this question well is a pre requisite to fostering even the faintest of possibilities that any so called “solutions” don’t just make the problem infinitely worse. And I have what I believe to be several solid ones.
Sadly, they will have to wait for another time.