[rvense]

This has actually been a fairly common position among American libertarians. Alan Greenspan, for instance, was strongly against fraud laws until some time after the financial crisis. The idea was that the market would sort it out.

(And no, I don't understand how this is a serious position that serious people can seriously hold, but then that is how I feel about libertarianism in general.)

[pdonis]

> American libertarians

The term "libertarian" I feel is almost useless as a description of the political views of Americans, because it gets used to describe views that don't make any sense with that label. Greenspan, for instance, often described himself as a libertarian (or "libertarian Republican", whatever that means), but that seems a bit rich for someone who was chairman of one of the most powerful central planning organizations on the planet for so long. If central planning is libertarian then I'm a blue whale.

The term "free market" gets misused just as much. It's not a free market if the government (or the Fed, which is just an arm of the government) has its thumb on the scales.

[flir]

It's the thumb on the scales that allows the free market to exist.

Without it there's just men with guns, and men with more guns.

[pdonis]

> It's the thumb on the scales that allows the free market to exist.

This is an oxymoron. A free market is a market in which all transactions are voluntary. Government intervention, by definition, causes some transactions to be involuntary. So you can't have a free market with government's thumb on the scales.

> Without it there's just men with guns, and men with more guns.

Historically, this is simply false. There have been societies that did not have governments that could manipulate markets, and they did not work this way.

In terms of guns, in such societies everyone had guns; there was no one who had overwhelming military force at their disposal. (They also had less wealth inequality than modern societies with governments.)

[flir]

> Government intervention, by definition, causes some transactions to be involuntary.

Here is a list of transactions (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repugnant_market) we're making illegal next Tuesday. Note that after Tuesday, all market transactions are still voluntary. Therefore your claim is wrong. (In other words you're not considering positive and negative freedoms).

> In terms of guns, in such societies everyone had guns; there was no one who had overwhelming military force at their disposal.

Tell me about power laws.

I recommend Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber.

[pdonis]

> Therefore your claim is wrong.

No, it isn't. You are simply giving evidence that a market with any government intervention is not a free market. Which is perfectly true.

Whether the particular interventions governments make are good policy is a separate question. A free market is a tool. So are government interventions. Sometimes you have to make tradeoffs. But that doesn't change the fact that they are tradeoffs: that every time the government intervenes in a market, it means the market is no longer a free market, because some transactions are not voluntary. (Or because some transactions that would be voluntary if they happened are prevented from happening; see further comments below.)

> Note that after Tuesday, all market transactions are still voluntary.

First, even taken literally, this claim is not true, because there are lots of other government interventions in place that dictate non-voluntary transactions (the most common, of course, being taxation).

Second, you're quibbling. I gave the short version of the proper definition of a free market; the full version includes that preventing transactions from occurring that otherwise would occur (because both parties benefit) by making them illegal also counts as making transactions non-voluntary. In other words, "voluntary" has two sides: not forcing people to make transactions they wouldn't voluntarily choose to make, and not preventing people from making transactions they would voluntarily choose to make.

[rvense]

> It's not a free market if the government... has its thumb on the scales

See, this is why libertarianism doesn't make sense. If there's no government intervention, then monopolies, incumbents, and rich and powerful people in general take their place. The point of having democratic institutions intervene in the market instead is to keep the intervention under control and in check. The alternative is Oliver Twist, ecological disaster, maybe even feudalism.

But we agree that there's a lot of hypocrisy on the Right in general. A lot of insider trading and "I'm a free speech absolutist" and then buying up mass media to censor people who don't agree with you.

[pdonis]

> If there's no government intervention, then monopolies, incumbents, and rich and powerful people in general take their place.

Historically, if there is government intervention, then monopolies--created by governments--incumbents, and rich and powerful people run things.

Of course if you take a society which has managed to regulate some aspect of all that using government, and then take away that particular government regulation--while leaving all the other ways the governments puts its thumb on the scale in place--then things will get worse, at least in the short term.

But that in no way shows that the absence of a government's thumb on the scale in every aspect, long term makes things worse. Historically, there have been societies that had little or no government intervention in things (for example, saga period Iceland, or some of the American colonies before the British tried to tighten up on them after the French and Indian War), and they did not have the bad things you mention; they had the opposite, people being able to run their own lives and getting along just fine, precisely because there was no government that could force them to do stupid things because of some government granted monopoly or incumbent, or because rich and powerful people were using their wealth and power to co-opt the government--the way they do in societies that do have government intervention.

> The point of having democratic institutions intervene in the market instead is to keep the intervention under control and in check.

That's the ostensible purpose, but it doesn't work. Giving a government the power to intervene in what would otherwise be a free market just means the rich and powerful use their wealth and power to co-opt the government. Having a government actually makes their job easier: it's cheaper to buy a government than it is to buy an entire society.

> there's a lot of hypocrisy on the Right in general

There's a lot of hypocrisy on all sides of the political spectrum. I don't think the Right is any worse than others in that respect.